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Facebook has been receiving some extra media attention lately. Some analysts believe the social networking site may not be worth as much as everyone thinks. Get all the details on WebProNews.
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Tuesday, July 17, 2007 |
Ongoing privacy concerns have pressured Google into announcing a change with the cookies they use to remember a user's preferences.
Editor's Note: C is for Cookie, it's good enough for me. Is the G as in Google policy on cookies good enough to satisfy your privacy concerns? How long should Google set a cookie's persistence? Will you change the way your servers deliver cookies to visiting browsers, in order to fend off possible privacy complaints in the future? Let us know in the comments section.
Over the rest of 2007, Google's servers will start issuing new cookies to visiting browsers. Instead of their current 2038 expiration date, these cookies will devour themselves after two years, assuming the browser never returns to Google.
Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel at Google, discussed the change at the official Google blog.
After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy.
In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years.
The 2038 cookies will go away, and a two-year cookie will be baked to replace it. While it looks like a significant change on the surface, Google's cookie will effectively function for regular Google users just like the current cookie does.
As Fleischer explained, the two-year cookie auto-renews every time a browser visits Google. Instead of that fixed expiration date 31 years from now, those cookies will gain new life with every subsequent Google visit.
A long-lived cookie becomes one with serial immortality. People with concerns about cookies on their machines should manage them with their browser's tools, if they really want to control how long a cookie, Google's or anyone else's, resides on their machines.
| Article by David Utter , a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. |
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High Stakes Gmail Shirt Contest
 By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer | WebProNews
There is going to be a new Gmail t-shirt, and in and of itself, this news probably wouldn't be worth writing about. But what's interesting is that Google is holding a contest to determine the shirt's design, and the winner stands to gain $2,000 and a new iPhone.
Actually, those goodies are just for starters. The grand prize also includes a $400 JetBlue gift certificate, a Jawbone Bluetooth headset, and "some fun Google schwag," according to Kevin Systrom of the Gmail Team. Systrom explained the contest on the Official Gmail Blog, saying the company wants people to "submit a design that you think embodies the Gmail personality most."
"We've teamed up with Threadless.com which does this sort of thing all the time," he continued. "Threadless.com is a site where anyone can submit designs that they'd like to see appear on a T-shirt, people vote, and a small number of winners are printed and sold online. Today, Gmail and Threadless launched a competition created specifically for Gmail with the theme ‘Connect!'"
The official contest page notes that submissions will not be accepted after August 16, and that "[w]inners will be chosen by the Judges within 45 days after the competition end date."
I'd like to encourage all of you design-oriented people to get to work. I'd also like to direct a hat tip to Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen for catching word of this contest.
Article by Doug Caverly, a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. |
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Does Google Learn to Expect Fresh Content?
First off, I'm not a 'Web Pro', but I have spent a good amount of time
around this & other forums to get a handle on SEO. As a marketing manager for a financial services firm, I set out to get our new website in as good a position as possible from the start.
Having made sure the bases were covered from a navigation/content/tags etc, I specified a CMS to allow constant addition of new content to the site, as this always seemed one of the main areas for attention.
Long story short, I started adding content on a regular basis (around every day) and sure enough, the site started to climb the SERPs (new content was generally linked to off home page). I remember the site getting as high as p2 on Googles' rankings under the term "Mortgage Network". Then I had a week off. The site fell a long way & has continued to do so, even though I have been making time to add content (though not as frequently as before).
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Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509
