Social media and the mob mentality failings.

Alas - Digg is having some serious growth problems (I will post about it soon).

The best example: Muslim community offended by NYC Apple 'Cube' Store

The sensational headline made me initially shake my head.

Reading the article made me incredulous. An uncited posting by one person on a single random website constitutes a community? Even more so, the organization that posted the no-references no-proof senationalist story has been accused of being pretty biased.

Alas, the mob went wild. ZDNet posted the raticle without even bothering to read it. So did TUAW. And then it hit Digg (and spread like wilfire onto other blogs). The comments were disgusting. People decrying a billion people because of a completely unsubstantiated report. Comments stating how the title made no sense were quickly buried. Mob mentality at its mind-numbing finest.

Update: Looks like Apple Gazette is help spreading truthiness.

11 Interesting thing about Google's Latest Offering - SearchMash

Hidden by all the noise about its Google Gadgets for webpages, Google has quietly launched SearchMash.

Stop reading this. The link above will open in a new window. Click on it, and give it a whirl.

The features page covers what they do pretty well, but a quick summary with a bit more detail:

1. The search box automatically has focus. Google, Yahoo, and MSN already do this on their frontpage. The difference with SearchMash is the search results page also has the input box have focus automatically. I personally don't like this (and wrestled with this choice over at iBegin) - I use FireFox and love the fact that if you start typing it automatically starts searching. This is very useful for me on the search results page, and forcing the input box active does not make me happy. The general population? I can see it useful there.


2. The [cached] [similar] etc links have been moved - while the page title links to the result page, the url is actually a drop down of those options (including open in this window, open in new window, etc). Not bad, but for non-JS users, it would be nice if the link worked like normal (instead of having nothing happen - always frustrating).


3. No ads. Not that big of a surprise there.


4. Image results right on the main search results page. Clicking on 'more images' gives you ... well ... image results. Clicking on an image simply takes you to the page where the image was found. I'm not a big fan of this as an image can easily 'roll off' a page that is being actively updated. The third image I clicked on - I could not find it anywhere on the resultant site.


5. AJAXified search results. I *much* prefer this than the stupid MSN live-infinite scroll bar. Click on 'more web pages' and the next 10 results are pulled inline . The only downside is that it will only go as far as the 90th result. After that - shucks for you.


6. CSS. While classic-Google has embedded and linked stylesheets, SearchMash is only linked. Incidentally they load up an additional stylesheet for IE. I don't blame them - I've done the same. Resizing the font-size did not cause the design to break (which I've seen happen quite regularly with CSS designs). No XHTML


7. Clean URLs. Search for 'toronto' gave me this: http://www.searchmash.com/search/toronto. The image search results is this page: http://www.searchmash.com/search/images:toronto


8. The frontpage has a 30000 ms 'idle' timer. If you don't do anything, it asks you to try exploring popular searches. The link: http://www.searchmash.com/explore. Clicking on that link forwards you to a random (popular) search.


9. No submit button. Sort of an odd choice, but it seems to have been killed. Not even on the inner pages.


10. Hiding the Google ownership. Not even the about page mentions Google. The Privacy and ToS page give it away.


11. Do a search (eg toronto), and the search results are numbered. Move your mouse over a number, and re-order the results (the original rank stays). They say they have no use for it ... for now.

Overall I have to say it is impressive. No ads, easy way of browsing results, and blazing fast. For now I am going to add it as my default search for FireFox and give it a extended whirl.