Tech Week in Review 2-12-2010

Google Buzz

First, they released stuff like FriendConnect and started messing around with the Social Graph and Google Profiles. Next, they dropped Google Wave. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think Wave was Google’s big jump into social networking. Finally, taking a hint from Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, Google creates Google Buzz. It lives in your Gmail and uses your social graph and email behavior to automatically find out who you’re connected with. The interface is quite similar to FriendFeed with Likes, Comments, realtime updating.

Many are complaining that Buzz lives inside their Gmail interface. Others just don’t get what Buzz is and have decided to disable it immediately. Many FriendFeed users have written Buzz off as a cheap knock-off, not realizing it’s probably going to be where they end up (FriendFeed is dying, remember?). No matter what your opinion, the bottom line is that Buzz has snagged a huge user base from the start and can only improve from here.

World’s Longest Married Couple Gives Romance Advice on Twitter

Herbert and Zelmyra, married in 1924, will be answering your romance inquiries until Feb 12th. Tweet your questions to @longestmarried and they will pick 14 to answer on the 14th, Valentines day. With the state of relationships as it is, I’m sure we could use a little help. One hint? They have separate bedrooms.

That’s right, while some of the older set just can’t wrap their heads around Twitter (unless it’s connected to a fax machine), the Fishers will be all up on the microblogging site this V-Day, dispensing pearls of wisdom to the younger set (for whom the sanctity of marriage has already been destroyed by Facebook). The whole project was dreamed up by blinkbox, which is an on-demand movie and TV website in the UK. (via Mashable)

Google Buys Aardvark for $50 Million

Founded by ex-googlers, Aardvark is a service that gets you immediate answers to your questions. It uses your social connections to get you quality answers. They recently received 6 million in funding and appear to be just the type of valuable data store Google would love to have their hands on. According to Aardvark’s research report:

87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.