Internet & Websites News - Page 86

Google has just passed the 62 million user mark in their social networking site Google+. They're also seeing a very tidy 625,000 new users each day and Paul Allen has a prediction for 2012: Google+ will have 400 million users by the end of next year.

Paul Allen says that the huge growth in support for Google+ could be:

The holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks.

Apple's cloud-based iTunes Match launched last month in the U.S. and while it has lagged behind a little, they've finally launched a website that is purely dedicated to iTunes Match. The new iTunes Match website tries to clear up most of the confusion that has risen since it was announced.

Apple thoroughly explain the basics of iTunes Match, quoted below:

With iTunes in the Cloud, the music you buy from the iTunes Store automatically appears on all your devices.1 And for music you haven't purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. iTunes Match is built right into iTunes on your computer and the Music app on your iOS devices.2 It lets you store your entire collection in iCloud, even music you've imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. When it's in iCloud, it's available on all your devices. So you can enjoy all your music anywhere, anytime - on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, or Apple TV.

Facebook have now unveiled Timeline to the world, and its now available anywhere in the world. Once you've noticed it, you'll have a 7-day review period, where you'll be able to flick over everything on your Timeline to make sure its all good, before anyone can see it.

If you approve the Timeline, you can make it 'live' to the world before the 7-day review period. If you decide to wait, it will automatically go live after the 7 days. If you want to view your Timeline as another person to see what it will look like, click the little gear menu at the top of your timeline, and click "View As." You can choose to see how your timeline looks to a specific friend, or the public.

As you start strolling through your timeline, you may or may not want certain things shared. These things can be removed by rolling over the timeline, clicking the star expand it to two columns and then clicking 'Hide from Timeline." The privacy dropdown can also do something similar, where you could just allow "friends" or "family" to view the posts you choose.

Facebook have just clicked the 'start ignition' button on their Timeline feature today, where it will eventually rollout to everyone on Facebook. New Zealand is the first place to get it, with other regions will get it in the "near future."

If you don't remember what Timeline is, it's a way to illustrate your entire life, in a graphical way. Some people criticize Facebook for just being made up of "here and now", where major life events are pushed to the bottom of a person's feed and thus, forgotten over time. Timeline doesn't do that, Timeline brings those events back, mapping them on a graphic that tells the story of a user's life, from birth to the present day.

It's an exciting new feature, although what happens to the users who don't use Facebook that much? Log in for a bit of a copy/paste spam status update... or to water their crops in FarmVille? This will be an amazing feature for those who share most of their life with the social networking site. I know I do, that's the deal with living in the 21st century, right?

Internode have a pretty good offer for games.on.net, where they've offered a no signup fee, with the first two months free. Internode! Internode really cater to gamers, and push this obviously through their gaming portal, games.on.net, but also in their services they offer to gamers.

Internode have a dedicated games network in games.on.net which offers patches, videos, demos and more, your favourite Internet TV shows and podcasts where you can download them all, unmetered, as fast as your Internet connection can handle. Internode even have two Steam content servers, where you can buy your Steam games, download them and get playing faster than ever - with everything above all quota free.

How can it get better?

Google have just unleashed Google Music from its beta hold, and have also announced a music store that is built into the Android Market. Google Music is available to anyone in the US without an invitation requirement, and includes the ability to upload 20,000 songs to the cloud for free.

Google Music will have an app for Windows, Mac and Linux devices that will help you upload songs to the cloud, and the songs uploaded to the cloud can be either streamed or "pinned" for offline listening. The Android Market music store will include millions of songs, sortable by genre, sub genre, top albums, and top songs.

There are Staff Picks and a New Releases section, song prices range between $0.99 and $1.29 and every song is 320kbps MP3s with 90 second previews for each song. There will be a new free song every day and the first one is David Bowie's "Sound and Vision", Google have said there will be hundreds of free songs from the get-go. Big major labels have joined in, such as Universal, EMI and Sony music, as well as a number of smaller, independent labels.

Microsoft are set to roll some changes into their Xbox.com site over the next few days in anticipation for the upcoming Xbox 360 dashboard update. "My Xbox" will be replaced by a forward-thinking "Social" area, which will feature Metro UI styling. This new Social section will also give Xbox.com users the ability to be the first to try the new Beacons feature, which lets you mark games you want to play with others, making it easier to find friends who want to play the same game.

Microsoft have baked in a bunch of other extras such as the ability to search the Zune video catalog and buy movies and TV shows directly from your browser. At the top of the replacement of 'My Xbox', which is now "Social", will be the ability to be taken directly to the Social page when visiting Xbox.com.

At the top of the Social page, there will be a group of tiles that you might find familiar, this is the new Metro UI. This is where Microsoft will have Xbox LIVE events, preview articles with all of the latest details on the hottest new items on the Marketplace, new video and game releases, Gamer Spotlight, and more. To the left of these are quick links which display how many friends are online, and how many messages you currently have.

Steam's official forums are currently offline with a message reading "The Steam forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated." Is maintenance the actual issue, though? It is believed that the site's vBulletin forum software may have been hacked, with Valve not yet to comment on the issue, with some gamers noticing a suspicious message on the forum last night that leads most to believe it was a security breach.

Eurogamer was contacted by a Steam user who said a group known as fkn0wned changed the text on the forum and spammed some user's e-mail addresses. Below is what was said:

Ever wanted to dominate the servers you play on with guaranteed results, but you were too afraid to cheat because of ban risks? Visit Fkn0wned.com. It's safe, secure and undetected. Along with hacks, we've also got some general discussion sections, hacking tutorials and tools, porn, free giveaways and much more. This site has been conditioned to meet all of your needs in terms of resources so be sure to take a look and tell us what you think. Thanks again, the fkn0wned team.

Google completed their Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows them to crawl and index the web from fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Google have just announced that they're making quite a significant change to their ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35-percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

Obviously, in today's world, information is power. But information can be from today, last week, the last minute, or thirty years ago depending on the search terms. Google's algorithm needs to be able to work out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Google have a bit more info on it, so if you're interested, check it out. As with most things like this, it is a great read and good to know if you're asked for a random fact one day.

Zynga's next entry in their "Ville" franchise, which includes FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille, is CastleVille. The latest game allows players to built mini-empires from castles, craft art and armor and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world. The game was created by the Zynga Dallas team, which was part of Zynga's acquisition of Bonfire Studios.

The game starts off by letting you choose your character and build your look. Zynga Dallas director Bill Jackson says that this is the most expansive character building feature to date, with dozens of looks to choose from. The games objectives is for you to build the castle of your dreams and transform the the unexplored land into your own kingdom. There are many characters you'll meet along the way, who are all involved in the storyline of the game.

Duke is the first you'll meet, who will help you build your castle and is from a neighboring kingdom. Yvette is a beautiful songstress, Giselle is a lovely maiden, then we have the friendly village Viking, George. Filling the characters out we have Sonja as the sexy pirate, Rafael as a playboy woodsman and finally, Tom as the rough dragon slayer.