Google Labs shows off News Timeline and Similar Images

Google, perhaps eager to counter any worries that its engine of innovation is sputtering after the recession triggered the closure of various projects, shed light on two new projects--News Timeline and Similar Images--and on a revamped Google Labs site for bringing others to the public's attention.

News Timeline lets you browse history through Google's eyes, with a sliding chronological framework that draws information from newspapers, Wikipedia and other sources. Similar Images, funnily enough, searches for images that look like one you've already found.
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Flickr Trends: Compare popularity of cats and dogs, good and evil

What do you do when you can use the Internet to datamine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning.

Flickr employee Kellan Elliott-McCrea wrote the application, deriving it from another by Derek Gottfrid that compares how often terms are mentioned in The New York Times. The idea came to broader light on Wednesday with a posting on the Flickr Code blog.
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Would you pay US$1 a month for Facebook?

As fast-growing Facebook closes in on MySpace in the US in terms of unique visitors later this year, it's burning through millions of dollars a month (some claim it's as high as US$20 million), with no magic levers to reverse the trend in the short term.

In November 2007, when Facebook took a US$240 million stake from Microsoft, the investment was at a US$15 billion valuation. Now it's down to US$4 billion and probably less. As Caroline McCarthy reported a few days ago, rumor has it that "one potential investor submitted a term sheet for a valuation in the neighborhood of US$2 billion".

As Facebook works its way toward a probable IPO, the big question is: How can it show it can make money? Well, one way--and I'm not the first to suggest it--would be to charge a nominal monthly fee. With that in mind, I ask a simple question: How much would you be willing to pay to use Facebook per month?

A lot of people I ask say they'd pay US$1 a month--or, preferably, a yearly fee of US$10 if paid in one shot. But some say they have Facebook fatigue and would rather quit than pay a dime.

Comments?

Via Crave CNET

Apple releases four new "Get a Mac" ads

Apple released four new Get a Mac ads Monday, continuing its nearly three-year-old campaign tweaking Windows PCs weeks after Microsoft began firing back at Apple.

The new ads are available on Apple's Web site, and will no doubt flood the airwaves in due course. Apple is following its old playbook with the new spots, tweaking PC guy as played by John Hodgman as virus-prone (Conficker), unstable, and difficult to use.

Microsoft's recent ads have focused on price comparisons with Macs, and Apple makes a brief reference to that line of thinking in the "Stacks" ad, in which Mac guy (Justin Long) responds to PC guy's observation that the facial recognition technology in the new iPhoto must be expensive by noting that it comes free with every new Mac.
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Fujitsu USB flash drive self-destructs data

With the recent spate of USB flash drives with sensitive data being lost or misplaced, from confidential personal data to military secrets, one would expect users to secure their portable storage with passwords and encryption. Unfortunately, the fact of life is that more often then not, we mainly use these devices as an easy and convenient method to transfer or carry around data. Once copied, the contents are usually left in the memory.
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