DISQUS

Definitely a step too far (or maybe even a couple of steps) but that does not really mean the discussion is not needed, I think - at least now everyone knows Google has 10k contractors and will probably turn to them to cut costs now. But of course it does not mean all 10k people will be simply let go while to me these stories are simply a good indication of the fact that even Google needs to behave reasonably in a recession.

Well, the obvious suggestion is that Google is not that capable to work in Russia efficiently while another major company working in contextual advertising - Yandex (the search engine and portal that is pondering an IPO for some time next year) - obviously understands the realities here much better. But that is just a theory, no proof or evidence of this!

Good suggestion on a social network for a group of newspapers, could make better sense here. After all, I would not say that NYTimes overloads us with the number of articles that we could really need a recommendation engine. What's more, it could be better off as an application for Facebook or LinkedIn (better yet) instead of making us build yet another network of friends.

Mike, very reasonable post, really a must-read for anyone just starting with personal branding. I remember in the early days of Profy I did not bother to register accounts named "profy" everywhere I could but now I am most certain to at least add some basic information to any new service launched and forget it if I don't see traction enough to justify my efforts to keep it active. And even if you don't really get any search traffic, it will at the very least provide an extra incoming link or two.


P.S. Thanks for the link, by the way :)

I actually think that the added ability to customize exactly what blocks you get on the homepage is also an important one - finally I'll be able to hide my own photos.

Excellent title for the post and I'm glad I'm not the only one this enthusiastic about the announcement. I guess the only people showing enthusiasm are those that studied university at college or university and spent way too much time with file folders of newspapers :)

Svetlana Gladkova's last blog post..Google Comes Up With a Great Initiative for Historians - Scans Old Newspapers

Excellent points about this behavior caused simply by kids natural inclination to exuberance when in college. But hopefully kids will finally realize that in this era the evidence of such exuberance should better be kept private whenever possible.

Zoli, I have the same situation on Profy with the same 38 years :) It looks like all the blogs hosted either on wordpress.com or blogspot have the same strange glitch.

I think the problem here is that we think that web 2.0 business is something of a large playground and often forget to think about serious issues like legislation when we can simply achieve our goals on social media sites.

Steven, excellent post this one is. The only thing I wanted to mention is that social media is equally capable of manipulating the crowds both for bad and for GOOD. And for Russians the CNN poll was actually a good cause to help the world see what people really see about the conflict. If it were for a bad cause people would have been much harder to manipulate and no one would have been able to initiate such a viral campaign if people did not believe in the cause.

I think filters will become even more useful when we are able to apply multiple filters simultaneously - like to see updates from FriendFeed for a certain friends list.

Steven, thank you for bringing the situation to the Mashable audience. It is an important issue that we see internet as a new theater of war these days but I personally don't think it is really all that important: all our online lives are worth way much less than a real life of one child actually killed in the conflict. Don't you think so?

I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. No messaging for now with only possibility to add it some time in the future. And the same multi-tasking, only you don't have to switch between apps, you switch between tabs.

Good to see it has been resolved but I think that this incident should make us all rethink our complete reliance on Google services for many of our professional or personal tasks. I think some level of diversification should be used to make it all more reasonable.

Andy, I don't think that there's a chance of catching the virus by simply looking at the profile or following it - from what I've read on Kaspersky Lab's blog you need to click the link in the tweets from that account to start downloading the trojan. It's very similar to fishing emails and general spam - you are safe unless you click the links.

And the tweets have been deleted from the account already (though I don't see why the account itself still exists).

Svetlana Gladkova's last blog post..by: Svetlana Gladkova

Have you tried the functionality yourself? I have tried and it really failed on a number of calls so it's definitely an honest alpha. But I like their approach to combining all the major IM clients plus chats in social networks on one service.

I'm not sure about one thing: if I choose to buy some stocks at the internal $4 billion valuation and taking into account the official $15 billion valuation based on the latest investment from Microsoft, where exactly will the valuation be when I eventually decide to sell that stock? Will it stay at the $4 billion, grow closer to $15 billion or instead drop further?

Mark, I have published my version of the story at http://www.profy.com/2008/08/02/editorial-chang....

Thank you for mentioning PitchEngine, I have tested it myself for some time and it does look like having a good potential. I can see some additions that could be added to really improve the relations between PR and media.

Yes, this new addition definitely puts FriendFeed in direct competition with Facebook but what I think is good about this is the fact that Facebook actually has the power to bring lifestreaming to a mainstream level, while FriendFeed (no matter how much I love it) simply has no such power.

Yes, that one could also be a big advantage - though I guess I'd have to spend quite some time making my choice. Probably I'd choose the same status updates but in my case this is more to watch Twitter updates from my closer friends than the entire timeline.

Yes, adding a way to filter what apps should get preference definitely makes sense as well. As of now the potential to aggregate all types of content on Facebook is huge and I think it will be only logical if they implement it.

I love the new tabs myself - the only thing that still seem to be missing is a tab to aggregate all the activities of my friends with various applications. This would have provided another source of interesting content (the way FriendFeed does) and it would probably familiarized a lot more people with lifestreaming.

This all sounds very good but I actually have a concern about the whole announcement. Don't you feel that 100 thousand of raised donations is a little too small compared to $4.2 million of VC they raised for the company itself?

That's a number of impressive examples. I often find unexpected search terms in the logs as well and can't help but feel pity for the readers who found something very tech-related instead of the information they were actually looking for. But are you hinting at a need for a new algorithm here?