This week, real-time search took center stage, along with a surging interest in the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Real-time search in Russia and Japan
Since the release of real-time search in December, we’ve seen that finding real-time content — often the only source of online information at the time — can be quite profound. For example, recently when California experienced a few earthquakes, real-time content appeared in search results just seconds after the ground shook. As you can imagine, getting this functionality out to the rest of the world has been a top priority. Because of this, we recently launched real-time search with Russian and Japanese, the first of the languages we plan to support. We want to bring you this functionality globally, so stay tuned as we add more countries.

MySpace in real time
Also in real-time news, starting this week we officially added MySpace content to real-time search. Now you can tap into the pool of news, photos and blog posts that MySpace users have chosen to publish to the world. These updates are all ranked to reflect the most relevant, freshest results, many of which are just seconds old. In all, real-time search includes more than a billion documents and processes hundreds of millions of changes daily. We’re quite excited to offer this enhancement so that real-time search becomes even more useful. You can find the MySpace updates in our real-time mode by clicking on “Show Options” and then “Updates.”

Example search: [myspace]

Better site searches for Images
Based on feedback from users and webmasters, we have improved the [site:] operator for Google Images. In the past, the [site:] operator filtered based on the image URL, not based on the URL of web pages linking to the images. Now, the operator will run your search over web sites that include images, no matter where the images themselves are hosted, which removes a lot of noise from your results and gives you more control over what you’re searching for.

Example searches: [site:digg.com space shuttle], [site:morbidanatomy.blogspot.com], [site:flickr.com/photos/polvero]

Continue reading google news

Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect was first announced in May 2008 (Google and MySpace announced similar projects at the same time).

Facebook Connect became generally available later in 2008, and it hasn’t looked back since. Today, Facebook says 80,000 websites have added Facebook Connect, and 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook connect on these third party websites each month. For many sites, like our own CrunchBase, it’s the only way to create an account and log in.

Facebook Connect is attractive to a lot of smaller sites simply because it’s so easy to implement. They’ve created a number of widgets that bring Facebook features directly to third party sites, and integration is easy. You can find some of these here on TechCrunch.

Last year Twitter released simply buttons to let users on third party sites sign in to Twitter and identify themselves (we use it in our commenting system).

The new Twitter product will allow sites to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter, we’ve heard. All of these features exist today via the Twitter API, but the slick Facebook Connect-like packaging and easy-to-use widgets don’t exist yet.

Twitter is also taking an open, standards based approach. They use OAuth, for example, for authentication and data sharing. Facebook uses proprietary protocols for Facebook Connect.

We’ll update as we hear more. But our understanding is that Twitter has been working with a handful of publishers and will likely announce the new product shortly.
source: tech crunch

Will 2010 be the year that Internet users cut back on friending, tweeting and connecting with their long-lost acquaintances?

A site called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is banking on it. It offers to help visitors “kill” their online presence on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn by clicking a “commit” link (complete with a noose icon).

It works by prompting users for their account information, then removing their friends, updates and other content, then changing the password and logging out — leaving an intact but bare profile.

The site offers this service for free and coaxes the uncertain with words like “delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles,” “feel free like a real bird again and untwitter yourself” and “you want your actual life back?”

At least one social network appears to be putting up a fight. The Suicide Machine currently notes that Facebook is blocking its IP address, preventing Facebook suicides.

“We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service,” Suicide Machine says on its site. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tech-savvy folks have considered whether they’re too connected via social-networking sites almost as soon as they launch — artist Cory Arcangel staged a “Friendster suicide” back in 2005.

Are you planning on paring back your profiles this year?

UPDATE: “Facebook provides the ability for people who no longer want to use the site to either deactivate their account or delete it completely,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which are violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We’ve blocked the site’s access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR. We’re currently investigating and considering whether to take further action.”

source: blogs.wsj.com

The buzz around realtime search of social networks has mostly surrounded Twitter and Facebook. Collecta, OneRiot and the search giants, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all tap into Twitter (and Facebook too) to capture the realtime stream of content. But MySpace is also getting into the game,  recently releasing a set of real-time APIs that both OneRiot and Google will be tapping into to provide content from the social network. Today, real-time search engine Collecta has launched a search platform that offers a real-time view into MySpace.

Based on Collecta’s Site Search Platform and the MySpace real-time stream API, the search portal indexes the collection of public comments, photos, links, and videos that are shared throughout the social network. Both MySpace users and non-users can perform real-time searches on any topic, and the search engine pushes out content the moment it has been published and lets users filter their result streams based on content type (videos, photos, blog comments, articles, updates). Each result includes the poster’s ‘mood’, giving insight to the emotion of the content.

While MySpace’s traffic no longer reaches the breadth of rival Facebook, the social network still offers a good amount of publicly-shared content about what’s happening on the web, especially surrounding music. In the future, MySpace public content will be incorporated into Collecta.com’s standalone search engine which aggregates content from Twitter, news sites, blogs and more and lets you share the content as well. Launched last June, Collecta has raised $1.85 million in funding from True Ventures and Campbell were the investors. The company was co-founded by Jack Moffitt, Brian Zisk, and Patrick Mahoney.

continue here>>