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Greenpeace campaign takes aim at Facebook’s coal–fired servers [animated video].

Published on September 19, 2010 in Facebook, Google, clean tech, environment, social media and video. View Comments

Following the recent social media driven success of Greenpeace’s campaign to get Nestlé to stop using palm oil linked to the destruction of rainforests, it seems the activist organisation is now taking aim at Facebook’s massive new data center. Apparently, the new facility is not powered by clean energy.

Greenpeace wants Facebook to “drop coal and commit to 100 percent renewable energy, cutting its carbon footprint and helping in the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change”

Greenpeace has released the embedded animated video, which is a bit of a spoof on the new feature film The Social Network – another movie Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not be particularly happy about.

Earlier this month, Facebook responded (in the comments section) to a Greenpeace open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, maintaining that their massive, new Oregon data center is quite energy efficient, although not run on renewable energy.

Perhaps Greenpeace feels Facebook is a good target for this kind of campaign as it’s getting pretty huge, with over 500 million users now. In addition, Facebook is increasingly in competition with the likes of Google, which is doing substantially more to address its carbon footprint, and even making investments in renewable energy technology.

What are your thoughts on what Greenpeace is asking Facebook to do? Could Facebook be doing more, given its huge size and growing revenue? In any case, It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how this one turns out.

New and improved Google Realtime Search.

Published on August 26, 2010 in Google, Uncategorized, social media, technology and video. View Comments

Google has actually had real-time search for a while now, and has been improving it periodically. You may have read my previous post from May comparing 10 different real-time search engines, which included Google’s offering.

To recap, as they say in the embedded “How to” video, Google Realtime allows you to search real-time content from across the web. Sources include news stories, blog posts and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and Friendfeed. The real-time stream constantly and automatically refreshes, feeding in live content as it’s posted to the web.

Google Realtime features now include:

  • The ability to look back in time to view updates from the past.
  • The ability to refine your search by location – by town, state or country.
  • The ability to browse a conversation (on Twitter for instance), to see how it developed over time.
  • The ability to set up Google Alerts for real-time updates.

Personally, I really like the addition of being able to refine search by location. As in my previous real-time search engine comparison post, I searched under a favourite topic of mine, cleantech, and then refined the search just to Australia.  It came up with some interesting and useful results for me. I’ve previously said, as it’s not a new feature, that I also like the ability to be able to search historically. This remains true.

What are your thoughts on Google Realtime Search? Have you found yourself using it yet? Is it useful enough for you, or do you use another real-time search engine? Do you use real-time search at all?

Check the embedded video for the full set of new features in more detail and how to use them.

Thanks @warlach via @andrewsayer for the heads up this morning.

Will you have to change your name to escape your digital past one day?

Published on August 19, 2010 in Facebook, Foursquare, Google and social media. View Comments

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently reported as saying that because of the increasing amount of information we are sharing online, he predicts that one day people will have to change their names and reinvent themselves if they want to escape their digital pasts, should they want to. Is this an extreme point of view or already an online reality?

Google Search

I’m sure most of us have Googled our names at some point to see what results are thrown up. You’d be silly not to in this day and age. Even if you don’t spend very much time online, it’s increasingly likely that your name will be referenced in relation to something yo’ve been involved with.

The degree to which your name can easily be found online can of course depend on how popular your name is, what name you actually use online, and how much online activity you have engaged in thus far.

Take my name for instance: John Johnston. Believe it or not, that’s not a very unique name in the world. However, partly for this reason, I mostly use my online identifier (okay, personal brand if you like), jjprojects. I don’t attempt to hide my real name, it’s just more beneficial in most cases for me to use jjprojects. However, because I engage in a lot of activity online, and because I do also use my “real” name in relation to jjprojects, my name still appears on the first page of Google results when searched for. I have no problem with what is found there.

I know quite a few people who engage in a lot of social media activity but have several different names, usually to attempt to separate their work life from their personal and political views, when they feel they want or need to do that. Needless to say, I’m not going to ask you to comment and say if you are one of those people :)

Many of these people are probably a little more online savvy than your average web user, so there are many people who use Facebook and Twitter (for instance) who mix personal and professional without a second thought to the consequences. It’s getting increasingly difficult to not mix personal with professional when it comes to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Do you ignore that friend request from that work colleague on Facebook you’d really rather not let have access to those personal pictures and comments you’ve already posted? Are many people even aware of what their privacy settings are set to on Facebook?

Even if you are aware of who could search for and read your online comments, and see the photos you’ve uploaded, it’s easy to forget. Then there’s the emerging location-based digital culture, in which more people will be leaving searchable traces of where they’ve been and at what time, without a second thought. Foursquare is verging on going mainstream and Facebook Places has just launched.

It has to be said that there is this emerging school of thought saying that we’ll eventually get over caring so much about people’s embarrassing moments and irrational emotional rants online, increasingly played out in real-time on the likes of Twitter and Facebook. The thinking there is that we are all human and we all make mistakes and do things we regret later. Let’s be prepared to forgive people their mistakes, let humans be human, and accept we are going to have more and more of our lives played out online. Let’s get over it and move on. Easier said than done.

It’s often said that common sense should lead when it comes to sharing online, but it may be a little more complicated than that. We are human after all. Humans are fallible. Who hasn’t done something they regret, especially when we were younger? If you are growing up in an culture that spends a lot of time online, those situations are no doubt going to be played out online. We all make makes, and sometimes it’s difficult (or impossible) to delete those mistakes.

What are your thoughts on this? By the way, if jjprojects suddenly stops all communication one day, you’ll know one of two things may have happened ;)

At last Google enables access to multiple Google accounts, well mostly.

Published on August 5, 2010 in Google, social media and technology. View Comments

Do you operate more than one Google account? Have you ever needed to use both at once and had to inconveniently sign in and out to switch back and forth between the two? Most annoying, isn’t it?

Previously the options have been to constantly sign in and out of different accounts like that, or use a second browser (which I found didn’t seem to work well between Firefox and Safari), or use Chrome Incognito.

Multiple Google Accounts

Google has announced on The Official Gmail Blog that we can now enable a feature that allows us access to more than one Google account at at time, well mostly. After enabling the feature, you can sign into two other accounts from the sign in menu. However, Google is calling this an advanced feature for a number of reasons:

  • Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. These are the Google products that do: Google Code, Google Calendar, Gmail. Google Reader, Google Sites, Google Voice. Apparently, Google Docs will be added soon.
  • The mobile versions of these products do not support multiple accounts in the same web browser. They will default to the first account you sign in to.
  • Google products not included above will also default to the first account that you signed in with, using your current web browser session.
  • Offline Mail and Offline Calendar will be disabled. You may lose any unsent mail.

These issues aside, I think it’s still a welcome addition and long overdue, especially if you have separate personal and work accounts. To enable the new feature, visit google.com/accounts and click the “Edit” link next to “Multiple sign–in”.

World’s fastest growing search engine? Twitter!

Published on July 7, 2010 in Google, Twitter, business, social media and technology. View Comments

According to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Twitter now handles around 800 million search queries per day, or more than 24 billion per month. This is a massive 33% more than it said it was handling back in April.

To put that into some perspective, Google reaches around 88 billion per month, so it’s pretty impressive that Twitter has already moved well past a quarter of that. In addition, Bing only achieves around 4.1 billion and Yahoo around 9.4 billion per month.

So as well as being an information network (as Stone prefers to call it), it seems that Twitter is now the world’s fastest growing search engine. It’ll be very interesting to see how much revenue they manage to pull in with their new Promoted Tweets initiative on search. Although quite different, Google has certainly done fairly well out of search advertising!

Twitter Search

via Fast Company

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