Tech Week in Review 11-13-09

Google Launches It’s Own Systems Programming Language: Go

Google is once again pushing the boundaries of everything we take for granted. Webmail was pretty much garbage until Gmail came along. When existing browser technologies weren’t advanced enough for what they wanted to do, Google created Chrome. When they realized that email and other standard communications protocols were inefficient and slow, they created Wave. Now, realizing that we have gone a decade without re-evaluating our systems programming languages to match up with today’s hardware and software technologies, Google has released the Go language to the public:

No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:

• Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
• Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
• There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
• Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
• The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.

Go is open source and ready for the hacking. If you’re a developer and you gotta get Go, go visit the tutorial to get started. If you’re interested in the gory details, you can watch a 1-hour Tech Talk video.

@ShitMyDadSays Gets a TV Deal with CBS

Don’t get me wrong, this is one of the funniest Twitter accounts I’ve ever read, but this deal has me scratching my head. I really don’t see how a sitcom about a dude tweeting all crazy stuff his 73-yr old dad says is going to last. At any rate, the creators of Will & Grace, David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, are slotted to executive produce the show. Seems to me that these quotes could have come from a sitcom (All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Married with Children, etc.), so creating a show based on them seems kinda backwards. The most pressing question is: What are they going to call it? (via Mashable)

Survey Shows How People Interact with Brands in Social Media

A recent survey conducted by Razorfish gives us some interesting results regarding how potential customers interact with brands online. If you’re a brand, you should definitely take a look at the details. Primary take-aways for me:

• 25% of respondents followed brands on Twitter
• 40% of respondents followed brands on Facebook
• The primary reason that respondents followed a brand on Twitter or friended them on Facebook was to get Exclusive deals and offers

So, if you’re a brand and looking to step into the social media space, get your self accounts on Twitter and Facebook and start giving your friends and followers the hook-up.

Photo Tagger Alerts You When People Put Your Face on the Web

Israeli service Photo Tagger works as a Facebook app to help you automatically tag your photos. It can recognize faces regardless of lighting conditions and angles. It will automatically tag and organize your photos. One of the most interesting features,though, is the ability to alert you when someone uploads your face to Facebook, regardless of whether the photo has been tagged or not:

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags. (via TC)