Google have announced news of Chrome, a new open source Webkit-based browser. The central premise is that it has been designed from the ground-up to work efficiently with the demanding web applications of today’s web. In particular, it features a JavaScript engine called V8 which can utilise multiple processes, as opposed to the single-process engines that power Firefox and Safari.

As Google are emphasising performance, it will be interesting to compare their efforts with Safari’s new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine.

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Buried deep inside the press release announcing the Yahoo-Google search advertising deal, is an interesting point about the company’s respective messenger clients:

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.

Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality.

Official Google Blog: OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

If you are interested in monitoring your online presence, or simply for a laugh, you can be alerted whenever your name is mentioned on a website. Here’s how:

1. visit Google Alerts
2. enter your name within double quotes in the Search terms box. e.g. “glen scott”
3. enter your e-mail address in the Your email box

Now, whenever your name is mentioned in a newly indexed page, you will be e-mailed with the link… fun!

This is a follow-up to my earlier post, Search engine snippets. My site has now got a meta description tag and Google and Yahoo have both picked up on it:

Google:

Yahoo:

Google shows just the content of the meta description tag, whilst Yahoo also adds some content from the top of my blog.

An interesting post on how different IM providers are embracing open standards:

Consider that everyone IMs. Websites come and go - but IM remains. What’s important about that is that your social network persists over many, many years. My friendster buddy list is essentially useless - since I no longer use that site. But my AIM buddy list, which I still use, has been around for over 10 years. And with XMPP, it’s now reusable. It could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network.

IM 2.0

An interesting comparison of what content the two main search engines have chosen to display for my blog:

Google:

Yahoo!:

Google seems to have just picked up the footer of my site , whereas Yahoo has picked up the header, some post content and the footer.

At the moment, there is no meta description on the page which I’ll add soon to see how the listings change.