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Weekly Digital News: Social Search Wars, All That Glitters, Apple Riots… time to escape with Lonely Planet’s app

Posted by Helen Moore On January - 13 - 2012

Well here we are in 2012 and this week is dominated by two huge stories. Let’s kick–off with Google and their announcement this week that they will be incorporating ‘social search’ into their search algorithm, which critics say, would place information from Google+ above more relevant links. This is something that we suspected that Google had in mind all along when it launched Google+ so we are not particularly surprised. Twitter is (understandably) spitting feathers and the mighty Google’s excuse that their search doesn’t recognise the @ symbol is a bit feeble. Already official complaints are beginning to fly amid claims that it is unfair and could breach privacy rights of Google+. This is very much a ‘live’ story, so we will be covering this in a separate blog post next week as more of the story unfolds.

The other big news this week is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which has seen all eyes turned to Las Vegas to catch up with the hundreds of new launches. Our lucky tech journo pals who actually get to go there, have been doing sterling work by giving the edited highlights from this massive show. There have been new phones, pads, laptops – you name it, it was at CES. There was even a Swiss army knife with a built-in flash drive!

One notable absentee from CES (as usual) is Apple, who seem to generate attention 24/7 with new products and just other things, like sneak unofficial reviews of the iPad 3 which may or not be true and near riots in China as the iPhone 4S is launched. Most importantly, Apple has announced (officially) that there will be ‘an education announcement’ in New York next week which is rumoured to be about them entering the digital textbook market – more news on this next week.

MySpace (remember them?) are still limping along, although recent figures show how they are shedding users at an incredible rate, and we are still waiting for the Justin Timberlake effect. Exactly what is he going to do with it?

Tesco make a rare appearance in the digital news after posting poor Christmas results and having a whopping £4 billion wiped off its share value – this has resulted in many predicting that the modern shopper, armed with the internet and their smart phone, will no longer slavishly trudge to the massive supermarket for the weekly shop, and that we are beginning to adopt new shopping habits. These include a diverse mix of online supermarket shopping, targeted buying of special offers, niche goods from small suppliers (online and high street) and a good dollop of Freecycle inspired recycling. This is another story that we will be following as the year unfolds.

And to finish, there are some lovely new iPad apps to look at including an online version of the Lonely Planet magazine with lots of extra photography so if you are planning your escape from the cold and grey, then this will be a good place to start. See you next week.