Swirls! Swirls!

And yet another Google post today on Play Things! (We would love to stop blogging about Google products. But as Somerset Maugham once said, I think, control hee nahi hota.)

The people at Mountain View have announced a brand new image search concept, still experimental, called Image Swirl that not only searches for images based on your keywords, but also groups them into clusters based on similarity. So if you’re searching for a Volkswagen Beetle, and not one of those creepy crawly things, Image Swiril will know.

The “Official Google Blog” has this to say: Read more…

Listen now:

On this weeks playcast, we have a couple of interesting interviews and two new segments lined up for you on the show. To start with, Sidin Vadukut deconstructs the Brandtology digital brand index with the help of Bob Grove, Asia Pacific Director of Technology,Edelman – the people behind the index.

Listen to a brand new section specially designed to help you avoid work, the head of Forum Nokia, Purnima Kochikar, tells us about the Nokia development Community in India

and Sidin Vadukut returns with a brand new edition of beautiful tweeple.

Image via CrunchBase

In  a blog post last evening, Google has just announced that it is going to dramatically drop costs of extra storage across the entire Google network, including email (Gmail) and photos (Picasa). From the post:

Today, we’re dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. And if you need more than 20 GB, you can purchase up to 16 terabytes! Read more…

Listen now:

This weeks show of the playcast comes in three segments. In the first part of the show we listen to a cringe inducing video introducing the “new” Orkut and speak to Google about the social networking sites redesign.

Orkut has become India’s OTHER social network, the one that’s not been in the news for a while now. It’s India’s most populous social networking site, home to 13 million accounts and double the number of communities and groups.

The new redesign makes the now-aging site sport a more Facebook-like look. Read more…

Traced memories: Danny Cameron was on vacation in the Greek Isles in September, when he found the camera

This interesting piece on social media was posted on livemint.com by Saabira Chaudhuri - we thought we would also post it here for our regular Play Things readers….

An Australian tourist who happened to chance upon a lost camera during his summer travels back in September has now found the owner – by harnessing the social networking power of Facebook.

Danny Cameron was on vacation in the Greek Isles in September, when he found the camera. “I found a camera that was full of someone’s memories, and I want to get it back to them. I tried walking around the main town of Mykonos, in the Greek Isles, the day after I found it, but I didn’t come across anyone recognizable. So this is the last shot. Read more…