Twitter was founded on 2006. With headquarters in San Francisco, California and USA, twitter is one of the biggest and fastest growing companies is the US. Not many of us here in Cebu, Philippines would appreciate twitter because we don’t understand how useful it is. We tend to appreciate more on social networking websites like friendster and facebook because we want to connect with friends, share our pictures, update our status and let people know of what we are doing.

Twitter works in a similar way but most of us did not know it. Our first impression of twitter was “Oh, just another social networking website. Major functionof this new site is we can share our status(facebook/friendster terms we got used to). Nah, this is nothing new, we can do also do this in friendster and facebook. We can only have 1 picture, and the picture does not show as big as our primary/profile picture in facebook/friendster, this website sucks!”. So, Why join tweeter? Why do you need a twitter account?

You were wrong. Twitter may seem limited to us when we first saw it, and nobody seem to appreciate it when it was new. Now and ever since it was launched, twitter has more users and everyday more and more have learned to appreciate it.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.  Tweets are 140 characters long, text based post. These post are broad casted to your followers(friends and fans) as soon as you update/post it.

In friendster/facebook we add people to become their friends and our friends. In tweeter, if you add someone who did not accept you yet, you are following that person. You are the follower/fan of that person you are trying to add/follow. If he/she follows you back, then you are called friends.

What makes twitter very useful is the sharing of tweets. Its like news, real-time news. If you did not know this, information you find in google is not really uptodate/real-time. Websites have to be submitted to google, then indexed for them to show up on google’s results. This whole indexing process can take upto 7days to 1 month at most. Why does it take this long? websites have lots and lots of information, not very specific and probably broad topics. Are you seeing my point now?

My point is, twitter has more uptodate information. Brief and straight to the point information. Its short and light, that means searching for information is much faster on twitter. Data/results are more uptodate, more to say “real-time”.

Google and other search engines appreciated this idea, and they have made their move in integrating twitter to their search engine systems. Google and Bing currently the largest search engines have now been working with twitter to generate more accurate/real-time search results. This project had already started months ago and you will soon be seeing real-time results in these search engines in the next few weeks.

Another thing about twitter is that more and more tools/websites that are compatible with it. See the few examples that I have below.

Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles.

Tweetie is a client for Twitter, the social networking website. Its mobile version runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, while its desktop version runs on Mac OS X.

Twittermail allows you to tweet using an emails.

Twitter Counter is a counter to show your twitter followers.

 Twitter Vision shows a visual map of Twitter posts.

Above are just a few of the twitter tools you can find in the internet. There are a thousands more that are currently active, and there are thousands more tools still being developed. You can imagine twitter’s future, 2 search engine titans google and bing are trying to get a hold of them and their technology.

If you think you are in because you have a facebook account, you might as well setup a twitter account. Create a twitter account now and make sure to follow us. 

Excuse the title of this post, I just found out about this and this just proves that I have been old and rusty in terms of web updates. While searching in google for answers about “How keywords affect your website ranking?”, I found out this revelation. Google did answer a lot of questions with this post from their blog which is where I found out about the information. You can read their post here.

To simplify things, keywords and descriptions of your website are only for relevance.  This means it only affects the type/categories of ads that are going to come up on your embedded advertisements. These information, no matter how many keywords you have, does not affect your website rankings on google. No matter how many times you submit or update your website information, this does not affect your website rankings.

Below is a video explaining the that google does not use meta-keywords for ranking results in the search engine.

Google giant logo

Everybody who has been a while with the internet would know that google is the best way to find information.

But there is a question, are the page results we see in google enough for what we are searching? Is it up to date?

I have tried searching for many solution of problems like, how to download music videos? Google provides very helpful pages in the results, but not all of them are upto date. So you may end up reading an aticle that has not been updated for years and may not be usefull/applicable today.

Another example would be if you search, what is happening in Cebu right now? What are the latest concerts in Cebu? You may find results of events that happened a month or week ago, but not real-time.

So the idea is to search for information that is upto date in the very few mili seconds that you just did the search. Where will you find this type of search results? Of course there is twitter search, facebook search, myspace search. These websites provide accurate and up to the min/mili secs results of what you need. Thus the brilliant idea of google come to play.

Google partnered with twitter on october to pull out real-time data from the partnered site. This means google results in the future will include results from live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, facebook updates and myspace updates. You can imagine how real-time that is.

real-time search of google(not yet available to everyone)

Google says the features aren’t available to everyone yet, but will be within the next few days. However, all users can see it now via a “Hot Topics” feature that’s been added to Google Trends. Click on any trend, then click a “Hot Topic,” and you’ll see the new “Latest Results” area of Google search results. For example, you can currently see real-time updates for the Tiger Woods story.

For some time, it’s been clear to us that search has been moving to real-time, but until now, Google was seemingly falling behind TwitterTwitterTwitter, and even perhaps BingBingBing (who inked its own search deals with Twitter and Facebook earlier this year).

Now, with one sweeping stroke, Google has grabbed the lead in the real-time search space, and it appears that Facebook and Twitter have both conceded that they aren’t going to outbuild Google when it comes to search. These are significant strategic decisions for all of those involved that will dictate much of where these companies head in the years to come.

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Chrome OS screenshot

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

I hope this operating system will be soon available here in Cebu. I am excited and they say its going to be released in the middle of 2010.