Google

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 2009-08-05

~ 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)

MischMasch 2009-03-24

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Twitter celebrated it’s third birthday. Singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson made a song about Twitter that can be downloaded. There is a funny video on Current called Twouble with Twitters. OAuth appears in the API Wiki and the Firefox addon TwitterBar and Twitter directory WeFollow already use it. Twitter changed the title for the personal pages from Twitter / name to name (user name) on Twitter.

Douglas Bowman left Google and wrote a blog post about his experinces as Lead Visual Designer. Graham Jenkin wrote about how he sees design work at Google. Anne K. Halsall, another designer, explains her reasons why she has left Google.

Last.fm announced that subscription will be required to listen to Last.fm Radio execpt for USA, Canada and Germany. (Via Last.fm – the Blog)

Jonathan Snook will be leaving the life of freelance and will start working at Squarespace. (Via Snook.ca)

MischMasch 2009-03-17

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Twitter‘s API Lead Alex Payne sent out a tweet about OAuth beta being now open to all developers. (Via Twitter / Alex Payne)

Flickr has a new people-picker for FlickrMail and contact list page, that let’s you find someone faster. (Via Flickr Blog)

The WaSP InterAct Curriculum is an interesting and nice designed curriculum based upon web standards and best practices.

Google Chrome got updated and has some new features. It is 25% faster and has form autofill, full page zoom, autoscroll and tabs are dragable. (Via Google Chrome Blog)

MischMasch 2009-03-16

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo! released Friends on Fire, a Fire Eagle application for Facebook that lets you share your location with your friends. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

WeFollow is a new, nice designed Twitter directory by Kevin Rose. (Via Twitter / Heiko Hebig)

Seesmic announced Seesmic for Facebook, an Adobe Air Facebook desktop client. Beside status updates it will support pictures and videos soon. Seesmic’s popular Twitter client twhirl will have Facebook support integrated in future. (Via Seesmic Blog)

After leaving FastCompany TV Robert Scoble‘s new project will be Building 43, a content and social networking community. (Via TechCrunch)

socialmedian, a social news service acquired by XING in December 2008, uses now Facebook Connect to let people login and participate on socialmedian. (Via socialmedian Blog)

Google Quick Search Box can now update your Twitter status. There is an instruction how to tweet on the Google Code site for Google Quick Search. (Via Twitter / steverubel)

MischMasch 2009-01-15

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Carol Bartz was appointed as new CEO of Yahoo!. (Via Yahoo! Press Release)

Apple has approved third party web browsers for the iPhone. (Via Mac Rumors)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave of absence until June, because health-related issues are more complex than he thought. Meanwhile Tim Cook will be responsible for Apple’s day to day operation. The company’s shares had dropped 7.8 percent after the announcement. (Via NYTimes.com)

Web design company Blueflavor launched 97bottles. It is a community site that lets you add, review and get to know different types of beer. It is for the ones who drink beer what is Corkd for wine lovers. 97bottles is very nice designed and supports OpenID. Would be nice if microformats would be supported too.

YouTube disables audio tracks that have not been authorized. It seems there will be a lot of silent movies like this one. (Via Twitter / Christian Heilmann)

Flickr launched the nearby-feature. For photos with geotags it is possible to see other photos that have been taken nearby this location. Just click on map link in the Additional Information section of a photograph, then click on the “See nearby photos and videos”-link on the bottom of the pop-up layer to see something like this. You can filter by whom and when the photos were taken. (Via Twitter / Dunstan Orchard)

Google is not only cutting stuff, but Google Catalog Search will be discontinued, Jaiku will be release as open source, dodgeball.com will be discontinued, developement on Google Notebook will stop and uploads to Google Video will no longe be allowed. (Via Search Engine Land, Inside Google Book Search, Jaikido Blog, Google Code Blog, Google Notebook Blog)

MischMasch 2009-01-13

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Qype CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher announced Stephen Taylor as his successor. Stephen Taylor worked for Yahoo! Europe and his experience will help social review site Qype to grow and expand and to compete against Yelp that launched Yelp UK last week. (Via Qype Vibes)

Google hired Joshua Schachter, who created the social bookmarking service Delicious and left Yahoo! some months ago. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

Think Vitamin, a site offering articles, interviews, reviews and more web related things, has a new layout and even a RSS feed. Think Vitamin is a produced by Carsonified. (Via Twitter / Brian Suda)

Full articles of Scroll Magazine number 1 are avaible online now. Scroll is a print, PDF and online magazine for web professionals by Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp and designed by Veerle Pieters.