Google Introduces Facebook Competitor Google+ →
Today Google launched a beta of their latest foray into social networking, social search, and social in general, called Google+. Wired has a great writeup about the design and engineering efforts and the purpose behind Google+, but I think this quote from the New York Times' coverage says it all:
Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said that knowing more about individual Google users would improve all Google products, including ads, search, YouTube and maps, because Google will learn what people like and eventually personalize those products.
That's what the game's really all about.
How to Get a Real Education at College →
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, discusses what you really need to learn in college, how to be an entrepreneur, and lessons he learned about entrepreneurship on his way through college.
Irony? Small consolation?
Friends as Subscribers →
We have just about thoroughly equated our online connectivity with our physical relationships with one another.We treat online relationships as friendships as subscriptions.
Ph.D student Zdenek Kalal demonstrates a learning motion tracking system called Predator that does some pretty impressive things. Full article and more videos here.
Windows 8 for Software Developers →
Ars Technica rounds up what we think we know about developing for Windows 8, including possible new runtimes, HTML5, and a unified presentation layer, and discusses the possible future of Win32, WPF, .NET, and Silverlight.
Perfect vector graphics from 8-bit images? Pretty impressive algorithm. Pretty cool possibilities. (via Wired)
Facebook Is the Largest News Organization Ever →
News organizations do two major things, commercially speaking: they use news to grab attention and then sell that attention to advertisers.And if that wasn't enough to convince you, there's the whole rest of the article from the Harvard Business Review to support the premise.
Stephen Elop's Nokia Adventure →
Business Week provides an in-depth look at Stephen Elop's role as the new CEO of Nokia and the company's decision to abandon Symbian and MeeGo and avoid Android in favor of Windows Phone 7.
Huh. Netflix just updated my Watch Instantly home page to a sleek touch-friendly HTML5 version. It's got a nice theme, but shows me a lot less content now.