Twitter to be the new Google?

clipped from www.searchenginejournal.com it stares at you upfront - the Twitter Search Box. As Loren commented to me via IM - “looks like a search engine to me…“ The redesign was made more for first time visitors to the Twitter home page and who are not yet using Twitter. Putting the Twitter search box right up front would give these visitors a first taste of how great Twitter is as a discovery engine and not just a social media tool for communicating with Twitter members. It’s a good strategy for Twitter which defines what it could do aside from being a micro-blogging service. And this could also be the start of biggger, bolder things to come for Twitter.

"it stares at you upfront - the Twitter Search Box."

The staring twitter search box. Such fear and dread lurks behind this simple description.

Google Voice vs iPhone

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store Earlier today we learned that Apple had begun to pull all Google Voice-enabled applications from the App Store, citing the fact that they “duplicate features that come with the iPhone”. Now comes even worse news: we’ve learned that Apple has blocked Google’s official Google Voice application itself from the App Store. who’s behind the restriction: our old friend AT&T. Google Voice scares the carriers. It allows users to send free SMS messages and get cheap long-distance over Google Voice’s lines. It also makes it trivial to switch to a new phone service, because everyone calls the Google Voice number anyway. John Gruber has confirmed with a trusted source that AT&T is to blame for the Google Voice ban. Apple can point to the App Store’s 50,000 applications all it wants, but how many of them could truly be called groundbreaking? Are they really putting a dent in the universe?

Go to FreeMyPhone.net to do something about it.

Google Book Settlement @ NYPL "Big Brave New World of the Jetsons"

This afternoon at the Celeste Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library, the main players in the Google Book Settlement gathered for a bit of PR soothing for an ornery audience made up of librarians, publishing industry workers, professors, and the NYPL 's general counsel.

To sum up the dominant metaphors in play - Now that Google has finished scanning every book on the face of the earth, the horses have been let out their barns, but lojacked, and we're all sitting around our kitchen tables on the internet, except those of us without access who are waiting in long lines out the door on 42nd Street for the one terminal that the settlement provides free for each public library building to access the new Google Book Search index.

• This settlement covers books out of print & under copyright with a 1/09 cutoff date.
  
• Authors & Rightsholders (publishers) will get a one-time payment of anywhere between $60-$300.
• Books found on the Book Search can be bought from $2-$200 - average price $6-$7.
• Price can be set by rightsholder.
• 37% will go to Google - 63% to Books Rights Registry (which will pay author & rightsholder.)
  
• Orphaned works are thought to comprise 10% of these books.

Best exchange - Google: "Money from [sales of] orphaned works will go to charity."
NYPL Director: "This is the most charitable place."
Google: "The money will be held in escrow for five years."
NYPL Director: "We're here for the long haul."