@adabot on @snapchat (Photo credit: adafruit)

Snapchat Refuses Multi-billion Offers

Facebook has tried and failed to claim the popular messaging app Snapchat. Last year, Facebook offered the company $1 billion dollars, but the company refused their offer.   Recently, Mark Zuckerberg offered Snapchat $3 billion dollars cash. The CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, has released a statement saying they are not considering selling the company at this time. He also said he would be willing to talk about a sale in 2014.

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Google's Newest Foray Into Video Gaming

For the past decade, the video gaming industry has been dominated by three companies: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.  These three companies, manufacturers of the Xbox, Playstation, and Wii (respectively) have enjoyed tremendous market share and no outside competition -- until now.  Google has announced that they will throw their hat into the Video Game Console ring and challenge the supremacy of the gaming titans with their own video gaming system.

Waze navigatiescherm (Photo credit: Henk-Jan van der Klis)

Facebook And Waze Talks Fall Apart

So far, all the talk of Waze, a free GPS navigation/traffic application, being acquired by Facebook, Google, or Apple has been premature.  The most recent talks between Facebook and Waze just fell through, though many thought the two companies were made for each other.  Speculation is running rampant about the reasons the acquisition fell through, but the actual circumstances are not clear.  Still, the Facebook/Waze connection made sense, and Facebook investors are undoubtedly disappointed.

The Waze application is a locally based one that helps members of specific communities shorten their morning commute by receiving the latest in road conditions, traffic flow, and even police presence. Users pool their information about local conditions, which results in a more complete and helpful picture of traffic in real time.  Ads for services also show users where the cheapest gas is located and where their morning coffee is on sale. 

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Filter Bubble DuckDuckGo

You are living in a technology filter bubble according to the search engine DuckDuckGo and  a recent presentation by Eli Pariser. Because of such technologies as personalization and localization, you see in search results things that you have previously found useful and interesting, effectively filtering out other points of view and opinions. Google provides ways for you to get around personalization and localization but the methods are not simple and must be implemented each time you search.

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Pretty much every website you go to tries to provide you with a customizable experience. Amazon suggests other items you may be interested in – based somewhat on what others buy but also on what you’ve bought, what sites you’ve visited, any cookies your browser may have, etc.

Facebook takes into consideration which links you click on and which posts you like, and then displays more updates from those friends and fewer updates from other friends. This may be good or bad, depending on whether you want to stay in touch with everyone or you want to just see what you care about most. (Compare this to Twitter, which may suggest users, but leaves it up to you to manage your actual feed.)

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On May 25, Google released Google Correlate – and statistic nerds everywhere spent the weekend playing with it.

            Google Correlate is the math-nerd cousin of Google Trends. With Google Trends, you can input and compare any given websites or keywords and phrases. You can see spikes in search and web traffic, see where the most traffic is coming from geographically, and other details. But you’re not really working with any raw data and you certainly don’t need to know what r is.

            Google Correlate, however, is a more statistical analysis of keywords and trends – telling you the correlation between your keyword and other keywords based on either time or geography. You still don’t have to be a stats junkie, but it might help.

Google has announced that they plan to hire more than 6,000 new employees in 2011. This hiring boom comes at an excellent time as many tech companies are cutting back on their employee base. Working for Google is more than just a normal tech job, though. Google is well known for its unusual work spaces and great benefits for employees. Break rooms are equipped with foosball tables and many employees enjoy free services like laundry and on-site fitness centers. Google is determined to provide creative employees with all of the resources they need to think outside the box and produce unique products that will continue to change the tech world.

According to reports from TechCrunch, some content farms are going to be completely banned from Blekko which is a search tag search engine company, and these farms will also be discarded from the companies search index.

Rich Skrenta who is also Blekko’s Chief Executive Officer did confirm the move based on the rationale of click/spam results from users, and that these sites will be removed from Blekko’s index completely. This will affect eHow.com, a content farm that is amongst Demand Media most productive websites.

MySpace Searches for Ad Revenue

With MySpace losing customers at a 13% pace over the past 52 weeks, they now face the difficult task of selling their advertising space to one of the big ad networks. Their last deal was made in 2006 with Google for $900 over the course of four years. But since then, their viewership has eroded as Facebook has overtaken the social web space. They currently in talks with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo but will most likely receive a significant reduction in revenue for this contract compare to the last one.