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Last year, Gina switched to Yahoo for her search because she felt Google already had enough of her data. Over at our gadget-obsessed sibling site Gizmodo, blogger John Herrman discusses taking things a little further, ditching all of Google’s apps. He explains:

You don’t have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google’s servers, and hand it off to someone else: You’ve got Google’s CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”—and hesitating on a drawback; you’ve got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you’ve got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google’s clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you’ve got reasons, and you’re ready for change.

Herman walks through some of Google’s most popular offerings, then proposes switching to what he considers to be the best alternative to each. He suggests using Bing instead of Google search, Yahoo Mail instead of Gmail (he even details how to get all your email out of Gmail first), Windows Live Calendar rather than GCal, Flickr over Picasa, and Zoho instead of Google Docs. (That is, most of the runner-up favorites in each category.)

Hit up the full post for more details, then let us know whether you’d consider dropping Google to enjoy a little less data monopoly in the comments.

The collaboration between Google and Aardvark, the question-and-answer startup Gogole just acquired for $50 million, has begun — though the initial integration is pretty superficial.

Aardvark is a service where users post questions to a trusted circle of friends and friends-of-friends. Both companies just published blog posts about the acquisition, and Aardvark is now listed in Google Labs, the search giant’s area for experimental features. But the Labs listing consists of just a product description and a link to the Aardvark website.

The Aardvark post also addresses a few questions about the acquisition. The company assures users that “Aardvark will keep running and improving on a daily basis — over IM and email, on the Aardvark Mobile iPhone app, and on vark.com,” and that you Aardvark user account “will keep working just as it does today.” Also, the company says user questions are set to private by default and so will not show up Google, Bing, and Yahoo search results unless the user wants them to.

GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable

It’s no shocker that the web is buzzing about Google Buzz (terrible pun intended), Google’s most aggressive push into social media yet.

The new social updating and aggregation feature integrates with your mobile and your Gmail, providing a service that seems like a hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp.

People are already taking sides, including some of Google’s competitors. Yahoo struck first, putting out an e-mail about its own previous (and similar) social media efforts before Google even finished its announcement. Microsoft didn’t take long to make its thoughts heard, either.

Here are some choice reactions from web experts and Google’s rivals:

Microsoft

Microsoft’s statement can be distilled into one very simple phrase: Nobody should care about Google Buzz.

Here’s the actual statement in its entirety:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

In three sentences, Microsoft manages to rip Google for building yet another social network, claim the social innovation crown, and promote its social integrations with its popular Hotmail product.

In reality, Buzz is far more advanced than anything Google has ever put out. However, Microsoft does own a piece of something that directly compete with Google Buzz: Facebook.

Google Buzz has the most potential yet to give Facebook and Microsoft trouble in the social space.

Yahoo

The Internet giant did not explicitly react to Google Buzz, but it did time an e-mail titled “Latest on Yahoo!’s social updates” with the intent of reminding people about its social features in the face of Google’s newest social media monster.

Choice quotes:

“There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!”

“Yahoo! Updates now appear throughout the Yahoo! network, in popular sites and services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com, and Yahoo! Messenger and across our content properties, meaning people can always keep up to date with their friends’ latest activities”

“Yahoo! Updates are featured prominently on the “What’s New” section of Yahoo! Mail, which is used by more than 300M people worldwide. People can also update their status and share it with friends and family directly from the “What’s New” tab”

Clearly Yahoo feels threatened by Google’s product and, perhaps just as importantly, the buzz it is receiving. Yahoo is quickly becoming the oft-forgotten “other guy” despite being first with some of the features that Google is touting.

Forrester Research

Forrester Research’s Augie Ray had this to say:

“While bringing relevance filtering to the noisy social media world could prove a significant advantage, this doesn’t (yet) seem to be enough to pull people away from the networks they’ve already created elsewhere. Buzz doesn’t update user’s Twitter or Facebook feeds, so I expect experimentation but not wholesale switching in the foreseeable future. Buzz could end up supplementing rather than replacing users’ other social networks for now.”

We agree with Forrester’s initial reaction: Google Buzz isn’t compelling enough to pull people away from Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter — at least, yet. Google is putting a lot of resources into this project, and it won’t give up the fight for social easily.

You

Now it’s your turn. What do you think of Google Buzz? Do you think it has the potential to challenge Facebook or Twitter, or is this going to end up being another Orkut or Google Knol (remember that thing?).

Let us know in the comments.

Tags: Google, google buzz, microsoft, Yahoo

Windows: If you like to mix up your Windows wallpaper, the latest version of John’s Background Switcher lets you do it from almost any web source, and in any specific way you want to match your monitors.

We’ve thrown a little love to this clever little freeware app once or twice before, and version 4 of John’s Background Switcher (JBS) gives us even more to love. If you’ve got one monitor and like your pictures scaled a certain way, JBS can do that, but if you’ve got a batch of photos that some need scaling—one needs a zoomed-in view, and others should be centered—the app can do that too. There’s new support for Google, Yahoo, and Bing image search results, background transitions on Vista and Windows 7, and a unified settings dialog for setting up and authorizing your image pools and preferences.

There’s also new “cork board” and “postcard” views for creating desktop collages of multiple photos. Best of all for those concerned about resources, JBS can be set to change a desktop picture on every Windows boot-up, then disappear if you don’t plan to change more than once per session.

John’s Background Switcher is a free download for Windows systems only, requires the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 or higher to run. Thanks y0himba!

Originally posted 2009-09-22 18:25:23. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Media information company Nielsen has released new data on the top 10 mobile internet sites and brands. It shows that, to a large extent, mobile internet usage mirrors total internet use, with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft among the most visited mobile brands. Surprisingly, the AOL network ranked fifth in terms of traffic.

Nielsen estimated from its mobile sample that in December 2009 the total mobile internet audience was 62 million. Over half of mobile users visited a Google or Yahoo brand in December. Facebook and MSN/WindowLive/Bing ranked third and fourth. And the AOL brand saw 17.3 million mobile users in December.

A look at the top mobile websites shows that AOL email accounted for 7.3 million mobile internet visits, which leaves 10 million unique visits coming from AOL’s wide array of content sites. It was certainly a surprise to this Google devotee, and demonstrates that the AOL brand still has legs.

A comparison of the top 10 mobile brands with the top 10 overall internet brands shows a few differences in how people are using the mobile web. The mobile sites in pink above are those that don’t appear on the top 10 list for overall internet usage. Not surprisingly, people care about weather, news, and sports when they are on the go, and Weather Channel, CNN and ESPN have succeeded in transporting their brands to mobile. The brands in gray to the left are sites that did not appear on the mobile list. Again, not a surprise to learn that mobile internet users are not as likely to watch videos, get tech support or buy products from their cell phones.

Nielsen estimated the total US internet universe to be 196 million in December 2009. With the mobile internet reaching 62 million, that means that 32% of all internet users are also using the mobile web. While the majority — 68% — of internet users still use only a computer, it’s encouraging to see these large numbers only 2 1/2 years after the release of the first iPhone, which brought the mobile web to an estimated 42 million phones worldwide.

Yahoo and the Associated Press have announced that they have inked a deal to keep the AP’s content appearing on Yahoo’s properties. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

We’ve known for a while that the non-profit Associated Press has been suffering due to the recession and rapidly falling newspaper revenues. It has accused web companies such as YouTube and Facebook of exploiting the AP’s content.

With this deal, the AP will likely get a revenue boost to help bolster its finances. In return, Yahoo will get the continued stream of AP stories and content that has helped it grow into one of the world’s largest websites. As a top destination for news, Yahoo definitely wanted to get this done.

Where does this leave Google, whose Google News hasn’t hosted any AP content since December? In a statement received by both Mashable and Search Engine Land the company said:

“We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Right now we are not adding new hosted content from the AP. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time.”

While Search Engine Land translates this to mean that the AP and Google have signed a new deal, that is far from clear. It seems just as likely that Google and the AP are still hammering out the details and will announce a deal in the near future. While Google has less to gain from the AP’s content, it’s still a valuable source of pageviews and ad revenue.

[via Associated Press]

Tags: ap, content, Google, google news, newspaper, Yahoo

In a public mailing list announcement, the leader of the desktop team at Canonical, maker/sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, stated that the default search engine and home page bundled into Firefox will be switched from Google to Yahoo. The switch is due to a new, and presumably more profitable, revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo, and will be implemented in the next official release, 10.04, slated for April. It’s obviously an easy change or two to switch back to Google, but it raises the question of what’s good for the makers, versus what the majority of users likely prefer. Do you mind having Yahoo as a default if it means more funds for Ubuntu to continue making its free operating system? Or should Canonical have stuck with what it had going? [Ars Technica]

Microsoft will eliminate all data collected on Bing users after six months. The software giant said it sent a letter to the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, a collection of the EU’s top minds on data protection and privacy issues, today notifying it that the company would reduce the amount of time it stores IP addresses from searchers from 18 months to six months before deleting them.

Currently, Bing takes search data and separates the user’s account information (such as e-mail or phone number) from the non-personal information (such as what the query was) and only after 18 months does Microsoft take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query. The only difference with the new policy is that the IP address will be removed completely at six months to provide greater user privacy protection; the rest of the process will remain the same, since Microsoft says it needs the data to make search better for consumers.

The change will be implemented over the next 12 to 18 months. The aim is to satisfy the European advisory group, which has been critical of how search engines collect and retain data on individuals for advertising purposes. In April 2008, the group issued a major report in which it said search engines can only hang on to European user data for six months, must generally treat IP addresses as “personal information,” and must comply with the rules even if they are based outside the EU. The panel, which is comprised of national privacy regulators from each of the 27 countries, asked Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to comply with these demands. After changes made last year, Google keeps data for nine months while Yahoo is at three months.

The Article 29 group is only an advisory body at the EU level, meaning its members are the national data protection regulators from each EU country, and while it holds the power to fine companies, it has not moved to impose sanctions over the search data retention. Microsoft’s announcement today tries to find the balance between studying trends in search queries to improve the quality of results and preserving consumer privacy and is likely to avert future problems in the EU.

This week’s BusinessWeek cover story is about the increasingly competitive relationship between once-cozy Apple and Google. It contains a bold forecast by Jonathan Yarmis, a research fellow at consulting firm Ovum:

Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. [Apple CEO] Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple’s engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says. “I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search,” he adds. “If there’s all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?”

Well, Apple would want Google on its iPhones because it sells phones. Hands up, who wants a Google-less iPhone?

But there’s a nagging truth here: Search engines on mobile devices haven’t been figured out yet. Typing text into a little box is aggravating. Voice-powered search tools have a high goof rate.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have spent millions on R&D, but it feels like mobile search needs a breakthrough app — the sort of thing Apple loves to do.

Yarmis agrees. “[Google chief executive] Eric Schmidt has said that the search problem is 99% solved, but, boy, is that self-serving,” he told BusinessWeek. “The fact that I have to go to a search bar at all is a sign of failure.” Fix that, and you could sell a lot of phones.

Companies that leverage the Internet to advertise to citizens should help support industries that are suffering thanks to the Internet, according to some in France. The French government is considering a tax on companies that advertise online as a way to prop up creative industries that are having trouble keeping up with the digital world, such as musicians and publishers. Unsurprisingly, the proposal has drawn criticism from those who believe governments should not be in the business of punishing Internet success and instead embrace the new things it has to offer.

The report was commissioned by France’s culture ministry and written by record producer Patrick Zelnik. In it, Zelnik argued that big companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, and Microsoft should together be taxed up to €20 million per year (about US$29 million), even if their offices were not based in France. This, he said, was in order to end “the endless enrichment without payback”—essentially, these companies shouldn’t be able to make a buck off the clicks of French citizens without giving back to the French creative community.