Google Makes Map Maker More Accessible
Google announced today that Google Map Maker is now available in 27 languages with more to come. They can’t translate the interface itself into every language, so they have opened up Map Maker in "Google in Your Language" so users can translate it into their preferred language.
The current available languages include:
* Bengali
* Gujarati
* Brazilian
* Portugese
A Wild Week For Facebook, And Its Users
Facebook has had quite a week. If it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity then this week has been a windfall for the social networking giant. I have even read some conspiracy theorists who believe that the whole terms of service ‘incident’ was intended. I’m not sure I can go there but to be honest it does make some sense.
Revenue Decline at TheStreet.com
Between the decline in newspaper performance and the dominance of financial reporting in the news, you would think that online financial publications would be one area that is flourishing in this economic downturn.
Megalomaniac Creates Digg Spam Business
A little chutzpah goes a long way, but this is chutzpah bordering on comical grandiosity. The existence of uSocial.net (sorry, kid, no linking) is audacious enough: The site offers a Digg.com gaming service (StumbleUpon and Propeller, too), where clients can pay to have submissions linking to their website voted up on Digg.
But wait until we get to the press release about it—then things get really good.
eBay Highlights Trusted Sellers (and Other Tidbits)
eBay recently announced a change to product pages for books, music, movies, and video games last week – a change that will likely give sellers yet another reason to complain.
Google Transit Ushers In Another Update
Let’s face it: public transportation isn’t a sexy topic, and it’s not really one of the fields in which Google specializes. But the subject does seem rather recession-appropriate, and the search giant has made a nice gesture by updating its Google Transit feature on Google Maps.
Firefox Extension Resizes Shortened URLs
Tools for shortening URLs have become very popular in the age of microblogging, but shortening a URL to incomprehensible code makes it impossible to know what you’re clicking on.
The now quintessential microblogging service is Twitter, which limits messages sent to a group of followers to 140 characters. This makes it difficult to post URLs with long set of parameters that follow. The necessity to shorten those URLs gave rise to services like tinyurl, is.gd, ping.fm, bit.ly, tweetburner and others.
Google Most Visited Property In January
Tax related Web sites had the biggest gains in traffic in the month of January with a 176 percent increase to 24.7 million visitors, according to comScore.
Career and job search sites also saw strong growth during the month. The job search category was up 42 percent to 26.7 million visitors and the career category increased 26 percent to 48.9 million visitors. The growth in both categories can largely be attributed to the increased amount of job losses.
Google’s Matt Cutts Talks State of the Index
You may recall a little over a month ago Matt Cutts from Google’s Search Quality Team talked about Google getting more transparent this year and making his talks from conferences available online so that everyone can easily see what he has to say.
Facebook Wants You to Monetize Your Apps
Facebook has addressed the monetization of Facebook Platform for people building applications into businesses. They’ve set up some new pages to help people share ideas with other developers on how to get the most out of their apps. Among the pages are: