Mar 142013
 

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Google Reader, one of the world’s most popular RSS readers, is shutting down on July 1, 2013, Google announced Wednesday.

The search giant is pulling the plug on the 7-year old project citing “declining usage.” Google says it is shuttering Reader and deprecating or shutting down a number of other services as part of the company’s “spring cleaning” initiative — one that seeks to help the company focus on the features that need the most use.

In addition to Google Reader, the company is also ceasing sales and updates for the Snapseed Desktop apps for Mac and Windows, shutting down its CalDAV API, as well as ending support for Google Voice for BlackBerry.

Still, the biggest and most forcible change is the death of Google Reader. Google will allow users to export their data — including subscriptions — using Google’s Takeout service, as well as the OPML export within Google Reader itself.

A Blow to News Junkies

Use of traditional RSS readers have slowed in recent years, thanks in part to Twitter and apps such as Flipboard. But Google Reader — and RSS in general — is still tremendously useful for individuals that follow lots of sites and web feeds.

READ MORE:  RIP Google Reader.

 

 


 

Mar 142013
 

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Twitter acquired the music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app, CNET has learned.

The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

Twitter Music, which is set to arrive in the wake of key competitor Facebook overhauling the music section of its News Feed, shows Twitter taking new steps into becoming a full-fledged media company. The app acknowledges the key role music has played in drawing new users to the service — particularly younger, mainstream users. Pop stars have some of Twitter’s most popular accounts, with followings in the tens of millions. The TwitterMusic account has 2.3 million followers — not a bad perch from which to launch an eponymous app.

Twitter and We Are Hunted did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

An app built for discovery

Unlike Vine, the video sharing app that Twitter released in January, the music app carries Twitter branding. The app’s icon consists of a silver “play” button with the familiar blue Twitter bird looking down on it from the corner.

READ MORE:  Twitter acquires We Are Hunted, readies standalone music app | Mobile – CNET News.

 

 


 

Mar 142013
 

What we do know is that Apple is spending mountains of money on a new breed of hardware device from a company called Fusion-io. As a public company, Fusion-io is required to disclose information about customers that account for an usually large portion of its revenue, and with its latest annual report, the Salt Lake City outfit reveals that in 2012, at least 25 percent of its revenue — $89.8 million — came from Apple. That’s just one figure, from just one company. But it serves as a sign post, showing you where the modern data center is headed.

Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you’ll find thousands of computer servers. Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it’s packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn’t have any moving parts, which means it’s generally more reliable. It consumes less power. And it lets you read and write data far more quickly.

But that’s only one way to think about it. The same card can also act like a beefed-up version of a server’s main memory subsystem — the place where the central processor temporarily caches data it needs quick access to. You see, today’s super-fast processors have outstripped not only the hard disk, but main memory — the hard disk is too slow, the memory too small — and with its flash cards, Fusion-io aims to remove both bottlenecks.

READ MORE:  Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future 

 

 

 

Mar 142013
 

 

Webpages are constantly getting bigger.

Massive JavaScript libraries and endless sharing buttons aren’t helping, but the main culprit behind most of the bloat is the good old image. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

One way to do that is with alternate image formats like Google’s WebP, which can yield images between 25 and 34 percent smaller than more popular image formats. Despite the astounding space-saving potential of WebP it, like JPEG 2000 and other efforts before it, has not completely caught on with browsers.

So far only Google Chrome and Opera support WebP (both also automatically convert all images to WebP for their respective proxy browsing mobile services). Mozilla objected to WebP when it was first launched, but all of the issues raised in that post have been addressed as WebP has evolved. Firefox still does not support WebP. Nor does Internet Explorer.

However, as Opera’s Bruce Lawson recently pointed out, using some cutting-edge CSS wizardry you can serve WebP images to Chrome and Opera, while still offering JPGs to the rest.

READ MORE:  Put Your Site on a Diet With Google’s Image-Shrinking ‘WebP’ Format

 

 


 

Mar 142013
 

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Pinterest has launched Pinterest Web Analytics, a tool that allows profiles with verified websites to see what Pinterest users are pinning from their sites and, as a walkthrough video puts it, understand where those pins are going.

That means brands with verified accounts like Honda, McDonald’s, and Walmart can see how Pinterest users organize and share their content on the network and learn more about how those users want to incorporate the content into their lives, Pinterest says.

“Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, ‘What are people pinning from my websites?'” Pinterest Software Engineer Tao Tao writes in a blog post announcing the tool. “These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting.”

Web Analytics features include how many people have pinned from a brand’s site, how many people have seen the pins, and how many people have visited the brand’s site from Pinterest.

The Analytics page also has tabs for Most Repinned, Most Clicked, and Most Recent Pins. The blog post says this will give brands a better idea of what’s popular.

READ MORE:  Pinterest Adds Analytics for Verified Websites | ClickZ.

 

 


 

Mar 142013
 

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Do you now how to measure your Engagement Rate? It´s an important social media metric that expresses how successful you are in engaging your audience within a social network.

It´s also a key performance indicator that has a direct impact on reach, as proven here, and drives the conversion of your fans to paying customers. We monitored the average Engagement Rates of Facebook Pages of different sizes and industries for a whole year, beginning from January 2012 to the end of January 2013, and reached the following conclusion: the more fans you have, the more challenging it gets to engage and reach more Facebook users. It´s only natural that engaging a larger fan base is more difficult, as it sets higher demands on the quality of the content – you need more people to Like, Comment on, and Share your posts in order to be successful.

READ MORE:  Is Your Business Benchmarking its Engagement Rate

 

 


 

Mar 132013
 

example-reportedattack

Google has launched a page and a set of tutorials aimed for webmasters whose site was hacked.

Specifically, Google explains webmasters how to deal with Google’s search warning that a site is dangerous, which usually appears if a hacker has infected the site with harmful code.

“Every day, cybercriminals compromise thousands of websites. Hacks are often invisible to users, yet remain harmful to anyone viewing the page — including the site owner,” claims Google on the site titled “Webmasters help for hacked sites.”

via Google Offers Help to Webmasters Whose Sites Were Hacked.

 


 

Mar 132013
 

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When Google unveiled its latest mobile operating system to the world last week, the company asked a reserved but extremely confident man named Hugo Barra to grab the microphone, and celebrate Android 4.1 as the best mobile operating system the world has seen. It couldn’t have been easy to sing the praises of an OS code-named “Jelly Bean” with a completely straight face, but Barra, Android’s director of product management, was cool and composed as he shared Android’s latest killer features.

There was the new graphically enhanced search tool, Google Now. There was the new voice-based search assistant — Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri. And there was also a new piece of hardware — the Nexus 7 — which would show off Android’s full potential. Barra anchored all these announcements, reporting the Google I/O news that the world was most interested in hearing.

And now he speaks directly with Wired about Google’s mobile future. We sat down with Barra last week at Google I/O to pick his brain about the Nexus 7, and all the other key Android announcements. Here is the edited conversation.

READ MORE:  Android Director: ‘We Have the Most Accurate, Conversational, Synthesized Voice in the World’ | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

 

 


 

Mar 132013
 

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Google Now is arguably the single best feature found in Android Jelly Bean, and soon, it seems, it may be coming to iOS, Windows 8 and Chromebooks everywhere.

Google Now brings you search results before you even go looking for them. Just swipe up, inside of Google’s search app (or from any home screen on a Nexus 4, 7 or 10), and Google Now activates. From there, the Google search app delivers today’s weather, your Google Calendar appointments, directions to home or work (depending on what time of day it is), a heads up to nearby events, the score from your favorite sports team’s latest game, boarding passes, package tracking, dinner reservations and a lot more.

via ‘Google Now’ Reportedly Coming to iOS, Chrome OS, Windows 8 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

 

 


 

Mar 132013
 

 

Facebook is testing a new interface for how users share items on the desktop site, which includes more prominent options for where users can post the story.

AllFacebook found that some users are seeing a new menu when they click Share beneath a post. Right away users can select whether they want to share the item on their own Timeline, on a friend’s Timeline, in a group, on a page they manage or in a private message. Previously these options were hidden under a drop-down menu on the share dialog.

via Facebook tests redesigned share flow to help users choose where to post.