Links 3-30-11: +1, Project Thunderdome, Amazon’s consumer cloud, Against gamification
Top of the Interwebs:
The big news of the day is Google’s partial launch of +1, a very geeky answer to the Like or Retweet button. In a move inspired by forum websites of the late 90s, Google is testing a product that allows you to “+1” search results.
Plus Oneing allows you to share pages with your social graph as well as total strangers. Google also plans on integrating it into advertisements and using that data to serve you (and probably your circle of friends) more targeted advertising. The data will also be added to Google’s mystery search recipe to better optimize search results.
There’s a +1 video, which a whole 484 people have watched as of this post.
This seems to be a wider role-out of the star-ing of websites you used to be able to do on searches with it more public and on ads.
What you need to know about Plus One:
- You need a Google Profile to use it.
- You can +1 +1 (+2?) by turning on the feature in Google’s experimental search ideas page.
- +1s are public. People will be able to see a list of them in your Google Profile.
- +1 helps SEO a site.
- You will be able to track your site’s +1 stats with Google Webmaster Central.
- If you run AdWords, you’ll be able to see stats on your ads as well.
- There will be a +1 button for sites to go under the ReTweet and Like buttons.
- Publishers will somehow be able to use +1 info to personalize information outside of search.
It’s a miracle (tool)!
Hey it’s $10 for a really nice, very clean CV/Resume Template. Worth it.
Create a time-lapse video of any website.
Niche controversy of the day:
Jim Brady, he of TBD, has been brought on to the Journal Register company. What will he be doing? Why another weirdly-named local-focused web project of course.
They want to take a whole bunch of local-focused shitty websites with different CMSs and give them all the same CMS and a greater focus on local news. Sound familiar? Why yes… this will be Patch with some shared content.
What does an old Mel Gibson movie have to do with it? Well apparently Project Thunderdome is “large.” I guess they have a big stumbling block with what sounds like a whole bunch of really horrible sounding CMS-powered (and non-CMS!) sites. Can’t we get beyond Thunderdome?
Look, a quick aside: I like Jim Brady. I think he has good ideas. I think that TBD was an awesome concept, just in the wrong place. That being said, someone needs to sit down with him and just revoke his naming rights. Project Thunderdome? TBD? WTF?
Worth looking at today:
A cogent and intriguing article against Gamification by Heather Chaplin at Slate. She argues that the gamification movement really just conspires to make us blind to our wage slavery. I disagree. That’s only if we do it wrong.
AT&T pays Georgetown Cupcake to supply 1,500 cupcakes for delivery to the F.C.C.’s headquarters as the communications regulator makes its decision on whether to allow the communications giant to gobble up T-Mobile.
Lifehacker compares the new Amazon Cloud Drive to Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Dropbox.
Google Street View maps historic landmarks. With their recent launch of indoor art tours with Street View this means you don’t have to ever leave the house.
Salesforce ads social media monitoring company Radian6 to their portfolio.
Approval rating for the Tea Party drops to 32%.
Watch this!
