Industry News

A big change in Android 4.4 is that those using Google’s new mobile operating system, nicknamed “KitKat,” can search for businesses right from within the Phone app. How’s it work? For me, it’s awful.

Google+ Invades The Android 4.4 “KitKat” Phone App: What It Means For Businesses & People is our separate article that explores the integration in general. In this article, I’ll share some examples of how business search works — and fails — in Android 4.4. The Disappointing Local Results...

I have been seeing some chatter at WebmasterWorld and other sources of a possible update that is being pushed out slowly since late October 31st through today.

If you read the thread...

From Jared Sinclair’s excellent “Form Follows Function” Is More Complicated Than iOS 7 Thinks, in which he explains why some of the skeuomorphic elements of iOS 1-6 were actually useful:

On iOS, putting function before form is not as simple as paring down icons to a strict grid and color palette. There are functions beyond literal communication that iOS designers must balance. Making icons warm and inviting serves many deeper purposes. It builds your confidence in the device. It makes you...

Linda Buquet, a top contributor in the Google Local forums, posted a thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums complaining about a massive spam attack in Google that started working on August 22, 2013...

Dan Frommer weighs in with a positive view of Twitter’s more visual timeline in The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public:

Love or hate Twitter’s new design features — I like the in-line photo and video previews, but the reply/fav/retweet icons under every tweet feel a little too noisy — they say one great thing about Twitter: That it’s not afraid to experiment boldly in public. [...]

Remember: Twitter’s goal is to maintain its independence, and...

Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet...

Looking for some help? Providing answers has always been Google’s goal, and now it has a new way to do it. “Helpouts,” a way to pick people offering help via live video, for a price. People that are vetted, checked and backed by Google.

Google shared the news of the new program today on its blog, saying: With Helpouts, you can choose who you get help from based on their qualifications, their availability, their price, their ratings and reviews. You can connect instantly or book in advance....

One of Google's most advanced data center systems behaves more like a living thing than a tightly controlled provisioning system. This has huge implications for how large clusters of IT resources are going to be managed in the future.

"Emergent" behaviors have been appearing in prototypes of Google's Omega cluster management and application scheduling technology since its inception, and similar behaviors are regularly glimpsed in its "Borg" predecessor, sources familiar with the matter confirmed...

There are a few different parts to this story, though I’m not sure how many there will be because I’m still in the middle of writing them. I started with a prologue, titled Are You,Your Business, or Products in a Knowledge Base?, which introduced...