Google Might Change Google.com and Make Using the Internet Way Better

 

Gizmodo - As a fashionable internet denizen, you do not use a homepage, probably. You open a new browser window or tab, and you're met with your Chrome apps, or Safari favorites, or whatever the hell Firefox is doing now. And if you do have one, it's probably a legacy media hub like MSN, AOL or Yahoo, or a search page like Google or Bing. But what if the web found a way for a landing page to be useful again? 

According to GoogleSystem, Google has live code that suggests it's working on bringing its Google Now feature to the web. Not just the web, but the Google search page—basically the most frequented and iconic web page on the planet. And that would be awesome.  

Google Now is maybe the most powerful convergence Google has ever conjured up. It's the proto-synthesis of the decision-making future Mountain View promised us in exchange for gobbling up reams of personal, often sensitive data about our lives.  

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10 Google search secrets

Google search secrets: Introduction

Everyone knows how to pop a search term into Google and hit the search button, but very few realize the true power of Google. In this short-but-revealing gallery, I uncover 10 little-known facets of Google that are guaranteed to make even the most astute searcher a better searcher. A few of the topics I will be covering are how to search FTPs with Google; how to block sites from your search results; and how to search Google Docs. If you’re an advanced Google search novice, that’s okay! Just be sure to read the recommended articles beneath each description in this gallery and they’ll turn you into a pro in no time. And now, without any further ado, here are 10 Google search secrets.

See the tips!

Facebook’s Timeline feature is just the beginning. Here’s why timelines will soon be everywhere

Computerworld – Facebook will soon foist its new Timeline feature on users as part of its plan to update its interface.

Dictionary.com defines a timeline as “a linear representation of important events in the order in which they occurred.” The key attributes of a timeline are linearity and chronology.
Facebook‘s Timeline is a brand name — and it’s somewhat misleading.

A Twitter feed is a timeline. Google+ streams are timelines. Blogs are timelines. In fact all major social networks, RSS feed readers, blogs and microblogs offer timelines — linear representations of chronologies — as the default view.

Facebook’s branded Timeline is different from those interfaces. Among the differences in Facebook’s Timeline are the size of the items and the fact that it has two columns rather than one. It scrolls all the way down to the beginning and has other visual and functional differences.

Timeline de-emphasizes the posts of other people in favor of a highlighted emphasis on one’s own activities. “Me Time” would be a more accurate name than “Timeline.”

Facebook once did have a much more timeline-like interface. Back in 2009, it introduced “Facebook Lite,” which was truly linear. Facebook originally rolled out Facebook Lite in India to serve the segment of that population with slow Internet connections. However, people back home heard about it and decided they wanted it, so Facebook offered it as an option in the U.S.

But it didn’t last long. Without apps and pages, and with fewer and smaller ads, the Facebook Lite timeline wasn’t the cash-cow interface the company wanted.

Either way, the “timeline” idea is nothing unique to Facebook. What’s interesting is not that yet another social or content service is rolling out yet another variation on the timeline concept, but that products that never had timeline interfaces are getting them.

Newest search engine is a timeline

 

When you search for something on Google+, the default result is a timeline (as defined above).              More

2011 in Review: The Fight for Free Speech and Privacy on the Internet

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark

 

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.


The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:

• Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.

• Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.

• Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.

• President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.

• CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News’ Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”

• The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”

• Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office’s budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.

• Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”

• NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government’s own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.           More