Google went live with Knol, a platform to read and write articles on all kinds of subjects. Knol was being tested privately since some time and had been pre-announced back in 2007. The address is knol.google.com, but notably not knol.com or knol.org or even googleknol.com. This project is somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, though there are many differences as well.
Google Maps walking directions had been spotted by some users before, and now they’re being rolled out for everyone, as Search Engine Roundtable reports.
Google pays domain parkers by allowing them to run a special AdSense program. Titled “Google AdSense for domains”, this program now reportedly triggered a class-action lawsuit which alleges “that Google committed fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment by selling ads that were unlikely to generate conversions”.
The graphics in Google’s 3D chat world Lively shine, but behind the scenes the Lively team also seems busy squashing minor and major early-release bugs. And since some days, Lively got its first social phenomenon, too: the almost meme-like creation of cyber sex rooms. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, or is there?
The New York Times says that Google News, Google’s semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth: ... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.
Totlol is a community-moderated video site for “those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.” Its video embeddings – like the Googleheads song – are based on the YouTube API, making for a customized, integrated look*.
FriendFeed (the social news streamer run by a team of by now seven ex-Google employees) got a new tab on top to create rooms. A room is a public or private area for discussions circling around one topic, group or need. For instance, you could create an invite-only room for discussing a specific work project, adding some other FriendFeed members.
YouTomb is a research project by the MIT “that tracks videos taken down from [Google-owned] YouTube for alleged copyright violation,” as the site explains.Comments
Google China has launched a multitude of help efforts for people looking for information in relation to the disastrous May 12th earthquake centered in Sichuan province. Some days ago, the Google China homepage linked to a special Google Maps layer, as previously mentioned:
Google is shutting down Hello, Picasa’s photo sharing service which was part of the Picasa acquisition back in 2004. On the program, Wikipedia writes:
