As if we needed another search engine up pops Topsy – Twitter’s answer to Google and Bing.
Well, whoopeee you may say! Twitter now has its own search engine for searching tweets. But as Twitter’s popularity hits exponential levels, we have also seen an equally dramatic shift in the focus and dynamic of web content – i.e., ‘conventional’ websites are no longer the place to look for current topics and information. And after spending just a few moments using Topsy to search you can quickly see its power – not just as a Social Networking Search Engine, but as a powerful market research tool to explore the current buzz,vibe or hot topics.
At the moment its BETA status restricts its focus to the US , but there’s no doubt that we will see its popularity expand globally. The major search engines are already adding this type of functionality in to their existing repertoire of search tools, probably in response to the shift in level and immediacy of user generated content, but is there a big enough gap for a dedicated player in this lucrative market? I suspect this just the beginning, and if I were a venture capitalist I know where I’d be waving my wads of cash!
Square Pies
In an effort to ‘channelize’ what is happening with the WEB, the BBC has come up with another mega series of programs - Superpower which tries to map out what is happening now (the buzz). As always they are, and promise to be, excellent in every way, and how’s this as a Stats representation ? -its a square pie chart of the top 100 companies (as an ex-stats teacher I could hardly contain myself). What’s interesting to consider is how it might look in 5, 10 years time. As you probably know anyway most of the Web is US-centric, with half of the top 26 wealthiest are from the US , only 1 European and only 1 woman in this list. With an average age of 45 and a half, the wealthiest is worth 17.5 billion and the poorest worth 1.5 billion – oh well you can’t win them all.
Keeping up Standards
Somebody once said about Standards: thats the great thing about having standards – there are so many to choose from.
Interesting to read an article then on how Internet Explorer differs from all the would be web browsers out there. While virtually all the others manage to render web pages almost identically IE has always been notorious for doing things its own way. It even has unique syntax in its code so long suffering coders like myself can accommodate its lovable little quirks with conditional comments. In all fairness they did enforce a recent update asking us to choose our preferred browser -which actually messed up my existing browser settings but anyway – long live Open Source.
