So Facebook’s big, and much speculated announcement, isn’t a search engine to rival Google as such, but it does involve search. It is social search and it does up the battle with Google as Facebook tries to bring the essence of search to social networking. What it doesn’t do is challenge Google’s control of the search engine market and the huge revenue stream that represents.

What Facebook announced, at its press conference at its Menlo Park headquarters, is something called Facebook Graph Search. It will allow users to search their network for photos, people, interests and places. Read More »

Tina Fey creator of ’30 Rock’ isn’t on Twitter. She isn’t alone. There are other great TV writers who aren’t on Twitter. Aaron Sorkin to name just one. Yes him, the writer of the ‘West Wing’,  ‘The Newsroom’, and ‘The Social Network’. Yes, that film about Facebook, which he isn’t on either.  I digress, but Sorkin also appeared as a guest star on ’30 Rock’ as himself where he and Fey discussed Angry Birds (see below).

As for Fey, she has taken the time in a comic rant to explain in her video blog why she does not use Twitter and isn’t using it under a sneaky pseudonym. Her main reason seems to be that “most people are so boring they should shut up” and that they fill it with a useless compilation of uninteresting things she doesn’t care about. She also worries that we are wasting “the internets”. Read More »

Branch, the new social network funded by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, has today stepped out of private Beta, and into public view. The idea of it is to simplify online conversation, and cut out some of the internet noise.

In a blogpost the founders says that they “want sharing your ideas on Branch to feel just like sharing your ideas around a table with friends,” and with the clean, simplified nature of Branch they seem to have achieved that. Read More »

For the past week or so the technology press has been widely speculating about an announcement from Facebook, expected this afternoon at its Menlo Park headquarters. Will it be the rumoured and oft denied phone? Or a new ad platform or search engine? Reports are now saying it is the latter and expect Facebook to launch its own search engine. Read More »

Yesterday evening the HBO smash hit ‘Girls’ returned on Sky Atlantic. If you are not yet initiated in the joys of the program, it depicts four 20-something girls trying to make it in New York, and all the love, lust and loss they encounter on the way.

It was produced by, written by, and stars, 26 year old Lena Dunham, who this weekend gave a great interview to the Times (£).  In the piece interviewer Stephen Armstrong notes:

“The British viewers — mainly young and tech-savvy — were downloading pirate copies [of season one] as soon as they went out stateside. This is one reason why Sky will be broadcasting each episode of season two less than 24 hours after America.” 

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