Internet & Websites News - Page 69

Facebook's big announcement today was the preview and beta launch of Graph Search, a new tool that will help you sift through the massive amounts of connections and data that Facebook has in its social graph. For the questions that can't be answered by Facebook's data, Bing will try and provide the answer from the Internet.

The current version is available in a limited preview for English users only. Zuckerberg stressed that privacy was an important issue when building the search engine. For instance, you should only be able to search for content shared with you, however, you can search for something like "TV shows watched by doctors" or "Music liked by people who like Mitt Romney."

The ability to do searches such as the examples above could allow researchers to sift through connections to see if there are any connections. According to Zuckerberg, there are currently 1 billion people, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections in the social graph. How it works:

The Internet Archive hosts unbelievable amounts of data, and stores something like 150,000,000,000 URLs and the associated data for these addresses. There has been a campaign pushing for donations so that they could expand their storage and store even more Internet history.

The Internet Archive have now announced they've almost doubled their storage, giving them the capacity to store some 240,000,000,000 (that's 240 billion) URLs - this works out to just over 5 petabytes of storage. All of this data gives you the ability to walk down the Internet Archives' Wayback Machine, cranking the dial all the way back to 1996 all the way up to last month.

The image above is a shot of our site, all the way back in May of 2000!

Foursquare have enjoyed a great 2012, seeing over 15 million new people joining the community, their 3 billionth check-in and have released over 50 new features but 2013 is going to see some big changes, and we're not even there yet.

Foursquare have unveiled a new "Privacy 101" document, which outlines how they build privacy into their 'product'. There are two changes so far, the first of which will display your full name. Until now, Foursquare has shown your full name, or sometimes your first name followed by your last initial. This would be a bit of a hassle, because when searching for friends you would sometimes see their full name in the results, but if you clicked through to their profile page it would not show their last name.

The second change is to businesses, where a business will now be able to see more of their recent customers which is a great change. At the moment a business using Foursquare can only see which customers have visited and checked in within the last three hours. This is great if a business owner is right there, all the time on Foursquare but there are plenty of businesses that wouldn't have the time to check their Foursquare until the end of the day.

Facebook has filled for trademarks for Poke, the app similar to Snapchat. The application was filed on Friday with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, the day before the app went live.

This is not the first time the company has trademarked the word "Poke" however. Since the early days of Facebook, the company held the trademark from 2006 until July 2011 when it let the trademark lapse.

Poke is the social network's latest app in which users can send text, videos and photo messages that self-destruct within 10 seconds, which is functionally very similar to the app Snapchat. That company's co-founder Evan Spiegel acknowledged Facebook's Poke with a brief statement on Friday: "Welcome, Facebook. Seriously."

Google has set its eye on converting a whopping 90% of Microsoft office users to it's web based Google Docs platform. In a recent interview, Google's head of enterprise Amit Singh said "the Google Docs platform can grab the vast majority of Office users who don't use the more advanced functionality."

"In the last year, if you look at the depth of where we've gone with Docs, both in the core features and in the desktop fidelity, we've made tremendous progress. Our goal is to get to the 90 percent of users who don't need to have the most advanced features of Office." he went on to say

Singh continued, "We know the gaps between our features and theirs. We're improving them week by week. We're going to get to the the 90 percent. If you need the last 10 percent, you'll want to use the desktop. The next thing is the import from PowerPoint to Slides. That's where QuickOffice is going to help us a lot."

Today we can share almost every aspect of our daily lives on Facebook. Where we eat, where we shop, even what our workout routine consisted of is easily share-able on the social networking site. Letting your friends see what you watched on Netflix however, has not been possible up until now.

It would seem that sharing your Netflix history on Facebook would be as simple as pulling some data from an API and integrating it with your Facebook account. Unfortunately, U.S Law prevented that from happening. The Video Privacy Protection Act, prevented Facebook and Netflix from sharing your video viewing history.

The new bill basically updates the old antiquated law and allows you to share your Netflix history with everyone who views your Facebook timeline. Social video sharing under the new bill will come with two stipulations: Netflix and similar companies will be required to give users a "clear and conspicuous" option to stop automatically sharing their views, and customers must be asked once every two years if they would like to continue sharing their views.

YouTube has posted on their blog about how Gangnam Style has officially hit 1 billion views, the first video to ever do so. The next highest song, and the previous record holder for most views is Justin Bieber's "Baby." We had posted that the moment was coming earlier, but it has now officially past the mark, with no damage to the Earth caused.

If you check out the awesome chart by YouTube, seen above, you can see how much quicker Gangnam Style took off compared to Justin Bieber's "Baby." PSY has many more cool stats to go with the one billion views, but that is probably the best of them all. If you're interested in the others, however, YouTube provided the following:

• PSY was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as Gangnam Style quickly spread from Seoul and the pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It's been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever!
• From a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to Gangnam Style are now being viewed 20 million times every single day.
• PSY's own remix with Hyuna has 200 million views alone.
• "Gangnam Style" was YouTube's top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for "gangnam style" in a single day. Check out this video demonstrating some of our most popular YouTube searches this year.
• For those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming "Gangnam Style" has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats!
• Since late last month, people have clicked to buy the track on iTunes over 600,000 times helping make PSY the first Korean artist ever to rank #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #1 in over 30 more countries.

Facebook has been tinkering again (do they ever stop?) and this time they have modified the messaging aspect of the site. The new version of Messenger will allow users to send messages to a person's inbox even if they aren't friends or friends of friends. The new service will act as a spam filter as it charges users $1 to make sure it gets to the inbox.

Right now, if someone, as described above, sends you a message, it will most likely go to the "Other" folder, rather than your inbox. For $1 dollar, a potential job candidate or someone who heard you speak somewhere can send you a message on Facebook and not have it be missed. Facebook said:

For example, if you want to send a message to someone you head speak at an event but are not friends with, or you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox. For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.

Twitter suspended @YourAnonNews, a popular Twitter handle that spreads Anonymous related news. The reason for suspension is said to be a picture that they tweeted, and it is believed to have contained the addresses or personal information of people in regards to the Westboro Baptist Church.

Twitter sent the Twitter handle owners and e-mail that contained the following: "Your account has been suspended for posting an individual's private information such as private email address, physical address, telephone number, or financial documents." They tweeted out a picture of the e-mail that they received.

The handle has since been restored and subsequently tweeted "BREAKING: We're back motherf**kers." (Pardon the censorship) Anonymous is a bit upset with the Westboro Baptist Church for protesting the vigils of Sandy Hook victims, hence the reason for them tweeting a picture believed to contain personal information.

If you are a Google+ fan (we are!) then things got really exciting for you today. Google launched many new features for the service today including the ability for Android users to back up the full sized photos taken by their phone.

While Google+ has always allowed users to backup their Android phone generated photos, the size was capped around 4 megapixels. Today's update removes that constraint and allows any size image to be uploaded. The caveat being that free storage is limited to 5GB with additional storage space being available for purchase.

This new backup feature is no doubt partially the result of Android 4.2's new "Photo Spheres" feature which creates 360 degree panorama's. This update allows users to share these extra large images on their Google+ photo stream.