Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Facebook Buys Gowalla – Web Weekly

Posted By abod on December 6th, 2011

Facebook Buys Gowalla – Most of the Gowalla team will be working on Facebook’s new Timeline feature (CNN Money)

Secret Software Logging Cellphone Use Found on Android, BlackBerry and Nokia Phones – Carrier IQ says the data is gathered ” to understand the mobile-user experience” and denies logging user keystrokes. (Wired)

Microsoft Plans to Release Office for the iPad (The Daily)

YouTube Gets a Makeover, Including Facebook, Google+ Integration (HubSpot)

Facebook Status Size Limit Increases Dramatically – A Facebook status can now reach up to 55,000 characters.  Is this an attempt to distinguish itself from Twitter? (ReadWriteWeb)

Google Hangouts Add Free Voice Calls – You can now add someone to your group chat via the phone. Remember those? That means you don’t need a Google account or even a computer to log into the group conversation. (Mashable)

India Asks Google and Facebook to Screen User Content - Well, so much for democracy! (New York Times)

Yahoo Site Explorer Disappears – A favorite tool of SEO noodlers everywhere is rolling into Bing Webmaster Tools (Search Engine Watch)

Syria Bans Use of iPhones - Pretty ironic since Steve Jobs’ biological father is Syrian (The Next Web)

Cane for the Blind Uses Social Media to Aid Navigation – Probably the most useful thing location-based social media has done in a while (The Next Web)

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LinkedIn Grows, Internet Explorer Use Shrinks, Google Reader Redesign – Web Weekly

Posted By abod on November 7th, 2011

LinkedIn Releases Glowing Q3 Report

The second most popular social media network is growing by leaps and bounds, so much so that it’s cheapest viagra in uk

.com/digits/2011/11/01/linkedin-doubling-headquarters-space-amid-growth-spurt/?KEYWORDS=linkedin”>doubling its office space at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, reports the Wall Street Journal. In its Q3 report, LinkedIn boasted a 60% increase in its user base and a 200% increase in premium membership subscriptions. ReadWriteWeb reports that LinkedIn is focused on capitalizing from matching employers with successful job candidates.

Internet Explorer Usage Drops Below 50%

It boggles the mind how many people use Internet Explorer as their web browser. It’s probably because it’s the default on PCs and people don’t bother to change. But oh how it’s worth the extra few minutes to download Firefox (my fave) or Chrome! After a decade of being the dominant internet browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer fell below 50% of web traffic served, reports Mashable.

Web developers will rejoice as old versions of IE, which don’t render fancier web features as well, are finally getting replaced with friendlier browsers by most users.

While its outdated browsing capabilities haven’t been enough to convince most users to switch, the fact that Microsoft’s inability to capitalize on the mobile browsing market has made an impact. Safari is the default browser on iPhones and iPads, which dominate mobile web browsing.

Google Reader Gets Cosmetic Surgery

When a product gets updated, one usually expects more features and user-friendly design. According to most users, that hasn’t been the case for Google Reader’s recent upgrade. The most bemoaned change is that the only way to “Share” is, of course, +1. Check out the comments on just about any blog post covering this change, and you’ll see a lot of griping. A lot of the flack users shared in response to the ReadWriteWeb coverage of Google Reader’s update is all of the valuable real estate given up at the top of the page in the new design and removal of the “Share” feature. While only a small portion of Reader users actually took advantage of the feature of sharing content with other Reader users or leaving notes, they were a loyal group, who are now peeved that their favorite toy has been taken away.

One of the best points was made by internet marketing consultant Tamar Weinberg on Google+: “New Google Reader redesign couldn’t give the real number of unread articles? If there would have been one change I’d have appreciated, it would have been seeing ’1230′ unread articles rather than ’1000+’”

And that’s not the only Google product to undergo some cosmetic features. GMail also unleashed some new features and a new design, which I wrote about in last week’s Web Weekly.

More Headlines

New Apple Store App Sends Your Order to Retail Store: Get immediate checkout with your iPhone after picking up your order, to be complete within 12 minutes of ordering via the app. (Fox Business)

Live Hajj Broadcast: In partnership with YouTube, the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information is live streaming the Hajj, the world’s largest annual pilgrimage. This is what 2.5 million people looks like! (Official Google Blog)

Widespread Siri Outages on iPhone 4s: Widely hyped virtual assistant runs into tits second day of outages (New York Times Bits Blog)

Google Algorithm Update Rewards ‘Freshness’: If you weren’t sure about the need to have a blog, this news should finish convincing you. Google now gives even bigger rank points to websites that are updated frequently and displays more recently updated pages in its results. (Search Engine Land)

Cool Tools of the Week

cool online tools of the week hammerNews360: Using your items on the cloud and semantic analysis, this handy app aggregates news designed to fit your interests.

Olly: This USB powered device turns the images and sounds of the Internet into smells. (Hat tip: The Next Web)

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Facebook, the Great Copycat – Web Weekly

Posted By abod on September 19th, 2011

Facebook Keeps Rolling Out Features

I haven’t been writing much about Facebook lately in the “Web Weekly” because it’s been mostly everyone else who has been innovating. Facebook is the great copycat, as Farhad Manjoo of Sla

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te noted this week in praise of Facebook’s “thievery” — that is, taking ideas from the competition, and implementing them expertly.

Much to the annoyance of those who use Facebook for marketing, Mark Zuckerberg and friends change the settings for creating apps and pages pretty frequently, but the regular ol’ user interface doesn’t change too frequently. Not so this week. Lots of little windows and new sidebars are advertising some new features of the smart friends list on FacebookFacebook experience that when given a little thought, are not that new in and of themselves.

  • Smart Friend List – a counter to the Google+ circles, you can now organize your friends a lot more efficiently, and Facebook even takes a stab at sorting some of them out for you.
  • Subscribe – a feature mimicking Twitter, which lets you follow other users, getting updates on your News Feed, even if you aren’t mutually “friends”facebook subscribe button (LinkedIn also lets you “follow” people who aren’t mutual connections)

Some older features that also copy other social networks:

  • Check-ins – works a lot like Foursquare
  • Deals – now defunct, but a Groupon ripoff
  • Questions – like Quora
  • Video Calling – like Google’s “Hangouts” (this doesn’t appear to be active yet in my account though)

Twitter Launches Analytics

Now you can finally really mine Twitter for information about who and what is getting tweeted. So far, only a small test group have access, but we now know that more than 3 million pages have the Tweet button. Read Write Web has all the details on Twitter analytics.
BeKnown Releases Mobile App

I wrote about BeKnown, a “LinkedIn for Facebook” app a few months ago when it first came out, and I wasn’t sure how it could really prove its worth amid all of the social networking noise, but BeKnown must be growing, because it launched a mobile app this past week (perhaps on the heels of LinkedIn’s mobile relaunch?). ReadWriteWeb gave the BeKnown mobile app a scathing review.

I think the real question that needs to be asked is “why bother” when LinkedIn is pretty easy to use.

 

Google+1 to Impact Search Results
There has been a lot of curiosity surrounding the Google+ network’s influence on its search rankings. Now some of the mystery has been revealed. Wired reported that Google is planning into integrate the crowdsourcing of “+1″ on an article to its search results rankings, couching it as an anti-spam measure. The thought of allowing people (and spammers) to influence rankings has a lot of people up in arms, but Google assured Wired that +1 would be one in a list of at least 200 factors affecting Google’s algorithm, and we still don’t know how heavily this factor will be weighted. Alas, much of the mystery remains after all.

 

Other Headlines:

  • Carol Bartz Resigns From Yahoo Board, after being fired as CEO last week, despite saying earlier that she would stay. (New York Times)
  • Mashable Grows – Social media news powerhouse Mashable is expanding to include national, international, and entertainment news (New York Times)
  • YouTube Features Expand – You can now edit your videos even better after uploading to YouTube (New York Times)
  • Linux Celebrates 20th Birthday! (Mashable)

Cool Tools of the Week:

  • OnYourOwnInfo – Securely store health, insurance, auto, property, and all other kinds of personal records (Hat tip: ReadWriteWeb)
  • Google Flight Search -You feel like you’re in slightly more capable hands, at least when planning your next trip, with this sensible, quick flight search tool. So far it’s only handling domestic U.S. flights.
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