Tag Archives: google

I’ve become oddly obsessed with Emoji recently and in examining the Unicode standardisation of Emoji characters I noticed a surprising number of common characters missing.

When I say “missing” I mean missing from the canonical EmojiSources.txt file in the Unicode standard, but present in iOS.

When I say “common” I mean no more obscure than any of the others and in every day use by iPhone owners.

Splitting the omissions out and viewing them on Android, the glyphs are indeed missing from the system font.

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You have until March 4th 2013 to watch this excellent BBC4 documentary called “Google and the World Brain“.

If you live on Earth I recommend that you watch it. (Although you probably have to be in the UK to watch iPlayer)

Starting off with the problems of copyright in the digital age, it goes much further – it prompts you to think about everything from corporate responsibility to AI and the direction of human civilisation.

There’s too much to cover, but here’s a quick write-up with links to some of my favourite moments.

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Take a look at this screen shot from my Google Analytics dashboard.

These are all click-throughs from tweets. They are all referred by Twitter’s URL shortener (t.co). Unfortunately this data is fairly useless. I’d like to know who the influential tweeters are and what the tweets said. I could search Twitter for the full URLs, but Twitter search is – quite frankly – rubbish for this.

My initial reaction to this vague and seemingly obfuscated data was annoyance, but after doing some research I now see that this data is actually a bonus. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved though.

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Why I don’t think Circles is Google+’s killer social feature

I firmly believe that if any company can dethrone Facebook, that company is Google. But from what I’ve seen of Google+ so far, I can’t quite imagine a MySpace-style emigration happening just yet.

I’ve recently been asking Google+ fans to give me a good reason to use it. By far the most popular answer to my question is that it provides better privacy and filtering options.

Circles is great. It’s about as simple to use as it can be, but I don’t believe it’s anything like a game-changer.

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– or – “Confessions of a Google Wave N00b”

After scrounging myself a B-list Google Wave preview, I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so. Rather than read more and think deeply about it, I thought I’d blurt out my half-formed opinions now. In fact, this is one of those posts I’ll probably regret in a year’s time. It might look as naive as some of my early thoughts on Twitter when I didn’t quite get it, but that’s blogging for you… so here goes.

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