Google welcomes Picnik

Google welcomes Picnik: "(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.

We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Management Director

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Google vs. Yahoo: Who Has the Right Social Strategy?

Google vs. Yahoo: Who Has the Right Social Strategy?: "

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech company, and all but one remains independent.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you think about it. Large tech companies have had limited to no success creating their own social media home runs. In an era where communication is increasingly taking place on these channels, the inability of these digital giants to build social networks is rather striking.

Two titans in particular are making social media headlines for different reasons: Yahoo has decided not to create it own social network, but is instead striking partnership deals with Facebook and Twitter. Google on the other hand, not only bought YouTube, but it is attempting to carve out its own piece of the social media pie with Google Buzz.

Partnership vs. in-house development; content vs. technology; Yahoo vs. Google: which company has the right social media strategy? What are the goals of both companies in the social realm? Do either have a chance against new and nimble startups like Facebook and Twitter?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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The Yahoo Strategy: Partner in Order to Drive Traffic

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In 2006, Yahoo made a $1+ billion bid for Facebook. As we all know, Yahoo failed to close that deal and the story ever since has been the rise of Facebook and the slow decline of Yahoo, who was nearly acquired by Microsoft for over $40 billion in 2008.

Now with new leadership (led by CEO Carol Bartz), Yahoo is trying to make a turnaround and bring back some of the authority it once commanded. The Internet portal is turning to social media as a cornerstone of its growth strategy, but it isn’t focused on acquiring a Twitter or building its own social network, but on creating partnerships that integrate every facet of Yahoo into social networks, primarily Facebook and Twitter.

In September 2009, Yahoo announced that it would integrate Facebook Connect in its most popular web properties. The goal was to truly make Yahoo your portal to the web by not only delivering news, email, and finances, but also your social graph and the status updates of your friends. On the flip side, Yahoo would also benefit from the traffic bump that comes with sharing articles and content on Facebook’s news feed.

Yahoo has continued to push this partnership strategy in recent months. Two weeks ago, Yahoo partnered with Twitter to give users access to their Twitter feed from within Yahoo, update their status, and integrate Twitter content into the company’s search and media properties. A few days ago, Yahoo Mail hooked up with Facebook, the first integration between Facebook Connect and Yahoo.

Yahoo seems content in partnering with the major social services, rather than compete with them. Social media efforts like Yahoo Buzz, the tech giant’s answer to Digg, which hasn’t made a dent in the social voting powerhouse, have likely left a bitter taste in the mouths of its executives. Yahoo is now focused on using social media to generate traffic, eyeballs, and engagement times.

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The Google Strategy: Dominate

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Google’s strategy goes in a completely different direction to Yahoo’s approach; its strategy is also all over the map.

Like Yahoo, Google doesn’t have a good record in social media. Google Friend Connect isn’t even close to Facebook Connect in terms of adoption, Orkut never made inroads in the U.S., Blogger has nowhere near the traction of WordPress, and other acquisitions such as Jaiku and Dodgeball haven’t panned out.

You’d have a very good argument if you said that Google’s only social media hit has been YouTube, and that “only” cost the company $1.65 billion. Google has a lot more social properties than many people realize, but it’s a hodgepodge of acquisitions (Blogger, YouTube, Picasa) and internally-created services (Orkut, Google Knol, Friend Connect). The company’s batting average, though, has been pretty poor, especially by Google’s standards.

That was before Google Buzz, though. With the launch of its most advanced social product yet, Google’s strategy has finally begun to emerge, and it is a good one. If Google can stir up adoption for Buzz (which it has via Gmail), keep that engagement (this remains to be seen), and launch a standalone version of its social media tool, it can carve out a piece of the (very large) social media pie. Linking or integrating it to YouTube, Picasa, Orkut, Friend Connect, and its other social tools could provide a boost to those services as well.

There’s no reason to believe Google will succeed with Buzz, given Google’s social media track record. However, Buzz is the most complete product Google has put out yet and has some strong engagement numbers. It’s riskier than Yahoo’s strategy, but the payoff could be be titanic.

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Google and Yahoo Are Very Different Companies

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Yahoo’s strategy is focused around integrations with already-popular social services, while Google is focused around building and acquiring its own social media powerhouses. While Yahoo does acquire social media companies (e.g. Flickr) and Google has some strong partnerships (e.g. Twitter in Google Real-time search), that’s not the focus of their respective social strategies.

The reason their approaches to social media are so different has little to do with their leadership teams or the quality of their decision-making. No, it boils down to one simple truth: Google and Yahoo are very different companies.

I argue that Yahoo is, for the most part, a content company, while Google is focused on technology. There was a point where Yahoo was known for its tech innovations, but that mantle has long since passed to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

I explored this phenomenon in my first Social Analyst column, Content vs. Technology: What MySpace and AOL Have in Common. MySpace and AOL were also tech giants, but at some point lost their technology edge (MySpace lost to Facebook, AOL lost to DSL and Cable Internet) and thus began to focus on ramping up content creation and driving traffic to their web properties. Yahoo falls into the same camp.

Because of this key difference between Yahoo and Google, it’s no surprise that they are implementing different approaches. Google’s is focused on building technology that will drive adoption, revenue, and information through its doors. Yahoo’s focus is on bringing more eyeballs to this content and keeping them on Yahoo for longer periods of time.

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Who Has the Right Social Media Strategy?

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Now for the big question: is Google or Yahoo doing better at social media? Which one has the right social media strategy?

If you’ve read this column carefully, you can probably guess that I’m not going to outright declare that one company is “right” or that one is “wrong.” What I want you to take away from this week’s column is simple: your long-term plan and company composition should determine your social strategy.

Yahoo is simply better at content than Google. Yahoo Finance is, in my opinion, simply a better product than Google’s version. Its array of hosted news content is bigger, and it owns properties such as OMG, which is doing well as a celebrity news hub.

Google doesn’t write its own news or acquire a newspaper for a simple reason: it’s just not their focus, and they wouldn’t be very good at it. Would it make any sense for Google to focus on using social media to drive traffic to its content? The answer is no.

On the flip side, Google’s technology prowess trumps Yahoo by large margins. Google can build better technical products (e.g., Search, Gmail, Buzz, Android, Chrome) in a shorter amount of time than Yahoo can, and it can iterate faster than almost any large-scale public Internet company (its rapid privacy changes to Buzz is one good example).

These things are no longer Yahoo’s strength. So does it make sense for Yahoo to try to build a social network to rival Buzz, Facebook, or Twitter? Could it really keep up with any of them over the long haul? I severely doubt it.

So here is my conclusion: neither company’s direction is “wrong” because each one requires a different social strategy to succeed. Based on their strengths, Yahoo and Google are implementing the right strategies.

Now it’s just about executing them.

82nd Annual Academy Awards Caption Contest

82nd Annual Academy Awards Caption Contest: "

The 82nd Annual Academy Awards aired last night (except for those of you who subscribe to Cabelvision; you only got to see half of them). Though the awards proceeded without too many surprises, a few memorable moments and famous faces made it television worth watching. We’ve selected some images from the broadcast for you to caption. To participate in the contest, simply:

1) Click on an image (or images) to be taken to our LOLBuilder.

2) Caption the photo(s). After you press submit, the builder will provide you with a link to your LOL(s).

3) E-mail the link(s) to roflrazzi@gmail.com.

4) Contest ends Thursday, March 11 at noon.

5) We will post some of our favorite captions after the contest ends.

And the award for “Who Ever Thought She’d Win An Oscar” goes to…





And the award for “Most Awkward Show Of Support For Avatar” goes to…



And the award for “Best Host Duo To Wear Two-Person Snuggie” goes to…



A few more images to choose from after the jump:

And the award for “Being The First Woman To Win A Best Director Statue Is Pretty Kickass” goes to…



And the award for “Why Were You People Invited?” goes to…



And the award for “Best Tribute To Hattie McDaniel” goes to…



And the award for “Classiest Sequined Suit” goes to…

Grace Quek aka Annabel Chong Sex Scandal

From Turner Entertainment Report Correspondent Paul Clinton PARK CITY, Utah (CNN) — “Did it hurt? Well, yeah. It’s like running a marathon, you know, the pain is part of the high — part of the adrenaline rush. It hurt, but it’s not something I didn’t expect.”

So said Grace Quek, aka Annabel Chong, in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival about her experience on January 19, 1995. At that time she was a 22-year-old University of Southern California masters degree candidate — and a porn star. That day, within a 10-hour time period, she broke a world record by having intercourse — on camera — with 251 men.

Quek, who says she likes being treated “like a piece of meat,” is sitting in the cramped living room of a small suite at the Shadow Ridge Hotel in Park City, Utah, just after the final 1999 Sundance Festival screening of the documentary following her sexual exploits, “Sex: The Annabel Chong Story.”

Born: 22-May-1972
Birthplace: Singapore Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: Asian
Sexual orientation: Bisexual
Occupation: Pornstar

Nationality: United States Resident
Executive summary: Former gangbang title holder
Held the world gangbang record in 1995 (251 humps), lost a year later to Jasmin St. Claire.

The documentary by first-time director Gough Lewis not only details the sexual marathon, but follows Grace for the next two years — at her apartment in Los Angeles, at work and at school — as she rides an emotional roller coaster while reeling between sexual bravado and deep self-doubt. The camera even goes with her on family visits to Singapore.
Tickets for this documentary were among the hottest items at the 1999 festival.


Few regrets about sex record
At first glance, she looks much smaller in person than she did in the film. Blond streaks run through her dark chin-length hair. She seems both unsure of herself and in total control at the same time.
This is the same woman who speaks in the documentary of being flattered that so many men wrote in wanting to take part in the marathon: “If that’s not a ego trip, I don’t know what is.”
When asked if there was anything she now regrets about having sex with 251 men in 10 hours, she replies in a perfectly even, but soft voice, “The only thing I thought I’d do differently if I had to do it all over again — I would definitely be more savvy about making sure all the guys were tested and wearing condoms for the big gang-bang event. But otherwise, I would do it the same way.”

As the documentary shows, even fellow members of the adult film community were shocked by her lack of safety, and by the actual event itself. Their outrage didn’t effect her then or now. “I’m not terribly involved in the politics of the adult film industry,” she says. “This sort of hostility eventually loses its momentum when they find someone new to hate.”
The most obvious question is why someone would even do this in the first place, let alone make a documentary about the subject. “What I hoped to accomplish firstly,” she says, “was to explore my own personal sexuality, my boundaries, and I think I accomplished that. To see how far I could go off the beaten track of the passive female who likes to be romantically seduced.”


Deep reasons behind behavior
But she also freely admits, both within the disturbing film and in this interview, that there are other, deeper reasons behind her extreme sexual behavior. The only child of parents who were both teachers, Grace led a sheltered life in Singapore and attended a girls-only convent school. She claims her life there was restricted and paralyzing.
In regard to her childhood and her current profession she admits, “Certainly that’s a major aspect of it and there’s, of course, all these stories about leaving Singapore and going completely in the other direction because Singapore is very, very repressive society, very rigid, very structured.”
Todd Williams, an independent filmmaker who directed the Sundance dramatic entry “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,” expressed a fairly common reaction after seeing the documentary.
“The thing about ‘The Annabel Chong’ thing that was interesting to me,” Williams says, “is that it wasn’t — I didn’t find it titillating at all. I think,” he continued, “a lot of people came there to be titillated, but it was — it’s pretty sobering.”

Quek claims that her record-breaking feat (the record has since been broken several times by others) was also her way of poking fun at the double standard between men and women. “If a guy did 251 women in one day, I guess everyone would think he’s a real stud,” she maintains. “But when a girl does that she’s considered to be this terrible slut.”

She says she’s aware that society still tends to put single women on a pedestal, sexually speaking, while single men are left off the hook by many, and allowed to exercise lower standards in their behavior. But she claims to see nothing wrong in lowering women’s standards to fit the more base standards set by many men.
“Don’t you think,” she says, “that by putting women on this terrible pedestal, where they’re all pure and perfect, is kind of terribly constraining on women? It really puts this terrible limit on what they can do in life. It’s just another way of controlling — limiting the avenues of exploration that women are allowed to do.”

When asked what she thinks is the difference between making love and having sex and whether she feels the need for intimacy, she says, “I think making love is an emotional connection, a sense of being a part of another person. For me at least — it’s the difference between having a gourmet meal and a taco. Sometimes you maybe want a gourmet meal. Sometimes you just want a taco.
The actual sexual marathon is handled somewhat discreetly within the documentary. Only extreme close-ups of various body parts and faces are shown; the film never gets truly graphic. However, many scenes are hard to watch as the viewer is treated to numerous wide shots of hundreds of naked men all lined up in a big room waiting for their turn to make history — an unsettling sight, to say the least.

In addition to the actual “gang bang,” there are two very disturbing parts in the documentary. Her visit home to Singapore is extremely painful. Her parents had no idea what Grace did back in the United States and were completely unaware of her new claim to fame. Her mother glows in front of the camera while talking about her little girl and how she hopes Grace will find happiness in life. When she discovers the truth, the results are heartrending.

In the other unsettling segment, Grace takes a knife and repeatedly cuts her arm over and over again in a horrifying act of self-mutilation.
‘Slightly overboard’
Asked if these difficult moments in the film actually reflected her life and how she felt at the time, she says, “The film is Gough’s interpretation of my work and my life. I think that he projects a lot of himself onto the movie and he’s drawn to certain situations. I look at the movie myself and say, ‘God, am I actually that depressed?’”

Read more: http://www.celebrity.ohfree.net/2010/03/annabel-chong-annabelle-chong-or-grace.html#ixzz0hfC2zy06

Thailand's greatest sex-related scandal

Impossible is nothing if You Market the Unconventional!

Well, this has gotta be the greatest sex-related scandal of all time in Thailand. This scandalously beautiful girl with an amazingly hot body is going to shock you out of your balls. She originated as a boy, but the transformation was so complete and flawless, you bet you would never believe she ever was born a boy till you see the last pic in this post. Treechada “Nong Poy” Marnyaporn (น้องปอย Nong Poy) (born October 5 1986) is a Thai actress and model. Born biologically male, Poy underwent sex reassignment surgery at age 21.

As a child, Poy saw herself as a girl, but in front of her parents, she had to pretend and live as a boy. She felt disgusted by her ‘male organ’, so at the age of 21, she underwent sex change surgery and since then, she feels as if she has been reborn.

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At age 19, Poy won the Miss Tiffany’s 2004 and Miss Tiffany’s International Queen. Soon after, Poy appeared in the 2005 music video Mai Chai Poo Chai (I’m Not a Man) by Doo Ba Doo. Since then, Poy has been renowned throughout Thailand. Soon after, Poy appeared in several Thai television series such as Rak Ther Took Wan (Love You Every Day) and Muay Inter (The Chinese Girl).
She is currently studying at Faculty of Law, Assumption University.

Boys will be Boys? See more pictures: Celebrity Gossips

Making Money with Amazon Associates on Google Blogger!

Welcome to Amazon Associate: Since we introduced the integration of Amazon and Blogger and we wanted to remind you of all the great features you will have access to once you save your Associates ID on your Blogger Account. Don't have a Blogger Account yet? You can sign up for free right here and start earning right away! This new integration allows you to monetize your content by adding relevant Amazon products to your blog posts without interrupting the blog writing process. Monetize Your Blog with Dynamic Features 1) Search the Amazon Product Finder for products and add affiliate links and images to your blog post without leaving the blog posting page. Easily insert a link or image to that product which includes your Associates ID, enabling you to earn up to 15% in advertising fees: 2) Enhance your blog with our sidebar gadgets, including gadgets with MP3 clips from our DRM-free music store, Amazon Deals, Contextual Product Ads, and an Amazon Search box: Stay connected by following us on Twitter and finding us on Facebook. If you have any questions or feedback on this announcement or the Associates Program, please contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you! Sincerely, The Amazon Associates Program