Techhawking

Is Percentage of company Bloggers/Twitter_users inversely proportional to Company size ?

admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:27:58 +0000

Small organizations often keep a very active online presence . For them, any news is good news. Larger organizations however try to be opposite of that and control information.

What I’ve been trying to understand is how in spite of all that companies like Google and Microsoft still manage to have a huge online presence.

No.Of.TwitterAccounts= (Size.Of.Company)^(1/2) ?

For example today, Google announced a list of all of its Twitter accounts in one page.

How do they do it ?

General
twitter.com/Google – our central account
twitter.com/Blogger – for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar – user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleImages – news, tips, tricks on our visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews – latest headlines via Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader – from our feed reader team
twitter.com/iGoogle – news & notes from Google’s personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents – news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube – for YouTube fans
twitter.com/YouTubeES – en Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork – solutions for IT and workplace productivity

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp – Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH – SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse
twitter.com/Modelyourtown – 3D modeling to build your favorite places
twitter.com/EarthOutreach – Earth & Maps tools for nonprofits & orgs
twitter.com/GoogleMaps – uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense – for online publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper – looking out for AdWords questions and tech issues
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah – Google Guide for AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics – insights for website effectiveness
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder – re building display ads
twitter.com/GoogleRetail – for retail advertisers
twitter.com/TechnologyUK – for U.K. tech advertisers
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE – for German AdWords customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE – for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT – info for Portuguese-language publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia – AdWords news & tips in Russian
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords – Spanish updates from the Inside

AdWords blog
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI – AdWords API tips

Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch – from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC – Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode – latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData – Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine – web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation – our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI – about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO – Google’s largest annual developer event

Culture, People
twitter.com/googletalks – notes from our @Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs – the voice of Google recruiters

Country or Region
twitter.com/googledownunder – Google activities in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/GoogleDE – Google in Germany
twitter.com/GoogleLatAm – Latin America (en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt – Notes on Google policy issues in Italy

Cell phone speeds, reliability in US

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:08:59 +0000

Novaram and PC World did a cell phone service provider test across the nation to compare the three big cell giants.

I was very shocked and surprised at how crappy the AT&T wireless network’s reliability is in the city I live. No wonder people have been constantly complaining about service problems.

I wish Apple had gone with Verizon for iPhone… I’ve used verizon for years (before I switched to AT&T) and was pretty happy with them.

BSET SearchEngine relevance test results

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:10:10 +0000

A few days ago I started a tool called BSET – Blackbox Search engine Testing tool to evaluate how good Bing really is. If you watch the stats on the page, its clear which search engine is being consistently picked as the winner.

The results were collected from 518 unique source IP addresses (some were just NATs from larger organizations). 251 users just executed 1 query each. 111 users executed 2 queries and rest executed more than that.

A total of 808 results were submitted just for “standard web search” category and of that 44% of the submissions were in favor of Google. 32% of them were for Yahoo. Only about 28% results went for Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing”.

Between Google and Yahoo, a user is 15% more likely to pick Google than Yahoo. Between Google and Bing, a user will pick Google 21% more frequently than Bing.

The results may not be staggering for folks who have been following search engine trends over the last few weeks, but for me, to see the results from this random test is surprising considering the amount of money Microsoft plans to pump into Bing’s advertisement. I wish I had done this test before Bing was launched to find out how different MSN is from Bing…

So why is Google better ?

Since search results were pulled using published search APIs from the search providers and because these search APIs may not always show the same results which users see on the real search page, it could be argued that these results may be inaccurate.

Another problem I noticed is that different search engines behave differently when there are spelling errors in search. For example look at the results for “steven hakwing” ( was looking for Stephen Hawking) on the 3 search engines

Bing – Bing tells you that you could have spelt is wrong, and shows results for “steven hawking” instead.

Yahoo – Yahoo warns me that I should probably correct my spelling to “Stephen Hawking” but shows the search results for “steven hakwing”

Google – Google suggests that I could be looking for “Steven Hawking”, but actually shows me results for “Stephen Hawking” which is what I really wanted.

Since I didn’t use spell-sugession APIs to correct the search terms before it was submitted, it could be argued that my tests are biased towards google which does auto-correction. But as an end-user, I could argue that that I want to see what I intended to type and not what I actually typed. I think the ability to predict what users are thinking is is one of the core reasons why Google has a lead over other search engines.

And as for Bing’s cash-back plan, a friend of mine said that he’d be happy to use Bing to buy something.. as soon as he figures out what he really wants on Google or Yahoo.

I welcome your comments or feedback, especially if you have ideas on how I could improve the tests.

BlackboxSET – Blackbox Search Engine Testing

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:05:35 +0000

The launch of Bing has shaken the Google Kingdom a little bit. I for one have been doubting my own support for Google’s search engine. And I know others who swear by Yahoo’s search engine which is a trust I don’t share. To make such testing easier, I’ve spent a few hours last night to create a tool which allows you to search something against the 3 top search engines and lets you decide which one is the best. At the end of the exercise you should be able to find out if you are doing the right thing by sticking with your personal search engine.

May the best search engine win.

Opera Unite: web server built in ?

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:02:17 +0000

There seems to be a lot of talk about “Opera Unite” launch and everyone is so pumped up about the new feature, “webserver built into the web browser”.

This is just like twitter. I think it might be a great idea for a few, but for the masses it might turn out to be just over-boated hype. Most of us who have used a recent OS have sharing features and we have been always on the look out for better firewalls to block it. Now here comes a browser which wants to do the same thing, and for some reason doesn’t expect firewalls to impact it?

Have all the security concerns gone away all of a sudden ? While the world is switching to a lighter OS and browser, Opera is trying to build a kitchen sink.

That being said, I think its a bold step on Opera’s part, and I have to give credit for its “unique” idea, regardless of how useful I think its going to be.

Google wave : Let the predictions begin…

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:47:13 +0000

During the keynote today Google premiered something completely brand new called Google Wave. From the look of it looked like next-gen SMTP+XMPP protocol which allows email-like-msgs/instant-communication/collaboration using fully distributed architecture (similar to SMTP). The focus was on collaboration and notification.

During the whole demo I was thinking just two things.

1) Twitter is screwed !
2) Ditto facebook !

The solution proposed has a side effect of trying to solve the spamming issue as well.

The key here is that they are not releasing an app on which people can login when its launched … they are instead releasing a protocol and possibly working opensource server which users can deploy and get running quickly.

…won’t happen overnight…. But if they build this into gmail which has a large adoption rate, it could become the next big hot thing pretty fast.

More here….

http://www.waveprotocol.org/
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Safari crossed 10% mark ?

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:28:03 +0000

Apple released some statistics to show that thanks to Safar 4 beta, Safari has crossed 10% threshold for the first time. Though that might be true, I don’t see it sticking there. Safari 4 javascript execution was fast, but I found Chrome to be faster. I for one have already abandoned Safar 10 on my windows. Doesn’t mean I hate it… just means that I’m not convinced its the best yet.

Techmeme run out of news ?

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:45:55 +0000

A lot of us go to Techmeme for our hourly fix. But for the last few hours things haven’t been quite the same. Come to think of it, the quality of news on techmeme could be an indicator of whats left to come to the tech industry.

The first couple of news of news has nothing to do with technology in general and the third news item is a few days old already. The three items after that are the same old news in different wrapping.

Either the weekend is getting to me, or this is the lull before the storm.

Internet evolution 1969-2007

admin — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:17:41 +0000

Found some very interesting graphs of Internet connectivity as they grew between 1969 and 2007.

Source National Science Foundation

Self-signed SSL certificate warnings in Mozilla

admin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:51:33 +0000

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 throws a warning for self-signed certificate, and makes you do a couple of extra clicks to see the contents. Though some think its bad, I’m not sure what the fuss is all about. There are two reasons for the certificates. One is to encrypt the traffic, and the other to make sure no one intercepted your traffic using some kind of man-in-the-middle attack. One cant guarantee the second objective until a respected third party can sign/vouch the certificate. This is why these organizations exist.

If this is such a big issue, the right approach should be for someone to setup a free certificate registry. There are few out there today like startcom, but the browser support on such registries is currently unimpressive.

Speaking on behalf of the 99% of the Internet population who doesn’t understand the significance of SSL certificates, I think the decision Mozilla took is courageous and admirable, and other browsers should do something similar if they don’t already.