Today was the day of acquisitions. Plaxo was acquired by Comcast, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com were acquired by Ask.com and CNET was acquired by CBS. (Via Twitter)
sevenload, the German image, audio and video portal, provides a REST-style API now.
Google Doctype is an encyclopaedia of web development written by web developers, for web developers, including articles on web security, HTML, CSS, DOM and more. (Via Simon Willison)
Vidlink is a new app by Google, which lets you record movies and upload them to YouTube using the Mac’s built-in camera or many Firewire or USB video cameras. It supports importing videos from other programms too. (Via Official Google Mac Blog)
Apple has three new Get a Mac ads: Group, Pep Rally and Sad Song.
There is a new iPhone interface for Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/i/. (Via Official Google Reader Blog)
Google Maps have now two more options, which can show geo-tagged photos provided by Panoramio or geo-coded Wikipedia articles on maps.
Jeremy Keith liveblogged some talks of this year’s XTech conference.
Eye-Fi, the line of WiFi enabled SD cards, added a new member to the family, a card geotagging photos using WiFi triangulation, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch. (Via JeffCroft.com)
For some time now Google Reader is the feed reader of my choice. Google Reader now has some new features. A new bookmarklet lets me share any site, not only sites from feeds that I am subscribed to. Notes can be attached to shared items or any blog entries. Even notes alone can be shared with others.
The multi-protocol instant messaging client Adium will support Facebook Chat in the next release. (via Adium – Blog)
The Safari search extension Inquisitor was aquired by Yahoo!. More information in David Watanabe’s blog. (Via Daring Fireball)
Google launched Google App Engine, a plattform to create and run web applications. Google App Engine is currently in preview release. On time it’s only Python-based supporting Django. Other languages may be supported in the future.
HuddleChat, one of the sample apps for Google App Engine, is critisized being a rip-off of 37signals’ Campfire.
Flickr have added the new Find your friends feature. Now you can look for people using Flickr by importing your friends using Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any password sharing. Hopefully soon more web applications will go the same way and won’t ask for login/password anymore.
Google has started to roll out an offline version of Google Docs powered by Google Gears. So when will there be Google Gears support for Google Mail?
Some April Fools’ Day hoaxes: MOO.com announced the Mighty Card. BarCamp Leipzig has been relocated to Köln. Erik Spiekermann has become a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was appointed to Microsoft’s board of Directors.
Finally Google got into the social bookmarking market. Until now Google was only offering Google Bookmarks to store bookmarks for yourself. But last week Google startet Shared Stuff.
Like for del.icio.us there is a bookmarklet to post a web page to Shared Stuff. You can tag that page and add a description. for some sites a thumbnail of the page is displayed. But for now that is nearly everything you can do. It is not possible to edit the entries on your personal Shared Stuff page. This is only possible by using the bookmarklet on that page again and change the tags or description.
The same bookmark can also be used to e-mail the page from your Google Mail account or use third party services like del.icio.us, Furl, Digg or others.
One interesting thing is that if the page you want to add to Shared Stuff already is in your Google Bookmarks the tags you us in Google Bookmarks are automatically added. If you change tags in Google Bookmarks tags are automatically changed in Shared Stuff and vice versa.
But items on Shared Stuff are not automatically added to Google Bookmarks.
On time it is a bit complicated that you have two places to store your bookmarks, Shared Stuff for the ones you want to share and Google Bookmarks for the ones you want to keep private.
I guess there will be new and more features soon. But I don’t think that Google can convince me to leave del.icio.us. And there are rumours that del.icio.us will be relaunched in the near future.