IE7 Tab Spawning issue with Follower (FriendConnect) gadget

I've posted an entry in Blogger Help Group about a frustrating problem that I faced with the Follower gadget. Apparently, no responses yet from anybody or from Blogger, is it only my problem or others just being ignorant. The post is copied below:

---

Hi,

I would like to report a possible bug of the Follower gadget when it
is added and run under IE7. The versions of IE7 i have tested are
7.0.5730.11 and 7.0.5730.13. IE8 and FireFox seems not affected by the
issue.


Symptoms:


When you opened multiple tabs in IE7 and one of the tab is loading the
page that contains the Follower gadget, if you close that tab before
the page loaded completely, IE7 will open new tabs indefinitely, at
random chance.


If you have multiple instances of IE7, the tab openings will be done
in the first instance of IE7 and proceed to second instance if you
manage to kill the first instance of IE7.


Currently, I need to kill all instances of IE7 to stop the tabs from
being opened.


It is mostly a design limitation of how IE7 handles some of the
Javascript calls, but I think that the team should make the gadget
less affected by such behaviors.


Thank you.

Google Counts More Than 1 Trillion Unique Web URLs

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

In a discovery that would probably send the Dr. Evil character of the "Austin Powers" movies into cardiac arrest, Google recently detected more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web.

This milestone awed Google search engineers, who are seeing the Web growing by several billion individual pages every day, company officials wrote in a blog post Friday.

In addition to announcing this finding, Google took the opportunity to promote the scope and magnitude of its index.

"We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content ... that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data," wrote Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers in Google's Web Search Infrastructure Team.

It had been a while since Google had made public pronouncements about the size of its index, a topic that routinely generated controversy and counterclaims among the major search engine players years ago.

Those days of index-size envy ended when it became clear that most people rarely scan more than two pages of Web results. In other words, what matters is delivering 10 or 20 really relevant Web links, or, even better, a direct factual answer, because few people will wade through 5,000 results to find the desired information.

It will be interesting to see if this announcement from Google, posted on its main official blog, will trigger a round of reactions from rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com.

In the meantime, Google also disclosed interesting information about how and with what frequency it analyzes these links.

"Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections," the officials wrote.

Never Piss Off An Angry Man.

Icahn trashes Yahoo for failed growth plan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Carl Icahn on Monday fired off another letter savaging the board and management of Yahoo Inc (NasdaqGS:YHOO - News) for failing in its growth plan, the latest volley in an escalating proxy battle the billionaire investor has staged at the Internet company.

Icahn -- who is seeking to replace the board of Yahoo with his own nominees, including himself -- took aim at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, saying he has failed to come up with a suitable plan to beat back rivals including Google Inc (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News).

"While Google's income from operations grew 59 percent per year for the last two years, Yahoo's income from operations shrank 21 percent," Icahn said in his latest salvo to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock.

"What was the board doing over this period? Where was their great plan? Why did you permit Google to leave you in the dust?" Icahn asked.

Later on Monday, Yahoo filed its proxy statement for its August 1 shareholder meeting with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Web company urged shareholders to reelect the current board of directors, including Bostock and Yang, and reject Icahn's slate.

Yahoo also said in the filing it expects to foot $12 million in proxy solicitation costs.

Shares of Yahoo were down 6 cents at $26.38 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Dane Hamilton and Anupreeta Das, editing by Mark Porter and Gerald E. McCormick)

Apple's Big Success--It's All About Sociology, Not Technology. Does Google Get That?

Apple's Big Success--It's All About Sociology, Not Technology. Does Google Get That?
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on April 24

Apple had a blowout first quarter in the face of a declining economy, proving, once again, that innovation drives revenue and profit growth. But what exactly does that mean in the case of Apple? A.G. Lafley, P&G’s CEO, told me over lunch recently that “innovation is a social system—it involves culture, organization and leadership.”

Apple has that now. In its early years, Apple succeeded because of

brilliant user-centric design and user-friendly technology. Xerox Parc was the origin of practically all of Apple's early high-tech innovations, and Apple applied these advances in ways that connected with consumers.

Apple is innovating on a wider and deeper scale these days. It is using sociology rather than technology to propel its sales. By that I mean the iPhone, iPod, Macs and stores are all at the heart of a consumer culture that defines itself in terms of connection and sharing. Apple is providing the tools, the methods and even the cool spaces (stores of all things!) to enable and empower this sharing culture. It is identifying with its customers who identify with it. Both Apple and its customers are creating a singular, distinctive identity together.

Apple is still learning this. The successful US model for the iPhone isn't working in Europe, where people want cheaper phones and carriers want to keep more of their revenues and not share as much with Apple. In India and elsewhere, people group text and the iPhone initially couldn't do that. In a global marketplace, being in customer cultures means being in many cultures. That's very hard, especially for such an "American" company as Apple.

Nike's slogan "Running Together" captures the new phenomenon of co-creating identity together. Every company now needs a "Together" concept and culture that unites it with its consumer base.

Companies that still rely on technology and not sociology to define their businesses and their identities will fail going forward. Does Google get that?