Those of us who live and breathe technology often accuse the rest of the planet of being populated by spoonfed idiots who have problems comprehending their DVD player, let alone the way that technology is changing the world around them.

Usually, our reactions are an overstatement - just a matter of a people needing a little more hi-tech literacy, and our anger borne from having to provide computer support to all manner of friends who haven't worked out that they should probably try turning it off and on again.

But sometimes your worst fears are given a real form - when you see the responses what is a browser, for example, or as shown by a little incident when the site ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook.... with hilarious consequences.

Yesterday RWW wrote a post about how Facebook was partnering with AOL, in a way that would make the site's login procedure more powerful than ever before - headlining the story "Facebook wants to be your one true login".

Suddenly, thanks to the magic of Google, that post became the most heavily-featured result for searches like "Facebook login" - which caused all kinds of confusion.

It looks like a number of users clicked on the top result, expecting to be taken to Facebook's login page (also known as, erm, facebook.com) and instead being presented with this ENTIRELY DIFFERENT site.

The post now has a comment thread of around 300 posts, many from disgruntled Facebook users who have clicked and can't work out what's happened to the site they know and love.

assorted comments by Facebook users who did not realise they were on a different website

While some of the comments are from jokers, many appear to be genuinely confused users. It's the sort of thing that makes you despair - when can't even work out they're not on the site they think they are, let alone understand that they could always reach Facebook by simply typing the address into the browser.

But, lest we simply laugh at the failure of the great unwashed to get the web, let's take a couple of serious points away from the whole thing.

First, it's a bit of a failure on Google's part. If Facebook users want to log in to the site, and Google's returning something that isn't Facebook's front page, then they're not delivering useful search results. That's not great for Google.

Secondly, perhaps we should refigure our idea of how many people actually use the web in this way. While the confused commenters largely seem to be middle-aged non-web-literate people, that doesn't mean they're stupid - just ill-informed.

As Matt Haughey, who runs community site Metafilter, said: "Laugh all you want about ReadWriteWeb, but two weeks ago I watched a 35 year-old friend with a PhD go to Facebook by googling 'facebook login'."

by Chris Rawson on Oct 23rd 2009 at 5:30PM

Google has released an official developer preview of Google Chrome for the Mac. Rather than digging through nightly development builds, you can download the developer preview of the WebKit-based browser at Google's official webpage.

Chrome sports several features similar to Safari 4 in Snow Leopard, such as sandboxing - each tab runs as its own process, so if one crashes, it doesn't bring down the whole browser. It also sports the "tabs on top" interface present in some builds of the Safari 4 beta released earlier this year. Some people hated tabs on top in Safari, but others eventually got used to it and even missed the feature when it was omitted from the final release of Safari 4; if tabs on top is your thing, then Chrome has you covered.

Chrome supports importing bookmarks, settings, and history from whatever browser you're currently using, so if you're curious to see how it runs on a Mac, go ahead and give it a try. Let us know in the comments if you run into any issues.

[Via Download Squad]

9/14/2009 04:11:00 PM

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.

Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Researcher, Google News

Posted by David Pescovitz, September 4, 2009 9:44 PM | permalink

I got a kick out of the special Google logo I just spotted on their home page. It links to a search for "unexplained phenomenon."

Last week the world was speechless when we learned that Phillip Garrido had allegedly kidnapped an 11-year old girl in 1991 and held her captive for 18 years. The details of the case are quite monstrous, but we were even more disturbed when we learned that Garrido maintained a bizarre blog titled Voices Revealed.

You also may remember a Google Maps image of Garrido’s address circulating around the web. The overhead view of 1554 Walnut Ave is chilling enough, but a Boing Boing commenter discovered something even more eerie. Zoom in to street view and follow the old dirty van out of the driveway onto Walnut Avenue and down Bown Lane. Notice anything strange? Yep that van appears to be tailing the Google street view vehicle.

Of course this is all speculative in nature. We don’t know who’s driving the van, and we certainly don’t know if the person in question was intentionally tailing the Google vehicle, but it’s incredibly eerie all the same.

We did a screencast of the van following the Google vehicle and embedded it below. Pretty creepy, right?