MischMasch 2009-08-17

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Local review site Qype launched Qype Italia. The Hamburg based company is now present in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Brazil and Italy. Currently reviews are written in English, French, Spanish, Portuese, Polish and Italian. (Via Blonde 2.0)

The Panel Picker for SXSW 2010 is live. Now you can browse through all the programming proposals and you can vote for your favourties.

Microsoft will continue to support IE6 until 2014. There are a lot of online campaigns aiming to kill the 8 year-old browser, but it seems this will be a very slow death. (Via BBC NEWS | Technology)

URL shortener tr.im, that announced to shut down and then re-opened again, will become public domain, 100% community-owned, operated, and developed. (Via tr.im URLs)

37signals are working on a global namespace that users will have a single username and password for all 37signals products. This will be more userfriendly and will make it easier to implement tighter integration between their products. (Via Signal vs. Noise)

EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. (Via The Everyblock Blog)

The Los Angeles Times web site was redesigned. But now it is quite hard to distinguish the links from the rest of the text. (Via Jens Meiert on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-08-14

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Twitter started Project Retweet to implement retweeting. It will be a bit different from what is retweeting now. There will be no RT, but the original tweet will show up in the timeline with the line retweeted by @name added to the date/time stamp. I agree with Eric Meyer‘s tweet that Twitter should fix replies above adding retweet features. (Via Twitter Blog)

Google Reader got some new features. It is possible to send blog posts to various sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and others. More sites can be added manually. There is the new feature to discover the feeds of people one is following. (Via Official Google Reader Blog)

Creative Commons licensed books can now be distributed on Google Books. More on CC and Google Books can be found on the Inside Google Books blog. (Via Joi Ito on Twitter)

YouTube‘s redesign went live. The site looks now cleaner, the masthead looks different and some functions were moved or eliminated. (Via Mashable)

Facebook is testing Facebook Lite, a simpler design for the site. Currently only a few selected users are able to access the Facebook Lite site. (Via Mashable)

Microsoft announced that they will launch a Zune HD on September 25th 2009. It will be thinner and and not as ugly as it’s predecessor. (Via Mashable)

Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle, so everyone can share, collaborate and play games on iGoogle. (Via Official Google Blog)

My Opera lets you push updates to Twitter and Facebook. (Via My Opera news)

MischMasch 2009-08-11

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Facebook‘s acquisition of FriendFeed I mentioned yesterday received a lot of response. Robert Scoble thinks about leaving FriendFeed, Khoi Vinh tweeted that he deleted his FriendFeed accounts, Leo Laporte wants Facebook to open source the Friendfeed codebase and Steve Rubel hopes that FriendFeed should become Facebook Labs. It seems that a lot of people doubt that FriendFeed will continue as an own platform.

Google released a preview of the new version of their search engine. It’s codename is Caffeine and it is faster and more accurate. More information on Caffeine can be found on Matt Cutts‘ blog and the preview can be accessed at www2.sandbox.google.com. (Via Mashable)

Facebook already rolled out a new search that crawls the last 30 days of news feed activity. (Via Mashable)

Doug Cutting is leaving Yahoo! and will be joining Cloudera. (Via Free Search)

Evan Williams‘ wife Sara gave birth to a 8 pounds 21 inch baby boy. (Via Evan Williams (ev) on Twitter)

Yesterday’s MischMasch dealt with Nambu‘s announcement to shut down the URL shortening service tr.im. Today they re-opened the website and state in a blog post that tr.im will continue to operate. They still criticise Twitter to create a short URL monopoly. (Via Mashable)

MischMasch 2009-08-10

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ 3 Comments

Facebook acquired FriendFeed. For the time being FriendFeed will continue as it is. News about the acquisition have been on Mashable, Current, TechCrunch and everywhere else. Some people think it was a good move, Steve Rubel names it the best news he has heard in awhile, Tara Hunt guesses that it is a talent acquisition and a lot of people are not happy with this news. (Via FriendFeed Blog and Facebook Press Room)

URL shortener tr.im shuts down because of lack of monetization. Links will work until at least December 31st, 2009. (Via Mashable)

There is a new release of the Qype API including JSON support, read/write and no more OAuth for reads. (Via Qype on Twitter)

Microsoft sells it’s online interactive ad agency Razorfish they have been owning since the aQuantive acquisition in 2007. (Via Mashable)

MischMasch 2009-08-06

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Today microblogging service Twitter was the target of a DoS attack and therefore the site was down for some time. (Via Twitter Blog)

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.8. Seems this is the last update before the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in September. (Via Macworld)

German based identity hub YIID has added a new, more comprehensive address book containing people you follow on YIID and imported contacts. (Via YIID on Twitter)

MySpace plans to incorporate open semantic microformats code. (Via Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist)

MischMasch 2009-08-05

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Google acquired On2 Technologies, creator of high-quality video compression technology, to improve video quality on the web. (Via Official Google Blog)

A big group of startups have started the initiative IE6 No More to support help to kill Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer 6. The web site explains why people should abandon this old browser and provides code samples that can be implemented in every web site. This campaign is supported by Weebly, Posterous, DISQUS, Justin.tv and many more. (Via Mashable)

The new Google Chrome beta is faster, has an improved New Tab page and Omnibox, allows to add themes to the browser and has new HTML 5 capabilities. On time this new version of Google Chrome beta is only available for Windows. (Via Google Chrome Blog)

MischMasch 2009-08-04

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo!‘s social bookmarking site Delicious has some new features. Bookmarks can now be shared from the save form by e-mail or Twitter, searches can now be filtered by tags and timeframes and the Fresh section lists the most tweeted bookmarks. (Via delicious blog)

Yahoo!‘s photo sharing site Flickr has a new search results page to make it easier to browse through all the photos and videos. (Via Flickr Blog)

Google‘s number of digitized newspaper articles is growing and they can be accessed by using the News Archive Search. (Via Google News Blog)

MischMasch 2009-08-03

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Happy Cog and Airbag Industries, two important web design firms, announced the merger of the two companies. The resulting company Happy Cog will continue to work on client services, web design and development. Moreover Happy Cog will continue publishing A List Apart and organising design conference An Event Apart. (Via Happy Cog News and Jeffrey Zeldman)

Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors. As the two companies become rivals in several businesses there are more potential conflicts of interest. (Via Apple Press Release and Macworld)

Design Observer, a weblog focusing on writings about design and visual culture, announced its makeover. The new Design Observer Group serves four channels: Observatory (design essays), Change Observer (design for social innovation), Places (essays from the Places magazine) and Observer Media (audio and video). (Via Observatory: Design Observer)

TheTWiT Netcast Network started a new show called This Week in Google. Leo Laporte, Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, journalist Jeff Jarvis and guests talk about latest Google-related news and cloud computing.

Twitter starts blocking bad URLs. Unfortunately shortened malicious links are not identified. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

NewsGator announced Google Reader syncing for the new version of NetNewsWire. Moreover a send to Instapaper feature was added. NewsGator will stop NewsGator Online and some other services. The company recomends migrating to Google Reader before the end of August. (Via NewsGator Daily Blog)

What is new with portenkirchner.net

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

It’s been more than a year since I decieded to leave my web site without any CSS after taking part in the CSS Naked Day. The idea was that maybe an unstyled web site would motivate me to work on a redesign. I had several ideas for portenkirchner.net, but mostly I did not have the time to work on it. When I had time, I prefered to do other things.

Every time I wrote a blog entry, what did not happen that often, I promised myself to begin with the redesign. Google Analytics tells me that although I don’t post very often, still visitors come to my site. And it is not very friendly of me to welcome them with a stripped down layout.

So finally I have updated my WordPress and bbPRess installations and decided to use a free WordPress theme again. After some time of search I remembered Alex King‘s Carrington Blog theme. When looking for it I stumbled upon Carrington Text, what is the theme for this web site for the time being. Carrington Text is a simple, text-only two colume theme using some jQuery.

In the near future I want to play around with this site again. I have a list of plugins I want to try out and want to fiddle about with the layout. I gathered several ideas and plans for portenkirchner.net and it’s design. The hard thing will be to bring them together to become the new look for portenkirchner.net.

MischMasch 2009-05-11

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

German based business networking site XING announced their first two OpenSocial applications. XING News lets you discover news filtered by your XING network. Ask XING lets you ask questions and get answers. More applications by XING and by several partners will follow. XING News and Ask XING will will distribute virally on XING. (Via net.work.xing

270 participants took part in Yahoo!’s second Open Hack Day in London, submitting 51 hacks. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google is the title of a New York Times article on data-driven design, citing Douglas Bowman and other designers. (Via Doug Bowman (stop) on Twitter)