Google is to launch a new cloud storage service called ‘Google Drive’ next week, according to reports.
People will be able to pay for more storage, but prices are not yet known, Read Write Web reported.
It is expected to allow users to put their files into Google Drive and access them on their desktop, mobile phone or tablet. The report stated that the service will work on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS – all via drive.google.com.
The salary was undisclosed, but the job still sounds awesome.
The role: Doodler
First impressions matter. Every day, hundreds of millions of online users visit the Google homepage. Yes, to search. But also, to be delighted, informed, and surprised (And maybe even to laugh a little). The Google Doodle makes this possible — it’s the change that is constant on Google.com. As a Product Graphic Designer/Illustrator, more commonly known as a “Doodler,” you have the world’s best platform to showcase your stylistic skills — as well as your sense of humor, love of all things historical and imaginative artistry. From Jules Verne to Pac-Man, you have the reins to our brand and iconic logo and can run free with your innovative ideas. Go forth and doodle!
Responsibilities:
- Draw, design, and/or animate the highly visible Google homepage doodles.
- Come up with consistently excellent creative ideas within the constraints of the our logo.
- Manage complex collaborative projects from idea, to executive pitches, to final execution in a fast-paced environment.
- Design illustrations both digitally and traditionally and in a wide range of artistic styles with great attention to detail.
More at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2124992/What-Twitter-Google-Angry-Birds-look-like-1980s.html
This week’s most stunning statistic: In February, Facebook drove more traffic to the Guardian web site than Google did.This fact was proffered (I couldn’t bring myself to write shared) at the Changing Medias Summit Conference by Tanya Corduroy, Guardian’s director for digital development (full text of her speech):
Eighteen months ago, search represented 40% of the Guardian’s traffic and social represented just 2%. Six months ago – before the launch of our Facebook app – these figures had barely moved.
A recent Pew report echoed these figures, revealing that just 9% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations from Facebook or from Twitter. That compares with 32% who get news from search.
But last month, we felt a seismic shift in our referral traffic. For the first time in our history, Facebook drove more traffic to guardian.co.uk than Google for a number of days, accounting for more than 30% of our referrer traffic. This is a dramatic result from a standing start five months ago.
She made her point with a graph showing the crossing of the two traffic lines, even though the Facebook referrals now appear to be receding:
This is obviously a great achievement for the team who created the FB app. Overall, The Guardian’s relentless pursuit of digital innovation is paying off. Its last monthtraffic stats are staggering: more than 4 million unique browsers (+64% vs. Feb 2011) and almost 70 million unique browser monthly (+76% vs. Feb 2011). As for its mobile site, it is growing at a year-to-year rate of… 182%, with 640,000 unique browsers a month.
The Guardian Facebook App played a critical role in this rise in traffic. Over the last five months, 8 million people downloaded it and 40,000 are signing up every day, again according to Tanya Cordrey.
More at: http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/03/26/the-sharing-mirage/
The Google comment system, which will almost certainly rival that of Facebook, will have deep links to Google’s network of services and websites, indexing comments in Google Search, and most significantly, the system will be available for use on third party sites.
You can’t go anywhere these days without running into a site that is using Facebook’sthird-party comment platform, and it looks like Google wants in on the action.
A third party Google comment system would ensure that users are further plugged in to their Google accounts, and one step closer to Google+.
It certainly wouldn’t come as a surprise, as Google continues to push its social networkfurther into the public sphere, and tie all of its products into that hard-to-miss black navigation bar at the top of every Google product page, with Playadded just yesterday.
The question remains how this will affect services that are dedicated exclusively to providing a comment platform, like Disqus and Livefyre, who may struggle to compete against the likes of Facebook and Google down the line, each of wish enjoy a well-established user-base.
More at: http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/27/google-to-launch-third-party-commenting-platform-to-rival-facebook/
The never-ending chicken-and-egg issue of gaining ground in Google results is about to take another abrupt turn. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the company is working on a new set of tweaks to the fabled “GoogleBot” that will penalize sites that over-optimize for prime Google results.
Search Engine Land’sBarry Schwartzreports that Cutts let the impending tweaks slip out while speaking at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The goal, said Cutts, is to “level the playing field” between sites that focus on excessive optimization to achieve strong Google results versus sites that hit Google naturally through strong, relevant content.
“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now,” Cutts said.
Cutts added that the optimizations could hit anytime between the next few weeks to a month from now. Google hasn’t gone on record with any additional details as to what its optimizations might include – fair, since additional details about how the GoogleBot will rank sites could invariably assist those looking to re-game the rankings for their benefit. It’s also unclear as to how Google plans to “penalize” sits that over-optimize, or even if there’s going to be a way for website operators to determine whether they fall below this threshold or not.
More at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp
[Implications for content strategists. If people don’t need to visit your page to the get the answer, there’ll be less traffic. ]
Instead of surfacing a list of blue web links, the new Google search engine, will also present more facts and direct answers to search queries at the top of the results page.
By employing ‘semantic search technology’, the world’s most popular search engine is going to endure its biggest makeover yet, as it attempts to stay ahead of the curve and maintain its spot as the market leader.
The changes, which will see more answers, rather than just web links, surface on each search results page, resemble Wolfram Alpha’s approach, a British computational search engine which tries to answer queries, rather than supply a list of websites.
Google now seems to moving towards the same model and may soon begin providing one answer to a search query, instead of thousands of links to different sites.
Since the rise of Twitter and information updates in real-time, Google has been trying to update its core search service, to make it as relevant and timely to each user.
Reality appears to have finally arrived at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest marketer, whose $10 billion annual ad budget has hurt the company’s margins.
P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.
He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.
Yesterday, Google rolled out yet another new feature for Google+ that lets you start a conversation directly from search results - and contribute to a topical Google+ stream.
In a post on Google+ (of course), associate product manager Alex Unger said that if you search for a keyword of phrase like basketball from within Google+, you can then create a post directly from the results shown.
He added that all you need to do is look for the share box, and you’ll see an opportunity to “join the discussion” about whatever you’ve searched for.
This means that when you post from the search results page, it automatically includes a link back to the original search stream. This way others can join the active conversation as it unfolds.”
This is yet another move to position Google+ as a central hub – as well as more closely connecting search and social functions.
Up until the announcement of this new feature, you could only comment on an existing post or share an item when searching for something on Google+.
This now removes one step in the search and share process, which makes it easier to start a conversation and keeps people in the Google loop.
Watch out, Facebook. Google is making its own game for Google+ … and it involves maps.
Yesterday, the company released a video of the new game, which takes advantage of its Google Maps product. The video shows a cube with a map overlay. A small blue ball travels through the map based on the spinning and tilting of the cube. Judging by the video, it seems players will have to move through the map, hitting certain destinations to collect points along the way. When a destination is hit, a small piece of information about the place pops up, then you can go on to your next.
Google introduced games to its social network Google+ in August. Facebook, Google+’s major competitor, integrated gaming applications onto its platform long ago and has made a very successful business of it. In fact, Zynga, now a social gaming powerhouse with titles like Castleville and Farmville, recently debuted as a public company on the Nasdaq. Google+ didn’t wait the shadows for too long, however, and quickly attracted big gaming companies such as PopCap and Zynga to its own social network.
More at: http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/11/google-plus-maps-game/?obref=obinsite
