digitalfu

Youtube now gets a whopping 4 billion daily video views

2012-01-24T09:17:00.000-08:00

Youtube as we all knew of some 5-6 years ago isn’t the same anymore. The largest video site on the web is accessed by billions of users from their computers, tablets and mobile phones. Google has been making lots of changes in Youtube in the last few years and now Youtube just doesn’t serve as a video site but serves as a portfolio for many brands and artists as well.

Around 60 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute from all over the world. This is a massive increase from the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute as per the stats of May 2011. Youtube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. Youtube is Google’s one of the most beneficial acquisitions till date. Videos on Youtube are also monetized by Google and not just that. Google lets the video owners earn revenues from their videos.

Youtube just recently got a fully revamped look as compared to its look a year ago. It was given the name Cosmic Panda. The website now specially features the channels organized on the basis of the type of videos a user is interested in. Youtube has also struck video programming deals with media partners and artists and now has about 100 such deals in total. Youtube’s 4 billion video views per day hint at how massively it is accessed all over the world.

Opera Mobile to be released for Android soon

2010-10-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Opera will soon be brining its very popular mobile browser software Opera Mobile to Android Platform. Android market is growing rapidly and with the introduction of the major iPhone Applications for Android platform, its not surprising that Opera is introducing an application for the same. Recently a Wolfram Alpha Application was also released for Android. The company hasn’t exactly mentioned the date of its release but they say that it will be released within the coming few weeks.
For Opera’s OEM partners, the Android application has existed for quite some time now. Its just that Opera is rolling it out for the public to use. The full-fledged mobile browser will be free to download for everyone. As the application is immensely popular among iPhone users, it will no wonder be a benchmark mobile browser for Android mobiles as well.

The Opera Mobile for Android is altogether from Opera Mini for Android. Opera Mini is a browser that enhances web browsing on mobile devices by rendering the pages from Opera’s server rather than directly on the handset.

Opera is hopefully testing the Opera Mobile on all grounds so that people won’t have qualms about it just within a few days of its release. Opera mobile will surely upsurge as a major browser for Android powered devices.

AOL to buy Web Video distributor 5 Min Media

2010-09-28T02:38:00.000-07:00

The technology giant AOL is buying the eb video startup 5Min Media very soon. The purchasing price hasn’t yet been finalized precisely but it could be somewhere around $50 million and $65 million, as the sources say. The deal will hopefully be announced on Tuesday morning by AOL

5Min has proven itself as a successful company in its fledgling career. It raised around $13 million in three years. CEO of 5 Min Media Ran Harnevo said that he could make more money as the company was offered the chance to raise some more amount at very compelling valuations.The deal will soon be finalized and AOL will have its hands on 5 Min Media very soon. The secret video strategy that AOL is coming up with in very recent future is marked by this takeover on 5 Min Media.

5Min takes up video clips made by people and distributes them to other people’s Web sites. The videos come from people, totally strangers to your and others that you are connected to inside your network. 5 Min Media is content at serving the videos on its own and isn’t interested in getting them on Youtube. 5 Min though not remotely as big as 10 percent of Youtube claims that it has a library of 200,000 clips that generate a whopping 110 million views a month, across 800 partner sites. This number itself justifies why AOL laid its hands on the company.

5 Min Media isn’t much of an attractive deal for company as colossal as AOL, unless the distribution rights are retained upon acquisition. This company will go in tandem with Studio Now, the video creation engine that AOL bought earlier this year. This venture will save AOL lots of cash in the long run as with the aid of StudioNow, AOL is making and will make a lot of videos at low cost.

The All new HTC Sense

2010-09-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

HTC has released a brand new version of its Sense UI for Android smartphones. It has rolled out a Web-based portal that will let you back up, access, wipe, or geolocate your Android phone from your PC. Isn't that awesome?

Well this online backup service isn't an all new embargo in the scene. The new HTCSense.com has successfully walked the line of Microsoft's My Phone, and BlackBerry Protect, Apple's Mobile Me as a backup service for mobile phones. HTC says that the new app will show a missing phone's location on a map, and then trigger it to ring at the fullest volume and also enables you to forward calls or texts to another phone. Or it can also let you completely lock the phone or wipe it out. Then, transferring everything to a new phone will also be very easy via the smart backup which will include transferring of contacts, texts and even call history. HTCSense.com isn't available for the phones in USA yet. HTC hasn't given a word on the phone models that will be available in the US in the future. But U.S. based phone carriers have taken the matter very lightly as these seem to be olden days stuff to them, already done my Microsoft and the like. There is a chance that US carriers could block HTCsense.com. HTCSense.com also comes with the latest version of the HTC Sense tool that also has the Kobo e-book reader and a new camera app. HTC has also launched two phones The Desire HD and Desire Z in the European market. These are the Euro Versions for Sprint's HTC EVO 4G and G2 phone, respectively.

Although the US carriers aren't much happy about the new HTC sense, Google sounds happy,
"As a key Android partner and smartphone brand, HTC continues to bring new innovation to the platform," Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android efforts, said in HTC's press release. "Android is about choice, and the new HTC smartphones continue to provide customers with powerful choices and flexibility.", says Google.

Lets see if this venture by HTC becomes successful.

New Iphone App by My6Sense

2009-12-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

My6sense has a new version of an application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature of the software learns the things that interests the user the most and then searches for tweets from the people he/she follows. MyTweetsense works best for tweets that include links. So, it can also pull pictures or vidoes from the links.

The default view in the app displays all the recent tweets you received according to relevancy. But you can view your tweets according to the timeline. My6sense keeps an eye on your interests and what you share on social networks and then it automatically tries to show you the things in your area of interest. It takes a little bit of training, but if our experience with the my6sense RSS reader is any indication, the results are surprisingly good. Not only this, My6sense also looks at the content of your Twitter stream and it also gives you an option to turn on the relevancy system for tweets that do not contain links.

with growing number of Twitter users and tweets everyday, it is a bit difficult to keep up with the tweets. But this useful iPhone app can be of real help!

It's a great tool to catch up on your tweets if you have been offline for a few days.

Tweetcraft-Twitter client dedicated to World of Warcraft

2009-07-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

World of Warcraft the most popular MMORPG game fans can now enjoy a new Twitter client that integrates with the Warcraft.Tweetcraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you want to take a rest in the middle of a match, you can just send out Tweets it’s more convenient.

The client also lets you upload some screenshots from the game using Twitpic. TwitPic and will then send the tweet automatically when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement. Tweetcraft also caught the attention of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. He has written a post regarding this. Well watch this video to know more.

Cooliris's Small Change Has a Big Impact on Usability

2009-06-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

Cooliris, one of the coolest browser based extension that lets a person see 3D visual search for images and other stuff has just updated their application. Well they call it just a minor upgrade but don't snub it anyway. This little change is actually gonna make your lives much easier.

Now, Cooliris will no longer launch into a full-screen 3D browser when activated. Instead, Cooliris will launch into a separate browser tab. This is actually very useful because, users had to sacrifice web browsing to view images with Cooliris. Now the change makes it easy for people to switch between Cooliris and other open tabs and also the applications running on the computer.

The 3d surfing interface of Cooliris is really unmatched any other thing. This is one of the leaders in the visual search engine realm. Cooliris, that was previously just meant for searching images from a handful of sites now lets users to search through all of favorite sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, deviantart, google image search and much more. And they have a nifty iPhone application, too.

The Cooliris after its launch would hide the whole desktop that was in one way a demerit of the application. Now with this major but nifty update, would make it much easier for users who love multitasking. So, download the latest version of Cooliris and forget those days when it used to engulf whole of your desktop.

Mapquest launches Application for iPhone

2009-06-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

MapQuest is one of the most popular online mapping services. It is one of the best sites to search for maps and directions online. Though it is not comparable to Google maps, it still is good. MapQuest has released ts first iPhone app. MapQuest 4 and it is a challenger for the iPhone's built-in mapping application. Not to forget, the default application on iPhone uses Google Maps.

The iPhone app for Mapquest focuses on finding local businesses and directions. One of the best features of the app is that it lets you save your maps and routes on the online account of Mapquest. You can have the saved map anytime anywhere on your phone. For example, you can click on the gas station icon and you’ll get a list of gas stations in and around the area.
MapQuest 4 Mobile has a number of useful features. You can also add stops to your maps. The app is not a fully dedicated GPS application but it really performs well when held in landscape mode.

MapQuest must be planning for a better version for iPhone 3.0. These will include push notifications and the ability to provide. Hopefully one would be able to use push notifications and send out alerts based on a user's location.

Facebook hires Greg Badros of Google

2009-06-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Facebook has hired Greg Badros, who is a Google Senior Director of Engineering.Badros has been a vital part of Google and he joined it in early 2003. He has already led the Google Calendar, Google Reader and Gmail team. He is the in charge of the Adsense Engineering team since 2004. He will be holding the title of “Director of Engineering” in Facebook.

Since March 2009, he has led the Application Platform group in Google. It seems like Facebook is planning to tremendously monetize its services. Badros will report to Mike Schroepfer who is a VP of Engineering (he too was hired from Mozilla by Facebook).

Before Google, Badros used to work at Go2Net which was later acquired by InfoSpace. He continued working there and so has served as the Chief Technical Architect at both companies. Here is Facebook’s official statement statement on Greg Badros:

“Greg Badros has joined Facebook as a director of engineering, reporting to Mike Schroepfer. Greg is one of the most accomplished engineering talents at Google, and it’s wonderful that he has decided to bring these talents to Facebook and take on numerous responsibilities across the engineering organization.”

iSamurai iPhone app for playing Samurai

2009-06-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to play Samurai on your IPhone? Well now you can and that too in a very cool way. iSamurai is a two-player app for iPhone that recreates real Samurai sword fighting without getting hurt. The app is based on the iPhone’s built-in motion sensor and accelerometer. It produces the sounds that make you feel like you are really playing Samurai. It connects to another player’s iPhone with peer-to-peer networking. When you play the game, it would be much like fighting with another person witha n invisible sword. So, it may take you some time to master the skills. You can buy it and play with your friend. The app comes just for 99 cents.

Here’s a video showing how iSamurai is played.

Snapstream shows trending topics on TV

2009-06-10T22:20:00.001-07:00

Snapstream, has launched its trending topics site for TV. The site is very interactive and lets you see the hot tags or keywords, i.e. the ones that are being mentioned and searched the most and also the cold words that are losing popularity on the television channels. Whats more interesting is that, you can also enter a maximum of 5 keywords into TV Trends and you’ll get a illustrative graph that compares their frequency and popularity of mentions. It actually analyses the mentions on popular news channels like FOX, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN.

Snapstream crawls closed-captioning text for programs that they record. Snapstream filters out local programming, sitcoms, and sports and then cleans-up and indexes data for the trends. When you visualize a trendy keyword, the site will give show you the excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and also lets you filter the results by network i.e. the channels they appear on. For example, you can chart trends of the mention of “New York” on CNN alone. The site also lets you embed the stats of the TV trends on your site. The gadget is powered by Google. Anyway Snapstrem provides a really good comparision chart for the TV Trends.

The latest version of Jingm Jing 2.1 out

2009-06-03T00:42:00.000-07:00

Jing is one of the most popular tools for taking screenshot and screencasts. With this tool, one cantake screenshots or record videos and save them to computer. You can also upload your screencast or screenshots to services like YouTube, flickr, and TechSmith's own Screencast.com.

Jing has launched its new version-Jing 2.1. It has lots of cool new features compared to the previous version. There is a minor change in Jing's aspect ratio feature. Now Jing lets you hold down either the Ctrl or Shift key to select the appropriate aspect ratio for your images and videos.

If you are an avid user of advanced applications like Snagit or camtasia stuido, you'll be glad to know that you can directly export your videos or images captured with Jing to Snagit or camtasia studio. While uploading to Screencast.com, you'll can now specify the folder to save your video in. For this, you simply need to create buttons for each of the folders that you wan to access using Jing. You can then choose to enable or disable commenting on those videos too. For Pro users of Jing, it can really be a boon. Pro users can now use Jing to access their webcam and capture shots of themselves from within the program. If you are using the older version of jing, you can download it from the site or directly update from the software.

Bing 411-Microsoft's 411 service

2009-06-01T20:06:00.002-07:00

After the launch of their new search engine Bing, Microsoft has come up with the subsequent launch of Bing 411. This is a counter to another Google service Goog 411. Both Goog 411 and Bing 411 are free and both use speech-to-text technology and voice recognition to completely automate directory assistance calls. GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) has been going for a while, and is surprisingly intuitive.

Bing 411 (1-800-246-4411) is great to use and it gives you local business listings, as well as local traffic. The voice in Bing 411 service sounds a bit artificial and computer generated than in Goog 411. Bing 411 can also get you a phone number, address, or directions which is a plus point. What’s more, the second time you call, it remembers your last request and you can ask for “saved searches.”

If Bing doesn’t understand understand your search, it takes you to a decision tree, asking you what type of service you are looking for.

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O

2009-05-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Google has come up with a new startup, the Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool. Through Google Wave, people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant of the conversation can add other participants in the process and edit the content. The conversations are much interactive and faster. Google wave aims at bringing instant messaging and email at a single place. The developers of Google Wave say that that Google Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today. Here’s a video on Google wave from Google I/O.

Facebook takes $200 Million Investment from Russian Investment Firm

2009-05-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

After some rumors Facebook today confirmed that it is going to receive a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading Internet investment groups in Eastern Europe. This keeps Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion. According to Mark Zuckerberg(Facebook's CEO ), around 70% of the company's users are now outside of the U.S., so cooperating with an international investment firm seemed to make sense in order to bring a global perspective to Facebook's operations.

The company Digital Sky Technologies claims to account for over 70 percent of all all page views on the Russian-speaking Internet. DST has the option to buy another $100 million worth of common stock from existing employees and investors. There are some rumors which say that Facebook is trying to raise capital to allow its employees to cash out some of their options.

Download multimedia content with Farkie

2009-05-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

Farkie is a free online tool that helps you download download scripts, videos and flash objects from websites and social networking services. This including videos from YouTube and Metacafe as well. This efficient file downloader has been in public beta for about two months now. Though there is an option for registering, you won’t need to register for using the service.

To begin download a video say from Youtube, all you need to do is copy-paste the YouTube video URL. Farkie will then let you download the video file to you in formats like MP3, WAV, AVI, WMV, MOV or FLV etc. Similar service is also provided by keepvid.com, javimoya.com etc as well. Firefox users can also use Farkei by installing an add-on that will let them download videos by just pasting URL and hitting a button.

Farkie is also a boon for Myspace users. Entering the URL to a public MySpace profile into Farkie and clicking download, you can easily extract the playlist from the page and display all of the songs found in the list and then download the whole bunch of sungs in MP3 format. You can also use Farkie to download scripts, stylesheets and images from any website, or to scrape Flash games from the online gaming sites. So, Farkie can be the ultimate tool for download multimedia from websites across the world.

Collecta: Real-Time Search Engine to Launch Soon

2009-05-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

Collecta is building up as a real-time search engine. The site is currently not available for people to do searches of but they can see the real time updates for some trending topics like Obama or Swine flu just a sample.

On these sample pages, you can see the related items from Blogs, Twitter, Flickr and also the comments containing the given term in real time. The site is is set to be open for everyone this month and it will come with an API as well.

Currently, the results that are displayed are the ones just containing the term despite much relevancy. There isn't a link-indexing system in place and just a steady stream of data that may be in some way related to the search term. The website states about Collecta saying, "the web's most powerful real time search engine" remains to be seen. We'll be staying tuned for the full launch later this month.

Collecta's team includes CEO Gerry Campbell, formerly president of search and content technologies for Reuters, SVP of search for AOL, and AltaVista strategist.

Blah Girls now on TV as well

2009-05-13T20:07:00.002-07:00

Ashton Kutcher first started off on the small screen and later through the MTV show Punk’d he paved his way to become a movie star. He had recently beat CNN being the first user with a million Twitter followers. He also has runs his web-based show Blah Girls. And now he is bringing the show on Television.

Katalyst Media, the production company Kutcher runs with Jason Goldberg, just signed a deal with CBS Television Distribution (CTD) to launch Blah Girls on television. The show will run as one-minute interstitials between the on the entertainment magazine show, The Insider. The show has been on the web since its launch last June. And CBS has a larger development deal with Katalyst Media, so this is simply an extension of that.

Well its a topic to wonder that that Kutcher is taking the show to television after going on and on about how his race to a million followers showed. He wants to make more money out of his online venture by distributing it on the TV. But Blah Girls will continue on the web as well.

Google Offering Training Services for Hyperlocal News in Europe

2009-05-11T19:16:00.001-07:00

The New York Times mentioned this weekend of a particularly interesting project in the Czech Republic. Google is providing its local staff to train reporters in one hyperlocal news network by using services like Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube.

An Amsterdam based holding company PPF and the Paris based World Association of Newspapers are funding a project that will launch 30 different websites covering hyperlocal news throughout the Czech Republic. Google is ready to provide technical training and the sites will be monetized using Adsense in exchange. The project has hired 90 mostly young reporters who will work out of offices with public coffee and internet shops built into the facilities.

There are lots of different factors at issue and Eric Pfanner in the Times says "think garbage collection schedules, not Group of 7 diplomacy." If Google and other online specialists could help more newspapers rock like LJWorld.com does, then things could really look up for local news.

To be fair, some people attribute LJWorld's success to its monopoly across different media types. The company has been wildly innovative in terms of types of content, and interactivity and the creation of a content management system (Django) that is now used by newspapers around the world. The company even offers an RSS feed of their most-clicked classified ads and displays those in a widget throughout the site.

MTV to use Twitter and Facebook to power its new flagship show

2009-04-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

MTV has announced plans to a launch a show that taps into the power of social media, tightly integrating with Facebook and Twitter to maximize fan interaction. The show will be hosted by British celebrity and model Alexa Chun and the airing will start this summer. Back in the late 90’s, an MTV show called Total Request Live was a staple in dictating what was hot in popular music. That show gradually lost steam over time (it was finally canceled in late 2008) and while MTV has maintained some succcessful properties, it’s lacking a flagship show that its audience tunes into on a daily basis. Its viewership is down 18% for the first three months of this year.

The show will include MTV’s standard variety of celebrities and musical performances, but and will include real-time from Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to interact with the show as it airs. Besides, Facebook and Twitter users will be able to upload their favorite videos (including those they’ve filmed themselves) through a RockYou application.

Audience interaction has been a part of MTV since long. Even in the TRL days it often featured messages sent in by fans, and the videos that appeared on the show were dictated by audience voting via phone and online. But Twitter and Facebook offer the network to stay directly connected with fans and followers and let them have their say in real-time, broadcasting frequent updates even when the show isn’t on the air. Lets see if the show really rocks.

Show related posts on your blog with LinkWithin

2009-04-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, most of the blogging platforms feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on blogs, or even from other blogs on. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recentness. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a related images from posts, which makes it far more attractive.

The plugin is available for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger, You can also do it with a code snippet that you can use on other blogging platforms. LinkWithin does some semantic analysis in the background in order to arrive at its list of related stories.

However there are a few Caveats. Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme. LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges and so this is not sure to go well with all sorts of themes. It would be great if you could actually customize the display settings. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories that will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts. If you want to show the related posts on your blog in a cool way, you should give LinkWithin a try.

StumbleUpon goes back to its founders

2009-04-14T09:33:00.001-07:00

The founders of StumbleUpon have bought it back from eBay. Two years after Stumble founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith cashed out and handed stumbleupon over to ebay, they've come back with a team of investors and bought StumbleUpon back from eBay. It's pretty exciting.

In the company’s blog post it has been said,

After nearly two years as a subsidiary of eBay, today StumbleUpon returns to being an independent company. StumbleUpon is now backed by myself and co-founder Geoff Smith, along with several great investors who’ve backed companies such as Google and Facebook.

StumbleUpon had hit 7 million registered users last year, which was at the time 50% higher than the number of Twitter's users. Twitter's users have dramatically increased this year though.

Both Twitter and StumbleUpon, though, are tools of discovery, sharing and social connection. They are different in some ways but similar in others. There's a special kind of magic to StumbleUpon, though, and we're very glad to see its founders back in the driver's seat. A web where Twitter and Facebook are the only social discovery games in town is a poorer web.

In the company’s blog post it is further said that:

This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus - helping people discover interesting web content. Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there.
Thanks to everyone for helping make this happen. While there will be some internal changes at SU, it will not impact the Stumbling experience and will help us create the best possible product. We are really excited about this change, and hope you are as well.

Lets see if the original founders of StumbleUpon will take it to the new heights.

Twitter affected by a worm from StockDaily

2009-04-12T06:35:00.001-07:00

Twitter has been infected by a worm originating from the owners of the website StalkDaily. Don’t visit this website even to see how it looks like, it may harm your computer. Visiting the Twitter profile of an infected user can lead your profile to become infected as well (some reports say that the worm modifies your ‘About Me’ section to include a link to the worm). Infected users begin to repeatedly spam tweets directing users to the StalkDaily website.

The attack originated early this morning, when a couple of blog posts sprouted up giving details of the worm. It is only now hitting critical mass, with hundreds of related Tweets appearing on Twitter Search in the last few minutes alone. Twitter’s official Spam watching account updated this morning stating that the company was aware of the issue. It also says that the issue had been mostly resolved, and just issued another update stating that it was aware of the worm’s resurgence this afternoon. For the time being, it would probably be better to stick with a third party Twitter client like twhirl, tweetdeck and avoiding viewing profile pages of other people until the company confirms that the issue is resolved. But some say that the attack may have started from one of the third-party twitter applications through which the worm took up the login credentials(username and password).

Twitter has recently claimed that the issue has been fixed. It has tweeted like this:

Update on StalkDaily.com Worm 36 minutes ago
Earlier today we were informed of a malicious site that was spreading links to StalkDaily.com on Twitter without user consent via a cross-site scripting vulnerability. We’ve taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this “worm” to spread.

No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.

After this update by Twitter, the StockDaily website has stated that it has no involvement with the spamming and infiltrating twitter. It says,

For everyone wondering, I did NOT promote and/or was involved with the spamming ON Twitter. All bad things you are hearing about this site is not true. Please reconsider as I am not the person who did this…StalkDaily is a website that follows the same functions as Twitter, except more advanced How? Well, instead of just adding an “update status”, people can add pictures and videos. Then you can stalk them, so when they upload a video or picture, or comment someone, you’ll know!

Lets hope Twitter remains away from these sort of worms in future.

Evan Williams answers questions regarding Twitter

2009-04-10T00:45:00.001-07:00

Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams on the Web video show Tekzilla in an interview conducted by Veronica Belmont on-stage last week at the Web 2.0 Expo answered many interesting questions submitted by the audience via Twitter. The first question was asked seeking his advice that would he give to someone trying to build their own startup. Evan William’s answer was:

The core thing would be just do something awesome. Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up on what the geek subculture thinks. There’s lots of valuable businesses that can be built there, but I think that is where a lot of people tend to spin their wheels, and I’ve been caught up there before. When I’ve had more successful things, I’ve thought, “Back to basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?” And create that.

Twitter’s Evan Williams was also asked for his opinion on Facebook’s Twitter-like redesign. He said that he is impressed and hints that some of the things Facebook did is on Twitter’s own design roadmap. About Twitter’s plan making an easier framework to share videos and photos, perhaps with inline viewing of Twitter, Evan William answered:

Yeah, I think we should support images and video better than we do today, it does not mean we should host them, maybe viewing inline. I don’t want to get into competition with Youtube. Twitter is lubricant for Web content.

When asked about a business model, Evan Williams answered saying that Twitter will be experimenting with different approaches, but that for now it is still a “secondary” concern to building out the service. He though added that Twitter won’t let posting beyond 140 characters in any case.

Seesmic Desktop to be released, a probable rival of TweetDeck?

2009-04-08T10:39:00.001-07:00

The owner of Seesmic, Loïc Le Meur announced a TweetDeck rival known as Seesmic Desktop that not only looks a lot like the popular AIR application (more popular than any other desktop client according to statistics) but also heavily competes with it on a feature level. TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth, not to be outdone by the announcements, sent an e-mail out to his contacts just now about an upgraded version of the software which should be available for download real soon (update: should be automatically pushed from now on - or get it here).

The new version of TweetDeck (v0.25) will also include a number of bug fixes and new features, including a Digg URL shortener, support for Spotify URLs (so you can play a song from a tweeted link directly in the Spotify player), previewing of TwitPic images inside the desktop app and preview of information about short URLs within the application before opening the link.

The biggest new feature being rolled out to everyone today is Facebook integration, so you’ll be able to view your Facebook friends’ status updates in a new column alongside your Twitter updates. You can also see when your Facebook friends are online and start a chat with them from within TweetDeck, simply by clicking their name. However, you cannot comment on their status message from within the client. This is of course making TweetDeck more a lifestreaming service than a Twitter client, so it might have to change its name if it keeps on adding integrations with other services.

Associates won’t be allowed now onwards to bring in traffic via paid search in Amazon

2009-04-06T09:53:00.001-07:00

Amazon has planned to make changes to its Associates program, Now third parties won’t be allowed to bid on keywords that would send visitors straight to Amazon websites where they’d earn a referral fee for each purchase. But this only implies to the North American Associates.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

Amazon is not much communicative about the reason behind this step, and the FAQ on its website only cites that it is based on ‘their review of how they invest their advertising resources’. This may be because it costs Amazon a lot of money, but at the same time it necessarily cannot be a reason to block Associates from using paid search as a way to bring in traffic during normal times. It can also agitate the degrading economic condition. In this case paid search underperforms contextual links when it comes to sales referrals.

Technorati cuts down 10 Percent of its Employees

2009-04-03T01:51:00.001-07:00

Technorati has announced close to 10 percent of its staff. The 10 percent cut off means a deduction of 4 employees at Technorati as it will be left with 37 employees after the deduction. The company’s CEO says that they the layoff was necessary for the company’s profit. Not to forget, last September, Technorati had to layoff 6 employees.

The CEO says that the number of blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Richard Jalichandra says that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible.

Jalichandra maintains that Twitter and Facebook are other great platforms for blogs to get popular. Technorati is beginning to track activity on those platforms as well. The traffic to Technorati is decreasing worldwide.

Is Hunch the encyclopedia of all Answers?

2009-03-29T19:09:00.001-07:00

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake has announced the release or Hunch in private beta. The helps users make decisions in a wide range of topics, say something like Yahoo Answers. Hunch presents people with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, and then use the answers and suggestions to help them make their right decision.

The site has a huge database and the interface is very clean. Users are presented with a handful of featured topics on the homepage, most of which have been ‘played’ through many times before so they have complete sets of questions and answers. Users are also encouraged to answer basic questions regarding themselves and the widget looks very promising in attracting the visitors and enticing them to answer the questions. The questions used to analyze users are very interesting.

Skype for iPhone-very soon

2009-03-26T23:54:00.001-07:00

Skype, the leader in VoIP service is to announce an application for the iPhone at next week's wireless CTIA tradeshow in Las Vegas. Tech Blogger Om Malik of Gigaom is pretty much sure about this as he says that he was informed by a reliable source about this. The company is hosting a press conference Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas the day before the show kicks off and it is hoped that it will be announced on that day.

Skype’s chief operating officer Scott Durchslag, had already said earlier this year that it's working on an application for the iPhone and would be soon available from the Apple’s Store. He said, "We have to make sure the call quality is there and the application works really well before we can announce the software for any device, But we will have something for the iPhone as soon as it's perfect."

Skype has 450 million registered users worldwide and launching an application for iPhone which has become immensely popular is sure to boost its business. By putting the peer-to-peer service, which uses the Internet to carry voice traffic, onto a mobile phone, it becomes very convenient to use. The Skype service till now is limited to a desktop application requiring a mic or a special phone, and as an application for the Windows mobile and some models of Nokia. Skype worked with iSkoot to develop a special Skype phone that is sold by some of the cell phone operators. Skype has gained much popularity and an upsurge in its business because of low-cost internation calls anywhere in the world.

Before iPhone users get too much excited about the Skype application for iPhone, there's probably a big catch. The new Skype app for the iPhone will likely be restricted to Wi-Fi networks only, as Apple has done to other third-party services like Fring, which offers access to Skype. In this case, the application won’t get much popular as they will need to find a Wi-Fi friendly area for using.

Find images on Google based on Color

2009-03-24T10:02:00.001-07:00

Google Image Search has now got a bit advanced. It has added a new option that lets you filter your search results based on their color. Well, you’ll say I’m wrong because you won’t find any intuitive options in the user interface. But tweaking around with the search queries will bring up some good results.

Try something like purple flowers. You’ll find a lot of images of purple flowers but may also get some irrelevant results. This is mainly based on the alt tag or the text associated with the image. But modifying the URL a bit can bring some really amazing results. Try this one now, copy this code and paste it in the address bar of your browser.

http://images.google.com/images?q=flower&imgcolor=purple

This will give you more relevant results than simply the query “purple flowers”. Here the item you want to find will come after “q=” and the color type after “&imgcolor=”. For example, you can search for green flowers by replacing purple above with green.

Try some more and see how fine the results are.

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for testing sites in Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer

2009-03-22T01:42:00.000-07:00

If you make websites, you might be familiar with the fact that all browsers don't give the same kind of preview for a page in many cases. You will find differences even in the same browser of different versions. Well if you want to test how a page looks like in IE's old and new versions, Expression Web Super Preview might be of help. This new tool from Microsoft allows you to preview websites in multiple Internet Explorer browsers simultaneously, without having them installed. This release of this beta version was announced at the MIX09 Developer Conference.

In its blog, Microsoft Expression Web community has expressed that the versions of Internet Explorer made available within SuperPreview will vary as the version of IE installed on the computer.If you have the latest version of IE, you'll be able to use Expression Web Super Preview for viewing your site on all the previous versions. Like if you have IE 8, you can use the software for viewing your page in IE6, i.e. to see how it will look like in IE6. You can download the software here.

Expression Web SuperPreview also lets you compare a site side-by-side with a zoom level available upto 500%. Or you can also minimize the preview by zooming it out upto 21% and while you scroll to zoom in or out, the previews are synchroinized for both new and old versions.

To campare the page elements, you can also simply drage the rulers at required spots and then see how the page elements are aligned in each browsers. You cn also compare using the screenshots of websites in older and newer versions of IE using image capturing softwares like Snagit.

The premium version of Microsoft Expression Web Super Preview will not only support internet explorer but also support other browsers like Safari and Firefox. Webdesigner Depot also reports the application will eventually support multiple browser sizes as well as analytzing the page in computers with different screen resolutions.So, Microsoft Expression Web Super Preview can be a great tool for comparing a website across different browsers.

Social media aggregation by Streamy

2009-03-20T01:56:00.001-07:00

Streamy a real-time news reading and sharing site is now open publicly after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. Streamy lets you bring together your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts at a single place and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Interesting stories and social media services will be recommended to you automatically via its cool user interface.

You can use Streamy as a RSS aggregator to read your feeds as well. You can follow other users, share posts with your followers, and even chat with them. Streamy is also going to implement Facebook Connect for signing in to Facebook, and all of your friends from other networks will be synchronized as well. The homepage of Streamy greets you with the updates from your friends from all social media services.

Streamy currently lets you import your Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and FriendFeed accounts, and from within Streamy, you can easily update your status on thse . Streamy is one of the first services that uses authentication through oAuth. Streamy also features a chat function (including group chat), which used to be at the core of the original service, but now it focuses more on what it is supposed to be, a very powerful social media aggregator. The cool AJAX interface lets you drag and drop almost everything even your favorite sites as you would drag and drop to your bookmark bar.

All in all, Streamy is a very powerful social media aggregator and the cool interface is really amazing. Watch this video featuring Streamy.

Facebook's New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness

2009-03-17T10:37:00.001-07:00

Facebook has new privacy settings now which let you selectively open up portions of your profile to everyone on Facebook. As an alternative to the new "Public Profiles" (formerly called "Pages"), These additional settings allow users to choose the parts of your private that are available for anyone making it easy for people to see profiles without becoming friends.

Individuals have now a better option than Public Profiles. Anyone who finds you on Facebook from anywhere can click through to see the parts of your profile you wish to show to others. These are the elements that one can choose to make available for everyone or keep private.

Profile, Status Updates, Personal Info, Education Info, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Work Info, Photos of You and Videos of You.

These privacy settings can be used to make any part of a user’s personal profile public. This thing is different from the Public Profiles that were really only effective for businesses or other large companies who needed to communicate with a very large audience.

One downside is that with this option, one is not allowed to have one-way friendship over Facebook. Hopefully, Facebook will still consider putting one-way friendships to let people share their content with anyone.

UnHub Offers A Simple Way To Showcase The Online You

2009-03-17T09:23:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of online applications that help you bring all your networks in one place making your work easy. A newly lanuched service UnHub lets you manage your online identities from a single place.

It creates a persistent iframe bar with tabs for all your online presences (e.g. your blog, Facebook profile, Twitter stream, Flickr profile, blog comments etc.) and link them to a dedicated URL that is like any other URL on the web and can be easily shared with others. For example, i can register a page which would be like, UnHub.com/skydweller or UnHub.com/techattitude. UnHub profiles also come with analytics functionalities of basic types making it easy for you to track down what the most popular tabs for your presence are based on the number of clicks.

Due to a short and easy to remember URL, people can use it anywhere they like, on their blogs, messenger status or elsewhere as many services like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. are integrated into it. The company says that soon one would also be able to use his/her own domain name which will make it even more interesting.

So, why not try it? You can Watch this video from the website.

UnHub Demo from Vinicius Vacanti on Vimeo.

Facebook Connect for iPhone

2009-03-15T03:08:00.001-07:00

Facebook has announced that Facebook Connect is now also available as iPhone and iPod Touch applications. This new feature will work works just as same as it works on other Web pages. Facebook connect is a great applications for sharing your data with your friends on Facebook. But the trust on this company seems to be flimsy as issues have been raised in the past about the user privacy.

With Facebook connect for iPhone, developers can easily enable their applications without having to write a whole thing from the scratch. Users can easily share their data with their friends right from the iPhone via the Facebook Connect Application.

Facebook is undoubtedly, the most popular social network on the web. But the problems that Facebook connect would flood might be alarming as spammers or other advertisers may send data to the Facebook and users might be compelled to see it even before they could choose to skip it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's had also stated realizing the problems it could bring: "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."

Facebook Connect for iPhone will surely be beneficial for the Facebook users loving to use it on iPhone but should we trust facebook regarding the privacy.

Get Friendfeed updates on your desktop

2009-03-13T19:04:00.001-07:00

Social media and network aggregator, Friendfeed has just released an application for displaying updates on Friendfeed right on your desktop. The alerts will be shown on your desktop and you won’t need to visit the site to see your friends’ updates. Friendfeed already has a service letting you see the real-time notifications over IM also letting you add quick comments and other stuff via short commands.

With the desktop application, you can choose your friends and groups the updates of whom you’d love to see on your desktop. You can also set up a Friendfeed group containing your dearest ones and receive updates whenever they comment or post something.

This desktop application also allows you to comment on your friends but makes the task a bit cheesy as it opens up a new browser window to do so. If you have a lot of friends who are active on social networks, blogs etc, you will have to scroll down a heck of a lot to see all those updates. It would be better if there would be an option for filtering out updates only in some preferred criteria.

Anyway this desktop widget is a cool one and will save your time and make you at ease to some extent.

Train horns-meant for safety

2009-03-12T09:50:00.001-07:00

Do you know about train horns? Well many of you may say yes and others may say no. You may have come across it but may not know much about it. Well a train horn is a device used to create a loud audible noise for alerting people and animals and are mostly found on diesel and electronic vehicles.

Either it may be while entering or exiting a tunnel or approaching railroads or grade crossings the driver must sound the Trains horn to alert people for their safety. Train horns are also used for acknowledging the signals given by railroad employees.

The trends of blowing train horns differ widely. Generally a train horn is blown twice, one for a short time and one for long. This is repeated in the 15 seconds up until the lead carriage has actually reached the crossing. But the way they are blown differ variously. In France, train horns are sounded only at certain hours of the day. And the horns should also be sounded while approaching other trains.

To find more about train horns, I looked through many sites. This can be bought at many places where you can find train horns, air horns etc. I had come across a site while looking for train horn kits which was really awesome. If you need to buy train horns, train horn kits, air horns etc., then this is the best site to look for.

Well train horns are a great device for ensuring safety of the people.

SocialMedia’s user-defined social ads

2009-03-12T09:01:00.001-07:00

SocialMedia, has released a new form of advertising called the “WOMI”, or Word of Mouth Impression. It present visitors with ads and asks multiple choice question or use a text field while showing ads. SocialMedia uses this input to customize ads to show them on the social network of a user’s friends.

Their responses are passed on to their friends. Actually this is a kind of viral marketing. This makes the ads mini-social applications can be fruitful for trial campaigns.

The Dynamic Logic research campaign came to know that in over three months WOMI has created much awareness and favorability. The campaign succeeded to perform well and placed among a major portion of all social media campaigns ever analyzed by the firm.

WOMIs are compatible with industry-standard IAB ad sizes(like the 125x125 ones). Due to this, they can be shown on most of the websites, blogs and social networks without tweaking around with the settings. SocialMedia claims that publishers who aren't in the social networks can also place the ads.If users aren't into viewing any sort of ads, there will be options for turning it off as well. You can watch this video.

Listen and share music with DropPlay

2009-03-12T00:57:00.001-07:00

DropPlay has launched its new social-enabled music site proclaiming itself the perfect streaming music service. Integrating the resources of the cloud-based applications like Facebook Connect and the YouTube API, DropPlay has come up with a sitesite that lets you organizes and share your favorite YouTube music and also your playlists. The site uses Facebook Connect to store the sharing data related to a profile.

DropPlay describes itself as a combination of iTunes, Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. You can easily search your favorite music, bookmark them, organize tracks into a playlist and watch them just in a matter of a few clicks. Or if you want to share the songs with your friends on Facebook, you can simply drag and drop the songs into your friends’ name.

The interface is really very cool and the site calls itself a combination of iTunes, Youtuve, Facebook and Pandora. You can create your playlists with the desired songs but cannot export them. The music and playlist sharing can only be done through Facebook and no other social networks. It would have been great if the site added integration with other social networks as well. And one more thing is that, due to lack of the link to the original Youtube video, it might be very difficult if you need to locate the same video on Youtube.

Lets see how DropPlay enhances music listening, bookmarking and sharing on the go.

Meehive-your all in one customized newspaper

2009-03-11T08:32:00.001-07:00

MeeHive, a new service launched today aims at giving people a custom newspaper or a tabloid composed of stories and articles from different sources mostly the popular news sites. The site uses the resources of a universal search engine called Kosmix that gathers data from a variety of sources producing great aggregated pages. Users can find pages on any of their favorite topics on the site, entering the required keywords.

MeeHive builds a digital newspaper, using the updated and fresh content from a variety of trusted sources including news sites like CNN, BBC and also the popular blogs in the blogosphere. The Kosmix authority algorithm is used which is supposed to work well, pulling in the relevant stories, filtering out the false unauthorized content and making sure that an information is not duplicated.

The site also shows the most recent Tweets relevant to the favorite topics. People can also opt to read the stuff on their favorite topics directly in their email or on iPhone via the site’s iPhone application. Users can also share the items they liked with friends, making their reading more interesting. Such a combination of news and updates can also be gathered through feed aggregators but this site has made it easy for almost anyone with basic knowledge of computer.

Gamers can now enjoy Browser based group chat service from Voxli

2009-03-09T19:26:00.001-07:00

Voxli, is planning to make group voice chat simpler than ever before. With the service, gamers can now have a group chat session and enjoy push-to-talk using a browser plugin by visiting a static persistent URL. Currently this is available on Internet Explorer and Firefox (both Mac and Windows) and the company plans to bring support for more browsers soon.

Chat clients like Ventrilo, TeamSpeak etc. are available in the market since long but one needs to enter port numbers and server addresses manually which can be a bit to geeky for some gamers. But with Voxli, one can get a static URL so that they can chat with their team very easily and quickly.

Now as the service is in public beta(1-2 months), Voxli will be free for everyone, and users can use it without having to register. But the downside is that, one cannot restrict anyone access to his chat room, so there is a vulnerability for scams. But when Voxli will begin charging users for its service, this bug will eventually tail off.

Voxli’s service is mainly targeted to appeal the gamers, who need to speak very often with their play mates while playing team based games. Games like World of Warcraft, Rise of Nations have made voice chat a necessity, because a number of players are involved as a team.

Users need to assign a hotkey in their chat room that can bring up Voxli whenever the hotkey is pressed. Around 200 users can be handled in a chat room, and gamers opening new tabs will let gamers to chat with others if they like. In such a case they’ll need to assign a different hot key.

Manage the list of people you follow on Twitter

2009-03-06T17:20:00.001-08:00

If you are following lots of people(a few hundreds or a thousand) on Twitter, it’s difficult to track updates of all of them, their update frequency and so on. There are some people who tweet after many days’ gap and you think it unwise to follow such people. But, how’ll you know who these lazy twitterers are? Well Twitoria, a very nice Twitter tool helps you.

You just need to enter your username (password not required) and then select the period of inactivity from a drop down list which includes for past week, 2 weeks, month, 2 months, 6 months and 1 year. You’ll then see a page with the username of the inactive users that you’re following, their number of followers, their latest tweets and the period of their inactivity, i.e. the time they last posted their tweet.

But due to Twitter’s public API, only a maximum of 100 friends activities can be seen on a page. So, if you are following a lot of people who are inactive for sometime, then you’ll need to skim through a lot of pages. That is really tiresome, isn't it?

This can be a really helpful tool if you want to filter out the active users from the inactive ones. Well it would have been great if one could directly login from the site and then stop following a certain user after seeing his passiveness on twitter. Well if you want to spread a word about twitoria, click on a link at the bottom of the page saying the same.

WaTunes to distribute music of independent artists for free

2009-03-06T16:31:00.001-08:00

WaTunes, a service that helps putting the music from independent artists on online music stores like iTunes and Amazon, has announced that its service can now be enjoyed for free. There are also other services like TuneCore, that help independent artists get their music online but charge fees.

The company’s CEO writes:

“We’ve went from being free to be charged, to giving 90% of sales, to giving back all the sales earnings. We’ve finally can say that we have raise the bar even higher by providing you guys an ABSOLUTE digital distribution service. As of now, WaTunes will enable it’s customers to continue to sell unlimited music, earn 100% of the royalties, and more, ALL FOR FREE! There are no fees, cancellations, no gimmicks.”

So, after making its service free for independent artists, the company seems to make no money directly. But the site’s CEO explains that the site is planning to launch a music based social network like MySpace Music where users can buy songs. The company plans to make money from it.

$4.5 million raised for turning mobile phones to Servers

2009-03-05T00:46:00.001-08:00

A Swedish mobile company Conveneer raised an amount of $4.5 million for turning Mobile phones to servers. The company previously raised money from the founders and Teknoseed.

The mobile platform Mikz that Conveneer is building will be able to assign a URL to mobile phones, making the content on phones accessible on the Web. Like if your phone has a URL like http://mymobile.me.uk, other Web applications and services can access the data that is present in your phone. Mikz can pull vital information from your phone like your contacts, photos, ringtones, music and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.

The company is convincing both handset manufacturers mobile service providers to add the service in new phones. Carriers can provide all customers their own mobile URL. But carriers are likely to charge extra for this service.

A few weeks ago, an iPhone application called ServersMan@iPhone was launched which could turn your iPhone to a webserver.

Global stats tool by statcounter

2009-03-04T23:12:00.001-08:00

The market share and trends in technology about the popular and most used Web Browsers, Search Engines, Operating Systems and Mobile Internet across the world, are matters of interest to many people. Now with the global stats tool created by Statcounter, it will be easy for you.

The web analytics company, Statcounter records the number of visitors for millions of websites and tracks about 4 billion page views per month So, the data relayed from Statcounter can be really trustworthy to much extents.

Besides just browsers on a PC, the tool also tracks the visitors surfing from mobile web browsers. In America, safari browser for iPhone and iPod touch are popular while in Asia, Opera is the most popular mobile web browser.

One can create real-time charts from the Statcounter tool as the data is updated 5 times a day. The data can also be filtered specifying various constraints like country, region or trends.

StatCounter allows you to download graphs as images as well.You can access raw CSV data and edit in Excel or embed the graphs in your site or blog.

Skype giving away new silk audio codec

2009-03-03T21:17:00.001-08:00

Skype has announced that its speech codec SILK will be made available to third party licensees for free. Skype’s GM Jonathan Christensen will be highlighting more on this topic in San Francisco.

The codec is available for third party users on a royalty free basis. Skype claims that SILK can beat all of the codecs available in the market like iSac, AMRWideband and the open source codec Speex.

The Mac version of the SILK will probably come in April. SILK is a great codec and if both people calling over Skype have a version of Skype that includes the new codec, the call quality increases. Skype says that it is giving it away to set greater standards in the VoIP services industry. Skype has 400 million registered users worldwide so it doesn’t need to worry about the competitors.

The Skype API allows developers to access only the limited features of the service. If Skype were opens its calling functions as an open service, the number of applications that would come up in future would be staggeringly large in number.

istockphoto is hit by phising attack

2009-03-03T20:58:00.001-08:00

One of the most popular site for stock images the istockphoto has been hit by a phising attack. The users trying to login to their account have been asked to change their passwords and you can see that the site is down.

The authority of the site has given a brief explanation, “This afternoon a phishing attack was conducted in the forums and through sitemail. This attack created a fake istockphoto.com login screen, prompting users for a username & password, saved them to a malicious server, then redirected the user back to the iStockphoto main page.”

The site is taken down to prevent more vulnerabilities. Lets see if istockphoto will come up soon.

Evan Williams predicts that Twitter will be a part of life for Normal people in five years

2009-03-02T20:36:00.001-08:00

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said on last Friday on Charlie Rose and says that, Twitter will be something “that normal people do” within five years.He says that Twitter can be compared to the early days when just a few people had started blogging and most people weren’t into it.

Now as blogs have become so addictive for people, both readers and writers, he predicts that Twitter will be the same to people in the coming days. People are finding Twitter to be a very valuable mode of communication. Everyone from normal people, to professional bloggers and even the giants like CNN, BBC, Google etc. are getting into Twittering. So, I guess it won’t even take 5 years.

Watch this video to see what Evan Williams says about the future of Twitter.

Google Toolbar 6 for internet explorer

2009-03-01T17:59:00.001-08:00

Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer, has been released as a beta version. It doesn't have too many new features.The Google Notebook functionality has been removed, the "new tab" page from Google Chrome is displayed when you open a new tab. The Quick Search Box which is a component of Google Toolbar 6 is already available for iPhone and Mac. But some unrelated items have been bundled.

Google explains this way,"Sometimes, multi-tasking on the computer can be a maddening process if you have to constantly switch between different programs and files. Try using the Quick Search Box: it lets you easily search both your computer and the Web from a slick-looking search box that comes up only when you need it,"

The new application can be launched by clicking on the Google logo on the taskbar. If you love keyboard shortcuts, you can also do it by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space. the program launcher is actually a very good and useful feature.

Quick Search Box is similar to the homonymous feature from Google Desktop, which only shows results from your computer. The Quick Search Box should have been better if bundled with Google Desktop and it is likely to confuse Google Desktop users. This Quick Search Box doesn't offer enough functionality and is unmatched with Windows Vista's search box.

World of Warcraft, the most dangerous computer game

2009-02-28T16:05:00.001-08:00

Do your kids play online games on the computer? If yes then you should begin getting conscious about the time they spend on it. From kids to youths, everyone seem to be addicted to online games these days, but it is said that no more than 2 hours of online gaming is good for health. If people around you seem to be addicted to World of warcraft(a very popular MMORPG), you should warn them as a Swedish youth organization specializing in game addiction says that “World of Warcraft is the crack cocaine of the computer world.”

In the organization’s report, Sven Rollenhagen, claims, "There is not a single case of game addiction that we have worked with in which World of Warcraft has not played a part." World of Warcraft holds the highest risk of addiction. The child for the report is a 15-year old Swedish boy who collapsed after playing World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King for 24 hours straight. The boy could have survived had his parents taken some control over his gaming addiction as World of Warcraft has a wide range of settings for parental control. Parents can set start and stop times for any day of the week.

So, be careful not to get to much obsessed with online games like World of Warcraft.

Ebay faces counterfeiting issues while its on low share

2009-02-28T15:40:00.001-08:00

Ebay’s shares are down by 23% and is now in the lowest economic level since 2001.

Highlighting the problem of counterfeit merchandise sold on the site, that the company provided a tip to German police for seizing 20 tons of designer clothing last month. Bloomberg says that though it is good to see eBay taking a serious attempt on reducing fake goods, the company should fix the issue. Jeffrey Lindsay Bernstein, a Research analyst notes in the story- eBay is “only as good as its worst seller in the minds of its customers.”

The story also says that eBay has been sued by a number of luxury brands for not doing enough to insure fakes and counterfeits. Some of these are, Moet Hennessy Louis Vuittton, L’Oreal, LVMH Rolex and Hermes International.

eBay CEO John Donahoe and CFO Bob Swan have spoken at the Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco indicating no imminent further reduction in insertion fees, but that they will trend lower over time. They also said that the company is ready to sell Skype, the VoIP software at the right price.

Twitter toolbar can be a boon for harcore twitterers

2009-02-28T06:01:00.001-08:00

If you frequently tweet about your favorite sites or stuff you are doing, an easy to use Twitter tool is something that you need utterly. Well, you might think of using desktop applications but wouldn’t it be easy if you use a tool that will neatly be integrated with your Firefox browser? Well twitter toolbar can be of help.

Twitter Toolbar for Firefox is a tool made by Dan Hollings, the creator of “100 World's Greatest Twitter Tips and Twitter Secrets”. The creator of this tools calls it “My Twitter Toolbar”. The tool is free to download. This is very helpful and easy to use at it lies on the upper part of your firefox browser the same way as your Google Toolbar. It has a small drop down of common Twitter updates for quick entry. Linking to your site is easier than ever with this tool. And most of that, you won’t have to leave your favorite website for tweeting.

The toolbar is installed as a firefox addon and after you install it, you can check it inside your addons to see if it properly installed.

Diomede for cloud-based green file storage

2009-02-28T05:40:00.001-08:00

A new storage company called Diomede has been launched in private beta with an aim to offer low cost cloud-based storage that it claims to be energy efficient. Diomede allows customers to set file attributes to place them as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. Most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating all the time. These files have an access time which can be of five minutes or four hours. You’ll need an invitation code to try out this service.

The Application Programming Interface(API) has been provided for developers, that will allow them to make other applications using its resources and also allows them to view the power consumption and other details of the file. The applications may allow developers to set their redundant file backups to ‘offline’, and the cost is far less than the normal cost.

Deomede is under Steve Iverson, who was CEO of MediaMax, a file storage company with that was closed last year.