Techgeist

Over the past few months since Wolfram was announced on Techcrunch, the company that wishes to answer user’s semantic questions has decided to keep themselves as closed as possible, until the past week. Until the release of Google’s Public Data Charts, Wolfram kept pretty quiet. On April 28th, Stephen Wolfram presented Wolfram|Alpha to Harvard Law Schools and broadcasted it online. Conviently, Google released its new addition to search by allowing you to see publicly accessible data inside searches, and then compare that data with other sets of data on a graph.

Before the presentation, Wolfram has kept a mailing list, as is common for most pre-release applications, and didn’t send out almost any email through it. The minute they launched however, this changed. In the past week, I’ve received several emails from Wolfram promoting its launch and the presentation at Harvard. But there is a problem:

I still can’t use it.

Google has just announced that it will be adding public data graphs to search results in order to give users the ability to visualize things like unemployment data. This is a big leap forward for allowing public data to be more accessible to users.

The public data is accessible by searching for a US city, and a term such as ‘unemployment rate’. Instead of having to navigate badly designed government websites, you will be given a chart at the top of the search results with the current unemployment rate of the specified city. You can click through to compare it to other cities, the US as a whole, or other reigons.

As Google adds more products to their main search engine, it steps forward in making it easier to find all types of data. Instead of just links to external websites, Google offers links to user profiles, news, stocks, trends, and other data from its various products.

In response to this release, Wolfram, the search engine that is promising to given users answers to semantic questions, has released screenshots of their interface.

I was hoping that I would only have to post 1 pre-game prank list. But no, people have decided to start early this year. Even with the recession, there is always enough time to post about how little munchins with large heads that look like Obama will take over the earth. Here are some more of the March 31st pranks:

• A new platform, PHP on Rails has been annouced. Its code name? Phails.
• The Alcoholics(AA) and Narcotics Anoymous(NA) have combined to create a new fellowship to simply ‘A’.
• Google will be annoucing a Google/Yahoo/Live mashup that allows you to search all three engines from one page.
• ViralURLs is planning on buying Twitter.
• Twitter will will follow people for you, and not let you remove them.
• iJustine will marry Chris Prillo, creating a super web TV couple. The wedding will, of course, be streamed.
• Genetically Modified Trees will be able to give directions to lost hikers.
• Microsoft will be buying Apple.
• Twitter will be limiting Tweets to one tweet per day.
• A Service will text message you when you are …

Read the rest of this entry »

April Fools day hasn’t even started, and we are already getting pranked. Check out the Pre-Game Pranks.

• TheFunded last week wrote a notice saying it would be shutting down. Techcrunch breaks the prank and annouces it is not shutting down.
• ZDNet gives their own twist on an April Fools gag by annoucing the ‘fake’ winner for the $4.7 billion National Broadband Network contract.
• Because Australia is ahead of us, Google has already launched its gBall for Australian footbal users.
• Smashing Magazine broke a story about Internet Explorer 8.1 and its ability to act like multiple browsers.
• SitePoint annouces that the internet will reboot at 11:59 UTC on April 1st.
• PSS annouces IVR-SmartASS – SMART Assisted Self Service System to make sure callers on customer service lines don’t lie.
• You can flip any YouTube video upside down by adding ‘&flip=1′ to the end of the url.

Check back here for more April Fools fun after the real game starts. Then, after the game, we’ll be wrapping all of it up.

The only upside to Facebook is the fact that you preapprove everyone that can see your data. Twitter however, doesn’t have this privacy feature and Mark Cuban has just figured that out. Valleywag just recently annouced that he has been fined $25,000 for slagging referees by the NBA.

This once again gives us a reminder that everyone can see everything you post on Twitter. If you plan on posting things that are private, you might want to set up Facebook with your close friends. Just make sure to restrict wall updates to people that you know won’t fine you for talking smack about people. Or just keep it to email.

In an act that copies what most 3rd party applications have already put in place, Twitter has finally expanded the replies section of the Twitter homepage to include mentions. Anyone who has followed Twitter already knows that its interface is often lacking in the way of features. This has spurred on the use of 3rd party applications that provide more features ontop of Twitter, and often in a smaller, cleaner interface. It lends someone to wonder what exactly is Twitter doing? They have said that they have enough captial to survive for a long time without monetization, but has it also closed its doors to changing things site wide?

This expansion of the Twitter reply feature has been the first change of the Twitter interface for a long time. Although, supposidly there is a new version coming out soon that will provide a search bar at the top of the screen, not much has changed about the popular messaging network.

So, during this break of innovation and changing design, what do you think we should change on Twitter? What are the features that you think should be added to Twitter that everyone would benefit …

Read the rest of this entry »