How much would you pay a friend for giving you a single advice for a movie?
Not much I guess. After all it’s just a few words. But try to see from the perspective of a business in which word-of-mouth is crucial to a long-term growth.
Netflix is giving away 1.000.000$ to anybody able to provide a fully working algorithm to give users reliable advice based on movie already seen.
It’s quite an interesting topic. No matter how much research we able to do but it’s really hard for a computer to beat our best friend reccomandation.
Here’s a more detailed explanation but if you dare to go through a massive pdf with a proper scientific essay on the topic.
Btw, if you’re into movies and struggling to find out something cool, check the 10 best film search engines by CNET.
EVen if the hype generated by the released had been soon vanished (and its market share seem’s not improving at all), Google as just released a few tricks to make sure your websites will be displayed properly on Chrome.
I experienced some troubles with Chrome recently, Google has released this tricks right on time for me.
Since my MacBook is gone and it will be for a while I guess, I was force to come back to my old laptop, a Pentium IV with only 256megs of ram.
I’m currently running Windows XP Pro which is fine but Firefox is just sucking up all the resources making everything else unbereably slow.
Here’s a short list of a few lightweight browsers I tried out in the past days:
K-Meleon: so far, the very best lightweight browser for windows. Basically it has got all Firefox funcionalities minus add-ons and a slightly old look&feel. It’s open source and works with the Mozilla rendering engine. It’s multitab and has got basically everything the old mozilla had.
Google Chrome: it’s Google’s wonderboy, truly a lightweight champion. The only bad thing it’s that it is not stable, not enough for me at least. Still the fastest so far.
Flock 1.0: another Firefox spin-off, at least 3 times faster and lighter. Still to much of a Firefox, which means huge memory leaks if left standing by. It’s more focused on social media but I noticed it is also quite lightweight.
23/03/09 update:
I just bumped into two other browser which even if they’re not exactly the most lightweight they may run smoothly on a machine with limited resources.
I’ve just found another one which is worth to be mentioned. Maxthon: originally born as an attempt to tweak Internet Explorer, its features and popularity escalated to a point in which is got funding from Google and one of Skype’s founder. It’s Classic Version its tiny and lightweight with a full set of features and that’s the one you should go for if you’re willing to spare some resources. It might be unknown to the most but is the most popular web browser in china. Give it a try and see if 186million users do actually know about web browsers.
AvantBrowser: according to its creators it’s the fastest browser ever. It uses the Internet Explorer shell built in windows (hence you gotta check your Internet Explorer out first).It’s largely inspired to Opera and it has got plenty of feature right out of the box, which makes it a really good alternative to using to many apps in a system with limited resources. It deserves a try.
Something big must be going on in between Google and Twitter.
1. Twitter started ranking on Google SERPS.
This means that Google recognized Twitters in nowadays web search results as well as it’s brand.
Therefore Twitter is becoming the next service to be flooded with bogus account filled with keywords. This usually happens when a service really goes mainstream and internet markeeters start exploiting it massively…
2. Google has opened his own account on Twitter.
They set up different accounts for each one of their top services.
This is the very first message posted:
For those who are not familiar with binary code, this means I’m feeling Lucky
I do not want to draw any conclusion from this, but looking back at previous Google acquisitions timeline, I would not be surprised if big G is getting ready to put his hands on Twitter.
In 2003 Google purchased Blogspot, realizing the web was not only made by websites. Three years later they bought Youtube, since the web was not only websites and blogs. I think they’ve just realized the internet is made also of asincronous short messages…