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Lively, currently in beta, is Google’s answer to Second Life. The downloadable application allows you to create rooms, decorate them to your liking, then make and invite friends over. Of course, you’re far better off actually doing these things in real life, but if you have poor personal hygiene and/or no friends you’re sure to find it very rewarding.
Search behemoth Google has announced a new tool to rival Wikipedia. Currently known as “knol” (it stand for a unit of knowledge, apparently), its object is “to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.” This sounds very much like Wikipedia, although some would argue that you need no nothing about a subject to be a Wikipedia contributor (despite credible evidence that suggest otherwise).
Google has yet to announce when the general public will get to experience “knol”, but you can find out more and see a screenshot of the prototype here.
Ask.com has launched a UK map service similar to offerings from Google and Microsoft. The postcode for our office brings up the following result:
Cheers Ask.com! So, Albemarle Way (London EC1V 4JB) is in the middle of the Gobi Desert? On a pair of Holly Johnson’s chinos? Oh, I despair! Ask.com, drop and give me twenty!
Google is rumoured to be planning a rival to the 3D virtual world Second Life, scheduled to be launched late 2007.
If this is true (and this being the internet, you really never know), it’ll be a surprising departure for Google, a company that has built its reputation on solid, reliable, consumer-orientated online applications. Second Life, whilst undoubtedly a great money spinner for Linden Lab, is a controversial, marriage-wrecking, sad, barely-legal, addictive beast that keeps people from pursuing their non-avatar based, real lives.
I’ve been playing around the Tafiti beta, which uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. The system is little more than a proof of concept at the moment, but I must confess, I’m impressed. It offers easy navigation between web, rss, image, news and book seaches, and boasts an interactive tree view (which is pretty much useless but looks fantastic).
Tahiti is my first Silverlight experience, and from first impressions, it seems identical from Flash from a user experience perspective. It remains to be seen whether it’ll prove to be a serious alternative in the long run.
Following the appearance of thousands of Google Maps mashups, Google have introduced a new technology to encourage further user interaction. The “mapplets” (mini-webpages inside an IFrame) can be combined to create custom mashups: for example, you could display information on house prices, crime rates and cemeteries simultaneously, with built-in features such as driving directions thrown in for good measure.
The following YouTube video shows the system in use:
You can find out more about mapplets here:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/
More info on the Google Earth/Maps blog.
The service will be live to the public sometime today, following months of private beta.
A website has recently launched that allows surfers to search Yahoo and Google simultaneously, providing side by side results for instant comparison.
The website, searchboth.com, has been developed by IdeaLabz.com who claim it to be a first. In view of the erstwhile existence of meta search engines such as dogpile.com, we presume it is referring to its somewhat innovative display view rather than the simultaneous querying of multiple search engines.
To be honest though, I can’t see it catching on…
As reported on Ars Technica, Google seems to have sneakily added some rudimentary face recognition filtering to its image searches.
Search for ‘ferrari’ and you’ll find, as expected, a multitude of images of Ferrari cars. However, append ‘imgtype=face’ to the end of the url string and see only images of people!
What will they think of next?
