Internet & Websites - Page 45

I have to admit, I scour the entire interwebs for news, virtually each and every day and up until now, I did not even know about Orkut. Orkut is a Google-owned social network, that gets overshadowed by its own rival, Google+ and other players such as Facebook. Orkut is still massively popular in India and Brazil, where more than 80-percent of its 66 million active users come from, as of October 2011.

Google have just released a native Orkut client for the iPhone, which is available for free from the App Store and includes the usual feature set like updating your status, and checking your scraps and messages to browsing your friends' profiles and uploading photos.

A description of Orkut for iOS:

Ah, torrents. You used to be cool before everyone dived onto you, years ago, but as they have become mainstream, the target has been made. Torrents used to not be mainstream, and thus, the websites hosting them were pretty safe. Now I hear grandmas discussing how their son/daughter/friend/grandson "downloaded X or Y movie/TV show from 'the torrents'".

The Pirate Bay is one of the largest torrent-hosting sites on the Internet, and in a month from now, thepiratebay.org will remove all torrent files from its site, in favor for magnet links. This new move is what The Pirate Bay calls a "new future" in file sharing, consisting of true peer-to-peer sharing without the use of trackers.

TPB has already switched over to the underlying technology that runs alongside magnet links, with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX). TPB have been using magnet links with torrent files for a while now, without letting any of its users know.

Facebook has previously held presidential debates, Twitter has had live concerts, but now theater has taken the social networking stage. Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater used Facebook to host a live theater experience on Monday, which is what they have called, Facebook's first performance.

Maxim Gorki Theater used Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, and performance a special adaption for the "online Facebook stage", reported Reuters. A spokesperson for the theater told Reuters:

The Wikimedia Foundation has reached its goal of $20 million USD in donations for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation announced today they had reached their goal and the banners that appeared asking for your donations will be removed.

A Wikipedia blog post by Jay Walsh noted that over one million donors from around the world collectively contributed toward the $20 million campaign. Walsh also stated that the 2011 total surpassed the 2008 total of a "meager" $4.5 million. Sue Gardner, Executive Director for Wikimedia Foundation, said the following in a message:

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:

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:

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:

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.

Google have rolled out their new Reader design over the last few days and it now sports the Google+ features that were mentioned a week ago. Reader now features a new look that is cleaner, faster and nicer to look at. It also includes the ability to +1 a feed item (which replaces "Like"), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (this replaces "Share" and "Share with Note").

Google say that integrating Reader with Google+ helps them streamline Reader overall, so with the rollout, Google have cut away friending, following, shared items and comments and replaced them with similar Google+ functionality. Google are loving the new layout and have also rolled the layout onto GMail also. Personally, I use Reader every single day for my news here at TweakTown and I really don't like the new layout.

It rocks on a tablet and it has a very Android 3.0/Honeycomb feel, but I don't like it on the Mac/PC. I have two browser windows open at once, one on the left side of my screen, one on the right. The legacy Reader was awesome - it was spaced out perfectly, the new Reader rocks if you're only looking at the single window, but if you're using side-by-side windows, it just doesn't feel as good. But, that's my thoughts.

Naughty, iiNet! iiNet's recent ad on TV has been taken down after it was found it breached the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice as it included a subliminal message. The message in the ad read:

The link sends you here, but the limit of 100 entries has already been met. You can however, still enter your details for the chance to win one of five iPads. The message itself is fine, it won't make you a zombie for iiNet products, but it was enough of a breach to enable Free TV Australia to take it down. The Code of Practice states that information conveyed in a manner that is "below or near the threshold of normal awareness" is unacceptable.

Chinese search engine Baidu posted their earnings today, and they've got some very impressive results. Total revenue in Q3 rocks along at $654.7 million, an 85.1-percent increase from the same period last year, net income was up 80-percent to $295 million. Diluted earnings for Q3 were $0.84; non-GAAP earnings were for the $0.86. Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu says:

Baidu's operating profits in Q3 were $349.1 million, an impressive 88.5-percent increase from 2010. Online marketing revenues for Q3 were $654.4 million, another big increase of 85.1-percent from 2010. Baidu had approximately 304,000 active online marketing customers in Q3, this represents an 11.8-percent increase from 2010, and a 2-percent increase over Q2, 2011. Revenue per online marketing customer for the third quarter was approximately $2,148, a 65.1-percent increase from 2010 and a 19.1-percent increase from Q2.

Facebook are eyeing down a fine worth $139,000 after an Australian law student discovered that Facebook held 1,200 pages of personal data about him, much of which he had previously deleted. Max Schrems, 24, requested a copy of his data after attending a lecture hosted by Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg whilst he was on an exchange program at Santa Clara University in California.

Facebook sent him a CD of his data and Schrems was shocked to find information through his three years of having an account despite having deleted most of the information. Among the 1,200 pages of data were rejected friend requests, information regarding incidences where he had removed friends from his list and his entire conversation history.

Also included in his personal data CD were images that he had removed tags of himself, every event he had attended and every event he never responded to, poked and email addresses of people he'd corresponded with.

CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo has revealed some statistics about Twitter's insane growth. Twitter now has over 100 million active users and that signups via iOS have tripled since the launch of iOS 5. It was only back in June that Twitter was hitting 200 million tweets per day, but this number has expanded out to 250 million tweets per day. If we rewind back to January 2011, there were around 100 million tweets per day.

Quite the growth, huh? Costolo revealed the stats during an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. With those 100 million active users, half of them login daily. Costolo says:

YouTube, if you didn't already know, is seeing 3 billion videos viewed, per day. But, its also seeing 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in their third-quarter earnings report. Today, YouTube is announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site. The new feature is called Merch Store, where YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors.

YouTube has partnered up with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will dabble in selling tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads. YouTube says the Merch Store will rock out to music partners globally over the coming weeks. YouTube remained silent on what the financial split will be for these sales, but did say that it takes a small percentage of sales just to cover costs.

However, the artist gets the same revenue no matter if they go through the Merch Store or through the affiliate on other channels. The new feature of the merchandise sales, ticket sales, digital downloads and more, really adds a few angle for artists with their fans. YouTube has now transformed from a place where people would visit just to watch music videos, to something that could really change up the industry for both fans and artists alike.