MischMasch

MischMasch 2008-10-26

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

There are three new Get a Mac ads by Apple: Bean Counter, Bake Sale and V Word.

Huffduffer is a web site that lets you create your own podcast by linking them, adding them to your profile and tagging them. You can explore audio files by tags or by user and you can subscribe to podcasts by others. Huffduffer was built by Jeremy Keith.

Britney Spears has a new website with a blog and there are Britney profiles on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and even on Twitter. Does that mean Twitter goes mainstream? (Via TechCrunch)

There will be a Brigthkite iPhone App soon. (Via Brightkite Blog)

Ma.gnolia, the social bookmarking site, introduces paid accounts that turn off ads on the site. (Via Ma.gnolia Blog)

A report of the FAS includes a chapter on potential for terrorist use of Twitter and other mobile technologies. (Via Wired)

MischMasch 2008-10-18

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Google Blog Search has been updated and includes now groups of popular stories clustered similarly to Google News. (Via Lifehacker)

Obama ’08: The Official iPhone Application gives access to information and news about Barack Obama and arranges your friends by state for the “call friends” feature. (Via Lifehacker)

Jon Hicks announce that he will join Opera Software as Senior Designer and will be responsible for Opera desktop, Widgets and Mobile/Mini browsers and general design. Jon Hicks is the one who designed the logo for Firefox, Mahalo, Miro and others.

Twitter Mobile finally has replies. (Via Twitter / Evan Williams)

Google Mail Labs added advanced IMAP controls so you can choose which Google Mail labels are shown in IMAP.

Qype, the Hamburg based user-generated local review site, launched Qype España and added Spanish as their fourth language.

Google finally rolled out the new design for iGoogle with canvas view that let’s you maximize gadgets to full-screen view. (Via Official Google Blog)

FriendFeed launched FriendFeed Real-time: New entries and comments appear in real time as they are posted. (Via FriendFeed Blog)

Stephen Fry’s web site has a new design and offers a blog, audio and video and a lot more. He is also on Twitter. (Via The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry)

Seesmic, the video converstion web site, started their mobile version.

MischMasch 2008-10-01

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Last week Twitter launched their Election 2008 site that shows the public opinion about the presidential election in a river of tweets. Hovering over a tweet pauses the updates. It’s possible to filter by candidates (Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden or Sarah Palin) and hot election topics (VP Debate, Tina Fey or others) are visible too. So I found out that Oktoberfest is not very important for the US elections. (Via Twitter Blog)

YouTube is testing a new and improved video uploader and everybody can try it out. It’s possible to upload multiple files at once, edit the video’s metadata while the upload happens and videos can have a size up to 1 GB. (Via YouTube Blog)

There have been made some more improvements to Webkit‘s Web Inspector like a redesigned interface, changes to the Elements Panel, JavaScript Profiler in the Profiles Panel, Database Panel and lots of changes under the hood. (Via Surfin’ Safari – Weblog)

In honour of it’s 10th birthday Google gives you the chance to search like it is January 1991. (Via Webmonkey)

Adobe is still working on a Flash player for the iPhone and hopes that Apple will approve it. (Via Daring Fireball)

Apple has decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. (Via Twitter / Cameron Moll)

Flickr quietly launched an iPhone friendly mobile version of their site.

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.

MischMasch 2008-07-03

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Some redesigns during the last weeks. MySpace has a new look done by Adaptive Path. The site is less cluttered and navigation is simpler. After five years the personal web site of Jason Santa Maria was redesigned. The interesting thing about the redesign is that the design can be changed to suit the content. Also Chris Heilmann’s site Wait til I come! looks diffrent now.

Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have left Yahoo! (via Wired), as did del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter (via Daring Fireball). Valleywag posted Stewart’s resignation letter and Wired linked the DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter.

Firefox 3 supports color profiles, but this is disabled and it has to be turned on manually. More about it by Joi Ito and John Resig

Plazes was acquired by Nokia.

MischMasch 2008-06-12

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ 1 Comment

For some days Google has a new favicon. Favicon is the tiny icon in the browser bar and it can be seen in the list of bookmarks. The reactions were mainly negative. Marissa Mayer wrote a blogpost about it on the Official Google Blog. There are several sets of icons that were designed and up to now there is no final solution. If someone has a nice idea for a favicon, there is a site to submit it to Google.

Today Opera released Opera 9.5. More about the the new version can be read in an article on Dev Opera. The official date for the launch of Firefox 3.0 is June 17th. This will also be the day to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Now multi-protocol instant messaging application Adium 1.3 supports Facebook Chat. (Via Matthias Pfefferle)

Jeremy Zawodny will be leaving Yahoo!. (Via Daring Fireball)

MischMasch 2008-06-05

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Google announced that they will be starting implementing AdSense ads in RSS feeds in Feedburner. (Via Burning Questions)

Blues and rock and roll musician Bo Diddley died on June 2nd. Rest in peace and keep on rockin’.

YouTube added a new beta feature: annotations. Have a look at this video. (Via Chris Heilmann)

Yahoo! released their Yahoo! Address Book API after Google released their Contacts Data API some weeks ago.