Today is July 7, and if you've been paying any attention to the news in the past week, you'd know that that means today is the day of the big Michael Jackson circus out in LA. At 10:00am Pacific Time, Jackson's memorial service will begin at the Staples Center. A mere 17,500 fans will be in attendance, and with over 1.6 million fans having applied to win tickets to the service, there is certainly a...
FriendFeed is a pretty nifty service that allows you to both find and talk about cool things you and your friends find on the web, and it's in real-time. Beginning last Thursday, FriendFeed also incorporated real-time search. As you enter a search query you'll now see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time, eliminating the need to hit "refresh" repeatedly. You can search across just your friends,...
On Tuesday, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real were named in a lawsuit filed by some music publishing companies claiming that each of their online music stores - Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody - infringe upon their copyrights. If you're shaking your head and wondering how that is possible, with all the royalties they pay out, you're not alone. This copyright business is a real mess. As consumers we know not to illegally download music or share it online,...
Yesterday Twitter sneakily unveiled a new user interface for both the "followers" and "following". While I personally believe that their efforts could have been better spent on stabilizing their servers and working out those infamous "overcapacity" issues, the change is a good one. First of all, let's go over the changes that they made. On your list of "Followers" and those that you are "Following", Twitter used to display the person's avatar and username, and...
On Tuesday Digg announced that they were finally rolling out some major updates to their duplicate detection technology, and let's be honest - it's about time! The technology they had in place before was hardly reliable. The way that it used to work is that you'd go ahead and insert your URL and all the details for the story you were submitting, and then after you had done all that, Digg would ask you if...
Google Android applications are currently written in Java and run off Google's Dalvik Java virtual machine, however, that will soon change. Last week Google announced the Android Native Development Kit (v. 1.0) that will allow software to run natively on the Linux layer below. Without getting into the nitty gritty details of software development, what this all means is that Mozilla is likely to bring the mobile version of Firefox, called Fennec, to the...
Google currently has more than 25,000 news sources that contribute content for Google News, and now they are inviting them to share professional news videos via YouTube. After being approved as a YouTube Parnter, these news sources will be permitted to host videos for free on YouTube. While that in itself probably isn't enough to convince them to share their videos that way - there's more to it that makes it a very enticing...
And you thought the "Digg Effect" was bad. Behold the Yahoo link effect. A link featured at the top of Yahoo's front page sent more than 9 million page views to an article published on The New York Times' website during a period of just two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the paper. Unfortunately, the massive spike in traffic failed to produce much advertising revenue. The article to which Yahoo had...
As a website owner myself, I have explored several different contextual ad platforms, and Google has always seemed to be ahead of their competitors in the ability to target ads. Now they're about to take that to a whole new level, getting much more personal with web visitors and the ads the target to them. According to MediaPost, Google has been testing the ability to lay consumer FICO scores on top of its Google...
With its web-based Google Apps suite of software, Google is trying go up against Microsoft to make some headway in the enterprise accounts area. While they're likely facing some resistance in a lot of companies who are ingrained in the Microsoft way of life, they are making some headway. Washington D.C. is one such example, where they've decided to shun the idea of spending millions on a new intranet for city employees based on proprietary...
Loren Baker
+Ann Smarty
Alan Bleiweiss
David Harry
