Here’s a map that’s tracking evacuation centers and updates related to Hurricane Gustav:

On May 11, 2005, I first used the term “acqhire” and was so amused with myself that I appended the post to define it: “When a large company ‘purchases’ a small company with no employees other than its founders, typically to obtain some special talent or a cool concept.” That post was about Google, then a mere $64 billion company, purchasing the two-person company, Dodgeball.com. (Ever heard of it? Didn’t think so.)

Earlier this week, Slate ran a story that picked up a theme written about often — that small companies Google acqhires often end up in a black hole. I have no personal insight into what happens at Google and I can’t say I agree 100% with him, but Jason Fried — who’s company, 37 Signals, has probably had plenty of opportunities to be acquired — has a great quote in the article that is worth repeating:

“You take great talents and you put them in this big company and they get drowned out by all this policy stuff,” Fried argues. “Putting a small company in a big company kills what was good about the small company.”

Here’s a MyBusiness magazine story I wrote about Jason in 2006 that explored his preference for keeping his company independent. From the time I spent interviewing him for the story and from being a user of his company’s products ever since, I’m glad he provides a balancing point of view to the notion that the only reason to start a business is to flip it. In the narrow niche that is covered by the tech blogosphere, that may be the goal, but for most small businesses in the real world, the magnet is independence and the opportunity to see an idea realized.

There will be no pity from me for those who have sold their startup to Google, only to see it sucked into a blackhole. Their product dreams may have been dashed, but they left with a lifetime’s worth of parting prizes. Next time, they’ll know better what matters.

Earlier today, I out-sourced to Danny Sullivan a review of the new search engine, Cuil.com. In a comment on that post, Bob Sacks (BoSacks) observed that he uses an ego search to decide if a search engine is any good. That makes sense to me. If I want to find out about someone, chances are the first thing I do is Google them. So I did as Bob suggested and ego-googled “Rex Hammock” — and this is what I got on the first search engine results page (SERP):

1. My Blog (RexBlog.com)
2. My Personal Tumble Log (RexHammock.com)
3. My Flickr account (Flickr.com/rexblog)
4. A photo of me at a BBQ restaurant taken by Dave Winer
5. My Company (Hammock.com)
6 My FriendFeed account (friendfeed.com/rexhammock)
7. My MyBlogLog Profile Page
8. My Twitter Page (twitter.com/r)

Pretty good job, Google, except perhaps, I’d kick that Dave photo to page 2 or 3. From that SERP, you can one-click to about anything you’d ever want to know about me — and way more.

Compare that to the results you’ll get on Cuil.com:

My Jaiku account — that I forgot I had
Several links to Techmeme posts that are two years old
A 2004 interview Steve Ruble posted on his old blog
Some posts on Dave Winer’s & Nick Bradbury’s blogs
Some other even more random links

Bottomline: Cuil is not going to be a go-to source for people who want to find information about other people — or themselves.

Bonus link: Rafe Neddleman writes how Cuil shows how not to launch a search engine. I couldn’t agree more.

Later: I just saw that Chris Brogan did the same thing with his name and discovered the same results. Says Chris, “Call me egotistical, but if you can’t find yourself in a search engine after a decade of littering the web with your presence, I’m thinking it’s not much of a search engine.” Okay, you’re egotistical. And you’re right.

Bonus video: Ouch! The WSJ’s Digital Daily puts Cuil through the meat-grinder. Title of video: How do you spell Cuil? F-A-I-L.

This will be my last comment about Cuil. I think the response is looking like “piling on.”

The Yahoo!-owned photo-sharing service Flickr today announced a “partnership” with the digital media licensing firm Getty Images to offer a Flickr-branded collection on GettyImages.com . Photo editors from Getty will select images and photographers who post photos on Flickr and will invite them to participate in the program.

According to the announcement , “Getty Images has the best editors globally taking the pulse of the market. In the next several months, they will be exploring Flickr’s collection of public photos and inviting some of these photographers to be part of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.”

Clients of Getty Images (basically, every design studio, advertising agency and media company in the world) will then be able to purchase the rights to the selected Flickr photographs.

Bottomline: Flickr is NOT setting up an arrangement where anyone can purchase the rights to all photos on Flickr. Any person who shares photos on Flickr has a way to easily control the rights granted on their photos — and even who can see the photos they post. What this means is that Getty will be searching through Flickr for talented photographers who may not today be professionals, but who may have work that could extend the “long tail ” of Getty’s collection.

Here’s a FAQ that Flickr has started regarding the program.

More coverage: CNet

(Via: APhotoEditor.com )

Google has created a street-view map of each stage of the Tour de France (which some Americans my be surprised to learn is still held each year, despite Lance Armstrong’s retirement). I continue to marvel at the powerful ways in which stories can be told with Google Maps.

When I see a project like this, it reminds me of the awe I felt when seeing a demo of the first such street-level “hyper media” I can recall, the Aspen Movie Map, a project that celebrates its 30th anniversary this fall. I recall seeing it on a laserdisc sometime in the late 80s. It was, in essence, a “street view” map of Aspen, Colorado. An early project of the MIT media lab, it was criticized at the time by Sen. William Proxmire who awarded it a “golden fleece” for the the way in which it was an example of how government research funds were wasted. Far from being a “waste of funds,” not only did that project lay the conceptual groundwork for such things as Google maps street-view, it also provided the foundation that has led to technology that today saves the lives of American soldiers.

Out of curiosity, I clicked over to Aspen on Google Maps and discovered they haven’t yet created a street view of the town. It would be nice of them to create by this fall (to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the start of the project) an update of the Aspen Map Project to honor its role in providing a glimpse into what Google maps street view has become.

Image via Wikipedia

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.

Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)

I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.

Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)

Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:

“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:

First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.

Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.

Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.

The Important Part: The people at Facebook describe your list of “friends” (contacts) as being your “social-graph.” Others use the term “social network” to describe in broad terms, your network of connections with other people. Chances are, you call that list of connections your “address book.” In the previous century, you may have called it your Rolodex. Your ability to export that list of contacts from your computer out to web services (geek word of the day - “portability”) is one of the building blocks of a future web where you can go onto any new site or service and instantly discover everyone using it who may be a friend of your second-cousin, Herbert. Today, Google announced that the newest update of the Mac operating system includes a preference in the “Address Book” program that will keep the Mac address book synch’d with the contact list on ones Google G-mail account. Why is this significant? There are lots of really smart people and groups working on standards and practices related to how someone “asserts” their online identity and their connections with others — and how web services should respect how individuals utilize such personal data. However, until the day comes when all of those standards and practices are worked out, your personal e-mail address and your phone number are serving as a form of “de-facto” identifier of who you are. Likewise, your list of e-mail contacts are filling the gap on identifying your social network. And until the powers-that-would-like-to-be all agree upon what your portable “social network/graph” is going to be and how it’s going to work, your address book has become a stand-in. That’s why, when you sign onto a new social networking site, they ask if you want to allow them to bounce your e-mail contact list up against their list of registered users. That way, you can discover who among your contacts are already using the service.

Take Away: For Apple Address Book users who used to have to “export” and “upload” your contact list manually, you now have one-click portability (and on-going syncing) to your Google G-mail contacts list of your most important “social graph.” And from your Google contacts, you can blast that social graph to infinity and beyond (or whatever Google Friend Connect is).

Related rambling: About a year ago, I talked about the concept of e-mail address as universal identifyer in a lengthy post.

[Photo credit: jcroach, Flickr.]

The Important Part: Since May 14, you can click on the “More” link at the top of a Google Maps location to see photos (via Panoramio.com) and explanations (via Wikipedia) of points of interest. For example, here is a map of Nashville with the “More” features selected.

The Take Away: Users of Google Earth will recognize the “More” feature as a pathway to the “layer-fication” of Google Maps. It is also a great example of a “nonlinear” approach to presenting information (or, as the engineering-types say, “data points”). I predict that before long, the “More” tab will include a check-box that has the word “News” on it. It will provide a geographical mash-up view of stories indexed by Google News. That’s not much of a long-shot prediction, however, as the news-layer feature was added to Google Earth last week.

Update: A mere 24 hours later, and Google has another announcement - that Google Earth can be viewed via a new browser plug-in. This isn’t going to replace Google Maps, just make Google Earth a little more accessible and capable of being integrated with third-party applications. Unfortunately, I can’t give the plug-in a review since currently, it’s only available for Windows users.

During the past 24 hours, I’ve been reminded why I like to have programs that operate on my desktop. Granted, if anyone is going to convince me that having all my documents and office-tool software online, in “a cloud,” is going to work for me, it will be Google. Google has the resources to own server farms the size of Wisconsin. So when Google can’t get it done, I begin to wonder if anyone can. During the past 24 hours, I’ve received three different signals from Google that maybe I shouldn’t have faith in anyone’s ability to be up 100% of the time:

The irony of one of those messages is especially choice: “Something bad happened. Don’t worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we’ll get right on it.”

I can imagine being in the midst of a budget presentation and getting that message: “Don’t worry, Google will get right on it.”

And now, for some shadow puppet shows.

As this press release and resulting barrage of blogospheric coverage has pointed to the dead link http://www.google.com/friendconnect all day (the site goes live tonight), it makes me wonder just how many “eyeballs” this “Not Found” message has attracted. Could it be a one-day page-view record for a 404 Error message? They could have at least slapped a few Google ads on it to generate some revenue. I thought I’d post a screen grab here for posterity.

A new feature that will be recognized as a tumblelog by the tiny fraction of the world’s inhabitants who might know what a tumblelog is, has been added to Google Reader. Wisely recognizing that tumblelog is a far-edge concept, Google chose not use such a term in announcing the feature on the Google Reader weblog.

I would spend a sentence or two describing why I think it is odd that Google is getting into tumblelog hosting through its RSS newsreader platform, however, the explanation would be so esoteric that even my eyes are glazing over at the thought of how geeky my reasoning is. It has to do with having a feature as a part of an RSS reader for sharing items one finds via means other than an RSS reader — but like I said, who cares?

Maybe it will be a great feature for someone. But I’m scratching my head at who might use it other than current Google Reader users who already have a “share” feature. Wouldn’t someone who might actually comprehend what’s going on with the tumblelog aspects of this feature prefer to display such sharing gestures at a URL like rex.tumblr.com than, say, http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02167497403971826980?

Or perhaps I’m having difficulty understanding it because I rarely use Google Reader.

Sidenote: If you want to see a tumblelog, RexHammock.com is an example. It’s where I share items I run across that are bigger than a bookmark and smaller than a blog post and less fleeting than a tweet on Twitter. And another thing: if something makes it to my tumblelog, chances are it has nothing to do with business or technology or media or anything remotely related to this weblog. And wisely recognizing that few people I know use the term tumblelog, I don’t refer to it as a tumblelog except in blog posts about the topic of tumblelogs.

Google Maps users (including those who use it via the iPhone) probably know the service provides real-time traffic data for 30 U.S. cities, including my hometown, Nashville, where there appear to be a few fender-benders today. For a view of some nightmare traffic, here is the other city I spend lots of time in, Washington, D.C..

Now, if you click on the “change” link while the Traffic layer is visible, you can view a predictive version of the Map that, as in the example below, suggests what the traffic will be like at 4:30 this afternoon. The predictions are based on historical data.

(via: Google Operating System blog.)

Bonus link: A recent post on Search Engine Land compares traffic data on several mapping services, including some impressive new features on Microsoft Live maps [or Nashville traffic view].

It took them awhile, but the “Street View” gang at Google Maps finally drove around Nashville and, gee, you can now do stuff like embed this panoramic view of the intersection outside my office window. That’s me up in the seventh floor of the building that looks super-thin in this photo (like, say, a MacBuilding Air). While I won’t get too privacy-invasive by displaying or linking to it, I’m happy to note that the Street View vehicle apparently drove by my home (not the location on the embedded shot, but another one) on a beautiful fall afternoon right after the lawn had been cut.

As Google Maps fans know, there are individuals who enjoy going through Street View photos looking for weird happenings that got snapped during the drive-bys. No doubt, there is a strong possibility of some weird sightings among the Nashville shots.

Bonus: Link to Nashville “Street View” Map: After clicking through to this link, click on the camera icon, then click on “zoom in” and then move the little “lego-man-ish” icon to a location to view the panorama from that spot.

Back in mid-2007, I wondered aloud why the Google Personalized Homepage was being re-branded iGoogle as the “i” prefix is so much the franchise of another technology company. Today, Google announced enhanced features for using Google on an iPhone, including better integration of iGoogle into iPhone. So, to clear up the confusion, you DO NOT need an iPhone to use iGoogle, but now iPhone iGoogle users have some special iGoogle features to make using it on your iPhone more iSpecial.