Phil Bradley's weblog

So.cl - Microsoft's new social network!

via www.so.cl

Well, just when you think the world of social networks cannot get any more insane, along comes Microsoft with a new one. I really do need to have a 'WTF?' category on the blog. This is available at  http://www.so.cl and they say of themselves: "So.cl is an experiment in open search. That means your searches on So.cl are viewable by other So.cl users and will also be available to third parties. So.cl does not automatically post your searches, comments, or likes to your Facebook stream unless you choose this option. Also, we don’t contact your Facebook friends unless you invite them."

The first thing that leapt out at me was this:

So... in order to use this new social network, I am expected to sign in by using.... another social network? (I can also sign in using my Windows Live account, but that's about as rusty and underused as a rusty and underused thing.) Unfortunately I can't yet tell you anything about it, since I'm on a waiting list, along with a lot of other people who I suspect simple want to wander around it and go 'uh?'

However, Danny has done a great job of dissembling it and his conclusion seems to be 'WTF? Uh?' with a side dish of 'use Bing instead!' I can't disagree with him on that.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google looks as though it's returning to its roots of search with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph. It's only just rolling out, and I haven't got it yet, so I'm using their video to introduce it:

 

What this means is that Google can understand the things in your search query, so we're slowly getting towards the concept of semantic searching. It's also widening out the opportunity to look more broadly (or indeed more narrowly) at a particular subject.

When you run a search, you'll get to see something like this:

(Thanks to RRW for the image, and please visit their site for more details on this development) I was amused that they're talking about becoming a 'knowledge engine' (2.20 in the video), but I'm sorry to tell them that the phrase has already been taken.

One other thing in particular has interested me, and it's a point brought up by RRW as well - where's the social gone? Come to that - where are the adverts? We're starting to see a very interesting split in the search engine world, with Bing beginning to go down the route of social search in more depth than ever before, with closer ties to Facebook, and Google backing away. I'm not about to suggest that Google is going to be abandoning G+ at all, but it's interesting to see how things are switching around at Google with almost hysterical speed. One may be forgiven for thinking they're not sure what they're doing.

Google images get personal

Has anyone else seen that Google is now pushing the personalisation of images as well? I did a search today for the 'Big Society' and this is what I got:

All of the images link to the named individual's blogs, and to specific posts within those. Now, these are obviously all people who I follow - in Google+ I'm assuming, but it's interesting to see these links coming out. Did the people who put these images into the blogs expect this was going to happen? Are they happy with it? How helpful is it to see the image without seeing it directly in context?

Online pharmaceutical companies

Well, not all of them, just one in particular. I spent a good few minutes clearing out spam from my blog which pointed to 'Health Websites' and I was rather irritated. So I thought I'd contact their customer live support number, to see what was occuring. This is the chat that I had...

11:37:19 Visitor: I have a query about cefdinir
11:41:56 Operator John joined the chat
11:42:03 John: Hello
11:42:13 Visitor: Hi John
There's then a long pause, so clearly they're not interested in customer service to any great degree, and in the end my patience snapped first...
11:44:25 Visitor: Anyone there?

11:44:52 John: We carry cefdinir. you may place the order on the website
11:45:29 Visitor: Yes,my friend bought some from you... I'm with him right now... he's turned blue and is having difficulty breathing... is this normal?
11:46:32 John: did you place the order with our company? What is the order ID?

I love the fact that their first concern is to wonder if it's anything to do with them... (Of course, my 'friend' doesn't exist, but John isn't to know that...)

11:47:05 Visitor: I don't know - he placed the order and he's not really in a position to say too much at the moment,,, difficulty breathing
11:48:12 John: Please, contact the doctor
11:48:33 Visitor: well, maybe he got a bad batch from you or something
11:49:13 Visitor: should I give him some more of it?
11:49:56 John: Unfortunately, we are not doctors and are not authorized to provide any medical consultation.
11:51:12 Visitor: but you can supply the items?
So they can supply items, but they really don't know anything about them...

11:52:46 Visitor: He's starting to choke a bit now.....
11:52:49 John: Yes, we carry cefdinirI like John - never mind that someone is apparently dying, if he can make the sale, he's going for it.

11:53:07 Visitor: So, should I give him some more?
11:54:01 Visitor: he's looking quite unwell now..... he's beginning to shake a bit... is this a normal side effect?
11:56:33 Visitor: What should I do?
11:58:05 Visitor: Any ideas?
11:59:14 John: I'm not competent in such questions. We are not authorized to provide any medical consultation.
11:59:51 Visitor: So.... you're selling a product that has caused my friend to choke, go blue and shake, and you can't tell me if this is a usual side effect?
12:02:43 John: You do not even know whether you ordered from our company. I'm sorry

I bet John's thinking 'phew, this gets me off the hook, nothing to do with me'

12:02:49 Visitor: Oh hang on......
Let's take it a tad further, see what happens next...
12:03:01 Visitor: I think he's just died. Is that natural?
12:03:30 Visitor: This could be excellent.. there are people that I'd like to do away with. How do I order this stuff?

Not a word from John. I wonder if he's actually noticed. This has clearly gone way off his script though.
12:04:32 John:
If you wish to order a product from us you are to do the following:
1. Choose the product you are to purchase by clicking "Buy now" button;
2. Choose the dosage and amount of pills you wish to buy and click "add to cart";
3. Click "Checkout";
4. Fill in the order information required;
5. Check all the fields, pills quantity and press on "Submit transaction"
button;

This is magnificent! I have to hand it to John... bloke dies, another bloke decides this medicine could be great for killing people... sell him some immediately! I wonder if they have a 'serial killer' special?

12:05:00 Visitor: That's great - and if they survive, can I get a refund?
12:06:51 John: In case you are not satisfied with the effect our medications produce, please contact us to inform of the problem. We will supply you with the return address and as soon as the product is received by our returns department, we will start the refund procedure.

I am wondering at this stage if this is an automated call assistant.. let's just be absolutely certain -

12:07:18 Visitor: Excellent, thanks. So you're not that bothered that my friend has just died then?
12:09:30 John: My condolences
12:09:42 Visitor: Thanks... I appreciate it.

Nooooo! It's real! It's a real person!

12:18:03 John: Do you have any other questions?
12:18:48 Visitor: No, that's fine thanks - you're not bothered that a product you sell might have actually killed someone. This is going to make an excellent blog post, ripping your company to bits. Thanks so much!
12:20:24 John: You are welcome

That's what I like - a person who is confident in their company and their products.

12:21:43 Visitor: So you're happy to give me permission to blog this discussion then?
12:22:44 Visitor: I'll assume that silence is assent, if you like?

12:23:04 Visitor: 3
12:23:08 Visitor: 2
12:23:12 Visitor: 1
12:23:19 Visitor: Thanks John - have a nice day!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cracking stuff. I'm sure that not all pharma companies are like this of course. Most are highly reputable, I'm sure.

Google+ Hangouts On Air: broadcast your conversation to the world | Official Google Blog

The Official Google Blog has details on a nice improvement to the hangout function that I've been talking about recently. You can now broadcast live onto your G+ profile page, your YouTube channel and to any page that you can embed HTML code into. You can see how many viewers you have, and the session will be recorded for you so that you can keep it and make available to other people.

This is a great idea - if you want to keep people on your site just embed the code and people can watch from the site or page that they're happy with going to - and if you are from an organisation like a school for example the site is giving the hangout authority at once. Moreover, if you're having a discussion about a book club for example, you can save the chat so that people who were unable to be there at the time can catch up later. It's also going to be very useful if you're running a training course or induction session as well. I can see how it's going to be really useful. Here's a video that explains it quite neatly:

 

 

Related articles

• Google Hangouts On Air Live Broadcasting Ability Coming to All Google+ Users (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google Hangout On Air Could Be A Big Thing (ryocentral.info)

Google Custom Search improvements

via googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk

One of the things that I like about Google (and yes, there are a few, and I'm as happy to praise them as damn the other stuff they do wrong :) ) is the custom search engine. It's a great opportunity to create your own search engine - simply toddle along to the home page and fill in the blanks and you're done. Google has now informed us via the blog that they have updated the functionality to include sorting and filtering options. The graphic above provides the details. The only annoyance is that it's necessary to go back and get the updated code to paste onto your own pages, but it's an annoyance that we can live with I suppose!

 

Related articles

• Google Custom Search Gets Better Sort And Filter Results (webpronews.com)

Twicsy

The Twitter Pics Engine Apparently, there's about a million pictures uploaded onto Twitter every day. This is your fun filled Monday Bank Holiday fact, folks, so cherish it to your hearts. Twicsy is one of the ways of searching for them. Simply pop in your prefered search term, and see what it comes up with. It's a fairly random collection, as you might expect, and results often have little to do with the term you input, so it's not brilliant. You get results from the past hour, past day and so on. Please be aware that images which are NSFW do often turn up as well.

Google+ hangout experiment - results

Well, I tried hosting my first ever proper Google Hangout - that's to say, one which had a particular purpose, rather than just being around and chatting at random. I decided on the idea of telling a ghost story, and thinking about it, using the hangout is a new way of doing an old thing - gathering a bunch of friends together and swopping stories. It really *did* feel like the gentleman's smoking club that I imagine of old.

FIrst thing to remember though - don't, whatever you do, under any circumstances, ever ever ever make it public. Instead of the nice quiet smoking club you end up trying to tell a story to a few people in the middle of a nightclub. People pop in and then pop out again, and since you're limited to a total of 10 (including yourself) it's really a drive by existance, and not one which is condusive to indepth chat or for which you've got a purpose. It's particularly annoying when you get morons like Mike Smith who come on in and start to hang out in ways that you hadn't intended! Sometimes I'm so innocent it's painful; I really didn't expect that - on chat roulette sure, but not on Google+ where you're vaguely identifiable. This showed a real limitation in the service - I was theoretically the room 'owner' but I couldn't throw the guy out. Apparently it takes everyone in the room to click to ban someone before the person is chucked, so it only needs two people who want to be a nuisance to really wreck a room. Most other resources take care of this so much better, and Google is shockingly lax and behind it's painful.

However, once I closed the room and then reopened it, limiting it to just my circles (and there's another Google+ limitation - once a room is public you can't make it private and automatically chuck out anyone who isn't in one of your circles) it was much, much better. There ended up being about 5 of us, and that worked really well - I could share my screen, which then meant I was able to show pictures of the haunted building, and I also played sound clips as well, which seemed to work to effect.

Overall, I was pleased with what I could do. As usual with Google, they have good ideas, which are poorly executed, and this is another example. I would suggest that if you're hosting a hangout, it's worth creating a circle of people that have expressed an interest, and limiting it to just those people. So it's a bit of work to create, but it's a lot easier than other tools that I've seen. I certainly intend to do something similar again.

 

Related articles

• Using Google Hangout for Coaching in an Immersive Environment (gridjumper.net)
• Google Hangouts & Chats (elirose.com)

MillionShort search engine

OK, this falls into the 'WTF' category, but think about it for a moment. A search engine which *doesn't* return results from the top 1,000,000 websites. That's what MillionShort does. This is how it describes itself: "Million Short is an experimental web search engine (really, more of a discovery engine) that allows you to REMOVE the top million (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites from the results set. We thought might be somewhat interesting to see what we'd find if we just removed an entire slice of the web.

The thinking was the same popular sites (we're not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatver reason (poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, competitive keyword(s) etc.). Most people don't look beyond page 1 when doing a search and now they don't have to."

It's an interesting concept, and I found it quite entertaining. I'm not sure how they're defining their one million - I presume through something like Alexa, but that's just a guess. What's a bit weird though is that this engine doesn't think that the CILIP site is in the top one million. Alexa has it pegged at 734,003 though so your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, I tried a few of my usual searches, and came up with some interesting stuff. I'm not sure that I'd want to use it for much, but it's an interesting experiment, that's for sure.

 

Related articles

• Million Short Search Engine (presurfer.blogspot.de)
• Million Short: A Search Engine for the Very Long Tail (webmonkey.com)
• Experimental Search Engine Removes Top Million Sites From Your Results (webpronews.com)

Finding Google Hangouts

Following on from my previous post, you may be wondering how you can actually find hangouts to join. If you've been invited by a friend or colleague, or you're in a particular circle, you should get to see a notification that a hangout has been started. However, if you're not actually in G+ at the time (you mean that you're not in there all the time??) that's not very helpful. Even if you are keen, you might simply want to join a public hangout to see what's occuring. There are a few ways in which you can do this. The first is to visit a site called GPHangouts, as this will provide you with not only a list of hangouts that are taking place right now, but with hangouts that are scheduled for some time in the future. You can also use this site to publicise your own hangouts, if they are public.

Another option is to use a plug in for the Chrome browser. There are a few of these available, such as My Hangouts, or Hangout Canopy for example.  There's also an app for the iPhone (and possibly other smartphones as well), which can be used on the iPad as well - Google has a good listing that you might want to have a look at. I found a really nice blog posting that shows this in some detail. Of course, if you're using an iPad or an iPhone, instead of having the camera facing you, you could always do it the other way around, and guide people around a physical resource, like a library for example.

 

Related articles

• Hangout Canopy: Find and Share Public Hangouts (bloggingot.com)
• How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Your Business (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• Use Google+ Hangouts to Share Desktop Screen with Friends! (clickhost4you.wordpress.com)