I wish this were a parody graphic. It’s from Google China’s Human Flesh Search page.

If you’re not paranoid or have nothing to hide, things like the UK’s millions of security cameras, the TSA subjecting you to cavity searches, and Google tracking everything you do won’t bother you, and may even comfort you somehow. Personally, although I’m not doing anything particularly questionable with my time, and am not ashamed of the questionable activities I do engage in, I enjoy the ability to say “none of your businesss” and go off into the forest to sit on a rock and think for awhile. Back in 2002, the fact that cell phone providers were going to add the GPS-powered E911 feature to phones raised the question what do they plan to do with this information? Well the answers are finally in. If you’re the Iranian government, they’ll help you prosecute and arrest political protesters. If you’re the FBI or the White House, they’ll help you track callers without a warrant, because the current administration - much like the Bush gang - believes that cell phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when using a cell phone. “So”, you say to yourself, “I’ll just ditch my cell phone then”. Ha. Forget it. They (whoever “they” are) will still find you, either using social networking like they did with Saddam Hussein , or with the latest in reverse lookups, disturbingly referred to in China as Human Flesh Search Engines. Interested in working part time as a “Google Human Flesh Searcher”? Explore your options here. I wonder if this would work for catching Osama Bin Laden? (more…)

A couple of years ago I had a neighbor who made a few hundred extra dollars a month playing online games. How did he get paid to play games? By acquiring virtual goods like magic weapons and selling them to other numb-nuts who would actually pay real money to advance in the same online games. If you’re not already familiar with the idea, it may sound absurd, but it has become quite an industry, sometimes referred to as Gold Farming. And over the past year, it’s started taking an even stranger turn. The web sites IMVU and myYearbook have established a cross-site virtual currency exchange, and some think Facebook Credits will not only expand the site’s revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but may even become the de facto currency of the Internet. Although as of this writing, the idea of connecting these “economies” into a larger exchange remains in its infancy, IMVU and myYearbook have also launched Currency Connect, which promises the rollout of more virtual currency partners throughout 2010, and VirtualCurrencyPlatforms.com currently lists 27 viable platforms. So how seriously should we take these new virtual economies? Pretty seriously, according to the Chinese government, which fears that instabilities in virtual economies could destabilize real money, among other things. Add to the speculative possibilities of all this real and imaginary money changing hands the emerging models for frictionless and inexpensive money transfers using mobile phone-based tools like Twitpay, Square, OboPay, GetGiving, Zong, and Kwedit, and the possibilities for truly viable virtual economies are enormous. Below are a few demos of the leading-edge startups, and quick summaries of how each service works. You can also find a more in-depth look at these “frictionless” transaction ideas in this Wired piece. (more…)

While I think it would be perfectly reasonable to question whether or not we want the man who brought the world the Blue Screen of Death and Clippy focusing his energies on nuclear power, I would still encourage anyone to take the time to watch Bill Gates’ recent TED talk (video below), and to recommend it to friends as well. Why? Because in spite of the fact that in a way it’s just a plug for his investments, and in spite of the fact that the arguments for and against what he said are all over the map (this BoingBoing post was fairly Stepford Wives-ish in tone, but the commenters fixed that in hurry), the fact remains that he did one very positive thing with his talk: he got the media talking about green energy issues (and in a very sticky, contentious way) with his bold assertion that we need to aim not merely for reductions in emissions, but for zero emissions. To me, it’s a tragedy that the politicizing of global warming and emissions issues detracts from the simple fact that we shouldn’t NEED an apocalyptic reason to have a cleaner, more efficient world. What rational argument could there possiby be against doing it just because it MAKES SENSE? In any case, the clip is a bit longish, and Bill’s “hip-three-years-ago” glasses only contribute to the overall “SNL Pat” look he’s sporting these days, but whether you agree with him or not, he throws an important objective on the table, and has generated a lot of green talk just by being Bill Gates. By the way, if you’ve wondered what Bill has been up to since his retirement, check out his site, The Gates Notes. (more…)

I’ve been deriving secret glee from Steve Jobs’ repeated slams against Adobe Flash. Although I have a lot of friends who are hard-core Adobephiles, I have to admit I’ve always quietly loathed the company’s products. I always found the interface of two of their flagship products - Photoshop and Illustrator - immensely counter-intuitive, and the software itself ridiculously expensive. As a web developer, I’ll also never forget the sneering contempt of a lot of Adobe-centric print shops when bringing them files that weren’t in their beloved .ai, .eps, or .pdf formats. Their most pervasive products - Acrobat and Flash - have also brought me agony in a variety of other ways. Who hasn’t struggled at some point extracting content from or converting a PDF file? Or had one crash while loading in their browser? One of many stories I could share about Acrobat would include the time I had a friend working for the Peace Corps in the Ukraine (Hi Ben!) who needed some simple training materials for classes he was teaching. He could find the material from free legitimate sources in PDF’s, but guess what? The security settings that some nitwit had added made it impossible to print them from the print menu. Enter the questionable legality of the Advanced eBook Processor, which made a joke of Acrobat’s security and encryption and allowed me to free up the restriction for him. Don’t sue me; I did it in the name of international cooperation and education! And Flash? Although it was an amazing product when in the hands of Macromedia (the company that developed it), Adobe acquired Macromedia and rolled their two coolest products (Flash and Dreamweaver) into their Evil Empire of Creative Suite (pick up a copy today, it’s only $2300!). Dreamweaver became much more buggy and cumbersome, and Flash? It’s a browser-crashing system hog riddled with security holes. When you consider the fact that Flash security issues effect THE ENTIRE INTERNET (Adobe claims 99% market saturation of Flash amongst web users) and the recent report that malicious PDF files comprised 80 percent of all exploits for 2009, you can probably stop worrying about the Internet Explorer facilitated China/Google hacking; Adobe’s buggy and vulnerability-riddled products could bring down western civilization as we know it.

Yesterday’s underwhelming launch of Google’s Buzz highlighted something that’s frustrated me for a couple of years, mostly since Google achieved search engine dominance. That “something” is the ability to search productively from a small variety of sources and get useful results; something Google has made it a little difficult to do, first by crushing the competition, later by failing to innovate in many ways, much like their predecessors. It would be idiotic of me to not give them credit for the ways in which they have innovated, especially web advertising (we’re using it all over this site!), but the fact is, the web is always evolving rapidly, and business models aren’t always keeping up. And Google’s ideas are generally focused on increasing Google’s revenue, not pure, user-centric innovation. Fortunately, we seem to be entering a new era of real search innovation; the only downside is that key players are going in so many directions that you almost need a search tool to find the right search tool. As an example, take a look at TheSearchEnginelist.com, one of the best-organized and largest lists you’ll find. Even this list omits a fairly large number of newer useful tools, which collectively take a rather diverse set of approaches to the problem. One approach is centered around the idea that you need help figuring out what you’re looking for in the first place. Like InstaFound.com, which tries to pick the “best of the best” from other engines and give you a single result, or Jamesoo, which assembles a newspaper-like results page from RSS feeds. But the former can also lead to the “worst of the worst”, and the latter can just be utterly irrelevant. Of these types of engines, WolframAlpha is pretty impressive, but not really geared toward daily use by the average person. There are also some cool new specialized search tools, especially when it comes to images and multimedia. TinEye and Gazopa both offer “similar image search”, which helps you find images based on existing images. Their predecessor Pixsta.com was acquired last year and put to work as the shopping site Empora, which demonstrates the value of this kind of search. There are also cool tools like Fizy (requires log in), which searches for song files and YouTube links based on simple song or artist input, and is REALLY FAST. It’s likely that all this innovation will lead to a few useful search tools rather than a single behemoth like Google. A couple of likely directions would be customizable aggregators like yourversion.com, or social search like Aardvark. Or as we’ve mentioned before, recommender engines. Along the way we’ll see lots of gimmicky approaches like Greenseng, a “green” search engine, or g8search, which is sort of like AdSense on steroids. And there are a few mysterious startups with dramatic homepages like RockMelt, which we touched on previously, or DiscoveryEngine, which apparently has an active crawler called DiscoBot but on their “about” page is only saying “We will sell no wine before its time”. There are in fact so many new tools that we’re going to revisit the topic in another piece soon. I personally use all three major search engines and a variety of aggregators to find stuff, but if YOU have any thoughts or tips, feel free to share them. Social search is where it’s at! (more…)