Month: September 2008

MischMasch 2008-09-26

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Already last week Twitter refreshed the design of their web site, rounded some corners, moved the navigation to the right sidebar, implementing Ajax and offering new design themes.

On tuesday T-Mobile and Google presented the first Androide phone called T-Mobile G1. It will be shipped October 22nd in the USA and will cost $179. Some of the features mentioned are a QWERTY keyboard, instant messaging, Google Maps with Street View and Compass View, a web browser based on WebKit, access to Amazon.com MP3 Downloads and more. The video of the T-Moble G1 press conference is avaiable online.

Yahoo! announced it’s new digital ad platform APT, a web-based platform that offers a simplified work flow process to streamline the ad buying process across multiple accounts and publishers. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

The New York Times launched a social network on the newspaper’s website called TimesPeople. Users can share recommendations, ratings and comments with other New York Times readers. It’s also possible to search for people or to import contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail or Windwos Live. More information on the About TimesPeople page. (via Profy)

This week Technorati is releasing a five part series on their annual State of the Blogosphere.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced that they aquired the comment system Intense Debate. (Via WordPress.com Blog)

Moreover some Google news. Google Contacts is the standalone contacts page that is part of Google Mail. Google Reader added some new features like adding tags to notes, switching between alphabetical ordering and drag n’ drop ordering and last-crawl-date for feeds. New in Google Labs are Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) and Google In Quotes. And Google has acquired Korean blogging platform Textcube.

MischMasch 2008-09-12

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Dropbox is an application to share and store files online. I have been using it already for some time while it has been in private beta. Files that are put in the Dropbox folder are automatically stored online and can also be accessed through the web interface. Today Dropbox finally launched to the public.

Flickr rolled out a sneak preview of the new Flickr home page. After switching to the new interface there are more photos from contacts and photos from groups on the home page. Users can minimize the sections they are not interested in. Moreover there is an activity stream showing the recent activities on the photostream. Pro users can access statistics directly from the home page now. More information on the new design on the Flickr Blog.

MischMasch 2008-09-10

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

During the TechCrunch50 Conference 2008 Marissa Mayer announced Google News Archive Search that makes old newspapers accessible and searchable online. It was already fascinating to read articles in The Times Archive going back to 1785. But now the Google News Archive Search offers an amazing amount of historical newspaper articles. There is more information about the Google News Archive Search in the Official Google Blog.

Google Chrome is already one week old, but there is still a lot of talk about the new kid on the block. It has been the first internet browser that has been the topic in nearly every newspaper and on TV. At the beginning the media coverage was quite positive, but became more and more negative. Now not the speed or how the browser deals with frozen tabs are reported, but that Google Chrome is insecure and that Google is gathering more and more information about the users of Google browser. Even the German nationalwide news programme tagesschau was reporting that the The Federal Office for Information Security warned of Google Chrome. But only a few media have been mentioning the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 althought seems that IE8 is another step foward to standards compliance and security.

SearchMonkey Developer Day

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ 1 Comment

SearchMonkey Developer Day was an event that took place in the Yahoo! office in Munich on wednesday September 3rd. About 20 developers and site owners took the chance to get to know more about SearchMonkey and how to make search results more useful. Neil Crosby was giving a presentation and showing the SearchMonkey web site, the SearchMonkey Developer Tool and the Yahoo! Search Gallery. After the talk he, Christian Heilmann and Guy Hepworth were answering questions. Then there was the chance to talk and discuss while having some sandwiches and something to drink.

The evening was really interesting and it was nice to meet the three guys from the Yahoo! office in London, Uwe Tippmann, Thomas Schaller and Paul Savage. Hopefully there will be more events and presentations like this in the future. Yahoo! Search BOSS was one topic that already sparked some interest.

The slides of the presentation by Neil Crosby are avaiable on SlideShare, there is a blog post on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog and photos of the event tagged smmunich can be found on Flickr.