Articles about Cloud

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user's circle of friends into Bing's search results.

In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends' opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the "likes" of a user's friend list into search results.

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One of the signature features of Google's Gmail e-mail service is about to become optional. The company said Wednesday that over the next few days it would allow its users to turn off "conversation view," which organizes e-mail threads onto a single page for easier viewing.

Technical lead Wiltse Carpenter said the move was aimed at drawing in users who may be passing up Gmail because of their dislike for the way it formats your inbox. "The way Gmail organizes mail into conversations is like cilantro," he quipped. "You either love it ... or you hate it."

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Microsoft's blogging platform Windows Live Spaces is being decommissioned, and the users are being absorbed by WordPress.com, Microsoft and Automattic Inc. announced on Monday.

Beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users have the option to automatically migrate their entire blog over to WordPress.com when they sign up to create a new WordPress blog, otherwise their content will be removed from Windows Live Spaces when it shuts down in six months.

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While outages have become an expected part of the Twitter experience, social network Facebook has a pretty good reputation for staying available. Beginning on Wednesday evening, and carrying over into Thursday, the site experienced rare outages that affected not only the main Facebook.com site, but also the elements of Facebook that are shared among other sites, such as the ubiquitous "Like" button.

In addition to API latency issues mentioned on the Facebook Platform site, a statement from Facebook on Thursday said:

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Microsoft's suite of free, browser-based productivity tools called Office Web Apps received a handful of feature upgrades today, which don't act as substitutes for desktop Office functionality, but instead bring Office documents out onto the Web.

As of right now, Office Web Apps users can embed Powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets in blogs and websites via the PowerPoint and Excel mini Web apps. Below, I've embedded Microsoft's example Powerpoint slideshow, which shows the relatively simple process of uploading a .PPT file to SkyDrive, setting permissions, and embedding it. Clicking on the "full screen" icon in the lower right hand corner opens the full version of the PowerPoint Web app, and with appropriate permissions, users can edit the presentation and automatically update it while it's on the Web.

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Google on Monday announced that it would offer a two-step security option to certain customers of its Google Apps product, aiming to offer its customers a low cost option for higher security. The new authentication system would combine the traditional password with a verification code sent to the user's mobile phone.

Initially the offering would be available to English users of its Premier, Education and Government editions, with Standard edition customers getting the feature in the coming months. Google wants to ensure they can scale the feature reliability before expanding it to the "hundreds of millions" using the free version.

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At a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday, popular microblogging site Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams announced the site will be rolling out a new user interface similar to the one used by the critically acclaimed Twitter iPad app.

Like the iPad app, the new Twitter interface is broken into two columns, the left will be the usual view of your feed, and the right hand side will contain detail overlays. For example, when users include links to photos, video or music, the linked content is embedded in Twitter.com, shown in the right hand column. According to the site's founders, one quarter of the 90 million tweets that are sent every day contain links, that's 22.5 million daily reasons for users to navigate away from Twitter. This move will keep users of the Web interface more stuck to the site.

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On Monday and Tuesday, YouTube will begin the trial of its live streaming TV platform, which uses the live Web-broadcasting technology that YouTube has already used for events such as the presidential inauguration and E3. The unique addition to this test will be the "Live Comment" feature, which lets users directly communicate with the broadcasters during their show.

YouTube partners Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood will be the broadcasters participating in this two-day trial, and the first show begins at 8am PST/11am EST. Long-running video podcast Rocketboom will be the first show to take the plunge today, and instead of the usual three-minute episodic blast, Rocketboom is expected to do an hour-long episode in the fashion of a live TV variety show.

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Google Wednesday launched a new search feature called Google Instant, which offers search results as you are typing your query terms.

Around this time two years ago, Google unveiled Suggest, a feature which predicted what searchers were looking for as it was being typed in the Google search field. Instant takes this a step further and provides the actual results so the user doesn't have to even click "search" or hit enter.

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Apple's foray into social music is not going well as its Ping service is experiencing a multitude of problems, including comment spam, a lack of promised functionality, and generally inconsistent user experience.

Security researcher Chet Wisniewski at Sophos said Apple is not employing any type of spam or URL filtering, as comments such as those advertising "free iPhones" were already appearing some 24 hours after the site's launch. He also said that Apple has made it easy for those to abuse the service.

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Google continued its reinvention of the Gmail inbox Tuesday with the introduction of Priority Inbox Beta, a new mail filtering system that prioritizes emails based upon the user's viewing and responding habits.

The feature will be rolled out incrementally to Gmail users over the next week, and will break up inboxes into three categories: Important and Unread emails, Starred conversations, and "everything else." Incoming messages will automatically be routed into one of these three categories, which Gmail determines by user trends. For example, if a particular contact is someone frequently exchanging emails with the user, their incoming messages will be ranked as more important than someone else's. Similarly, messages that users actually opened instead of skipped, deleted or "marked as read" from certain senders will be considered higher priority.

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Popular social link-sharing and bookmarking site Digg on Wednesday made its new, redesigned site available to all users after testing in an invitation-only mode for roughly four months.

"This redesign is a major revision of our platform -- front end to back end -- this is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We'll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often, "Digg founder and CEO Kevin Rose said on Wednesday. "Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better."

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Wednesday, Google officially announced that North American Gmail users can place voice calls to any phone number directly from their Gmail interface. The feature will roll out to all users in the next few days.

Users will be able to place totally free calls within the U.S. and Canada for "at least the rest of this year," and international calls for comparatively low rates. All outgoing calls originate from the user's Google Voice number, and calls can even be received within the Gmail interface.

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Now approaching its third year online, Adobe's Web-based photo editing suite Photoshop Express underwent a significant redesign which launched Wednesday. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor, Organizer, and Uploader are included in the refresh.

Firstly, a Photoshop.com account is no longer needed to use Photoshop Express Editor. Users can simply navigate to the Web app, upload photos directly from their local drive, edit and change the photos, and then save them back on their local storage. Previously, an account was necessary, and photos were uploaded to online storage first before they were edited. This is still an option, as Photoshop.com members can still store and share photos online as well as create albums, but it's no longer the only way to use the Editor.

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I experienced quite a personal shock when I aged out of having access to my university's research portal. The vast catalog of peer-reviewed journals, empirical studies, and thorough analytical research I had at my disposal as a student was boarded up behind a distinct paywall not long after I finished school.

The fast-moving news, blogs, forums, and free tools I had been taught to eschew were suddenly all I had. My principal option (besides re-enrolling in school) was to become a member of a research service like LexisNexis or NewsLibrary; but those portals cost several hundred dollars a year each.
I suddenly recognized that the best information on the Web is not free.

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