New Microsoft ad “I’m a PC and I’m seven years old”; 7-year old Alexa makes panoramic photo

Earlier this month, we saw an ad featuring, 4–1/2 year’s Kylie using Windows Live Photo Gallery to make a picture of her pet fish Dorothy “better,” then send it off to her mom and dad.

If you missed it, here it is again:

A new Microsoft ad now shows seven year old Alexa, who snaps some photos of her “home-made fort”, creates a panoramic photo in Windows Live Photo Gallery, and then print it out. The ad finishes with Alexa saying, “I’m a PC and I’m seven years old.”

Well it is kids who change the world around you :)

How are friends connected on Facebook? Facebook intern, paul buttler has created an image that shows you the facebook friend connections worldwide based on cities, the number of friend connections in them.

When you have a social graph data of 500 million people, there are many ways you can look at them.

{Click on the image to view full size}

The creator paul says:

Defined the importance of each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends among them. Then I drew lines between pairs of importance, so that pairs of cities with more friends among them were drawn over others. The color scale goes from black to blue to white, each line with the color corresponding to their weight. Also transformed lines to fit in the picture, rather than lengthen them all over the map.

The image, besides being spectacular, it also gives us an idea of how friendships are spreading throughout the world, including oceans.

Bulkr is a free software which uses the Flickr API to help you download all the photos from flickr easily.

It allows you to download up to 200+ photos at a time from photo streams, favorites, explored photos, and Flickr search.

Related: Top 7 useful flickr hacks

Also, the main features of this is that it takes a backup of the original size photos, batch download upto 200 photos with a click, preview images before downloading and you can also pause and resume downloads.

If you want to download the file, visit clipyourphotos.com/bulkr and click on download. The size of the file is about 880KB, so it’s pretty compact too. Try it and share your comments below!!

Some common URL shortening services are bit.ly and tinyurl.com. Initially, goo.gl is not a stand-alone service as bit.ly BUT is only available from the Google Toolbar and Feed Burner.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

• Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
• Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
• Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google says:

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

You can find the new shortening service being implemented in the Google Toolbar and In Feedburner for now.

Matt Cutts from Google said there are strong chances of Google introducing a new ranking factor into the search result algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with ‘how fast a site or page loads?’.

Matt explained that page speed is a factor in search ad AdWords quality score and there’s currently a strong push to make it a factor in organic ranking algorithm.

Keeping 2 things in mind:

(1) There are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently. If I had to guess, page speed would not be a tremendously weighed factor, unless the site takes 90 seconds to load.

(2) Monitoring complaints from the AdWords (and organic) side of webmasters and virtually no one complains that their quality score is low because of having a slow site. I would have to assume the same speed criteria would be applied from the quality score page speed requirements to the organic side of things. So if advertisers rarely, if never, complain about it – one would assume non-advertisers would also not complain much about that as a reason for their site’s poor ranking. This makes lot of sense for advertisers to advertise on faster loading websites than on slowly loading websites.

p.s. If you are web developer\designer and code\design all your blog pages by yourself, there is a tool called page speed, which is used by Google to test its own page loading speed. It’s a Firefox extension which can be used with firebug. If you are interested, you can grab yourself the plug-in from here.

Google Chrome‘s homepage for Brazil has a screenshot that shows a new orkut interface. Google decided to use some ideas from services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and make it easy to post messages and to see the messages posted by your friends.

Here is the screenshot:

I wonder if this is because most of the Orkut users are from Brazil and India. Orkut’s popularity in Brazil and India is probably the only reason why Google didn’t discontinue the orkut service.