Softpedia News - Webmaster

Facebook, 325 Million Users and Counting

Softpedia News (Catalin Cimpanu) — Sat, 7 Nov 2009 11:12:00 GMT

Once on top, it's hard to stay there. As other social networks can stand by to that statement, Facebook seems to be ignoring all critics that see its death in the hands of its own success. As the network reached a ground-breaking number of 325 million users, the company seems to be on track to reach the goal it set in May of this year to achieve the 500 million users mark.

The service did not only take its goal seriously, but it came under par when supplying the tools and applications to keep their users interested and attract new ones. Facebook has constantly gotten better, upgraded its services and paid close attention to the details that previously ruined or brought down other social network juggernauts: real users on the site.

There is no point in proving that MySpace, Bebo or Hi5 are full of spamming bots and fake users that make your life a living hell whenever logging in on one of those services. This fact has now become common knowledge. And studying the cases of other social services, Facebook has taken all the right steps in keeping the mass of all those bots out of its service.

This is why the 325 million mark is such a big thing. For the biggest part, there are over 300 million real users on the website. Only by flipping through the official statistics page on Facebook, we see that abou... (read more)

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate Coming Next Week

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:29:00 GMT

Mozilla may be known for its Firefox web browser but these days, it has spread out its interests over many web-related aspects. For a while now, it has spun off its communications arm into Mozilla Messaging, which mostly handles Thunderbird, one of the earliest and most popular projects at Mozilla. The old-school desktop email client is getting ready for a big release with Thunderbird 3 but the organization is also looking ahead at the future of communications with the Raindrop project.

Thunderbird 3 is already a year late but Mozilla says it's very close to being launched, with the release candidate version coming next week. The four beta versions have provided all of the needed feedback and the team is now putting the finishing touches on the build that could prove to be the final release.

The biggest new feature is proper support for add-ons, which have greatly helped Firefox in becoming the second most popular browser on the planet. These should greatly expand the functionality of the email client especially now that email has become a lot more intertwined with a multitude of web services. For example, an add-on could integrate with Gmail and Yahoo's Calendar functions. An add-on that has been in the works almost as long as Thunderbird has aims to bring some advanced calendar functions to th... (read more)

Apache and Subversion Join Development Forces

Softpedia News (Catalin Cimpanu) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:12:00 GMT

Code and application developers are quite acquainted to the “SVN” term. It stands for Subversion, an open source versioning control system used for years in application development. After being quite some time in the making, CollabNet, the main developer and the primary corporate sponsor of the project, has submitted Subversion to the Apache Incubator, a project where different applications spend some time before becoming official Apache top-level projects.

"We are happy to welcome the Subversion development community to the Apache Incubator," said Justin Erenkrantz, President of The Apache Software Foundation. "Since its inception, the Subversion community has modeled itself using many of the Foundation's principles, including the Apache license, our voting structure, and building upon a diverse range of contributors. Through organizational, legal, financial, and infrastructure support, the ASF's proven framework will help the Subversion community to do what it does best: provide valuable software to millions of developers around the globe. It's a natural fit."

For industry experts, this comes to no surprise since back in 1999, some of Apache's founders went their own paths, eventually putting the knowledge base in place for Subversion in 2000.

From its initial release in 2004, Subver... (read more)

Flickr and Getty Images Are Now Asking for Photo Submissions

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:35:00 GMT

Flickr and Getty Images have announced an extension of their partnership, which allows Flickr users to be featured in Getty's Flickr Collection and potentially get payed in the process. Until now, Getty has decided which users would get in and, so far, it has amassed over 60,000 photos in the collection. Now, the two companies are giving amateur photographers a chance to be featured by submitting their works for review.

"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter, and technical skill," Andy Saunders, Getty's vice president of creative imagery, said about the new agreement.

The two companies have been working together since July 2008 and, so far, this has proven beneficial to all parties involved. Flickr is getting a revenue cut from Getty, the stock photo company gets to have exclusive rights to a pretty big collection of photos and individual photographers can round out their revenue while also getting some recognition by licensing their works. And, with more than four million images to choose from on Flickr, quality works shouldn't be that hard to find.

Budding photographers have to submit exactly ten photos to a group poo... (read more)

Mozilla Labs Releases Weave Sync 0.8

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:01:03 GMT

Mozilla Labs is working on several interesting projects at a time. Some graduate and become integral parts of Firefox, like Personas, but others are more long-run projects. One of them, Mozilla Weave, has the potential to change the way we use browsers and the web, but for now it's still pretty much in the early stages. The project is getting closer to becoming a reality, though, and it's getting ready for the beta stage with the release of Weave Sync 0.8.

“Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs, as well as form-field history and preferences,” Mike Connor wrote for the Weave development team. “If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out! In this last pre-beta release we have made a number of changes based on feedback from users.”

The Weave Sync Firefox extension is the first step of the Weave project, which has a broader scope of making the browser more connected with various web services. It just offers some basic synchronization options so far, but the extension is becoming more robust with each iteration. The latest 0.8 o... (read more)

Skype Founders and eBay Reach Settlement Ensuring the Company's Future

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 14:50:00 GMT

It's official, the Skype saga is finally over, with all parties involved most likely satisfied with the results, though not exactly thrilled. eBay got rid of Skype, allowing it to focus on its other assets, most notably PayPal, the investors got a nice piece of the VoIP service and Skype's founders also got themselves a small but juicy stake in the company.

The settlement puts an end to months of legal disputes that could have potentially threatened Skype's future entirely. The deal has been rumored for a while now and most of the details have now been confirmed. As expected, Index Ventures is out of the picture, along with Mike Volpi, a partner at the venture capital firm. Volpi had been CEO at Joost, a company owned by Skype's founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, and the two accused him of abusing his position to gain important inside knowledge used then to broker the deal between eBay and the prospective investors.

Skype's founders get a 14-percent stake in the new company in exchange for dropping the three lawsuits related to the VoIP company. As part of the deal, they also cede rights to the Global Index technology, which powers Skype and that was at the heart of the dispute. The two will get representation in the board of directors, but they will also bring to... (read more)

Facebook Chat to Open the Door to Third-Party Clients

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 14:01:01 GMT

Instant messaging is about to get a lot more interesting and a lot more crowded if Facebook has its way. Apparently, the social network is very close to launching support for XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), allowing Facebook users to connect with any IM client which also supports the protocol. Considering that the Facebook chat is already being used by some 70 million users and that the social network has passed 300 million active users, it's easy to see why this could be very big.

The Facebook Chat project was started about two years ago and it was launched in April 2008. Since then, it has grown along with the site to become one of the most popular IM protocols in the world. It's not challenging the big players like Yahoo or Microsoft yet, but for a web-only service, it has done remarkably well. About a year and a half ago, Facebook announced its plans to build a Jabber/XMPP interface for the Chat and said it should be available soon.

Since then though, the social network has stayed quiet, with not much happening on that front. Meebo and a handful of other services have introduced support for Facebook Chat a few months back and now it looks like this was just a limited trial to test Facebook's XMPP technology. However, there are now talks that the social network may be ver... (read more)

Google Books Introduces Magazine Directory

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 11:52:00 GMT

Google Books may be getting all of the attention because of the high-profile lawsuit and the subsequent settlement involving it, but, in the meantime, the service is continuing to evolve and it's important to remember that it's not just about the books. Google has been focusing on magazines more lately and there are already a number of titles in Google's library. Until now, though, actually finding them proved to be almost impossible, unless you already knew what you were looking for. Thankfully, Google has now released a simple interface to browse through all of the titles.

“One of the feature requests that I got from friends and family was to add a way to browse all the magazines available. Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles,” Jeffrey Peng, a software engineer on Google Books, wrote.

“The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast. I'm happy to announce that last week I coded up a page on Google Books that lets you browse the available magazine titles.”

So far, Google has only had less than 100 magazines, which provide regular updates and are available to search and read on Google Books... (read more)

Yahoo Music Video Search Gets Smarter with Albums and Song Filters

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 11:10:00 GMT

Google music has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to its brand-new music search features. So much so that Yahoo felt the need to underline that it had had somewhat similar features for a while now. In fact, its offering may actually be better than Google's, it certainly looks better, but that didn't look like anyone cared. Yahoo is undeterred, though, and is now introducing a couple of music-related features to its video search engine.

“We know that many of you come to Yahoo! Video search to find entertainment-related information. Our video search traffic also shows us that many of those queries have an exploratory intent, including digging for great work from your favorite music artists,” Manish Sharma and Ishwar Sridharan, Yahoo Music Search, wrote.

“Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist in Yahoo! Video Search. We have hooked into the 'Web of Things' to intelligently extract the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries. This feature lets you explore music artists intuitively and easily.”

When searching for bands or artists on Yahoo video search, the left sidebar will be filled with related information and filters. Yahoo uses U2 as an example, for some reason the ba... (read more)

Twitter Takes a First Step in Cleaning Up the Trending Topics

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 10:37:00 GMT

Twitter has a very open attitude, allowing any developer to access much of the service and its users to express themselves as freely as possible, but this openness has a downside, namely it makes it very easy for spammers to take over. Twitter has been battling this problem for quite a while now, but without too much success. Now, it's finally turning its attention to the Twitter Trends and has announced that it will begin to curate them to remove the spammy ones and make sure they stay relevant to the users.

“As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation,” Twitter's Jenna Dawn wrote.

“So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” she added. Twitter doesn't want to interfere with the process too much, so it's taking a more cautious approach. This means that the differences won't be too noticeable at first, but,... (read more)

Google Open Sources Internal JavaScript Tools

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 10:08:00 GMT

Google is all about the web apps and, for Google, web apps means JavaScript. The giant has been a huge backer of the scripting language and has played a big part in making it one of the most popular web technologies today. But, now, it wants to help it become even more popular and allow developers to build faster and more powerful web apps, so it's releasing and open sourcing a set of JavaScript tools and libraries that it uses internally on some of its most popular and resource-intensive apps like Gmail, Docs and Maps.

“Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community,” Google wrote about the new set of tools.

“Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google,” it added.

The Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer, which is designed to make web apps smaller and faster by doing several modifications to the code.... (read more)

Twitter Rolls Out Limited Retweet Test

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 09:35:00 GMT

Twitter has been on a roll lately launching new features on a rate rarely seen in the past year or so. It just launched a major feature, Lists, which is already proving very popular and is changing the way many are using the service. Now, it's ready to launch a brand-new one, first announced in August, which may be even bigger than Lists, the integrated retweet feature aptly dubbed Project Retweet. Twitter is introducing it for a small number of people at first, to see how it works out.

“We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know,” Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone wrote.

The feature was detailed a fair bit before, but it's now clearer how Twitter decided to implement it. Retweets are one of the biggest things that have come out of Twitter, but, interestingly, and perhaps fittingly, it was the users themselves that introduced it and made it popular. Employing retweets, popular and interesting tweets would reach a much greater number... (read more)

What's New in Google Chrome 3.0.195.32 Stable

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 08:27:00 GMT

The development on Google Chrome is moving forward on three fronts, with builds suited for all different type of users. The Stable channel build doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention, as the development is focused on the Beta and especially the Dev channels, but, if Chrome is ever going to get some real mainstream traction, it's the stable build that's going to accomplish that. Google just updated the stable channel Chrome build to 3.0.195.32 and the latest version comes with the usual set of stability and security fixes, but nothing in terms of new features.

Chrome 3.0.195 has been around for a couple of months now, and it's only seen some small bug-fixing updates. This latest one is no exception, with five issues being resolved. An issue that prevented users from going back from searches in Google Maps has now been fixed. Another one affecting Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.2 has also been resolved and content now displays properly.

A problem coming from upstream in the Webkit build, the open source HTML rendering engine on which Google Chrome is built, in which decoding an AAC file would sometimes lead to an infinite loop has also been resolved. A bug that was one of the leading crash causes in the stable Chrome builds has now finally been fixed. Finally, an issue where setInterval would take up 100... (read more)

Google and Bing Maps Get Updated Satellite Imagery

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 16:26:00 GMT

Online mapping services are becoming increasingly popular and useful and, as a result of that, more profitable for those running them. All the big players are present in the space, Google, of course, which started it all, but also Yahoo and Microsoft. They each have their advantages, but what most people don't realize is that they all share pretty much the same mapping data, from the same providers. It's no surprise then that Google and Bing announced new satellite imagery on the very same day.

“We just shipped another 9,460 square kilometers of imagery onto Bing Maps. This month’s release showcases high precision imagery for the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom… it’s all 15-30 centimeter resolution imagery, so it’s pretty stunning,” the Bing Maps blog announced.

Google also introduced updated imagery, but it also announced that it was stepping up the update frequency. “Today, I'm happy to announce that we're increasing the frequency of our updates to bring you the world's freshest and most complete imagery,” Senior Geo Data Strategist Matt Manolides wrote. “As a part of this announcement, we're also making some changes to the way that we tell you about new imagery.”

Bing provided updated data for some English-language reg... (read more)

YouTube Takes the Crown When It Comes to Embedded Videos Too

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 15:39:00 GMT

One of the great things about an online video is that it isn't locked to a specific place, most of the time anyway, and people can easily share one with friends or embed it on their blogs. But, while we have plenty of stats on how many users visit these video sites, data on the embedded videos is harder to come by. Social media analytics firm Sysomos conducted a very thorough study looking at over 100 million blog posts to see how popular online video was.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube takes the crown when it comes to embedding videos as well. Being the largest video site in the world by a very significant margin, the fact that 82 percent of all embedded videos are from YouTube shouldn't be too unexpected. YouTube is followed in popularity by Vimeo, which manages to get 8.8 percent of the embeds.

Vimeo's clean-looking player and higher quality videos have undoubtedly made it a popular option with the many bloggers who don't want to clutter their websites too much. The European video site Daily Motion takes the third place with four percent, followed by a number of websites barely getting to one percent.

The demographic layout of those that embed videos is also pretty unsurprising, as 20-to-35-year-old males are the most engaged group. The study, which looked at data between July ... (read more)

Deezer Introduces Premium Services, Desktop and Mobile Apps

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:53:00 GMT

Eventually, music is bound to move online completely, no matter what the labels think about that, so a lot of companies are competing for what could finally become a very huge market. The problem is that, today, there isn't that much money being made from it, but this doesn't seem to deter that many. Music streaming is picking up steam in a big way and, surprisingly perhaps, it's Europe that is seeing some of the most interesting players. Though not as hyped as Spotify, Deezer has been around for a few years as a free music-streaming site, but is now moving forward in a big way with paid subscriptions, which come with a dedicated desktop app and mobile ones for the most popular platforms.

Deezer now offers streaming music on its website from a variety of licensed artists, though the selection seems a little smaller than Spotify's. The service is free and it allows users to listen to the songs or discover new ones, as well as manage the ones they like with playlists. The site will remain free for anyone, but Deezer is moving with some interesting, new features only available for paying customers.

There are two offerings at the moment, the lower tier one Deezer HQ for €4.99 per month and the Premium option for €9.99. Deezer HQ, similar to Grooveshark's VIP option, removes all of the... (read more)

Mozilla Testing Program Moves Forward with Test Pilot 0.3 for Firefox

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:07:00 GMT

Firefox is always evolving and adding new features and changes to the functionality. Most of the times developers try to do the best they can to meet the users' needs, but usually there isn't enough data to really know in what direction to move next. This is why Mozilla has introduced the Test Pilot program, which aims to understand how users interact with the browser through a series of tests. Now, the Firefox extension associated with the project has reached version 0.3 and Mozilla is also releasing some details on upcoming tests.

“One of the problems with the Test Pilot extension so far has been that we’ve needed to release a new version of the extension every time we wanted to add a new experiment or survey, or even in order to fix a minor bug. And every time we released a new version, users had to download it, then restart Firefox; an annoyance that we’d rather not force on people,” Mozilla wrote. “The new release of the Test Pilot extension, version 0.3, has been rewritten from the ground up to avoid this problem.”

The new Test Pilot extension is completely rebuilt and makes use of the technology underpinning Jetpack, the new add-on platform Mozilla is working on to replace the current technology in Firefox 4.0. Because of this, new exper... (read more)

Missed Guarantees Cost MySpace $100 Million in Google Money

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 13:34:00 GMT

It's common knowledge that MySpace has seen better days, as the once-biggest social network in the world loses even more traffic and users. But at least it had something to fall back on, a $900-million deal with Google running until mid-2010, which would guarantee at least part of its profits. But this isn't the case anymore, it looks like the traffic numbers are so low that the social network isn't meeting the minimum required agreed in the deal and will get less money from Google as a result.

News Corp. has released its financial results for its fiscal year's first quarter and they aren't pretty. Its newspaper and TV businesses are doing better than expected, but News Corp.'s Digital Media Group, which handles MySpace, is seeing some rough times. The unit's revenue was down 26 percent year over year and most of the blame comes from the lower income from traditional and search ads.

When asked in the conference call after the announcement how hard MySpace's revenue would be hit, the three executives present put forth some rather different numbers. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. CEO, said he didn't have an exact number, but the figured it could be as much as $300 million. The other two, Chase Carey and Dave Devoe, though, replied it would probably be much lower... (read more)

Novell Pulse, the First Enterprise Google Wave

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:48:00 GMT

Google Wave may not be winning over the regular users, but it looks like it might have better luck in the enterprise sector. Novell, a software company specializing in enterprise products and maker of the popular SUSE Linux distribution, has just announced a brand-new, real-time collaboration tool dubbed Novell Pulse. So, what does this have to do with Google Wave? Novell Pulse is actually pretty much a heavily customized Wave and offers complete interoperability with any Wave server out there through the Wave Federation Protocol.

“Novell Pulse is the first enterprise class, real-time collaboration platform that unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information,” Novell said in a statement.

“This is a technical collaboration between Google and Novell to bring federation to both systems, using the Wave Federation Protocol. We're the first company to show federation using the WFP, and we're the first collaboration solution to integrate with Google Wave.”

Collaboration tools are popping up all over the place, but this one is interesting in that it leverages all that Wave has to offer while at the same time offering... (read more)

Manage All Your Privacy Settings with the New Google Dashboard

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:09:00 GMT

Google has been as open as any company its size, but, with the number of services and products it has, it can be hard to know what exactly is shared and with whom and what Google really knows about you. Now, though, Google has introduced the “Dashboard,” a tool to centrally manage the security and privacy settings of many Google services and products.

“Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data,” Alma Whitten, software engineer, Yariv Adan, product manager, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, wrote.

“In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their [sic] own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings,” they added.

Privacy can be a real concern online, despite the fact that most people are very relaxed about it. In fact, many don't really give it a second thought until something bad happens, at which point they blame the sites where it happened. It'... (read more)

Twitter Tests Tweet Update Notifications

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 10:25:00 GMT

Twitter may have been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to its new Lists feature, but this doesn't change the fact that it's facing a problem that seems to have been sticking with it for several months now. Traffic has stalled for the microblogging service and many users leave after the novelty factor wears off. The Lists feature and the translation effort may help with the first part, but it still needs to address the engagement issue, so it's making one first step with the new “tweet notifications.”

“We’re starting a limited test of notifications on twitter.com for when you have new tweets. So if one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying '1 new tweet' that, when clicked, will display the new content,” Twitter announced the new feature that is still in testing. “We think it improves the tweet consumption experience and hope to roll it out to everyone as soon as we can.”

The feature is being rolled out to a few users to see how it goes. Those who get to test it will receive a notification on top of their Twitter stream alerting them if there have been new tweets from their friends or the people they follow since the last time they refreshed the page. The notifications look and feel very much ... (read more)

Google News Introduces Advanced Custom Sections

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:34:00 GMT

Google News, one of the company's most “feared” products, is about to get even more powerful with a new customization option. Plainly labeled “Custom sections,” the feature does exactly what you'd expect, it allows you to create your own news section based on any topic you want. What's more, you can even share it with your friends if you think it could be useful.

“One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this so we've allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter,” Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, Google News software engineers, wrote about the new feature.

“Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit,” they added.

There was a similar feature available before for Google News, but it was much more limited. Users could enter a search term and then create a custom section based on that search. This was so... (read more)

Digg Tests Trends Feature to Bring Up Stories Faster

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 08:46:00 GMT

Digg was one of the most promising sites for news and content discovery thanks to its speed and the fact that it relied on its users to weed out the garbage. But, then, Twitter came along and, all of a sudden, Digg looked like a slumbering dinosaur where things could take days before they reached the main page. Since then, the site has been looking to reinvent itself and has been adding some real-time elements into the mix. Now, it's launching a trending topics feature of sorts dubbed Digg Trends.

“Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there,” Digg said about the new feature.

The idea is to get stories moving faster, so that the ones that are likely to generate attention can get to the homepage sooner than just by using the regular process. Digg identifies stories that are getting a higher than usual activity and then posts them on top of the homepage for just ten minutes. During this time, users can vote on it... (read more)

Google Commerce Search, Dedicated Search for Online Retailers

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 08:15:00 GMT

Google is aiming for the enterprise and business market with several products and it's slowly making some progress in the sector. Now, it's launching a new product aimed at e-commerce sites, but, this time, based on what it does best, search. The new Google Commerce Search is a dedicated cloud service aimed at large online retailers that want to replace their current search capabilities and, considering the lacking search capabilities many sites have, using outside help may be a very good idea in some cases.

“Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too. Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers,” Alex Dovlecel and Nicholas Weininger, engineers on Google Commerce Search, wrote.

“Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute.”

So, what does Google bring to the table. Well, speed, for one, as Google says that its cloud-based technology can provide almost instant results and, judging from... (read more)

Google Steps Up the Social Game with New Friend Connect Features

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:40:00 GMT

Facebook may be winning the social wars for now but Google is not giving up just yet. At first glance, Google may not be exactly the first that pops into your head when you think social features but that's because it’s taking a different approach than Facebook for example, a less successful one though so far. But now it's adding a new set of features to its arsenal hoping to make Google Friend Connect a much better match to Facebook Connect.

It isn't obvious yet but Google's biggest enemy is Facebook and vice versa. They seem like very different beasts, Google is all about helping users find the information they need simply and efficiently while Facebook wants to help people connect online. While their approaches may be different, they're going for the same thing, becoming an integral part of the Internet, and that means conquering as many sites as possible.

Google's Friend Connect has the upper hand when it comes to the raw number, it boasts over 8 million sites having implemented the feature, while Facebook Connect has just managed 15,000. But the numbers can be misleading; Facebook has managed to get far bigger and more important sites on its side than Google.

Although Friend Connect gets some pretty big features that could make it a more of a worthy adversary, the b... (read more)

Amazon Launches Twitter Referral Program

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:37:00 GMT

Twitter can't figure out how to make money from its service, or just doesn't want to rush into things, but others have started making some revenue on the microblogging service. Now, Amazon has come up with an interesting proposal. In an email, the company notified members of Amazon Associates that it had introduced a new Twitter sharing feature on the site, like so many websites had done in the past. But, unlike most share buttons, this feature can also earn the users some cash.

“Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks,” the Amazon email reads.

“The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account.”

This sounds innocent enough, after all, users should be able to share something they like or find useful. A little further down in the email, though, Amazon reveals that all of these links will earn the users mon... (read more)

Google Chrome to Convert Greasemonkey Scripts into Native Extensions

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:47:00 GMT

Google Chrome is still behind other browsers in some aspects. Extensions are especially lacking when compared with Firefox and, judging by their popularity for the Mozilla browser, they could be a huge asset for Chrome. Right now, extension support is a little lacking, but development is moving fast and an upcoming feature that converts user scripts into extensions shows just how easily Chrome can one-up Firefox.

Greasemonkey scripts are very popular with some users, allowing them to easily modify the look and behavior of any website or online app. However, in Firefox, users have to install the Greasemonkey extension before installing any script. This isn't too much of a hassle, but, for most users, it's enough to pass on the opportunity to use the scripts.

Now, Chrome developers have come up with a better implementation by supporting scripts natively. In fact, because these scripts use standard web technologies, Chrome has had support for them for a while now. Users, though, had to manually install them by copying them to Chrome's “scripts” folder.

Aaron Boodman, a Google Chrome developer, explained the problem by saying that, “Lots of users still complain that Chrome does not support Greasemonkey user scripts. Even though we have had the infrastr... (read more)

Oracle - Sun Deal Set for Full Investigation in the EU

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 13:57:00 GMT

The tension between the EU and Oracle may be mounting, as the Competition Commission is getting ready to release a formal statement of objection to the deal. This is usually the first step towards blocking a deal, but it serves more as a warning rather than a real threat. Oracle has refused to make any concession regarding its acquisition plans for Sun, and EU regulators aren't pleased with the current form of the deal.

According to a report from the Financial Times, the EU seems determined to launch a full-scale investigation of the acquisition. The core of its concerns is the MySQL open source database system, which competes with some of Oracle's own offerings. Considering that the software giant's bread and butter are the various database offerings, the EU is worried that there would be little incentive for it to invest in the free MySQL.

Sun has been greatly affected by the prolonged investigation, with Oracle saying it loses $100 million every month as customers are weary of doing any business while the company's future is still in the air. It also had to cut several thousand jobs, on top of the massive lay-offs already underway at Sun.

Despite all this, Oracle seems unmovable in its determination and has made no concessions to get the deal approved. This stance has even made ... (read more)

Sweden Promises 100 Mb Connections to All by 2020

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 12:17:00 GMT

A bit of a Nordic rivalry is heating up between Sweden and Finland, but a type of rivalry anyone can get behind of. Just a couple of weeks after Finland announced its plans to make broadband connections a legal right, Sweden is following suit with plans of its own. Regardless of whether it's national pride or a real necessity that needs addressing, Sweden is announcing its commitment to providing 90 percent of its population with a 100-megabits-per-second broadband connection by 2020.

The plans have been announced by none other than Åsa Torstensson, Sweden's infrastructure minister, who recognized the importance of the Internet and of a broadband connection in particular. "Although broadband access is generally good in Sweden, we still have thousands of households and enterprises with no access to broadband today. Sweden is a sparsely populated, elongated country... The need for broadband is as great in rural areas as in other parts of the country," she said, according to The Telegraph.

In fact, Sweden is one of the most connected countries in the world, with 89 percent of its population having an Internet connection with a guaranteed minimum of 20 kilobits per second, this despite the fact that large parts of the country are very remote and inaccessible. This is far from enough, it seems, and... (read more)

eBay Hyped About the PayPal X Platform It Launched Today

Softpedia News (Lucian Parfeni) — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:17:00 GMT

ebay is moving forward with the next phase of its payment platform, PayPal, by opening it up to developers. The new API, dubbed PayPal X, was announced last summer, but eBay is finally ready to make it available to everyone wanting to integrate some sort of payment option into their app or site. This is the first step in a huge shift at eBay, which is focusing a lot more on PayPal, as its core Marketplaces business is shrinking.

"We believe that consumer behavior will change in the next three years, more than in the last ten. Think about it this way: this year: the eBay iPhone app will do $500 million dollars in volume on a device that didn't exist two years ago, on an application that didn't exist one year ago," eBay CEO John Donahoe told the audience at the first-ever PayPal’s X Innovate 2009 developers' conference in San Francisco.

The new Active Payments API has a number of capabilities designed to make transactions easier and more transparent. It will allow developers to incorporate payment tools in their applications removing the hassle of having to switch between different sites and going through the usual process. It features options like currency conversion, pre-approved payments, parallel payments, and many others, and the biggest focus is on microtransactions and mobile paym... (read more)