Internet & Websites - Page 46

Google are shutting down Google Buzz, its non-started Gmail-based social network that paved the way for such things as Google+. Google VP Product Bradley Horowitz wrote today in an announcement post on the Google Blog:

Old Buzz content is still ok, and will be visible on users' Google profiles, users will also have the ability to export their data from Buzz before it becomes unavailable. This should be in a few weeks. Google is also shutting down some other social products such as Jaiku and iGoogle social features, not only that, but Code Search and a program that gives academic researchers API access to Google Search results.

This news bit is short and sweet, and doesn't add to your love handles, just in case you were wondering. iCloud gives you 5GB of free storage, not bad, eh? Well, Box.net are actually offering [for the next 50 days], iOS users the chance of grabbing 50GB of free storage. Free, that means $0. Not only is the deal bloody amazing, but there is no fineprint. No asterisks, no buts, nothing. Most of these types of offers expire after a certain amount of time, or are only open to fresh, new users, but this one is neither.

It is open to anyone and everyone and lasts forever. 50GB of free storage for iOS users thanks to Box.net, nice one!

This promotion starts at midnight tonight and runs for only 50 days, so get your free space in the cloud by following these steps:

Zynga is holding a press event tomorrow in San Francisco dubbed "Zynga Unleashed", where it is expected to share its plans on how they're going to use Facebook's new HTML5-based mobile platform. Facebook's platform was announced this afternoon and runs on Apple's iOS devices as well as across the mobile Web. It will allow game developers such as Zynga to connect versions of the same application on PC and mobile devices.

In order to achieve this, developers will build applications in HTML5, rather than the commonly used Adobe Flash technology. Zynga is expected to launch "selected titles" tomorrow, with other developers set to follow such as EA, Moblyng, Storm8 and Wooga. Zynga are quite on what they're bringing to the table tomorrow, saying to AllThingsD they "will have HTML5 games coming soon the Facebook's mobile apps site".

SVP at EA Interactive, CJ Prober said:

After months of speculation, opinion, leaks and other events, Facebook have today launched what people have expected: a mobile app platform as well as Facebook for iPad. Before this, Facebook users had to use their computers for gaming and app needs (or obsessions) where now, they should be able to play and participate from almost any device with a web browser. This experience amplifies if you're on an Apple iOS-based device.

It was rumored that Facebook were totally against Apple, with iOS 5 having Twitter integration but this news is joy to the ears of Facebook and Apple users. The reason is simple. Facebook apps and more importantly, games, don't work on phones or tablets because iOS devices don't support Flash. Facebook has now helped a select group of developers, Audiovroom, Branchout, EA, Flixster, Gilt Groupe, Huffington Post, Moblyng, Storm8, Wooga and Zynga, all create HTML5-based versions of a selection of their apps and game titles that will work within Web browsers.

HTML5 doesn't quite offer the performance that many apps require, so if the developers have created native versions of their app, they can also connect Facebook users directly to that native application. For example, a friend sends you a request to play Words With Friends and you view it on the Facebook app on your iPhone, you can click to play and be taken directly to the Words With Friends app. If you don't have the app, that's fine, as you'll get directed to Apple's App Store. If you're on an Android device, you'll be taken to an HTML5 version in your mobile Web browser.

Sony has announced their new video store application which includes a snazzy new intuitive interface which allows easier and smarter navigation, "Video Unlimited - preview" is available right now for PlayStation Plus subscribers who are living in the United States or Canada. PS Plus subscribers can download the new application and experience a new way to navigate and discover video content on the PlayStation 3. While mirroring content found on the existing PlayStation Store video delivery service, the new app delivers a totally fresh experience by providing endless related search results via a whole new way to discover content for purchase and or rent.

All PlayStation Network users will gain access to "Video Unlimited - preview" on October 11, 2011. The new UI does indeed look very, very nice and the search functions look surprisingly easy to use. Hopefully this trickles down to all Sony-related gear in the future!

What I think people will love about it is shown in the video below. Being able to browse a movie, then say an actor within that movie. Once within the actors details, it'll show their movies in a list. You can then browse into that movie and then dive into a new category, say, "action". Within "action", it'll display a list of action movies. It's intuitive enough that it just seems so, so easy and you'll think "why hasn't anyone done this before?". It really does feel fresh.

Alright, we were a little too hasty in our previous news post saying that Spotify would be the provider of music on Facebook.

It turns out that Spotify is just one of the partners that will provide music playback on Facebook. It will be very easy for you to discover what songs your friends are playing and listening to via the ticker notification system. All you will need to do is click on the song and the song will playback on the music service which you use and it will play in the area where you usually see the chat window.

This does make more sense - if Facebook did just use Spotify, it would only work in countries where the service is supported. Mark quickly mentioned that he thinks all music should be free as in his opinion it enables users to discover new music which will encourage them to buy more in the long run. That's an interesting theory since nowadays if you are in the right part of the world; you don't need to pay a cent for the music you enjoy.

Kogan have begun a new phase in their mission to make the latest technology affordable for all. How will they do it? They're now sourcing brands like Canon, Nikon, Apple and Samsung by cutting out the middle man and sourcing the products higher up the supply chain, then selling direct to customers via Kogan.com. Until now, Australian-based customers have been ripped off by consumer electronics with prices significantly above World averages.

Kogan is already globally renowned as the place to go for best value consumer electronics that they design, assemble and deliver, including TVs, Blu-ray players, Digital Internet Radios, Home Appliances and more. The initial products that Kogan will add to their ever-growing list will include popular Digital SLR Cameras and Tablets. As with all Kogan products, they'll come with a 12 month warranty, extendable to up to 5 years.

As for pricing, how good is it? Well, let's use 2 examples:

Facebook for iPad has been a long time coming and between you and I, it should've been here weeks after the iPad launch 18 months ago. But, are we edging closer to social network goodness on the iPad? Possibly... It looks like we might see the iPad app unveiled at Facebook's "f8" developer conference which is being held in San Francisco on September 22. The f8 conference is aimed at getting Facebook app developers together or people who want to integrate their website with Facebook in order to showcase Facebook's newest feature additions.

At the last f8 conference, the "Like" feature was unveiled which let you spread the word about a website, brand, product, video or anything else of interest to your Facebook friends. This years f8 conference is being held at the San Francisco Design center which will be the largest stage ever used for an f8 event, which is leading people to believe Facebook is set to unveil something quite large.

As with other f8 events, the event will focus on demonstrating new tools within the site which are set to work more efficiently with the current ones, as well as a live Q&A session which will allow developers to ask questions from the Facebook crew, as shown on the f8 website:

Anonymous has had quite the resume built up, responsible for attacks on the Pentagon, News Corp and others have now set their targets on Zuckerberg's love child, Facebook. Anonymous have vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5 citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account. Anonymous hopes to "kill Facebook," and the "medium mof communication [we] all so dearly adore."

The full announcement is below (and in the full post of this news) for your reading pleasure. Let's just hope V for Vendetta is not involved because we all know what happens on the 5th of November.

On August 6, 1991, British engineer and computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled a project for organizing information, which would later result in it turning into what we use today as The Internet. He dubbed it the World Wide Web and posted a short summary on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.

The World Wide Web is really just a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Within this, users can obviously access text, images, videos and other multimedia web pages. Navigation of these web pages occurs via hyperlinks. Berners-Lee is now the Director for the World Wide Web Consortium and back in March of 1989, he used concepts from earlier hypertext systems to write a proposal that would essentially become the World Wide Web.

The project was publicly introduced in December 1990 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. By Christmas of 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools required for a working Internet: the first Web browser (which doubled as a web editor), the first web server, and the first web pages which described the project itself.

During Facebook's "Awesome" event that is going on now at Facebook's HQ in Palo Alto, CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced "Video Calling".

It is a partnership with Skype and integrates into your current Facebook experience rather seamlessly. All you need to do is pop up your friends list in that chat area in the bottom right of the screen and select a friend. Then click on their name and click the "start a video call" camera looking icon.

For the first time you are asked to download the Facebook Video Calling Plug-in which is small and downloaded and installed very quickly. I'm going to give it a try right now! One last thought, now that Microsoft own Skype, does this mean we will see more Facebook and Microsoft joint efforts in the future?

As you may well know by now, Google introduced its social network platform last week called Google+. It was only opened up to a select group of people at the start, then others managed to find their way into the system by way of a little invite trick. The trick required that you have a Gmail email address, though.

Now obviously convinced of its readiness for the general public, Google has decided to open up its new social website to the general public.

It's still going by the name "the Google+ project" which still suggests it's in its early stages, but Google and its engineers and staff have been playing with Google+ for around 8 months now, according to an employee of Google who mentioned it during a "hangout". It's tuned rather well, but still has many featured to add in the following days, weeks and months.

Google are on a rampage this week, not only launching their social networking extravaganza Google+ (which is awesome btw) but now a new look Gmail is out and being previewed. The new look is virtually identical to Google+ which helps keep an overall theme for Google and has cut the clutter away and still keep it as a powerhouse e-mail solution. Google have stated it's a Google-wide effort to bring you, the user, an experience that is more focused, elastic and effortless across all of their products.

They've said that they are not going to change everything at once and will work on the upgrades gradually over the next few months which will allow users plenty of time to get used to it and incorporate feedback that will go into the ever-evolving design. Google are starting with two new themes for users to try as a sneak peak of things to come. Currently there's "Preview" and "Preview (Dense)" themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings.

Once you take a look around you'll realise it looks cleaner, with a more modern look yet has a few rough edges. Labs features will also look strange as they're not built for the current themes (yet). Google plan on fixing these issues once the changes are rolled out over the next few months. New themes will be released and will include the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment (yay! I enjoy my dark Gmail background and will wait for this).

Google+ has been launched today and it is quite the bundle of joy. Included are multiple parts which create one large social networking web of connectivity, social fun and constant information on friends and more specifically the friends you want to know your whereabouts or specific posts.

Included are four major sections, +Circles, +Sparks, +Hangouts, +Mobile. First off +Circles is all about sharing what matters, to those who mean the most to you. Not all relationships and friendships are equal, +Circle allows you to create a "circle" which allows you to add the people you want to it and share what's new or something cool you found online. Instead of going out to all of your friends at once.

+Sparks allows you to strike up a conversation about, well, pretty much anything. Sparks delivers a feed of content from the internet in any topic you want across 40 languages. All you have to do is add your interests and Sparks will find relavant links and info on what you want to look at, again with the right circle of friends.

Google held a media event in San Francisco today where they talked about how they're tackling barriers on mobile, announcing that they're bringing speech recognition and computer vision technology to the desktop and took the next step for Google Instant - Google Pages. Google are right when they say the thirst for knowledge doesn't stop when you get off the computer, it continues on your mobile device. Mobile search traffic has grown 500-percent in two years with mobile search growing at a comparable pace to Google in their early years.

It's hard to believe but YouTube are celebrating their sixth birthday today and announced they receive more than 3 billion page views per day, a 50-percent increase over last year. Another impressive feat is that 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, a 37-percent increase over the last six months and a 100-percent increase from last year. YouTube are congratulating the improvements to these numbers to their job of making the processing of uploads faster, increasing video length limitations, tweaking the homepage, etc.

Normally I wouldn't bring the world of reality TV to TweakTown, but this news is quite hilarious. I've been watching snippets of Dancing with the Stars (#dwts) and its funny. The show features a bunch of 'celebrities' and they dance. If you haven't heard of it, then start painting that rock you live under in a better colour. Anyway, the show feels rigged because the three (to me anyway) main stars are Manu from My Kitchen Rules, Lara Bingle (I'm sure you all know her) and Damien Leith (Australian Idol winner). These 3 seem to dance the best and I'm sure they were picked up by producers months in advance and told to get practice, now.

You've undoubtedly heard about the controversy surrounding Facebook's attempt to smear Google via what turned out to be a pretty shady public relations firm. If you haven't, here's a quick summary:

In case you live under a rock, or in a multi-acre off-the-grid "luxury" Pakistani compound, Osama Bin Laden is officially dead and accounted for, thanks to a successful Covert Ops mission yesterday. Not only did the news start pouring in on Twitter before mainstream media had time to compose stories and segments of greater than 140 characters, but the announcement saw the highest sustained tweets per second (TPS) ever.

Yesterday at the Guardian Activate conference in New York, Twitter Vice President of International Strategy Katie Stanton confirmed that there are now over 200 Million registered users on Twitter. She commented that over 70% of Twitter traffic comes from outside the US, with around 25% in Japan alone. Also remarkable -but not altogether surprising- is that 40% of Twitter traffic comes from mobile phones.