afternoonbuzz

Cars, Reddit, Zillow, More: Saturday Afternoon Buzz, March 28th, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

Au.to is a new search engine for used cars (PRESS RELEASE). “Like Google, AU.TO crawls the web seeking out cars for sale, collecting both vehicle and dealer data, and sorting vehicles based on user predicted interest, thereby providing custom-tailored search results for individual users. AU.TO features a lightning fast, text-based search, yielding results in milliseconds, not minutes. It also provides the first user-predicted interest algorithm for online car shopping: Think Pandora for cars.” You know, you could just be a search engine for used cars. Comparisons to Google and Pandora aren’t necessary…

USEFUL STUFF

From Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 13 Must-Have Chrome Apps for Music Teachers.

How-To Geek: The Best Ways to Save Web Pages to Read Later. I heart Pocket.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reddit now lets you embed its comments on your site. “To generate the necessary code simply click on a comment’s permalink page, then select ‘embed’ to generate the code you need to copy. You also have the option to include parent comments.”

Real estate site Zillow has launched an updated agent finder. “The new tool takes into account ratings from Zillow’s users, as well as data about who the most active agents in a given area are (based on past sales and their number of current listings). Prospective home buyers and sellers can then filter according to their price points, needs and specialties (relocations, short sale, etc.), as well as the languages the agent speaks.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Jack Schofield takes a look at Twitter tool Nuzzel. Thanks to my sojourn in Ick Limbo last weekend, I spent a lot of time tweaking Twitter and Tweetdeck and this past week I’ve found that between a carefully-cultivated TweetDeck and Nuzzel, Twitter can be more interesting than Facebook. (Of course, I also discovered that there are some ridiculously frustrating things about Nuzzel, but that’s a different article.)

Business chat service Slack got hacked. It’s launched two-factor authentication.

Google is pushing back against stories about how much time/effort it spends on DC. “Having whittled its visit count down, Google says it consulted the White House records for other companies. It claims Microsoft made 270 visits over the same period, whereas Comcast made 150 visits — which is in stark contrast to the WSJ’s claims of just 20.” I have never liked the “but this other guy is doing it too” method of defense…

More Google: it is bringing its fiber service to Salt Lake City.

More More Google: Is Google setting up a billing payment service for GMail? “The service, dubbed Pony Express, would ask users to provide personal information, including credit card and Social Security numbers, to a third-party company that would verify their identity, according to a Re/code report on Tuesday.” What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Good afternoon, Internet…

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Categories: afternoonbuzz

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