A Week in Digital
Google Launches Google TV
Google officially launched Google TV both as a functionality built in to new TVs (one specific model from Sony for the moment) and set top boxes (again one from Logitec).
Google TV gives the user the ability to seamlessly search for TV programs both online and offline, surf the web with Google Chrome, watch YouTube videos and so on.
Interestingly Google also has another service called Google TV Ads, which allows users to purchase national TV cable ads, much like text ads.
Available in the US for the moment of course, but it is easy to see the connection here, user searches for a program, gets a text ad served relevant to your demographic, see a tv ad targeted to you later.
However, according to CNET (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20018829-265.html) Google does not plan to do so, which is something we need to wait and see.
New Facebook groups faces issues
The new version of Facebook Groups was launched last week, reworked from the ground up, the feature only shares the same name as the previous incarnation of Groups.
New functionality ensures privacy, as Groups are closed by default and can even be secret, making it easy for its users to control the conversations and content shared between them.
However not everything is rosy, Groups have already got some flack as users can add people to groups without the users consent.
To illustrate this, Michael Arrington made Mark Zuckerberg to join NAMBLA (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/07/conspiracies-privacy-spam-and-nambla-facebook-groups-are-fun/), which stand for North American Man Boy Love Association. Zuckerberg responded, after removing his group subscription, that “that is why it is easy to leave groups”.
Google Googles for iPhone
Google Goggles has been around for some time for Andriod phones, and now it has been released for iPhone users.
For those that have installed the Google Apps app, there is no need to install anything additional, the Goggles functionality will be there.
After playing around with it for a while, i discovered that it might work well for monuments and other significant things that you need to know if you have lived on planet earth for more than 15 years, but will not always work properly with logos or images.
There is much room for improvement, still, very impressive.
