Students from Sandy Hook Elementary School, many of whom were present on the day of last month’s horrific Newtown shooting , gathered this morning on Good Morning America . With assistance from singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, the 20 children (ages 6-9) sang a cover of “Over the Rainbow,” with the track now available on iTunes and all proceeds benefiting the Newtown Youth Academy, a local nonprofit, and the United Way of Western Connecticut. It’s a moving performance in the name of a tremendous cause. Watch now: Newtown Children Sing “Over the Rainbow”
Facebook’s big announcement today involved the unveiling of a customized Facebook search engine called Graph Search. So what is this thing’s deal? “Graph Search is not a web search,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s about graphing our part of the web.” Zuckerberg and the tool’s creators showed how you can use Graph Search to dig through Facebook to find exactly who or what you want to find. Zuckerberg, for example, said he and wife, Priscilla Chan , recently used it to search for “Mexican restaurants nearby that my friends have been to.” “We found a place and it was good,” he reported. The Facebook crew also emphasized how Graph Search will enable more efficient Facebook-stalking … in a positive, privacy-protected wa of course. The tool essentially allows you to put natural queries into a search engine to make it easier to mine information from the massive Facebook ether. Sensitive to recent privacy freak-outs around their products, Zuckerberg and Co. emphasized the “privacy awareness” of the new search engine. “You want a search tool that gives you access to just things that people have shared with you,” he said. “I can only search for what I can already see on Facebook.” “You can only search for the content people have shared with you.” What do you think you might use Facebook Graph Search for? Does it intimidate you, given the recent privacy concerns at FB? Are you just like “meh”?
