AlterNation: Your Source for all Things Internet

Welcome to AlterNation, the official Alter Imaging podcast! Alternation will provide a weekly review of the latest internet news, as well as commentary and tips. In episode 1 we discuss the huge amount of Google news from last week, Facebook's 6th anniversary, and some interesting statistics.

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For show notes, click more.



Google Fiber: Coming later this Spring, Google is going to be testing a competitively priced, ultra-high speed fiber network in an as-yet-unannounced area of the United States. They say that they plan on providing a minimum of 50,000, and up to 500,000 people with internet connections at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second. Google

Google Buzz: Last week Google rolled out their answer to social networks and status updates in the form of 'Google Buzz'. Integrated in to Gmail, Buzz has already seen widespread adoption, and equally widespread debate. Buzz can pull content from your other places online, such as Flickr, Blogger, and Twitter, meaning that you can 'buzz' without ever having to write an update specifically for the service.
More Information
Mashable on Buzz Integration
Mashable on Buzz Buttons
Mashable on Buzz Features

Statistics on Social Networking on Phones: Some very interesting data emerged last week on how people are using phones for social media and other entertainment purposes. In a nutshell, social networking is the new entertainment.
Mashable

Google Acquires Aardvark: Google acquired the social search startup "Aardvark" last week, for a reported 50 million dollars. Aardvark is the result of 4 Phd's in Artificial Intelligence writing an algorithm that pushes questions to people who can answer them. While no-one is entirely sure what Google wants to do with the company, setting up a counter to Yahoo Answers, or augmenting search results both seem like decent bets.
Announcement

Facebook Milestones:
Facebook hits 400 million users right as they began celebrating their sixth anniversary, and just 2 months after reporting 350 million. This means the social networking site is still growing rapidly, and you have to wonder when it will be able to claim 1/10 of all world citizens. Mashable has an infographic that looks at Facebook's history, valuation, and more. In addition, Facebook has rolled out a major site redesign, placing greater emphasis on search, and putting much more content on the homepage.

Suggested Reading
The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has aggregated nearly 200 articles about Twitter from 2007 until now, making for an awesome guide and reading list. The list covers everything about Twitter you could think of, and even the most out-of-the-loop person could become an expert by reading these. 140 Learning

Special Segment Today's special segment features an awesome infographic that details the 'state of the internet' for late 2009. This graphic is absolutely full of information, and has a few truly unique gems- such as "54% of bloggers consider themselves experts on what they write about".

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