But these “shared by” links are clearly new – and more and more people are now seeing them, too, so this seems to be more than just one Google’s many bucket tests and could be here to stay. These links tend to appear underneath links to news items in the OneBox news results section when you search for recent events. Another new feature is a live count of recent updates that now appears underneath the “Recent Updates” box when you search for keywords that are currently popular or trending on Twitter and Facebook.

All of this points to a new emphasis of real-time search results in Google. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan speculates that Google could soon restrict these searches to just your friends, which is entirely possible and would make sense in light of Bing’s recent addition of more social features, but I actually find the new focus on real time more interesting. All of these new links, after all, point to Google’s real-time search feature, which was mostly hidden from sight until now. Instead of just pointing to a somewhat cryptically names “Updates” section in the sidebar, this new test actually explains that these updates come from “Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and more.”

MG Siegler over on TechCrunch thinks that this could be an HTML5 project to showcase great tech demos, but as he rightly notes, the site itself is in Flash, which would be rather odd for an HTML5 competition.

I did some basic sleuthing and the site was registered on Go Daddy in August and the whois entry was last updated on October 4. The site itself looks to be hosted by Tier 3. The registration is private, though, so it’s rather hard to confirm that this is indeed a Google project (hence why I’m not writing about it on ReadWriteWeb for now).

Assuming this is indeed a Google project (maybe a 20% project), chances are that the company plans to hold some kind of competition where the best tech demos go head to head. Tech demos can indeed be pretty bad, so I’m all for any effort to make them better and to highlight the best so others can learn from those examples.

We will likely know more on Wednesday, but I also just reached out to Google to see if there is anything they would like to share about the site before that.

Asked about Facebook’s recent acquisitions, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook never acquired a company just for the product but for the people. He wants Facebook to have a very entrepreneurial culture and one of the ways for the company to do this is to acquire companies with great founders. These new employees, including FriendFeed‘s Bret Taylor, according to Zuckerberg, often end up working on products that are extensions of their startups.

Facebook’s Early Days

Talking about the mistakes he made, Zuckerberg noted that the mistakes the made while architecting the earliest versions of Facebook, including FMBL, are still bugging the company down sometimes. He also noted, however, that starting a web service in the early days was a lot easier than today. Now, with multiple mobile platforms competing for users attention, it has gotten more important for developers to create services that can be easily replicated on numerous platforms.

Asked about the early days of Facebook Zuckerberg also talked about his early experiences in Silicon Valley. According to him, his thought at the time was to see what it would feel like to be there, especially if he ever wanted to actually build a startup. As Facebook was already growing rapidly at the time, he – and some of his co-founders – decided to take the next semester off as Facebook was already using a data center in California.

Asked if he would move his company to the Silicon Valley again, Zuckerberg noted how the Valley offers new companies all the necessary services. He also pointed out that the Valley is very “short-term focused” and insular, but the fact that the infrastructure allows startups to quickly get of the ground makes it the ideal place to start a new business according to him.

During the interview, Zuckerberg also talked about his parents reaction to his decision to drop out. His mother, apparently, told him that she always expected him to drop out and his sister had a bet with him that she would finish college before he did.

The Social Network

In addition, he also took a few jabs at the “Social Network,” the fictionalized account of the early days of Facebook. While he noted that the movie got all of his shirts right, he noted that the general theme of the movie was simply wrong. He did not, for example, get the motivation to build Facebook from a breakup, but because he simply enjoyed building things. Taking a jab at the film industry, he noted that it is apparently hard for Hollywood to understand that sometimes “people just build things because they like to build stuff.” Clearly, Zuckerberg has decided to embrace the fact that the movie has pushed his celebrity status to a new level and throughout the interview, he seemed surprisingly comfortable talking about it.

What About China?

Currently, Facebook is planning to expand in Japan, South Korea and Russia, but China is clearly still a major issue for Facebook. Zuckerberg noted that he doesn’t want “Facebook to be an American company” and that the company has to follow the laws of all the company it is entering and be “culturally sensitive”. He noted that while the U.S. (and Facebook) has a certain standard for free speech, Facebook users can’t post Nazi content on Facebook in Germany. Zuckerberg himself is currently learning Chinese to understand the language and culture. How, he asked, can you want to connect the whole world if you leave out China?

Should Albums Cost $1.50? | Fast Company.

To get full access to the content, users do need an NYTimes.com account, however. Unregistered users will only be able to see a limited selection of articles , including the top news stories, most emailed stories, business news and a small selection of videos.

Overall, the new app resembles the old Editors’ Choice app, but instead of the menu bar with icons for the limited selection of available sections at the bottom of the screen, the new app now features a button that opens up a menu with a list of all the 25 available sections. As the app now also makes far more articles available, the designers added a new scroll bar at the bottom of the articles that allows you to easily switch between stories and go back to the main section (this scroll bar only appears when you tap on the text).

Besides these minor changes, the app will feel very familiar to anybody who ever used the old app. The only other major addition are push notifications for breaking news alerts and a dedicated photos section that looks similar to Boston.com’s Big Picture and the Guardian’s Eyewitness photo app.

While it doesn’t offer a dedicated offline mode, the app will cache articles for offline browsing. As far as we can see, this offline mode won’t display any images, however, unless you already browsed through the section while you were still online.

Overall, all of this additional content comes with a small performance penalty, as the app doesn’t feel quite as snappy as the original one. This is a small price to pay, however. For now, the app will remain free, but the NYTimes plans to charge monthly and/or annual subscriptions in the long run.

One could argue that the new app doesn’t do anything wildly new and isn’t highly innovative. Personally, I am perfectly happy to just have easy access to all of the NYTimes on my iPad. The content really speaks for itself and doesn’t need bells and whistles to stand out from the competition.

Is Tech Blogging Itself is Ripe for Disruption?

TechCrunch’s big conference is called Disrupt and focuses on – well… – disruptive ideas and startups. While that blog’s new parents will likely not change much with regards to how the team there operates, it does somehow feel like this current batch of blogs is ready for a disruption itself. We like to talk a lot about how blogs are disrupting the newspaper industry, but I think it’s also worth thinking about what the next generation of tech blogs should looks like?

Looking at the current batch of top tech blogs (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOm, Engadget and the tech-focused blogs published by the NYTimes, Wired and other more mainstream publications), they all look and feel very similar. All of these are great publications in their own right, of course, but we really haven’t seen a lot of innovation in this business lately. Some, of course, focus more on social media, others on the financial side of the startup world and others on reviewing web and mobile apps. In terms of how they operate and publish, however, the differences are rather small.

What Should the Next Generation of Tech Blogs Look Like?

Obviously, I have some ideas about what I would do and will write about that soon, but I’d like to hear your ideas first.

If you were starting a new tech blog today, what would you do that’s different and disruptive?

Bonus question: Who are the tech bloggers that aren’t well-known yet but are doing something new and different on their sites?

A few weeks ago, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly told a shocked audience that it will soon be routine for adults to change their name in order to erase their misguided teenage online identities. According to the report, today’s teenagers are quite aware that their online data is being collected and storied by lots of companies. Indeed, the report notes that 92% of teens think that they should be able to delete all their personal information that search engines, social networks and marketing companies collect. The vast majority of them (85%) also believe that these sites should first ask them for permission before they begin to collect private information.

Can We Trust This Data?

I do have some doubts about this report, though. Fast Company’s Austin Carr points out that the report also suggest that 45% of teens read the terms and conditions of the sites they join. I find this extremely hard to believe. My best estimate is that about 0.1% of college educated adults read the TOS before joining a site and that the number of teens who do so is considerably smaller. T

This puts the rest of the study in doubt for me. Until we get to see the full report (it’s not available on Common Sense Media’s website yet) and the actual questions the pollsters asked (which could easily skew the answers), the overall quality of this study remains doubtful.

This study’s results also don’t quite mesh with data I’ve seen from the Pew Internet & American Life project. According to the most recent Pew data about this topic, in 2009, only about 33% of teens actually cared about how much information is available about them online – a number that had declined from 40% in 2006.

While Calacanis says that these stories will go out over email and won’t run on a dedicated blog, chances are that he will do both in the long run in order to profit from the valuable ad sales for the email newsletter and the online ad sales that are keeping the current generation of tech blogs afloat. Calacanis will also host a new startup conference early next year that will challenge TechCrunch’s highly successful Disrupt conference.

“The Tech Blogging Scene is in a Race to the Bottom”

In his interview with the Guardian, Calacanis claims that he is not trying to challenge the existing tech blogs on their own field, but that he is “going for something that doesn’t exist in the market – not a blogger writing the story in two hours. The world really wants deeper stuff right now.” He also notes that “the tech blogging scene is in a race to the bottom and is dragging mainstream media down with it.”

Those are fighting words. Blogs like TechCrunch and others have made their name by rushing stories to their readers as fast as possible – sometimes at the expense of depth and analysis. Indeed, the reality of tech blogging is that very few authors actually have the time to spend two hours on a story. Breaking news stories often take less than 15 minutes before they appear on TechCrunch, the Next Web or ReadWriteWeb. Clearly, there is an audience for these stories, but Calacanis is betting that the market also wants more depth, knowledge and thoroughness (a mix we strive for over on ReadWriteWeb).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the marketplace. Starting a new tech publication is not easy, given how many players there already are today. With his successful e-mail list and high name recognition, Calacanis clearly has an advantage over smaller editorial startups and his best work has always been in developing editorial concepts. Even Calacanis’s biggest detractors have to admit that he has created a number of successful startups in the past and should not be underestimated, especially now that his motivation is to challenge his old arch-nemesis Arrington. We have not seen a lots of newcomers on the tech blogging scene in the last two years (let alone in the tech mailing list scene), but if anybody has a chance to make a difference in this business it is likely Calacanis.

Image Credit: Joi Ito

YouTube – Worlds Scariest Job.

And some people do this for fun…