Our own Jenny Zaino recently discussed some of the interesting developments that Google announced at the Google I/O event yesterday. Francis Bea of DigitalTrends adds to that discussion with a few other developments shared by Google: “With Google I/O introducing and hyping the tech company’s latest batch of products today, Google also announced a whopping 41 new features to Google+. Along side this update, it was revealed that there are currently 190 million active Google+ users – a number Google likely feels compelled to focus on in the wake of news about dwindling user activity.  Read more

Nicole Laskowski recently shared five developments in the text analytics industry recently cover in a talk given by Seth Grimes, owner of Alta Plana Corp. Laskowski writes, “While text analytics technology still struggles with unstructured data beyond text or how to handle a narrative or an argument as opposed to a string of sentences, it has made strides, Grime said. He noted that interest in certain aspects of the field is exploding. Tens of thousands of users, for example, signed up for a recent online course at Stanford University on natural language processing, one of the core technologies for text analytics.”

The first development is Big Data: ”Grimes said the challenge with big data is the inability to get rid of the garbage. ‘Clay Shirky, who we could call an analyst and observer, said it’s not about information overload; it’s filter failure,’ Grimes said, referring to one of the Internet’s most well-known commentators. Read more

A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.” Read more

An article by Stéphane Corlosquet discusses some of the highlights from the recent schema.org workshop. Corlosquet writes, “One of the highlights of the workshop for me was the syntax break out session, where most of the key players of the microformats, RDFa and microdata communities were present. The room was full of people passionate about structured data, and the atmosphere was very relaxed and friendly. We exchanged our opinions and pros/cons about each syntax (more on that in a different post). The outcome was a rough consensus that the community needs to keep supporting multiple syntaxes, since they are currently all still evolving and learning from one another.”

Corlosquet continues, “I noticed on Monday that Google released a new version of the Google Rich Snippets testing tool which supports the schema.org types in RDFa. That’s a big deal for Drupal 7 which ships with native RDFa support. I’ve put together a screencast which shows how it is possible today to enable Rich Snippets on Drupal 7 using the schema.org module.” View the screencast above.