SEO by the Sea » Social Networking and Social Search

Facebook Places vs. Yahoo’s Who, What, When, Where (W4) Communications Network Patent?

Bill Slawski — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:41:54 +0000

A new location-based service from Facebook is rolling out this week, known as Facebook Places. The announcement on the Facebook blog, Who, What, When, and Now…Where, describes Places as a way of letting your friends know where you’re at and what you’re doing in realtime when you check in.

The Facebook blog post title [...]

Yahoo’s Social Search Answer to Google’s Aardvark?

Bill Slawski — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:42:08 +0000

In February of 2010, Google purchased a social Q&A site, Aardvark. It seems like a great match, for a couple of reasons. One is that a paper from Aardvark that attracted a lot of attention, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (pdf), written by Damon Horowitz and former Googler Sepandar D. Kamvar, [...]

Before They Were Social

Bill Slawski — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:09:09 +0000

Would Twitter have the success it has now if it wasn’t at Twitter.com? What about Digg, or Facebook, or MySpace, or Yelp? Before social networks appeared at those domains, there were other pages at those locations.

I took a time trip to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to see what those [...]

A Yahoo Widget Using Social Network Activity to Recommend Blog Posts? Working with MyBlogLog?

Bill Slawski — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:03:15 +0000

Many blogs display a list of “recent” blog posts or “most popular” blog posts in their sidebars, using a plugin widget. But those lists of blogs stay the same regardless of who is visiting the blog.

Imagine a sidebar widget for a blog that can consider the online activities of visitors at sites like [...]

Facebook Patent Filings (Updated)

Bill Slawski — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:30:06 +0000

Added 2-26-2010 – Two more pending patent applications assigned to Facebook were published yesterday, and one of Facebook’s pending patent applications was granted earlier this week. I’ve added the patent applications, and moved the granted patent on “Dynamically providing newsfeeds” from the list of pending patent filings to the list of granted patents at [...]

Community Tagging and Ranking in Images of Landmarks

Bill Slawski — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:25:05 +0000

In addition to collecting a lot of information about the Web by using crawling programs to index content across the internet, search engines can learn a lot about pages and images and videos and other objects on the web by watching what we choose when we search, by seeing how we browse web pages [...]

Yahoo on Visualizing Community Use of Social Media Sites

Bill Slawski — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:39:48 +0000

Run a social network, or participate in one?

You might find a couple of Yahoo patent applications interesting – they discuss some of the challenges in understanding how communities interact with social media sites over time, and how the interests of users of those sites evolve over time.

If you run a social [...]

OpenSocial and the Google Patent Filings

Bill Slawski — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:18:39 +0000

Over the past few months, Google has been publishing a number of patent applications about adding customized applications (modules) from third party developers (sources other than Google) to a wide variety of personalized web pages.

These seemed to cover much more than the creation of add-on content for Google’s personalized homepage, though they [...]