All posts in “caffeine”

Social Media Roundup for November 4, 2011

Gmail’s New Look

Google seems to be ever-changing and upgrading these days. This week they released the new Gmail and Google Reader layout. The new layout is supposed to be about making your view more streamlined and efficient, although some users have a different take on this. Eventually, most of us will get used to the new layout, but lost functionality is a different story. Negative posts and reactions have been voiced, mostly pertaining to the changes to Google Reader, where you can no longer one-click share to social sites unless it’s to Google+. Check out the tweets that turn up when you search for @googlereader in Twitter:

Not only are people angry about this change for future sharing, they were also given no warning and so people that have used Reader to push content to their sites or blogs have lost that content. A little heads up would have been nice! The root issue behind this change is that it is disrupting the communities that we have formed and people can no longer communicate and share with their community, at least not through your Google Reader. And having to +1 something before it can be shared can even make people not want to share at all. How do you feel about having to share publicly first if you want to share with your network? A former Google employee even offered his services to come back on a contract to fix the Google Reader.

Google’s New Search Algorithm

Another update from Google this week is talk about their new infrastructure, Caffeine, which makes crawled content available in our search results more quickly because as soon as a page is crawled, it’s made available in our searches. Now it is reported that not only will results be “fresher,” it will also change 35% of your search results. This will impact your searches related to recent events or trending topics because Caffeine will be able to crawl those news stories or posts that people wrote maybe only minutes ago while they are at an event like Occupy Toronto. This seems a bit like Twitter where your searches will always be updating. If you search something in the morning, your results could very well be different by lunch.

Because I use Google often for research, I’m excited about this change. For example, if I want to know the best practices for measuring social media engagement, I can type this in and Google will now pull up the most recent reports and studies on this topic. If I did the same research a year from now, I would not want to see those same reports, because they are now outdated.

Another type of search this “freshness” factor is great for is when you are searching an event that is regularly occurring. Now, Google will know that when you type in “Who went home on America’s Next Top Model last night,” you will see highlights from this week’s episode and not say from Cycle 7, several years ago. Now you can make your searches with less thought, you don’t have to think about dates and specific keywords because it’s like Google is in your head, it knows what you want to see and read about.

This seems great – who doesn’t want the most recent news? But there is a potential downside, too. Although a story may be the most recently posted, this doesn’t always mean it is the most up-to-date. Think about people reading stories and then sharing them on their own blog. Their blog post may occur a few days after the original story, making it more “fresh,” but there is no promise that there haven’t been more updates to the story since the original story. So we must be careful.

Social Timing Insights Infographic

Speaking of “freshness” and timing, check out this Infographic for insights in social timing.

When your brand is posting on Facebook and Twitter, are you thinking about what your customers are doing at that moment? You wouldn’t want to post when most of your audience is busy and your update just gets pushed down their News Feed, so they may not see it. This Infographic gives us insight into when customers are most receptive so that you can reach the most customers and achieve maximum engagement.

Social Media Roundup for June 11, 2010

Bing Adds Facebook & Twitter Updates

Bing lovers can rejoice! On Wednesday Microsoft launched their social implementation of Bing, which indexes data from Twitter, Facebook fan pages, and Facebook updates that are shared to “everyone.” There is also the functionality to play/pause the feed which will refresh the content or keep it static. The social view of Bing can be found @ bing.com/social.

Google Announces Caffeine

This week Google announced the details regarding their new and improved indexing system Caffeine. The new system will provide more content, and 50% fresher more relevant results from web searches. This is a fantastic update for those looking for the most recent article, stories, blogs posts, or forum threads. Google states that content on the web is blossoming, and to ensure scalability, Caffeine will add hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day to their web index!  Wowza!

Twitter Announces in House URL Shortener

My momma always said that clicking on shortened links is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get! Twitter has announced their plans to improve how shortened links are viewed in tweets, by implementing their own service. The new feature will shorten links using the t.co URL, but the actual link or variation of the link will be visible within the tweet, which wont count towards the max character count. Twitter hopes this will remove remove the obscurity from shortened links and let users know where they will end up. The new shortener will be rolled out during the summer, and be tested by twitter and developers.

Test Your Focus

The New York Times has released an online assessment that will put your focus and task juggling skills to the test! Living in the digital world of today, our brains are hit hard with multiple stimuli at the same time. Managing the information can be difficult, as Kord Campbell found out when he missed an email that could have cost him $1.3 million. The key is knowing your strengths and weaknesses, as it will help you create more efficient personal workflows. Research has shown that heavy multitaskers have trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant data, and in turn experience more stress.

Adidas racks up the cameos in Star Wars Cantina 2010

Just in time for the FIFA World Cup™, Adidas has released a new Star Wars themed video for their Adidas Originals collection. It has quickly reached over 2.7 million views!

See if you can spot David Beckham, Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Franz Beckenbauer, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, Ciara, Jay Baruchel, and DJ Neil Armstrong.