Web Apps News

Silverlight 3 goes live on Microsoft's servers

By Scott M. Fulton, III on July 9, 2009, 2:32 PM

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Download Microsoft Silverlight 3 for Windows Final from Fileforum now.

A day earlier than expected, though not without precedent, Microsoft's servers began reporting to Silverlight users today the availability of version 3 of the company's portable media runtime for Web applications.

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The Google Revolution begins; Will you join the fight?

By Joe Wilcox on July 8, 2009, 3:10 PM

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July now has a third major independence day. Canada on the first. The United States on the fourth. Google on the seventh.

July 7 is the day Google declared independence from Microsoft dependence. It is the day one Google blog post fired the first shot heard at Lexington and Concord. The post might as well be the first paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence:

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AOL Lifestream is more a circle of life, actually

By Angela Gunn on July 8, 2009, 9:59 AM

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Download AOL Instant Messenger for Windows 7.0.5.30 Beta 2 from Fileforum now.

I feel old. Looking at AOL's new Lifestream service, which lets you see all your pals' Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed status updates in addition to whatever they're up to on AIM, I'm thinking, isn't this how we got those services in the first place, when we all decided that status messages were the most useful aspect of instant messaging clients?

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What's Next: Google throws down the gauntlet, as Chrome challenges Microsoft

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on July 8, 2009, 9:30 AM

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Google goes for the OS gold chrome

9:37 pm PDT Tuesday, July 7, 2009 > Google's Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management) and Linus Upson (Engineering Director) posted an announcement that the search giant will be launching a Chrome OS, geared toward netbooks.

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Yahoo Search Pad vs. Google Squared Showdown: History in the making

By Angela Gunn on July 8, 2009, 8:48 AM

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Online search engines have proven themselves a boon to topical research... and to sticky-note sales, when you finally hit the mother lode of great sites you want to remember without condemning them to the unfiltered pond that is your bookmarks list. Yahoo on Tuesday released Search Pad, a search companion meant to snip, store and annotate useful items; Google Labs last month unveiled Google Squared, which also aims to help parse and organize online information.

Yahoo Search Pad, a close spiritual relative to Yahoo's 2005-era " My Web " search-saving tool, entered beta back in February. It's designed to stand by while you search on that site and, when it detects that you're following a train of thought, to keep track of the sites you find.

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Web royalties compromise means fee hike for Pandora, perhaps others

By Scott M. Fulton, III on July 7, 2009, 6:26 PM

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The proprietors of online streaming radio, including Pandora's Tim Westergren, are finding themselves surprised today to be cheering an agreement with performance rights holders that has them paying as much as 25% of their revenue in royalties. But that's better than all of their revenue, which was a literal possibility in 2007, and better than 70% which Pandora and other services were paying at this time last year.

Under the new deal announced today, webcasters are being offered a so-called "alternative set of rates and terms" by SoundExchange, the organization responsible for managing performers' royalties in the US. Those that agree to SoundExchange's terms must adopt a new and more rigorous reporting schedule for reporting their revenues right down to the dollar -- the reporting system that SoundExchange insisted upon two years ago . It's an even more rigorous reporting system than what the US Copyright Royalty Board agreed to last January, when it made a reluctant U-turn in favor of revenue-based royalties accounting.

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CBS is the last man standing against Hulu

By Tim Conneally on July 6, 2009, 3:15 PM

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Today marks the beginning of ABC's arrival on Hulu. Last April, Disney's ABC Enterprises jumped aboard NBC Universal and News Corp's increasingly popular video syndication site, and this morning, the first ABC program was rolled out for streaming.

The first ABC show available on Hulu is the drama "Grey's Anatomy," of which five episodes have been posted. For the next two weeks, more content will be added, including episodes of the network's biggest hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs." A month before Disney and ABC arrived at a deal with Hulu, the network agreed to first bring its content to YouTube, where it would supply clips of popular shows and short-form episodic content equipped with "different monetization options" than standard YouTube videos.

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What's Now: Drenched with 'Purple Ra1n,' iPhone users caught eating 'redsn0w'

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on July 6, 2009, 9:00 AM

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Drenched with "Purple Ra1n," iPhone users caught eating "redsn0w"

Afternoon of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • If you're a Mac user and you're wondering where those fruit-punch-looking stains on your keyboard are coming from, well, it must be an outbreak of "Purple Ra1n." Last Friday, independent developer GeoHot gave iPhone 3G S users a shower of sorts with his pwnage tool for Windows, enabling iPhone users to install their own apps outside of AT&T's control. Yesterday collaborator Ari Weinstein ported that tool to the Mac, although he also acknowledged that for the "full freedom experience," users should turn to the Dev-Team's "redsn0w" tool , for unlocking their 3G S units from the AT&T network.

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IE8 WSUS update push to begin August 25

By Angela Gunn on July 6, 2009, 8:53 AM

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After months of availability to users willing to seek it out, Internet Explorer 8 will be rolled into Windows Server Update Services starting August 25. The change will affect those versions of Windows currently relying on WSUS -- in other words, not Windows 7 RC.

Microsoft's IEBlog has the details for those administrators who use WSUS but prefer not to make the IE8 switch just yet, or wish to make that switch on their own calendar.

Google talks spam trends, spiffs up Gmail labels

By Angela Gunn on July 2, 2009, 9:48 AM

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The first of the month always brings a bountiful harvest from Google's blogging troops, and two posts yesterday pointed us to some nifty changes to Gmail's labels features and passed along some cheerful numbers concerning spam levels as measured by the company's Postini group.

With one notable exception, those who rely even moderately on Gmail's labels ought to like where things are going. The section is finally positioned above the chat area, for starters, and your labels can be easily grouped and rearranged for your convenience rather than only in alpha order. (Gmail attempts to help you out by picking a few to put at the top of the list, hiding the rest, but we found that it didn't guess well at all; fortunately, sorting it out was drag-and-drop simple.)

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What's Now: Recording industry wins big against Usenet file sharing service

By Angela Gunn on July 2, 2009, 9:00 AM

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Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter , and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)

Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier

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Bing bites Google very, very slightly

By Scott M. Fulton, III on July 1, 2009, 10:32 AM

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The latest usage share data tabulated by StatCounter, a private Web analytics service, confirms that Microsoft's new Bing search engine really did capture usage share of US Web users from rival Google, without damaging share numbers for #2 search engine Yahoo. Just how bad was the damage? Bing gained 0.42% usage share in June from predecessor Windows Live's US numbers, while Google's declined by about that much.

Bing's US-based usage share now stands at 8.23%, StatCounter estimates, based on numbers that closed out yesterday, June 30. This compared to Yahoo at 11.04% and Google at 78.48%.

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What's Now: Joost squeezes out employees, Pirate Bay to squeeze out...royalties?

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on July 1, 2009, 9:00 AM

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Joost so done with the consumer-video space

Afternoon of Tuesday, June 30, 2009 • Once it aimed to compete with YouTube, but that goal has backfired on bigger companies than Joost, which on Tuesday announced that it would be converting to a white-label video hosting service. Joost's CEO, Mike Volpi, is also stepping down in favor of Matt Zelesko, the current senior VP of engineering.

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Twitter tweaks its follower management tools

By Angela Gunn on July 1, 2009, 8:19 AM

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Someday, somehow, Twitter or one of the other social-networking services will release a tweak to its interface that every user will love and no user will whine about. We'll all be dead by then, of course, but for now the latest changes to Twitter give as little legitimate reason for complaint as anything we've seen lately.

The Following and Followers sections have been changed to expand the user's options for keeping track of who's following and what people they're following are up to. There are two views for each section -- List, which shows username and real name, and Expanded, which shows all of that plus location and their last tweet. In addition, in the Followers list you can see which people also follow you. (Why isn't that offered in both? We may never know.)

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'Extreme' beta news: Pirate Bay may or may not be streaming videos

By Tim Conneally on June 30, 2009, 10:54 AM

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While Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X looks to turn the Pirate Bay into a legal business , the torrent tracking site's founders have taken the wraps off of their HTML5 project site called The Video Bay, a streaming video service in the vein of YouTube and, what else, The Pirate Bay.

Even though The Video Bay has been in development for two years, it is still extremely rough. The team recently rolled out an "extreme beta" version (like a public alpha) which carries the warning: "Don't expect anything to work at all." Indeed, even the site itself doesn't load for all the traffic it's currently shouldering.

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TweetPsych wants to get inside your head

By Angela Gunn on June 30, 2009, 10:05 AM

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We spent some enjoyable time earlier this week playing with TweetPsych , a site that puts linguistic analysis algorithms to work figuring out just what's with the most compulsive Twitter users out there. Currently in beta, the for-entertainment-only analysis still provided us with some amusing insight into Twitter talk -- and into the brains of three Betanews staffers.

The site, developed by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot (home of the addictive Twitter Grader ), builds a "psychological profile" of a given Twitter user based on his or her last 1,000 tweets by running the text against two algorithms that look not at what topics people are talking about but at the cognitive processes they seem to be using. The RID (Regressive Imagery dictionary) algorithm sifts texts for their primary (free-form, associative, creative), secondary (logical, problem-solving), and emotional content, while the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) algorithm matches words against 82 language categories that can roughly estimate the writer's mindset. The LIWC is a widely used linguistics database; the RID is less so.

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What's Next: The first signs of improvement for the tech economy

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on June 30, 2009, 9:00 AM

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Pandora silenced abroad, which LimeWire gains an exec

Monday, June 29, 2009 • The strikes and gutters of digital music advanced another frame on Monday, with users in France reporting that their Pandora feed is gone while LimeWire scores an executive fresh from TotalMusic.

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Swedish firm looks to acquire The Pirate Bay, may take it legit

By Angela Gunn on June 30, 2009, 6:47 AM

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With a statement telling visitors, "We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die," the proprietors of The Pirate bay confirmed on Monday that they expect to be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X . It's a Swedish firm that wants, according to its ownership, "to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

The acquisition, which would lead to GGF operating The Pirate Bay site, is expected to close in August according to GGF. Profits from the sale, according to The Pirate Bay, will go to online projects expanding freedom of speech, information and access.

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What's Next: Microsoft looks to throw back Razorfish

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on June 29, 2009, 9:00 AM

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Microsoft's advertising over the past three years has focused on this "human element" thing (although that's also Dow Chemical's campaign at the moment), where technology is supposed to empower people to do what people can do best, rather than simply make technology better or more complex or cooler. Well, with the May 2007 purchase of ad agency aQuantive, Microsoft had the opportunity to practice what it preached, since an ad agency is full of people -- not just ordinary laborers, either, but creative folks whose factories are their brains. Just the kind of folks you'd think Microsoft would be eager to employ, right? Nope. For two years, it's been looking to unload the creative baggage from the $6 billion technology package it bought, and this morning it may be closer to dumping its load. That's coming up in What's Next, but first, let's see if the Mythbusters can blow up AT&T all the way from Canada.

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Afloat on the endless news tide

By Angela Gunn on June 26, 2009, 7:12 PM

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This episode of Recovery is brought to you by second bananas. Ed McMahon knew he was one, but I'll bet Farrah Fawcett would have been surprised how things worked out. (What, too soon?)

There's an application just launching into beta called thisMoment, and I've had a tab open for it all week in hope that I'll catch some quiet time to try it out. Harry McCracken at Technologizer got there first , and he describes it as "part social network, part media sharing site, and part Facebook application."

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