Clint Boulton

Google tweeted Feb. 24 that public status updates posted to Facebook Pages are now part of Google’s real-time search results. Facebook Pages are basically advertising tools for organizations, businesses, celebrities and bands to blast out info and updates information to fans. The Pages are bonafide, meaning users don’t have to spend time worrying whether or […]

Yammer March 1 will launch Yammer Communities, a free service that lets workers extend microblogging beyond the firewalled confines of corporate e-mail domains. Yammer is a communications service for businesses by which company employees can communicate via Twitter-like status updates. The company launched in 2008, has banked $15 million in funding and boasted a seven-figure […]

It was only a matter of time before Microsoft followed Google in announcing a secure cloud collaboration suite targeted for U.S. federal government agencies, as my colleague Nick Kolakowski noted Feb. 24. Business Productivity Online Suite Federal will include the customary hosted Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office […]

Google Feb. 23 told the Federal Communications Commission it reduced a fee charged to buyers of its Nexus One smartphone that canceled their service contract early to clear up concerns and confusion in the market. Shortly after Google began selling the Android-based Nexus One from its Web store Jan. 5, bloggers discovered that Google would […]

Google Feb. 23 said three Web companies have filed complaints with the European Commission alleging that the search engine is demoting their Websites in Google search results and not respecting fair competition. The European Commission, the antitrust body for the European Union, received complaints from UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine […]

Google and Yahoo Feb. 23 denied infringing search technology and information integration patents owned by copier maker Xerox and vowed to vigorously defend themselves in court. Xerox filed suit Feb. 19 alleging that products from Google and Yahoo infringe on two patents: a 2004 patent on a “system for automatically generating queries” and a 2001 […]

Two fine articles on search engine technology landed in our laps to noodle over this week. One piece focuses on Google and the other Microsoft’s Bing platform. Both deal with the artful but dodgy practice of disambiguation, or tuning search algorithms to parse semantics. Folks, I mean the difference between Apple, the company, and apple, […]

Google Feb. 22 refreshed its ad serving platform for large publishers, retiring the DART brand, renaming the platform DoubleClick for Publishers and offering a version for small businesses. DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP for short, combines Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad-serving skillset. Essentially, DFP will be the display ad-serving engine […]

Mindjet, a maker of visual mapping software to improve team collaboration among knowledge workers, is forging ties with third-party applications Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com. Mindjet lets users create “mind maps” where users chart their ideas and information, starting with a central topic surrounded by subtopics arranged on lines. Think of the topic as the trunk, […]

10 Quick Tips for Using Google Buzz by Clint Boulton Google Buzz on Dashboard First, you should know how Google is trying to help you protect your privacy. The company added a Buzz section on its Google Dashboard, which provides a private summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as links […]

Twitter Feb. 22 said its users were sending a combined 50 million Twitter messages each day, indicating a huge bump in Twitter use despite other claims that the Twitter machine is slowing. “Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 […]

Oodles are being written about Google Buzz being a privacy train wreck that Google, with all of its wise engineering talent, could not foresee. And perhaps that’s the problem. Googlers excel at logic-based algorithms, engineering challenges and cool coding. Now Google is being undermined by its apparent inability to see outside the Googleplex window and […]