A week with Google's Chrome OS laptop, Day 5: My life in the cloud
Settling into the cloud is taking longer than I expected, as I try to root out enough applications to make up for what I used locally on my last laptop -- the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. The simple reality: There aren't enough good applications yet, or perhaps I'm just too slow finding them. Strangely, if I were living in a different cloud -- from smartphone or tablet -- I could choose from plenty of apps and many of them would be better than those available on the PC (the difference, of course, being something running locally and connected versus something running in the browser that must be connected).
I got a stronger-bitter sweet taste of the difference between the clouds on the evening of Day 5, when I bought the Nexus S smartphone running Gingerbread (aka Android 2.3) from the local Best Buy Mobile.
Bing Maps gets another graphical overhaul, feature upgrade
Wednesday, the mapping component of Microsoft's search engine Bing got another significant UX upgrade and new features for both the desktop and mobile versions of the service.
Last August, a new style of the Bing Maps was unveiled, which focused on providing a cleaner visual experience for users. Today, that new style has been updated even further with subtle changes to color contrast and brightness, as well as to the density of information and size of text to help in overall legibility and usability.
Facebook makes user profiles more visual
Though it is primarily known as a social networking site, Facebook is actually one of the top destinations for photo sharing, and a new user profile design change unveiled Monday ups the visibility of Facebook photos and encourages users to share personal information in a more visual way.
Two years ago, Facebook came forward with some staggering figures about the photo sharing taking place on its sites, which amounted to between 2-3 Terabytes of photos being updated daily with a peak of 300,000 images per second. Facebook would serve about 15 billion photos, and the storage dedicated just to photography amounted to more than a petabyte.
Microsoft announces Silverlight 5 beta will launch first half 2011
In a keynote presentation at the Silverlight Firestarter event this morning, Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's developer division, Scott Guthrie officially announced Silverlight 5, and outlined its new features and 1H 2011 beta availability.
Silverlight 5 adds more than 40 new features to the Web application framework that focus on improving its streaming media functionality for users and on improving application development for engineers.
The App Store model faces disruption from HTML5
Today's Wall Street Journal features an article by Christopher Lawton that talks about the difficulty independent app stores face when competing with Apple and Google for developer and consumer attention. Paul Reddick, chief executive of third-party app store HandMark told WSJ that he couldn't simply bet the whole company's fate on independently distributing apps with a presence like Google to compete against.
It may not even be a prudent bet to be in the app store business at all.
Twitter faces growing international competition from Windows Live
At GSMA Mobile Asia Congress yesterday, Sina Mobile general manager Gaofei Wang said his company's 15-month old microblog Weibo is well on track to hit the 100 million user mark by the second quarter of 2011. The Twitter-like service launched in August 2009, and recently hit the 50 million registered user mark. It took popular microblog Twitter a little more than three years to hit the same milestone.
One week ago, Microsoft's Web services branch MSN announced it had partnered with Sina.com to team up and offer a comprehensive web services package to Chinese users.
Google Docs editable in iOS, Android mobile browsers
Google on Wednesday announced that it will add support for real-time document editing in Google Docs on iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2 (Froyo) devices.
The feature is an extension of the real-time document editor that Google added last April, and it will be rolled out at docs.google.com over the next few days. The new web-based document editor lets multiple users access the same document or spreadsheet, and changes show up in real time. For Android users, the added benefit of speech-to-text is available, letting users dictate their document changes.
Google marries Profiles and Places with new recommendation service, HotPot
Google on Monday unveiled a new service called Hotpot which marries Google Places with Google Profiles to try to provide more accurate recommendations when searching for physical destinations such as local restaurants and businesses.
Users of the new service are encouraged to use their Google Profile to rate and review businesses they've had experience with. These reviews then serve two main purposes: to strengthen the database of Google Places reviews, and to build a profile of what the user likes and dislikes to help Google learn what to suggest to him in the future.
Facebook's new messaging system handles e-mail, chat, SMS, Office Web apps all in one
Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that "isn't just e-mail," but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread.
The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."
Google Instant Preview: making linked pages visible improves search
Google on Tuesday announced yet another upgrade to its search results pages intended to provide more information so that users don't haphazardly click away: Instant Previews. These previews are as simple as a small magnifying glass icon next to a search result, which users can click upon to see a visual snapshot of the linked site. These snapshots may also include search terms highlighted in orange where they appear in the resulting page. That's about it.
It's an understandable concept, and Google said on Tuesday that the feature increased users' satisfaction with search results by about 5% in internal testing.
Blekko, the 'crowdsourced' search engine launches in beta
ComScore's most recent qSearch Web search market share analysis gave Google 66% of the core search business, with the closest competitor, Yahoo trailing by 50%.
Of the more than 16 billion explicit core searches conducted in September, Google handled 10.6 billion of them. Yahoo sites handled 2.7 billion, Microsoft sites took care of 1.8 billion, Ask Network fielded 593 million, and AOL sites took 362 million.
Hotmail becomes 'Web-based Outlook,' sends email from other POP services
Today, Windows Live Hotmail users will begin to be able to send email from other existing email addresses while using Hotmail.
In the Hotmail Options menu under the heading "Sending/Receiving email from other accounts," users can add their other webmail addresses, and then use hotmail to send and receive messages.
Mint Data opens in beta, lets users check how their local economy is doing
Mint.com today has rolled out the beta of a new service called Mint Data that takes the tons of anonymous shopping data it receives, and turns it into a searchable database of retailers. Similar to the way Amazon's Alexa categorizes the popularity of a website by its unique visitors, total views, and inbound links, Mint Data ranks a retailer's popularity by the average purchase price and number of purchases per month.
The information comes from the anonymous spending data of the more than 4 million Mint users, and Mint breaks it down into which categories people are spending their money on (such as food, dining, entertainment, etc,) the specific businesses that they're patronizing, and the city in which they're spending their money.
MySpace looks to refocus with entertainment-centric redesign
Having all but lost the social networking war, MySpace on Wednesday decided to lean on one of the few areas where it still has a good deal of clout: entertainment. The newly redesigned MySpace focuses less on the "friends" aspect it pioneered in the space, and more on sharing videos, music, and games with friends.
The site says it wants to become a "social entertainment destination" for the Generation 'Y' crowd. CEO Mike Jones said that the move marked a complete change in strategy for the company, and focused on its existing strengths. This change may also be the last best hope for the site given how far it has fallen.
Mozilla unveils prototype cross-platform Web app store
Software company Mozilla on Tuesday unveiled its plans for Open Web App stores for distributing, selling, and managing rich Internet applications built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Mozilla's concept is similar to the Chrome app store Google discussed when it first unveiled Chrome OS one year ago, but it is meant to use only browser-native functions that can be accessed just as easily on a PC as on a mobile device.
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