Another service named 'Buzz?' What gives?
Today, AT&T Interactive launched Buzz.com in beta, the company's answer to entertainment search and recommendation site Yelp. If you think you've seen it before...well, you haven't -- not this, anyway.
The word "Buzz" was employed liberally throughout the 1990's to describe successful alternative rock groups. Pretty much any non-pop band that sold 500,000 albums in that era was classified as a "buzz bin" artist by MTV. By 2004, it was worn out.
New Facebook 'Connections' may expose users' likes, filter likes from profiles
Facebook's privacy policy, like its services, is an evolving organism. Recently, that evolution has been reactive rather than pro-active. Another reaction may be in the works after today's announcement of a new Facebook feature that enables users to subscribe to personal interests or "likes," officially called "Connections," the way they connect to other users.
The company said today there's a new way for a Facebook user to block others, including friends, from seeing one's "connections" -- the list of pages that represent things one likes to do (e.g., snowboarding) or to partake in (e.g., classical music), or people they may enjoy who may not be represented by their own Facebook pages (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Elvis Presley). But someone who's perusing the page for people or things that Facebook users vote that they "Like" (which replaces "Become a Fan Of" today) may still see the list of everyone who has voted she likes something, the company also said -- indicating that one's likes may never be completely private.
With Silverlight 4 and Flash Catalyst, the RIA battle begins in earnest
Download Silverlight 4 RTM for Windows from Fileforum now.
In recent years, most Web applications in widespread use have been developed with Web browsers as their platform. Here, one imagines Java advocates are already composing their complaint letters. But with Web resources bound to URLs, for most developers, it's made sense to utilize the functionality most commonly associated with URL-bound resources: HTML, JavaScript, and now its rapidly maturing derivative, AJAX.
After buying its own client, Twitter toys with sending ads to clients
In the history of anything whatsoever, timing is rarely, if ever, coincidental. More often these days, however, the strategy behind it looks confusing. Just days before it's scheduled to hold its developers conference in San Francisco (tomorrow and Thursday), Twitter revealed that it is in the process of either acquiring or building applications that will compete directly with the Twitter clients these developers will be taught how to build.
On Friday, Twitter revealed it was in the midst of purchasing Tweetie, believed to be the most popular Twitter client for Apple's iPhone. That product will become "Twitter for iPhone." That same day, the service released a Twitter client for BlackBerry; and it's that second event that let developers know, as Arlo Guthrie once put it, that there's a movement.
The true cost of iAd
Despite all the buzz this week that the upcoming major update to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad operating system was all about multitasking and APIs, the real story was iAd. Although multitasking-deprived Apple fans haven't been holding their breath for almost three years waiting for an advertising framework, the new mobile ad network is infinitely more significant to the future of the platform than the ability to run more than one app at a time.
In many respects, iAd is nothing short of a full frontal assault on Google. While Google's model for generating ad revenue from activity-linked behaviors has rewritten the rules of advertising over much of the past decade, the path for the mobile market has not been as linear. Desktops and laptops have more than enough bandwidth and screen real estate to easily accommodate subtle text-based ads (or not-so-subtle dancing-cow banners) without significantly disrupting the end user experience. Indeed, many users can become so engaged in a given service -- search, mail, productivity, mapping, whatever -- that they virtually ignore the presence of ad-containing boxes toward the edge of the screen. Even if they're aware of them, the delivery paradigm on a traditional desktop, evolved in recent years to a ruthless level of efficiency, is largely responsible for Google's meteoric corporate rise.
Dropico lets you drag and drop photos between sites
Dropico is a new rich Web application that lets users manage their photo albums from Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, Myspace, and Bebo all in one central location with a simple drag and drop interface.
Users pair their accounts from those sites with Dropico, and then they can pull photos off of one site, edit them, and pipe them down to another site quickly and easily. Additionally, users can pull photos from their friends or favorite profiles and move them to other sites. For example, if you follow the Library of Congress' Flickr stream and you discover something that you really like, you can drag it from the Flickr window over to the Twitter window and post it to your Twitter feed via yfrog, twitgoo, or twitpic.
Google is armed for iPad launch
Google today announced its strategy for delivering services on the iPad, and unveiled a new mobile Gmail interface optimized for bigger touchscreens. Since the iPad lies somewhere between a notebook and a smartphone, the Mountain View search company is taking a hybrid approach, offering some services in their desktop format, some in their mobile format, and some as standalone apps.
"We're particularly excited by how tablet computers create the opportunity for new kinds of user interaction," Punit Soni, Product Manager for Google Mobile wrote in the official Google blog. "Here on the mobile team, we often talk about how mobile devices are sensor-rich: they can sense touch through their screens, see with a camera, hear through a microphone, and they know where they are with GPS. The same holds true for tablet computers, and we're just starting to work through how our products can become even better on devices like the iPad."
The explosion of non-Flash devices is driving HTML 5 growth, Brightcove says
Video sharing site Brightcove is using the impending launch of the Apple iPad as a platform to talk up its support for HTML 5, the updated spec for the Web's core markup language which brings rich functionality to sites (such as video) without the need for third-party plug-ins like Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight.
Earlier this year, Brightcove's bigger competitors YouTube and Vimeo announced they were experimenting with HTML 5, but both warned that not everyone would be able to see videos unless they had a compatible browser. Vimeo, for example, said 90% of its videos would work in HTML 5-compatible browsers, but only 20% of viewers would be using one.
Get in on the limited beta of new suggestion engine, Zite
Late last year, I took a look at how search services were being affected by the unchecked growth of ultra-digested, 140-character-or-less news blips. In my research, I talked to a Vancouver-based startup called Worio that was tackling the difficult problem of creating a search engine that "understood" what kind of data was important to the user.
Now, the team is working on creating a new content discovery service, which it is calling Zite.
Facebook jumps the shark
When news broke last week that Facebook users were on the receiving end of a large-scale phishing attack -- the first one to use external e-mail and not just the service's own messaging system -- I started to wonder whether the service had jumped the shark. If this sort of thing continues to escalate, you should start wondering, too.
Hardly a week goes by that Facebook doesn't get hit with another spam, malware, or phishing attack. Last week's screaming headline, that spammers are using conventional e-mail to spread virus-stealing malicious code to Facebook's 400 million users, is the latest chapter of a book that doesn't have an end in sight.
IE9, Windows Phone, Silverlight: What can we expect from Microsoft at MIX?
At this moment, Microsoft is kicking off what is probably the most important MIX conference since 2006, with three make-or-break developments in key product categories taking the spotlight. Since January, the company has dished up a very cloudy picture of Windows Phone, and I don't mean in the sense of "cloud computing." That incomplete picture of the company's newly bifurcated roadmap was perhaps intended to spark anticipation and excitement, but instead in some quarters, it's sparked outright anger: What is the system that we now know to be Windows Mobile, supposed to become?
Windows Phone, and Windows Other Phone. At CES, we were told to expect the future of Windows Mobile. Correction, we were told later, it's not Windows Mobile. That particular episode was reminiscent of a 1970s detergent commercial: No, Mrs. Clawson, you're not using Tide, you're using new improved Tide! So we had a cute little name change. Correction, no we didn't, because New Improved and Classic will co-exist. But will they be compatible? Well, suppose Classic edition is called "Starter Series," or something to that end. If you start at one end of the product line, that naturally implies you're progressing to the other end, and that implies compatibility, right? Sure. Correction, not necessarily.
Early praise for Google Maps' bike routes
The nice thing about the Internet, or so I've been told, is that it has all this information. Perhaps you've noticed this lately, but the big problem has been that there's no one way to get at this information with any kind of consistency.
Supposedly Google is the "portal" for most of the world's information, which may be why so many people find Betanews by typing "Betanews" in Google. In one respect, you might expect Google to have an interest in creating that consistent methodology for getting at information. On the other hand, given that so many folks depend on Google Search just as it is now, you could see how Google might very easily come to the conclusion that there's no new benefits to be gained through improving its software, just to keep the user base it already has.
Second thoughts about Google Buzz
So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and, more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social media darling service.
Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.
Google Maps now generates bike routes
Different modes of travel often require different routes to be taken. If you're walking somewhere, for example, you're not likely to take a highway to get there, and you have the distinct advantage of being able to go through certain structures that cars cannot. The same goes for biking. When someone is planning to get somewhere by bike, they're going to demand different routes. This is why the Google Maps team today announced that it has added bicycling directions to Google Maps.
Shannon Guymon, product manager for Google Maps said, "We wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done."
Google unveils its cloud-based Apps Marketplace, wants 20% revenue share
Tuesday evening, during an event televised over YouTube called Google Campfire One, Google executives lifted the curtain on its cloud-based Apps Marketplace for PC-based applications, with the promise of opening its online store with 50 charter vendors later in the evening. The Marketplace is designed to feature applications that integrate with the company's existing Google Apps, Gmail, and other cloud-based services.
Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gondotra told attendees at the company's headquarters that the company plans to utilize very simple terms of service. Think of a garden, but more with clearly marked paths as opposed to walls. Extending the concept of the Android Marketplace from handsets to computing devices, the company is inviting developers to build applications using its Studio tool, then deploy those apps by way of the Marketplace. Each developer is asked to pay a $100 sign-up fee, and then give Google a 20% revenue share for sales, at whatever price the developer charges. (We have not seen yet whether there will be a price cap.)
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