Last year’s video (displayed below) followed the same family, brought in millions of hits on YouTube and left many in awe of Corning’s interpretation of what’s possible with photovoltaic glass, LCD TV glass, architectural display and surface glass.

Do you think this is possible in the future? Connect with us on Facebook and tell us what you think.

It turns out there’s an advantage to old-school search directly from Google.com. Not just content to sit around fine-tuning their algorithm and counting their money, the web wizards of Mountain View, CA have also taken to working some clever tricks and treats into their programming to the delight of users that happen to stumble across or successfully uncover them. These fun little surprises have come to be affectionately known as “Easter eggs,” hence the shade of  hide-and-go-seek involved.

Here’s a few of our faves for your viewing pleasure (Fair Warning: this list is a time drain!):

• Find Chuck Norris…if you can.  Type “Find Chuck Norris” into Google, hit I’m Feeling Lucky, and Google will tell you what’s up with Chuck
• We can only assume that this one is meant as an ode to lost productivity: www.Google.com/Pacman
• Type “Do a Barrel Roll” into the search bar.  We dare you not to turn your head
• Type in “Askew” or “Tilt.” Same dare
• A holiday classic:  type in “let it snow” and watch the magic happen.  You can even defrost your screen and write in the snow with your mouse!
• See if you can find the subtle humor in this one: type in “Recursion.” Get it?
• Type “gravity,” click I’m Feeling Lucky and watch the Google logo defy Isaac Newton
• Ask Google Maps for directions from Japan to China.  You might want to pay close attention to step 42…
• BONUS: Google has a bit of Pirate in ‘em with this next Easter Egg.  Simply click here and have a good time, matey (or whatever pirates call friends)

For the rest of my very cold walk through the park I took my gloves off so I could text, take a picture of my dog and answer my phone…I might have been able to do all this with my nose but I choose not to look like an idiot and just let my hand freeze.

Fast forward to last night when I’m Christmas shopping at Target and I happen to come across the perfect present for everyone who has a smartphone:  TOUCH SCREEN GLOVES!  How did I not know about these before?  I ended up buying a pair for all my friends and family with smartphones – which is everyone.  So after my semi-expensive trip to Target, I Googled these gloves and it turns out they are everywhere!

While I realize you (or my boss, hi James!) are probably thinking this has absolutely nothing to do with what we do here at Thoughtprocess Interactive, consider this:  Morgan Stanley’s analysts believe that based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop Internet use by 2015.  That means if you want to get on the internet anytime during the winter in the future (without your hands freezing off) you may want to invest in these touchscreen-friendly gloves.

Or you can just use your nose.

We know, we know, Facebook has had so many changes lately it’s hard to keep up with them all. If you are a casual user, there are plenty of new features to explore. You may see some changes in accessing some of your games, or notice different content on some business pages, but generally you’re good to go.

However, it gets trickier if you’re a business owner who has developed Facebook apps. Starting October 1st, apps that run on Facebook must be hosted from a secure server. Facebook is requiring this to help protect the privacy of its users. What does it mean to you? If you don’t have a SSL certificate for your app’s site domain, your app will not show up on Facebook anymore – meaning your fans won’t see it!

Don’t worry, we’re here to help. If you host your application with us, we can get a SSL certificate set up for your domain. If you use a different host, they’ll be able to help you. Either way, you’ll just need to provide some specific information that verifies you are the owner of the site, and you’ll likely have to pay a small amount to buy the certification from the company that provides it. The most commonly known certificate provider is VeriSign, but there are plenty to choose from, with a variety of features and prices.

If we can help you, let us know. In the meantime, enjoy the latest features on Facebook… we will be back soon to guide you through more of the interesting changes that are happening there — stay tuned!

Ticker & Chat: The new ticker on the top right of your homepage shows real-time posts making them easier to go through.  Just hover over any story to see entire update.  Additionally by clicking your chat sidebar the ticker attaches to the top.  You can chat while navigating to any page you like while watching your friend’s status updates change.

Photo Layout: You probably noticed the creative way our pictures are now laid out in our News Feed.  This is purely for our viewing experience and gives business pages a more unique way to attract “likes”.

Top Stories:  Facebook’s new concept shows posts that you will most likely find interesting and puts them at the top of your feed when you first log in.  The top stories are marked by a blue tag on the top left corner of the post.  To remove them from your top stories just click on the blue tag and they will be removed.  To add a top story that you are interested in just hover over an update where the blue tab would be and click-it’s that easy!

Friend Lists:  Facebook’s new “Smart Lists” are just that-Smart.  Smart lists automatically create lists for your city, work, family, and school.  You can add friends or brands you follow to the lists Facebook automatically created for you, or you can create a new list to organize your friends even better.  To create a new list or edit an existing list click on “Lists” on the left of your News Feed.

Here you can see a list I created based on my favorite movies and television shows making it easy for me to skip all the news feed and go straight to my shows.

Friend List Dropdown:  You can also organize your friend into lists right from their profile page.

Subscribe:  The subscribe button allows you to hear from people that you are interested in, even if you’re not friends.  You are automatically subscribed to all your current friends updates and with the subscribe button you can choose which of their updates you see.  For example, if you have a friend who is always playing Facebook games (we all have those friends), you can hide all those game posts in a simple step.

Not all profiles have a Subscribe button.  Only people who allow subscribers will have the Subscribe button on their profile.  If you choose to allow Subscribers they will only see the things you share publicly.

What do you think of all these new features?  Love it or hate it?

Once there you select your avatar and create your own playlist, which can be anything you want in Turntable’s huge library of tracks or you can upload your own.  You can also bookmark songs on other sites and if you like a song that is playing you can buy it right there from iTunes or add it to your own playlist.

The beauty of this social music site is that you can choose if you like the song that is being played or not…it’s either “Lame” or “Awesome”.  The more “Awesome” points you get the closer you become to changing your avatar to something bigger and better, if the song gets “Lamed” too many times then that song is skipped and the next person DJing” gets to play their song.

Simple enough right?  Well there is one downfall…for the moment you need an “invite” from a Facebook friend in order to play music or join a room, but once you’re in, you’re in!  You can start inviting friends each time you start to play music!  Enjoy!

UPDATE: Now you can take turntable.fm to go with it’s new iPhone app.  It offers all the same features as the online version but fits right in your palm.  It’s easy, just log in with Facebook and up pops all the rooms you are used to seeing!  I’ll be in the Top 40 room!

iPhone Screenshot of turntable.fm

http://buddypress.org/

http://2011.uxlondon.com/
http://www.saltercane.com/

Any person or company with a consumer-facing web site, if they are paying any attention at all, will want their site to be mobile phone accessible soon if not sooner. Assuming 1024 pixel wide screens isn’t going to cut it, these two sites show how it can be done really well in just one smart design, rather than the usual way (sniffing out the client browser and redirecting mobile phones to a different version).

Resize your browser and watch what happens as it get narrower. (Use Firefox or a webkit browser like Safari — IE need not apply.) The first site re-flows in each section and the bio pictures shrink down as the page gets narrower. The second site dynamically re-flows from three columns to two columns to one.  If you have a browser on your mobile phone, look at the sites there too. Very cool!

You can read about the technique from the guy who designed those sites here:

http://adactio.com/journal/

Something to think about.

However, there is a growing movement on the web to kill the dinosaur once and for all. This site provides a snippet of code that will encourage users to upgrade their browsers for betting online experience. That’s all well and good to persuade average Joe internet user, but what about the many companies out there who use corporate applications written specifically for IE6? Do they represent the “death” of the death of IE6?

Web giants YouTube and Digg are the most recent sites to cut IE6 support, according to a recent Tech Crunch article.

“The show would feature players using Twitter to follow their favorite celebrities while competing in an interactive challenge. Producer Noah Oppenheim said the show would be the first to bring immediacy of the site to TV.”

I would say more, but I just vomited on my keyboard.

1. People who are extremely lazy. And by extremely lazy, I’m talking too lazy to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse. Or maybe you have a bad case of laptop touchpad hatred like me. For these folks, Keyboardr lets you search the web in a “mouseless” fashion, allowing you to use the arrow keys and enter button to scroll through search results and select the page you wish to explore. 
2. Competitive research. I love how the results update instantly, as you are typing in a keyword phrase. This allows you to quickly get a glimpse of all of the sites that rank for any given phrase in Google, Wikipedia and Youtube.

However, a “new” idea has been thrown on the table recently - Instead of making users pay for content, what if you asked them for donations if they like the content? Okay, so the idea isn’t new, National Public Radio has been doing it successfully for decades, but it’s something the newspapers have not tried online yet. Or at least not to my knowledge, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Start up venture Kachingle (in private beta) has a solution that some feel could help bring this model to fruition.  From a high level, the Kachingle model works like this: 

• A user creates a Kachingle account, and you determine a monthly fee of what you are willing to donate to support good content. This could be $1, it could be $50, whatever you feel good content is worth.
• You sign in once per device – PC, laptop, phone, etc and Kachingle remembers you from that point on.
• Publishers who are part of the Kachingle network place a little Kachingle medallion on thier site
• When you are visiting a blog, online newspaper, etc that you like, you click on their Kachingle medallion which notifies Kachingle that you’d like some of your monthly fee to go to that site.
• Kachingle measures your usage across sites you’ve tagged to receive money, and allocates your donations accordingly. So for example, if you are willing to donate $5 a month to good news content on the web, and 50% of your usage goes to WSJ.com, then Kachingle would give $2.50 to WSJ.com that month. The remaining $2.50 would be split up amongst the other sites you “kachingled” (not sure if that is a real term yet) based on your usage of their sites.

So the real question becomes, is the problem with the paid news model the lack of choice? Will people not pay for online content when they are required to pay for it, but change their mind if they are given the choice to contribute based on their own assesement of the content’s value?

Yesterday Google introduced their Latitude service, a new feature that allows smartphone and laptop users to share their location with “friends” through  Google Maps. It has been compared to the “Marauder’s Map” from Harry Potter, and since someone made a Harry Potter reference, I had to investigate…

Like all Google services, Latitude is in many ways useful, and in many ways creepy. 

On the useful side of things, this new service has some cool benefits:

• Share your location with friends – Could be useful if you are traveling and want to see if any of your friends are nearby so you can meet up. 
• Location based marketing – Could be very useful for businesses to serve ads based on a users location and time of day. For example you could be served ads for nearby restaurants at lunchtime, or bars with happy hour specials later in the day.
• Tracking your equipment – This information could be very useful in the event that your phone or laptop is stolen, assuming it is signed into the service.

On the flip side, this service has loads of creepy potential. You might want to ask :

• Do I really need my friends to know where I am at any given time? 
• In the event that a third party (including the government) demanded access to this data, how much of a fight would Google put up to protect it? What if there wasn’t a Google anymore, then who gets it?
• How many ways could this data be used for evil? Oh let me count the ways – stalkers, jealous boyfriends, crazies in general…
• Will companies begin requiring use of this service so they can track (spy on) their employees and equipment?
• Hacking. Yesterday someone hacked the highway signs in the Metro East, altering their message to warn motorists of zombies and raptors up the road. What if someone was sending you creepy messages based on your location?

1) Use the subject line in your e-mail for initial clarity and add as much information as you can without making it too long.

2) Consistently use the “To” line for all those who you require a response from, and put those who need the information but don’t need to respond, in the “CC” line.

3) State the main point in the first sentence of the e-mail so folks don’t have to guess what you’re trying to say.

I had to chuckle while reading the post because I think most of us are all too familiar with poor email communication. The Jedi Mind trick email surfaces quite a bit, or my personal favorite, the “pass the buck” email, in which one person forwards an email to 20 other unwilling CC recipients with a simple vague message such as “please advise.”

The major problem that I have (and many others have) is believing everything I read. I could see something on TV and believe 50% of it, hear the same thing from a friend and believe 75% of it, or see the words in print and believe it wholeheartedly. Perhaps it stems from learning from text books in school, or writing research papers with strictly text sources. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that reputation means a lot but even the most reputable authors and journalists aren’t exempt from bias.

The article that sparked these thoughts is about net neutrality. The article addresses the changing stances of major players in the net neutrality debate. The article is entitled “Google Wants Its Own Fast Track on the Web“.

The article singles out Google and Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessig:

• “Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content”
• “If companies like Google succeed in negotiating preferential treatment, the Internet could become a place where wealthy companies get faster and easier access to the Web than less affluent ones, according to advocates of network neutrality. That could choke off competition, they say.”
• “Google’s proposed arrangement with network providers, internally called OpenEdge, would place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers”

• “Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service.”
• “Stanford’s Mr. Lessig, for one, has softened his opposition to variable service tiers. At a conference, he argued that carriers won’t become kingmakers so long as the faster service at a higher price is available to anyone willing to pay it.”

Google’s response:

• “Google has offered to “colocate” caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the provider’s bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times. We’ve always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like colocation and caching, so long as they do so on a non-discriminatory basis.”
• “All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs — which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache — are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers’ connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.”
  

Mr. Lessig’s response:

• “Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a “shift” or “soften[ing]” of earlier views. That’s because there isn’t any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had — whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.”
• “As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance.”
• “Now no doubt my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong — that it doesn’t go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is “recent” is baseless. If I’m wrong, I’ve always been wrong.”

According to Google, Chrome is ready to come out of beta (already). In just 3 months time Chrome has won over 10 million users. Such impressive numbers demonstrate that there is still plenty of opportunity in the browser market. Apparently plenty of people are willing to jump ship, or at least consider jumping ship, on their current browser of choice. And so the browser wars continue…

“Blackbird is a web browser for the African American community. Blackbird was developed by a team of African Americans to allow you to connect to what’s going on in the African American community….Because we know that 85% of African Americans prefer online news information from the Black perspective.”

Um….Nevermind, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself on this one.

Something that never occurred to me when I purchased the iPhone in the summer (clever release date)…You can’t use it with gloves on. It only responds to your bare skin. This poses a major problem and serious annoyance, especially when you’re driving or walking around outside in the cold. It’s really not cool to have to either:

1) Scramble to take my gloves off and get to the phone in time to answer while simultaneously operating a vehicle or walking two large dogs, or…
2) Use my nose to unlock the screen and type in my password.

That little oversight has become a real annoyance.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html

And apparently Microsoft is working on just this thing, with collaborative searching:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4292830.html?page=2 (see #7, collaborative search)

My mind’s too simple to make sense of it all, but it looks like there are some big things coming.

I found a lot of different opinions and reasons for liking one or disliking another.  For me, it came down to performance (after all, it has to keep up with my tab count). Here is the study I found:

Beta Browser Speed Tests:  Which Is Fastest?

“Agency officials say the water from the system will be cleaner than U.S. tap water.”

Maybe Bear Grylls is actually on to something…

“We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of [removed] publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.”

The letter then went on to say that the company realizes the partners are one of the company’s greatest assests and the company does not take for granted the fact that their success is tied to their partners’ committment.

“We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of [removed] lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.”

So it’s probably obvious to you now who this letter came from even though I removed their product name twice. It came from Google. The phrase that was removed twice was “Adsense.” Google is reaching out to Adsense publishers with a heartfelt email. 

One would think that an email that went out in mass to an entire nation of Adsense publishers wouldn’t have much of an impact on an individual level. But it did have an impact on me actually. It made me think for a couple of reasons:

1.  It caught me off guard initially because Google isn’t exactly known for customer service with Adsense Publishers. Granted their CS has been improving quite a bit over the last couple years, but still, it was unexpected.
2. After the initial “huh” moment, it made me think of something more important. I thought about how critical customer service can be when times are tough economically. When your clients are feeling the pinch of a recession, a little extra customer service goes a long way. Letting your clients know that you value their business and that you’re committed to helping them succeed can make all the difference in the world. It could be the difference between developing a long-lasting and respected relationship with them or being the first to find out they’ve recently had budget cuts.

One device that seems to always keep me locked out with proprietary software and drivers is my cell phone, but not anymore.  The new Android-enabled phones have an open source framework that will give any developer the ability to take mobile apps to the next level.  Read more about Android on Google’s website:

http://code.google.com/android/

1. Gas drops to $2.79/gallon
2. Milk drops to $3.50/gallon
3. US jobs exceed 138 million
4. The Twin Cities median home price returns to $233,000
5. Osama Bin Laden is captured