Just when you thought that there aren’t that many ways you could improve upon a website that gives driving directions, Google has introduced a feature on Google Maps that warns about potential traffic delays. Who would this benefit? Those who commute through big cities. The current cities that the new Google Maps feature support include San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Dallas. This announcement was made official by Google Software Engineer, David Wang on the Google Blog.

How does it work? Below is a screen shot of the real time traffic data of Chicago, IL 5:23PM Central Time. Around this time is rush hour, so that explains why a lot of the routes are marked in red.  This implies that there is a delay in how fast the traffic is going. Users can select or de-select the traffic feature simply by clicking on the ‘Traffic’ button. This feature is also available on certain mobile phones.

How could Google Maps improve from this point? Two ways. First is by integrating this feature into other cities of the U.S. and secondly, imitate MapQuest. MapQuest has a gas price tracker that displays the gas stations that have the highest and lowest prices in any city of the U.S. [screen shot below].

Upon looking at Windows Live Search, I discovered that Microsoft had integrated the traffic feature before Google did.  And on top of that, Windows Live Search also includes under construction data. This is especially useful for those that live in the MidWest. There’s a poor joke that circulates around the MidWest: “There are only two seasons in the MidWest: Winter and construction.”

[Microsoft Virtual Earth Screen Shot displaying construction data]

The intensity of rivalry between driving directions websites only makes life easier for us, the consumer.   Microsoft should also take a page out of the MapQuest book of ideas and integrate a gas tracker feature as well.

March Madness, U.S. college students’ favorite time of the year, is rapidly approaching and people are preparing to make bets on their brackets. CSTV, a division of CBS has been proactively finding ways to get students on the information superhighway to show off their intensity of rivalry for their schools. This is solved by means of video-supporting websites, CBS’ YouTube Channel and CSTV’s own website called Post Up.

Some of the sample videos already running on CSTV includes a man claiming, “I’m the Ba-baller here to represent San Diego State.”  And another man representing the University of Nevada-Las Vegas responded by saying, “You can’t get past the Running Rebels.”

CBS paid $6 billion for the coverage rights to the NCAA tournament between 2003-2014.  Video clips submitted will be checked for profanity.  CSTV video search is powered by America Online.  Below is a screen shot of the CSTV Post Up website:

Viacom was also in the process of negotiating a deal with YouTube, but the deal went sour, so Viacom turned to Joost.  The outcome was thousands of videos with Viacom-sponsored content forced to be removed from YouTube.

For those who aren’t familiar with NetVibes, the website allows users to import RSS feeds from all types of other web applications and publications, including Wall Street Journal, Flickr, YouTube, NY Times, etc. NetVibes is customizable and is one of my homepages. Tabs can also be utilized for all of the feeds that you want to subscribe to.

Earlier this morning, NetVibes had a slight outage of servers because of its upgrade. After the upgrade was complete, there was a great new feature added to NetVibes as part of its Coriander initiative: Resizable columns for the RSS feed boxes.

“Until now, you could adjust the layout with 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns to take advantage of all you screen space. Today, we are pushing the layout possibilities a bit further by allowing the columns to have a custom width. Have a module with your favorite comics?  Simply make your column wider so you can read it comfortably,” wrote Tariq Krim, founder of NetVibes on his blog.

In the above screen shot, I drew an arrow to point out where you adjust the column width within NetVibes’ RSS boxes.

I’m really looking forward to some of the upcoming features NetVibes is looking to add to its user interface such as the ability to choose a background image and the stock quotes module.

Today it was announced that Microsoft Corporation has hinted at becoming more active in the healthcare sector by possibly acquiring Medstory Inc. Medstory is a health search engine start-up in Foster City, CA. Medstory’s search software algorithms revolve around an ability to detect medical and health-related articles within Internet medical journals, government documents, and also the newly featured Wall Street Journal and Breastcancer.org articles.

This acquisition also indicates Microsoft’s intention to “improve the consumer experience in health care” stated Peter Neupert, VP of Health Strategy at Microsoft. “Search is a critical part of that better end-to-end experience for consumers.”

So, who is the competition? RevolutionHealth.com is a competitor and is backed by Steve Case, former chairman & also the co-founder of America Online. WebMD is one of the conglomerates out there right now that has a market cap of $3.05 billion and has made an annual revenue of $253 mill this past year.

Google is also another player in the field. “Using the Google Co-op platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need” wrote Adam Bosworth on the Google Blog.

From first-hand experiences, I believe that many people do not understand the importance of technology and its contribution to healthcare until they know someone who has been diagnosed with a disease or shows irregular symptoms. For example, I had a relative get a call this past weekend from the Er because he had high potassium levels. So the first place we turned was WebMD to see what could alleviate the high potassium levels.

I believe that there is a correlation between this news and the regular announcements made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I also believe this would be one of Microsoft’s smartest acquisitions compared to some of their previous.

This idea is definetely one of those out there ideas, but I’ve been watching Digg closely and envision its ability to use the power of its users in another way besides just news.

Until the company made the correction, if you searched for the word “failure” using Google’s search engine, the first two results would be 1.) The Biography of President George W. Bush at Whitehouse.Gov and 2.) MichaelMoore.com. Why did this happen? The technology that caused this to happen is the reason why Google has a market cap of $146 billion and has offices all over the world. PageRank.

PageRank worked so well that Google became the search engine of choice over the years instead of the usual suspects: Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Excite, etc. Yahoo! offered $3 billion and it was rumored that Microsoft was considering buying Google but later found out that the company was powered by Linux servers.

The way that PageRank works is that a bot checks to see how links between different websites are related to each other. Seeing as there are many people out there that associate the word failure with both George Bush and Michael Moore, PageRank picked up on it and moved those results to the top of Google searches. Depending on how credible a website is, PageRank assigns a score (1-10). Pulse 2.0 attained a score of 5/10 after writing about 4 months worth of content.

There are also other ways to manipulate various search engines by using what is known as SEO techniques and also by playing around with META tags in a website’s source code. Spam websites are out there and there is only so much that web crawlers can do to prevent them from rising to the top of search engines. What if a a large community votes for what websites are better for certain content based upon user searches?

Digg users are mastering the art of recognizing what news belongs at the top… on a daily basis. Imagine if Digg created a search engine in which users could vote the better websites to the top and the spam websites to the bottom. Actual humans will be far better at recognizing credible websites than any automatic technology.

Digg users tend to prefer receiving credit for the votes they put in (or how active they are), so voting for websites could also be counted to complement one’s profile. Its worked well for the news, so it could work for a keyword search engine.

Put a few of these things: next to the search results in a Digg search engine. The spam will have a negative number and the better websites out there will have positives. Of course it’ll be tough since a lot of the community may be biased towards certain company websites over others. For example, Enron may end up in the negatives, but Apple wouldn’t. Yet some of the content on the Enron website may be important.

The hardest part of getting this off the ground would be developing a web crawler search engine itself, but the Digg team look like they could handle it.

I just wanted to entice a little discussion. Readers, let me know what you guys think.

A victory for the open source community, Wikipedia has officially entered the top 10 most trafficked websites in the U.S. on Alexa. Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ open source encyclopedia joins the rankings of Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, YouTube, eBay, MSN, MySpace, Google and Yahoo. Wikipedia receives over 42.9 million unique visitors per month.

Where does Wikipedia traffic come from? In the U.S., I’m guessing that search engine optimization (SEO) and school students looking to fill up paper bibliographies play a major role in Wikipedia’s growth. Let’s say that you are a high schooler and you are in a biology class that requires you to write a paper about whales. You type in “whale” on Google and the very first result is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s donations currently amount to over $1.1 million, including an anonymous friend’s $286,000 donation, but some Wikipedia fans (including the Wikimedia, Chairwoman Florence Nibart-Devouard) fear that once funding runs out or slow down, Wikipedia may have to go offline until there is another funding option.

In response: “I don’t worry about the future.  Raising enough money to keep Wikipedia going is a big job, but we feel confident that we will continue to be able to do it [source: Arstechnica],” stated Jimbo Wales.  This is definetely an admirable move by Wales.  Contextual advertising could help the company raise 9 digits per year easily, but Wales clearly cares more about what the community sees when visiting his creation.

Late last month I wrote about online photo editor, Picnik. And at the time, I was thinking that online photo editing couldn’t get any better. But it turns out that I was wrong. As of today, Snipshot is the best that I have seen.

First reason: The Snipshot import Bookmarklet [how it works] makes it easy to edit any image you find on any website.

Second reason: Snipshot has an API that allows you to embed the pics that you edit online seamlessly on to your own websites.

Third reason: Import pictures directly from picture or (1st page of) PDF file URLs.

Once you are done editing your files, you can also export the images to your Flickr or Webshots account. Also, you can save the image as a PNG, GIF, JPG, PSD, TIF, and/or PDF. Image alteration features include Undo, Resize, Crop, Enhance, Adjust (Size, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, Sharpness), and Rotate.

In terms of feature quantity, Picnik’s basket of goods is a little bit greater. Both have a pretty sleek UI though.

Picnik’s:

SnipShot’s:

SnipShot has been funded by Y-Combinator, early stage investors of JamGlue and Reddit. Both, Picnik and SnipShot are great tools, but the fact that they are substitutable of each other is a bit worrying. Picnik and SnipShot are relatively new and may stand in the way of each other’s progression. It is survival of the fittest at this point and it seems like SnipShots evolutionary path is in the lead because of its website-importing interconnectivity.

Picnik vs. SnipShot Tech Specs:
It appears that Picnik utilizes Adobe Flash technology, whereas SnipShot uses server-side Java processing. This could cause SnipShot to hit a wall if the site really takes off and there are many users logged into the site at once. Because YouTube utilizes Flash media, the video-sharing site did not have as many technical difficulties as the site should have had with all that incoming traffic.

An old friend of mine from college showed me how useful CallWave was a couple days back. His phone battery died, but fortunately he had the CallWave widget to tell him that his parents in Dubai called. I thought that was pretty cool so I decided to test & install the widget myself. The widget works with Yahoo! Widgets, Windows Vista widgets, and Apple widgets. You can download the widget file from the CallWave website. The service works with most U.S. phone providers such as Cingular, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

After you save the widget file into your default widget folder and then open the file, CallWave opens up a disclaimer as displayed below (I used Yahoo! Widgets):

After you agree to use the widget, then you are asked to enter a phone number, a pin number, and your e-mail:

Once you submit your information, a request is sent to the CallWave servers. You would also receive an e-mail confirmation with the same information that you inputted above. After that, the widget asks you to select your phone service provider:

Once a phone provider is selected, the widget will generate a random number and several meta-characters for you to type in as if you were calling someone:

Once you dial the number and hit call, your phone may indicate that your calls are being forwarded. If you’re using Windows, you also have to download and install extra software.

After you install the software, you are then notified on the widget of all received calls and can even listen to voicemails on your computer. Here is what the CallWave for Windows software looks like:

I had a friend call me and leave a voicemail to test it out. It worked perfectly. This is one of the most amazing software tools out there and I highly recommend it.

CallWave was founded by Peter V. Sperling and David F. Hofstatter. The company trades under the stock ticker symbol CallWave, Inc NASDAQ: CALL. CallWave also has a blog with company updates.