Internet & Websites - Page 42

I imagine most of you are sick of the spam floating around on Facebook; I know I am. Part of the problem is due to OpenGraph and the ability to auto-share. This auto-sharing is the source of many of the annoying, spammy posts that keep showing up in my already crowded news feed. And they crowd out the really important things, such as TweakTown posts.

Facebook has come up with a solution to this problem: the "10 second rule." What this rule does is require a user to read a post or watch a video for at least 10 seconds before it can auto-share it out with the rest of your friends. According to a developer blog post, "Built-in watch and read actions can only be published after someone engages with the content for 10 or more seconds. If a video is shorter than 10 seconds, the viewer must watch the entire video."

The frictionless sharing that Facebook introduced a year ago was helpful in gaining views for integrated services, but it has been taken advantage of since then. Thankfully, Facebook has decided to try curbing it with this new rule. Facebook is also requiring developers to allow access to app content without auto-sharing it. It will be interesting to see if the amount of spam is cut down due to these new changes.

Think your home internet connection is fast? How about your work connection? How about you try 4700Mbps on for size. That's the new speed that has been reached by a German ISP using existing cable network infrastructure. This speed is incredible considering that most PCs only feature Gigabit Ethernet and this would manage to flood that.

Kabel Deutschland, a German cable operator, is claiming to have created a real-world download speed of 4,700Mbps. This ins't theoretical either as they are claiming this speed in a real-world test. Let's see just how fast that is. Four Gigabit connected computers would be unable to max the bandwidth available.

More incredibly, a connection of that speed, if you were able to use it all, could download a full 4.7GB DVD in just a mere 8 seconds. This title isn't the fastest real-world connection, as someone already provided a 40Gbps fiber connection to a residence, but this does use the existing cable networks. The test was carried out to test an upgraded network using the 862MHz spectrum, channel bonding, and the EuroDocsis 3.0 standard.

Not only are the browser wars heating up again, but apparently a new mapping war is heating up. The mapping world used to be just a few key players: Microsoft, Google, and a few other smaller ones. But with Apple now rumored to release its own solution at WWDC, the market is about to become a lot more complex.

It would appear that Google would like to steal some of Apple's thunder before its rumored release of a new mapping service. Google is hosting an invite-only press event in San Francisco to unveil "the next dimension of Google Maps." Considering Apple's new mapping service is expected to be 3D, does the mention of "dimension" in the invitation indicate Google is going to be adding more 3D features?

Google will also offer attendees "a behind-the-scenes look at Google Maps and share our vision. We'll also demo some of the newest technology and provide a sneak peek at upcoming features that will help people get where they want to go - both physically and virtually." Of course, Google already has the 3D Earth, but it requires a plug-in. Could this event be releasing one that runs without a plug-in?

Twitter has announced updates to its website which they claim has decreased page load times down to 20% of what they were previously. The old system used the browser to render JavaScript which was groundbreaking at the time. It does have a disadvantage, however, in that it misses out on optimizations only available to the server.

As such, Twitter is bringing some of the front-end grunt work back onto the servers in order to speed up load times. As Twitter says, "To connect you to information in real time, it's important for Twitter to be fast." Part of the change is not using # (hashbang) in the permalink URLs to improve initial load times.

Another update is to decrease the "time to first Tweet." This is where Twitter has managed to decrease page load times to 1/5 of what they were previously. The general, watered down version of how this works is to take the JavaScript out of the equation and render the content on the server. This removes the slowdown from old browsers or slow machines. Twitter explains in more detail:

It's always a difficult task to choose the next profile picture that you're going to use. You put a lot of thought into the process and probably look at several photos for a while before deciding. You may even ask a friend or two what they think. It turns out that there is also some cultural influence into the decision as well.

Your profile picture has different qualities depending on your culture. According to a new study, Americans tend to focus on the face and usually have a close-up shot where the face takes up most of the frame. This is contrary to Taiwanese users who tend to have some background visible and a much smaller portion of the frame taken up by the face.

The study was done twice after the first one found the correlation. The second time around they increased the sample size and locations in which they were drawing participants from and the findings still held true. The study also showed that Americans preferred a more intense facial expression such as a huge smile while Taiwanese tended to have a less intense expression.

With the SOPA and PIPA protests becoming distant memories, the attacks on internet freedoms have been renewed by Congress in the form of CISPA. There have been no protests like there were against PIPA and SOPA and that has Reddit's Alexis Ohanian concerned. An entrepreneurial group now wants to create the internet equivalent of the Bat-Signal.

The idea is that SOPA-like mass protests could be started at the push of a button when internet freedoms were deemed in danger. Website owners can sign up on the group's website and add a piece of code to their website that can be activated when a political crisis like SOPA rears its ugly head. Owners can also receive the code by e-mail when the signal is turned on.

"People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something," says Ohanian. "Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions...If we aggregate everyone that's doing it, the numbers start exploding."

Ever see a game on Facebook that looks interesting but you don't want to play it because of all the hassle of installing and uninstalling if it's bad? Facebook is looking to change that with a new feature which will allow game developers to demo their wares in the news feed. Developers won't be given any information about the users.

If players like the game then they are able to click through onto the full version. This new feature is great, although I'm not sure that the news feed is a proper location for it. Personally, my news feed is already overflowing with the posts of my friend and the posts of quality content here on TweakTown, so I don't think I want more posts, especially ones that take up a lot of room.

Facebook has provided some examples of games already using the new feature. These games include: Idle Worship, Angry Birds, and Bubble Witch Saga. Developers of these games receive statistics about impressions of the story and how many people use the game contained within. Facebook has provided examples of how current games are using the new feature:

Google has given us a bit more insight into the links that are removed from search results as a result of copyright and piracy complaints. The details include which organizations make the request, who actually owns the content, and the top targeted domains. The numbers are actually pretty shocking, so let's just start with one. 250,000. That's the average number of links taken down per week.

That 250,000 number is more than the total number of links removed for all of 2009. Even more incredible is the fact that Google's senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann says that the majority of requests are legitimate. Most of the requests are for sites that are offering unauthorized copies of software, entertainment or pornography.

Now, another number: 22,923. That's the number of sites that were targeted last month. Those sites generated over 1.1 million take-down requests. The illicit content was owned by just 1,190 people. This means, on average, each copyright owner had roughly 1,000 links removed over the past month. But, the numbers show that the average is extremely skewed.

Yahoo is working hard to turn themselves around from the brink of ruin, and this new Axis search that they have released could just manage to do that. Axis is a new way of searching the web and focuses on getting rid of the search results page. Interested yet? I certainly was, so I investigated the story a bit further.

TechCrunch spoke with Yahoo's Director of Product Management Ethan Batraski: "No one's innovated on 'How do I get rid of the search results page altogether'", Batraski said. "That is what we want to do." And so that's what they did. The new way to search is via a plug in to Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox. There is also an iOS app for this new search.

Once you type in your Yahoo credentials, a small black bar gets added to the bottom left of your browser window. Click inside the search bar and it expands to about 1/3 of your page. No longer do you have to leave the page you are on to do a search. It will probably take a bit of getting used to as I know I am in the habit of quickly Ctrl + T'ing a new window and punching in my query.

President Obama is embracing technology. On Wednesday, he ordered major governmental agencies to create mobile-optimized websites. The agencies have to provide two key services to mobile users within a year. The directive also ordered agencies to create websites to report on their mobile websites progress. These sites have to be completed in just 90 days.

I've had to go onto government sites from my phone before and it's near impossible to gather anything as the site is designed for desktops, and not even designed that well for those. Obama has recognized this fact and realized the importance of mobile phones and data access. By 2015, it's likely more web traffic will come from mobile devices than desktops.

"Americans deserve a government that works for them anytime, anywhere, and on any device," Obama said in a statement. "By making important services accessible from your phone and sharing government data with entrepreneurs, we are giving hard-working families and businesses tools that will help them succeed."

Dear Facebook and Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, you're a publicly listed company now. Don't you think it's high time you fixed these things? I'm pretty positive your near enough to 1,000,000,000 users are sick and tired of the issues.

Invest your cash injection in more staff, perhaps? Your users aren't going to stick around with poor quality aspects to some areas of your site and apps.

These are just some of the issues that have been bothering me deeply with Facebook.

A while back we brought you the story about users being infected with the DNS Changer malware and how, come July, they were going to lose their ability to connect to the internet. We also told you about how a collection of websites were running a piece of code to alert users to the fact their computers may be compromised.

Now Google has joined the group of websites offering up the warning to users. They are expecting to alert around half a million users in the first week alone. Without Google, it was going to take the other sites quite a bit of time to reach everyone. Who doesn't use Google? It's important that these messages reach users as the system will be shutdown July 9, 2012.

"In general we want to notify users [of malware infections] anytime we are capable of doing so, but the fact that we don't do this more often is really just because it's hard to come across cases where we can do it this accurately," Google security engineer Damian Menscher said. "In many cases we only have maybe a 90 percent confidence that someone is infected, and the false positive rate of 10 percent is simply too high to be feasible. But in this case we can be essentially certain that someone is infected."

Google Docs' days are numbered. Google has pitched Google Drive as a replacement to Google Docs since its release in April. What I, along with many users, didn't realize is that Google will be killing off Docs and transitioning all users to Drive. Drive is currently still opt-in, but it looks like soon users will be opted-in automatically as their Docs account is upgraded to a Drive account.

In fact, Google has started to warn users of just this fact. It seems as though this transition is coming sooner rather than later, and Google's transition documentation supports that saying that "we expect to finish the transition from the Google Documents List to Google Drive by late summer (2012)."

This transition will occur in three phases. Currently, users are in phase one, or the "opt-in phase." From there, users will be allowed to opt-out for a little while longer if they would like more time to transition. Once users are moved onto phase three, everyone will have a Google Drive and Google Docs will no longer exist.

In what will be a huge initial public offering (IPO), Facebook is confirmed to be selling shares at $38 when it starts trading tomorrow morning. This price will value Facebook at an incredible $104 billion and raise $18.4 billion in capital. This release price is higher than what Facebook had originally aimed for in the first filing.

MSNBC believes that the total amount raised will be flexible:

Twitter, just like Facebook, tracks its users. Twitter does track users less, but it is still there. The microblog has now joined Mozilla in giving its users a way to opt-out of being tracked in any way. Twitter is implementing this feature by enabling Firefox's Do Not Track feature. The Firefox feature only works if a website acknowledges it.

The new feature was announced by Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, at the New York Internet Week privacy panel. Twitter has since confirmed the announcement on its website. Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said, "As the Federal Trade Commission's CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC's leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track."

This move is just another in recent times that attempts to put power in the hands of its users. Not to long ago, Twitter filed a court motion to protect the information of one of its users who used Twitter during an Occupy protest. Mozilla shared some statistics on Do Not Track in a post. "We're excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the Web," Mozilla said in the post.

Netflix took a pretty big hit last year when it announced pricing changes to its plans. However, today a Netflix executive has come out and said that he believes they have taken the brand hit from those changes. Netflix has rebounded in the first quarter, but scared off investors slightly with talk of its competitors.

Netflix CFO David Wells spoke at the J.P. Morgan Technology Media and Telecom conference and talked about customer satisfaction, churn, and overall feeling towards Netflix. As Netflix nears the one year mark of the changes that consumers hated, CFO paints a bright future through the fact that one third of new customers are actually returning customers:

GM has announced that they will be pulling $10 million in ads from Facebook as they say they don't work. This comes at a bad time for Facebook as they are about to launch their IPO. GM's marketing executive have apparently been reviewing GM's advertising and found that the paid ads are worth the money. They will, however, continue to use the free advertising on Facebook.

GM currently spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $40million on Facebook advertising, though only $10 million of that goes to paid Facebook ads. (These are presumably annual figures) The other $30 million goes to upkeep on the company's Facebook page, along with paying for promotions and giveaways which don't appear to make Facebook any money.

This $10 million isn't much in terms of the $3.7 billion that Facebook brought in last year in advertising. However, GM is the third largest advertiser in the United States, so the fact of them pulling their advertising may cause other companies to reexamine their strategies to see if Facebook is really worth it.

The photo sharing site Flickr is set to improve a major feature. Flickr is moving to something they are calling a "liquid layout" which will change the layout to match the size of the browser window viewing the site. The layout will focus on showing high-res images as large as it can on the main photo pages along with the usual information around the side.

The image above is what it used to look like. The image below is what the new "liquid layout" will look like for someone with a large monitor. The pictures were originally 500px wide as the site launched when 800x600 was the norm. In 2010, this was increase to 640px. Now they have selected a range of sizes so that images won't have to be upsampled.

This redesign is just one of many that the aging site is in need of. The site promises many more over the coming year. Next is speed: "Now that the algorithm is complete, we need to work on the performance," said Flickr developer Ross Harmes in a Flickr code blog post. "The first time you go to a liquid photo page, we have no choice but to adjust the page width on the fly. But every other photo page you visit will have the dimensions stored from the last page, and the page will be rendered with the correct width from the start."

YouTube is an empire like Google, one that is built on clicks and advertising. However, as of late, clicks have been falling, but YouTube isn't concerned. You see, this is all going perfectly according to plan. YouTube would rather have "engagement" than "views" as it will allow them to garner a more lucrative advertising market.

YouTube has invested $100 million in order to create content channels which should aid in getting users to more engagement and fewer clicks. Incidentally, this type of video, the engaging type, is more appealing to advertisers as users who are engaged are thought to be in a more receptive mind-set for brand advertising.

"Our goal is we want users to watch more and click less," said Cristos Goodrow, a former Google search executive who joined YouTube as director of engineering a year ago. "This is better for users because it takes less clicking to get to the video you want to watch." Eli Goodman, media evangelist at ComScore, said, "The effectiveness of advertising is enhanced when someone is in an engaged state."

I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is even more OCD about GUI layout and usage than even Steve Jobs was. The latest example of this is the new update that has been released for mobile users. The update aims to make better use of the limited screen real estate that is often a restriction on mobile design.

Facebook plans to make better use of the real estate by reducing the amount of white space, or blank space. Instead, some of the content will be more densely packed so that more fits onto the screen. Above is a before picture and below is an after. You can clearly see the change in the size of the 4 photos posted.