Google today announced a significant change to how its search results are delivered. With Knowledge Graph, results will be arranged according to categories.

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Google search to become more human

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market.

Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world.

The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it, its overrun by ads, there’s something better, or it’s simply uncool, Facebook could fade away.

It’s size, network effect, and wise leadership could protect it from these threats, and honestly, I think Facebook has the potential to be successful for a long, long time. But if you had to bet against Facebook, here’s what you’d be betting on.

Big Brother

Facebook is banned in China and access is or has been restricted in several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Right now this is limiting the social network’s growth potential. But if disputes with governments over what content is appropriate cause it to be shut out of more countries, these roadblocks could divert users to other local social networks. That would fracture the value that comes with having such a high percentage of Internet users in one place. For example, Singapore is a valuable market with a strict government that could drop the ban hammer on Facebook.

Regulation around privacy could also slow Facebook down and make it more vulnerable to competition. Facebook narrowly escaped privacy audits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union. If the government of a core market put restrictions on how Facebook can launch new products or what features it can show where, it could create opportunities for startups to eat Facebook’s lunch. Imagine how much bigger a threat Foursquare would be if Facebook had been restricted from launching its Places location service.

Competition From The Next Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook doesn’t actually need to worry much about Twitter, Google+, or international players. They’ve failed to offer something revolutionary enough to make early adopters ditch Facebook, or mainstream enough to appeal to everyone. What big blue needs to worry about is the next social product visionary, the next Mark Zuckerberg that could turn Facebook into the next Myspace.

While acquiring and acq-hiring top talent from companies like Instagram was easy when it had pre-IPO stock to throw around, recruiting that next Zuck to side with Facebook rather than wage war against it is about to get tougher. Same goes for keeping its current rock stars from leaving to start a true competitor.

It might take a big hardware change like eyewear computers, holograms, or apps you download straight to your brain to finally make Facebook obsolete. Even then that upstart would have quite the uphill battle, but so did Facebook when it launched.

Smaller Screens, Small Ad Revenue

Staying afloat on display ads won’t cut it if the social network wants to live up to or surpass its ~$100 billion valuation, as Chris Dixon writes. It will have to think bigger. But for now, it has to worry about mobile.

Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service.

To counteract this, Facebook is aggressively acquiring and hiring from mobile companies like Instagram in hopes of getting its mobile site and apps up to draw more eyeballs. However, while it has a huge footprint of over 500 million mobile users, there’s widespread discontent with the speed of its mobile apps. Many people think they’re cluttered, and complain of slow loading speeds.

Mobile is the biggest threat to Facebook, and the company admits it. If it can’t make more compelling mobile apps and earn more money from these small screens, the shift to mobile will see Facebook lowered into its own grave.

Losing Its Cool

Facebook doesn’t want to be cool. It wants to be a utility. It wants to be the cell phone or the television, not Virgin Mobile or HBO. But the fact is that a big reason Facebook is so popular is because it started by being accessible to only the most envied demographic in the world: Ivy League college students like those at Harvard. It used that prestige to spread like wildfire on every American college campus, and the sexiness of young adulthood to capture the teenage market. Its popularity in the trendsetting United States soon pulled in the rest of the world.

But now your mom is on Facebook. You grandma, professor, little cousins, and plumber are too. It’s not exclusive anymore. Usefulness is what keeps it afloat, but cold, dry, utility for everyone is vulnerable. And soon Zuckerberg will be 30, and he might no longer be seen as the geeky boy genius challenging the adults. He’ll be one of those adults. There are already signs that apathy and distrust for Facebook are setting in.

The slick destroyer of today’s social network would be something that starts elite but that gradually opens up like Facebook did. It would be designed specifically for the hip and young in-crowd. It would recruit big celebrities and carve out an influential niche from which to grow its power. This could be what makes Facebook seem old and boring. And the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go somewhere boring every day. That’s what their jobs are for.

[Image Credit: WaterySoul, TheFW, E:TB.]

Originally posted here:
Here’s What Could Kill Facebook

When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional dedication from a boy/girlfriend to their significant other. It was awkward, but also kind of beautiful. But mostly awkward.

Now it sounds like Pandora has made an impressive gesture toward keeping that tradition alive, while also demonstrating the power of its ad targeting.

So yeah, this happened: Someone, specifically someone named Kyle Taylor, used a Pandora ad to propose marriage to his girlfriend of almost six years. You can read the full account in his blog post, but the Pandora-relevant bit begins after Taylor has decided that this is a great idea, and has sent off a customer support request:

I started to work with the team at Pandora and they told me this has never been done before, so they would be more than happy to help… that’s when I knew this was going to be it. After working with the creative and technical teams to figure out the best medium, getting passed to their audio advertising team to get a script together and recorded by an awesome voice actress, and once it was finalized it went back to ad trafficking to test out my ad and see if it worked. Of course, it worked out perfectly. (Throughout this whole process, I had to lock down my email account and step out for “unexpected” phone calls a lot – luckily I’m a planning ninja.)

That’s the set-up. As for popping the question itself, Taylor decided to do it on the night of his graduation dinner from University of North Texas. It was carefully planned — he picked a restaurant whose driving distance would create the perfect timing for the ad. So he turned on Pandora (which was built in to his girlfriend’s Hyundai Veloster), and as he pulled onto a service road, the marriage proposal started to play.

Now, you might be thinking that while this is pretty damn impressive, it was incredibly awkward for anyone else listening. In fact, CTO Tom Conrad says that’s “very, very unlikely” that anyone else heard the ad, thanks to the targeting that’s powering Pandora’s efforts to steal local advertisers from terrestrial radio. In this case, the ad was targeted at “very old listeners” in a “sparsely populated zip code,” Conrad says. So Taylor entered some fake demographic information to put himself, and no one else, in the target. The result? He used Pandora’s advertising to deliver a genuinely personal message.

Oh, and by the way: She said yes.

Read more here:
Ultra-Targeted Advertising: Man Uses Pandora For Marriage Proposal

Apple is indeed planning to introduce an iPhone with a larger screen, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The company has reportedly ordered 4-inch screens from its suppliers, a bump from the currently standard 3.5-inch screen size that Apple has been using since the original iPhone appeared in 2007.

Rumors of a larger-screened iPhone have been floating around for some time now—especially since comparable Android phones gotten bigger and bigger, like the Galaxy Note and it’s monster 5.3-inch screen. But many observers—including those of us at Ars’ Infinite Loop—have not bought into those rumors. You can count me as a critic of this rumor, but there may be more to the large-screened iPhone rumors than we originally thought.

We’re not likely to find out the truth anytime soon, though—the report says production is slated to begin next month, and Apple isn’t expected to roll out new iPhones until the fall.

Read more | Comments

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WSJ: production of 4-inch iPhone beginning in June

The Jester, a vigilante hacker opposed to Anonymous and Wikileaks, was finally exposed over the last few days. Some, however, think he’s just acting out a scheme to raise money for a favored cause. [Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica]

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Anti-anonymous hacker doxed–perhaps a little too spectacularly

Fluffeh writes “General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising. However, in a statement, they just announced that ‘it’s simply not working.’ That’s a bit of bad news just prior to the Facebook IPO — and while Daniel Knapp tries to sweeten the news, he probably makes it even more bitter by commenting ‘Advertising on Facebook has long been funded by marketing budgets reserved for trying new things. But as online advertising investments in general are surging and starting to cannibalize spend on legacy media, advertisers are rightfully asking whether the money spend is justified because it has reached significant sums now.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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General Motors: "Facebook Ads Aren't Worth It"

Almost 12 years after the launch of its predecessor, Diablo III has now been released. The game went live last night with over 8,000 midnight launch parties across the world. 2,000,000 players showed up for the beta test prior to launch, including 300,000 concurrently during an open beta weekend, but even so, the login servers struggled for the first few hours after launch. Diablo III had been in the works for quite some time — another example of Blizzard’s notoriously long development cycle — and game director Jay Wilson said it was in “polish mode” for the past two years. “One of our sayings internally is ‘polish as you go.’ We have a belief that when you put a feature in, you should prototype, but then after you prototype you should do the real thing, and you should polish it to shipping quality.” For those of you who are familiar with this type of game, there’s an official game guide in which you can browse class skills, items, and other game information. There are also YouTube videos showing how each of the classes work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Diablo III Released

This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.

The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.

Tenable released 2.0 of the software this month and sits on top of the company’s Nessus security scanner software. Sadly, the visualizer doesn’t show the “polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining” of the average computer virus. Maybe we need to wait for the Kuang Mark Eleven.

Continue reading here:
Tenable Network Security Creates A Gibson-esque Network Visualizer

Popular Science reported yesterday on an ambitious plan to build a functioning scale replica of the Starship Enterprise — a plan which has been carefully considered and proposed by engineer BTE Dan (BTE stands for “Build The Enterprise”, which is also the name of the project’s website). Labelled the Gen1 Enterprise, the enormous ship would incorporate ion propulsion technology, powered by a 1.5-GW nuclear reactor, and could travel to Mars in three months and the moon in 3 days. The 0.3-mile-diameter gravity disc would spin at two rotations per minute, and provide 1G of gravity to the crew. It is a fully-functioning, full-size replica of the Starship Enterprise, and due to the legendary ship’s exact size, if built, it would be the largest structure ever built in the history of humanity (its length would be more than the height of the Burj Dubai Tower).

“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” BTE Dan writes. He even provides a cost feasibility study with regards to the U.S. Federal Budget, and proposes tax hikes and spending cuts to cover the $1 trillion cost of the ship: “These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the Republic,” BuildTheEnterprise.org reads. Gen 1 Enterprise would be built in space and have a triple function as not only a space station, but also a spaceport and travelling spacecraft all-in-one. The goal of the ship is not only to create the first space station that exists outside of earth’s orbit, but also to accelerate space exploration to distant targets much more quickly. Its first mission would be to the Moon, Venus, Mars, and perhaps Europa. As Universe Today notes, the ship’s onboard laser would be used to sear through the moon’s ice crust to allow a ship to drop into its oceans. Three additional nuclear reactors would provide electricity for this laser and other ship needs.

The project is not the first of it’s kind either. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, announced the 100-Year Starship project in early 2011. DARPA says the 100 Year Starship Study is a project to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible. The Department of Defense and NASA are also involved in the project. DARPA’s 100-Year Starship was also designed partly to foster ideas exactly like the BTE project, from a project planning roadmap to a real ship. You can learn more about BTE’s Gen 1 Enterprise by visiting the project’s website (NOTE: the site’s servers have been off-and-on due to the unpredicted spike in demand over the past 24 hours) and follow BTE Dan on Twitter.

SEE ALSO: US Defense Dept.Laying Groundwork For Starfleet Program To Explore Deep Space
SEE ALSO: MIT Research Indicates We Will Soon Travel 1/4 Speed Of Light By Using Ships Made Of Metamaterials and “General Relativity”

Source: Network World, Popular Science, Universe Today, DARPA and US Department of Defense

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Ambitious Engineering Proposal To Build Functioning Starship Enterprise Getting Major Attention

New submitter Adesso writes “Seem [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with a update of all their Premium customers. A update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of Windows to block almost all critical application. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Avira Premium Anti-Virus Bug Disables Windows Machines