Internet & Websites - Page 36

Posterous, a popular blogging platform that was acquired by Twitter last year, has announced that it will be shutting down as of April 30. The site says that they are shutting down in order to focus on Twitter and there will be no more viewing or editing content past the shutdown date.

Because of this, Posterous is offering users the ability to download their data. WordPress and Squarespace are alternatives and both feature importers for Posterous data. A "backup" option is also provided and it will provide you with a zip file containing your data. You can request a backup by heading to the Posterous site.

"We'd like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter."

If you're still on the hunt for a Nexus 4 and can't get your hands on one, Google have your back with their Nexus Store Locator tool. This tool will will allow you to search local retailers for Nexus devices.

All you have to do is type in your address, and it'll find you a retailer that deals in Nexus devices. At the moment, the only Nexus 4 retailer in the US is T-Mobile, so right now if you're looking for a Nexus 4, then this tool is kind of like a T-Mobile store locator. If you're after a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, then it branches out a little more.

The Nexus 4 should reach other retailers soon, where this tool will become more useful.

Over the years, Google has forged their way into the english language, thanks to people saying "Google it" when asked a question. Well, it helps that iOS' default search engine is Google, but just how much does Google pay for this privilege?

Well, it looks like it could be as much as $1 billion per year. Scott Devitt from Morgan Stanley in a recent note to investors said "the next Google is Google", believing that the search giant's business has much more room to grow in expanding markets and subsidiaries such as YouTube could see as much as $20 billion generated by 2020.

Devitt estimated during the note that the Mountain View-based company could be paying Apple up to $1 billion per year to be their default search engine, with that figure set to expand over the coming years. Previous reports pegged the companies to be in a revenue sharing deal, but Devitt doesn't think this makes sense. He says that Apple would instead be much better off to do a fee per device agreement for the benefits of upfront payments and easier accounting.

Google Hangouts is a pretty cool product. A group of users can come together and host group video chats or performances for free. Today, the Google has updated the Hangouts product with a couple of new features. The first is a bandwidth slider. This new adjustment allows you to change how much bandwidth Google Hangouts has available to use.

This can be very useful if you're in a low-bandwidth area, such as on a metered 3G connection or at the local coffee shop. Another feature is the option to send and receive only audio. This will also reduce bandwidth requirements while still allowing a user to stay engaged in the conversation.

Google and Mozilla are pushing WebRTC as the future of software-independent video and voice chat. To show off the capabilities, Mozilla called up Google from Firefox to Chrome to demonstrate the cross-browser functionality that is available via WebRTC. Of course, to do this, you'll need the latest builds of both browsers.

Mozilla's blog post talks up the new technology and open source:

You might have read a story I did a few days ago on a class action lawsuit settlement in which Facebook admitted to using its users images in "Sponsored Posts". The settlement was agreed upon with $20 million being set aside to compensate affected parties.

This morning I received my settlement notice even though I had no idea that I was one of the affected parties. The notice does say that I could be entitled to up to $10, but if the number of claims exceeded a financially feasible number, then all the money will be donated to charity. Other than that, it is full of legalese, but it does state a few interesting things which I have quoted below.

Stickam, the live video streaming website that gained notoriety in the alternative teen culture took itself offline last night in what appears to be a permanent decision. This shocked many of its users who had no idea the service was closing.

Its service let users "stick" a live video stream on their website, or blog and could also be accessed from Stickam's website. It grew in popularity with the scene, emo and alternative youth demographics, but it also attracted more adult content related "performers" which Stickam quickly banned in an effort to keep things family friendly.

Stickam launched in 2005 and it quickly grew to 10 million registered users with about 6 million monthly unique visitors. With other services like YouTube, Google+ Hangouts and Ustream, gaining in popularity, the service just could not keep up.

Google, citing help from its community of citizen cartographers, has launched a highly detailed map of North Korea in its Google Maps service. The company pieced the map together using "very limited map data," and admits that it is far from perfect.

Most of the data was generated by users who added it using Google's Map Maker, a web app that lets users add to a map using their unique local knowledge. All of this user generated data had to have come from visitors to the country as its citizens are denied access to the internet. In a blog post, Jayanth Mysore, Senior Product Manager at Google Map Maker wrote:

As part of Facebook's governance change--you know, the one that took away your right to vote--Facebook instituted a policy that would allow easier access to their chief privacy officer, Erin Egan. The way Facebook is allowing access is through a new app aptly named "Ask Erin."

The app is basically a comment form on the site's "Facebook and Privacy" page that allows users to directly ask questions of Erin Egan. While she won't answer every question, certain ones that have value for the public or are especially important will be features in a series of posts present within the app.

Specific account questions should still be directed to the Help Center. To get the ball rolling, Egan answered three common questions in a blog post:

Well, we were right. The tweet by Twitter's CEO was a tip that they were going to release Vine soon. Today, Twitter has announced the launch of Vine. According to the blog post by Twitter, Vine is "a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos." Twitter hopes the short length of time will inspire creativity.

Vine is available for iOS devices, specifically the iPhone and iPod touch. The app is free and currently available in the App Store. The blog post states that they are currently working on bringing the app to other platforms, meaning we should soon see an app available on Android and possibly Windows Phone, Windows 8, and other devices.

Vine explains the app a bit better in their blog post:

Mega, the recently launched brainchild of the infamous Kim Dotcom, has already climbed to the ranks of the top 150 sites on the internet. In just five days, the file sharing website has eclipsed rivals RapidShare and Dropbox according to Alexa rankings, a service which ranks websites by size from users who install its browser toolbar.

In a tweet that simply read "141", Dotcom announced the sites entry into the 150 club. The numbers are based on website ranking service Alexa, where Mega is still in the 7,000 range if you go by the three month stats, but if you track the site on a seven day basis, Mega has beat out its major rivals in terms of website traffic.

The joy in the Mega camp is not everlasting though as allegations arise that the site's encryption service is not as secure as they would like us to think. The issues arise with Javascript and a "poorly" created random entropy for the encryption keys. In true fashion, Dotcom addressed the issue by tweeting that a contest with cash prize will be held soon, and saying "Let's see what you got". It's unclear if Mega's massive website traffic will continue after news agencies around the world move onto other topics.

If you happened to be living under a rock over the weekend, you might have missed the small news story about Kim Dotcom's launch of the new file sharing service Mega. For the rest of the world, you did not miss it - you were just unable to use it.

Mega, the replacement of Megaupload, has been long anticipated, and has been expected to be a major success from the beginning. On Saturday the service went live worldwide, and users were able to sign up for an account, which included 50GB of free cloud storage to get you started. That is about all that most were able to do as the service has for the most part, been extremely slow and plagued with outages.

All of this is of course due to is wide, err... mega popularity. Everyone is flocking at once to check out the new encrypted file sharing service, and that is killing the servers. Dotcom has announced that over one million accounts were created in the first 24 hours alone. We expect that things will cool down in the next week or so as the initial rush begins to settle down. Did you sign up for Mega on launch day? What has your experience been like so far? Let us know in the comments below.

It looks like the Pirate Bay is about to get a little bit harder to find on the Internet, thanks to a bunch of malware alerts sent to Google have resulted in sites on the Pirate Bay being flagge by their content advisory service.

If you're like me and rocking Google's Chrome web browser, the advisory is alarment and displays the phrase "visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware'. Sitting on the Firefox side of the browsing fence will display it an attack page, stating "many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners".

The team over at the Pirate Bay have told TorrentFreak is in relation to one of their ad partners who have "screwed up". There should be no malware threats now, and the warnings should eventually fade away from their side. These automated tools are slipping, and banning certain sites because of the ads, as they're made to target specific items and flag them. TPB getting flagged is another one of those "automatic" anomalies.

Kim Dotcom, the infamous creator of Megaupload, has announced via Twitter in a series of tweets that Mega, the encrypted file sharing service, will feature 50GB of free cloud storage upon launch. It also has plans to bring back Megaupload user's data.

50GB of storage is quite a bit with other cloud based services offering less than 10GB, but we all know that Kim Dotcom loves to do things in grand style. Dotcom also revealed that the service will be hosted on the New Zealand based domain Mega.co.nz.

Dotcom also tweeted that Mega was partnering with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in court to give Megaupload users access to their files. The team of lawyers "will seek court permission" to make the transfer. Mega is set to launch in just two days. Do you plan on signing up on launch day? Let us know in the comments below.

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.