Remember that little old BlackBerry app for MySpace that premiered last week? Apparently it struck a chord with users because RIM reported just after midnight on Friday (EST), that it hosted more downloads for the product's first week than it has for any other app.
While 400,000 downloads in one week for the BlackBerry-compatible MySpace software is a drop in the bucket compared to Firefox 3's 1 million downloads in 24 hours, it did beat out the initial release of RIM's Facebook app.
RIM did not reply with comparative numbers.
In a statement, RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie regards the download count as a proof of "an evolving consumer lifestyle where social connectivity and information access are more important than ever." Yet, the spike could as easily correspond to a more concerted marketing push, to a growing adoption of BlackBerry phones among consumers versus business users, or to first-time BlackBerry owners responding to the sexier looks of the Bold and Storm.
Either way, RIM has a lot of work to do if it wants to join Mozilla in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The new TypePad comments are a lot more attractive than before.
Six Apart's paid, hosted blogging service, TypePad, is getting improved community features. The first thing most users will notice is a new blog commenting system. It has both a cleaner display of comments (with icons for the comments, WordPress-style), as well as a simpler comment entry interface. Users can also reply to particular comments and the system supports one level of threading.
The updated comments service hooks into TypePad's new profile system. Commenters with TypePad IDs get a place that collects all the comments they leave on all TypePad comment-enabled blogs, and users can add feeds from their accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, and about 45 other services. That makes the profile pages a lot more dynamic and interesting.
The TypePad comment system can be embedded on non-TypePad blogs. The service can automatically install on WordPress.org, Blogger, and Tumblr sites. HTML code is provided to put the comment system on other blogs.
This new comment ecosystem is certainly an improvement over the previous version. But bloggers have other very good commenting systems to choose from. I favor Disqus, for instance. Although I do like the new TypePad system, I don't see a reason to install it on my WordPress blog ProPRTips, (and actually, I couldn't if I wanted to--users of WordPress.com-hosted blogs can't get far enough under the hood to make the switch; bloggers using WordPress.org software hosted elsewhere can, however).
The new system is certainly an improvement, and more than that it's interesting to see Six Apart continue to spin core functionality out of its paid products and offer it to the world for free. Previously, of course, the company made Movable Type open source and free. The company clearly hopes that exposure to these products will make revenue-generating products more attractive. Whatever the motivation, these are serious and full-featured products, now available for nothing, and I'm cool with that.
The new TypePad profiles collect all your commenting activities on TypePad-enabled blogs.
Cooliris has put out a useful update to its iPhone application that adds YouTube videos to its search results. This joins the image search that made the application so popular to begin with.
You might be asking yourself how this is helpful since the iPhone comes with an official YouTube application. The answer to that is that Cooliris' presentation is slightly more appealing. Where the official YouTube app forces you to scroll down a long list, with Cooliris you can simply rock your phone back and forth an endless array of thumbnails until you find something you like. Videos play back in a YouTube window, then you're brought back to the search results. It's smooth and it works well.
Cooliris has also managed to fix one of my big qualms with the earlier version, which would not let you save images from the image search results. With the new version there's now an option to save the full resolution version (not just a screenshot) with one button. The picture goes straight to your camera roll and you can keep on using the application. Again, this is a drastically better system than having to snap a screenshot.
You can now get YouTube video search as a part of Cooliris' iPhone application.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)
The mobile application continues to be a shell of its desktop self, which integrates with a wide range of sites, and can be programmed to work with your own blog or Web site. While Apple's SDK won't allow such deep integration with other iPhone applications, Cooliris continues to pack in more sites and sources into this one.
Cooliris is free and can be found on the App Store (iTunes link). If you've already got it installed, and the 1.2 update isn't showing up, just delete the app from your phone and re-download it.
Yahoo is continuing to dribble out its open platform.
The company on Thursday added an eBay Anywhere application to the dashboard area of the new home page in testing. The eBay application allows users to monitor their buying and selling activities from the Yahoo home page. Other applications blessed by Yahoo include checking various e-mail in-boxes from the Yahoo home page, and down the road activity updates from social networks. The functionality isn't much different from what users can do with external applications built for Facebook or OpenSocial containers.
Yahoo supplied a video to show off the new home page since it is still in "bucket" testing, meaning that only random users will see the page, which was first unveiled in September. I am still waiting to be found by the randomizer.
Several readers have e-mailed me and asked for instructions on how to take their HD YouTube videos and embed them elsewhere. As I mentioned before, this isn't an officially sanctioned feature, and as such, the embed code you get on these video pages will still yield the lower-quality, non-widescreen clip.
Needless to say, this is completely unacceptable.
The good news is that you only need to make a few changes to the stock embed code get the job done. Here's what to do:
Step 1: Copy this code and paste it to wherever you intend to embed the video:
Step 2: Grab the direct link to your video. In case you've never done this before, it can be found to the right of the video player on YouTube or from your browser's address bar.
Step 3: Tweak the embed code. The finishing touch involves making a simple change to embed's URL source code to direct it to the HD version. To do this, you simply need to copy the alphanumeric gobbledygook at the end of the link you grabbed in step 2 and paste it into the part between /v/ and the & symbol in the embed code.
That's it--you're done, and all you had to do was use copy and paste twice! The end result is this:
It's been a busy two days for AOL Mail. On Wednesday, AOL launched a beefier version of the AOL Mail gadget for iGoogle. On Thursday, AOL won a few more fans with the introduction of its beta feature AOL Sync.
AOL Mail for iGoogle improves upon the previous gadget by replacing the preview-only capability with functionality that lets you compose, reply, and fully manage your in-box from the iGoogle page.
AOL Sync beta, launched today, targets mobile and desktop users with the ability to sync their AOL address book and calendar in real time to Microsoft Outlook, the iPhone, BlackBerry, phones running Windows Mobile, and phones made by Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung.
You'll get started on AOL's Sync site, where you'll sign in to get access to the mobile or Outlook plug-in. On that end, AOL has turned to Funambol, which brings open-source push synchronization to companies like AOL.
It's a little disappointing that AOL Sync beta won't yet sync e-mail, but we're always big fans of two-way syncing and if this beta catches on, message-syncing would be the next logical step.
MapQuest today got a few useful additions: You can now save personal data in your My MapQuest account -- like your home and work addresses, your mobile numbers, and car's mileage. The first two features make it easier to create a route involving one of your typical hangouts and send it off to a phone. The third helps you with your expense reports or taxes.
Other updates dropped on MapQuest users recently: You can drag a map around on-screen (finally), and grab and move a route if you want to change it (the "Highway 101 Always Sucks" feature). And there's a robust "local" page that gives you a ton of information on events and news attached to a location. It'd be a good thing to scan before going on a trip.
MapQuest now lets you keep your favorite routes handy.
Since I'm sick of creating new accounts for every new service I try, I also like that you can log in to the new personalized MapQuest with my OpenID.
MapQuest continues to be relevant for a large number of users, and it also has deals with publishers who use its APIs. The cool QuickBooks data visulization service I covered recently, for example, use MapQuest data and maps.
However, I still won't be using MapQuest. The service may be getting more capable, but the interface is busy and slow compared to Google Maps, which, by the way, saves the addresses you visit automatically.
Disagree with Google's search results? You'll be able to do something about it with a change the company plans to release starting Thursday.
Google's SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.
Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some people for months, but starting Thursday it will become available to anybody who's searching while logged in with a Google account.
"This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results," said Cedric Dupont, Google's SearchWiki product manager.
SearchWiki shows an up arrow for promoting Web sites, an X for deleting them, and a 'note this' speech bubble for adding comments.
(Credit: Google)
There's also a collaborative element: people can show the collective wisdom of the masses by clicking a "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of each search results page. That shows notes and how people have promoted or deleted pages in aggregate.
Feedback for ordinary search?
Where things get interesting is whether Google will use people's voting behavior as an input to the regular search algorithm that determines the order of search results. Google already employs human judgment in its algorithm by virtue of its PageRank technique, which judges a Web site's merit in part on how many other Web sites link to it, but people promoting or deleting specific Web addresses could be another signal.
Dupont was noncommittal about whether the company planned to build in that feedback loop, either directly as a signal to influence search rankings or indirectly as extra data that could help the company judge the relevance of its search results. But he certainly didn't rule the idea out.
"We don't close any doors. We constantly evaluate signals" that are incorporated into the search results algorithm. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results."
Certainly people's collective behavior could be useful. For example, Dupont said, "You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control," he said. In other words, if a lot of people deleted a particular page from search results, perhaps Google should check why its system isn't flagging that page as a problem.
Another narrower possibility could be to use SearchWiki customizations to influence the personalized search results people can get through Google by signing up for the Web history feature. Dupont seemed cooler on this idea.
With SearchWiki, Google produces "customized search results in a very granular and precise manner," adjusting only specific Web addresses and not broad influencers on search results. "At this point we don't have anything to say about how to combine these two features."
Wired, with the help of users on the VR-Zone forums, has uncovered a simple way to get high-quality uploaded videos to display in 1280x720--also known as 720p.
YouTube has long been expected to roll out high-definition video playback, and this appears to be the first viable way to do it. The hack in question is similar to the one that was first used to toggle on the "high quality" mode. It is done simply by adding "&fmt=22" to the end of the video URL.
I got it to work without any problems on a video I uploaded earlier this morning. What's interesting here is that it was not ready at the same time the Flash version was.
In my case, it took about 15 minutes longer for the HD version to display. YouTube could be doing the second round of processing for these higher-resolution videos at the same time it's doing H.264 conversions for playback on TiVo digital video recorders and iPhones. My original upload was H.264 to begin with, so that could have sped things up.
Getting the higher-resolution video to display properly in embedded code is not so easy--but as you can see below, it works and looks gorgeous. You have to manually go in and change the embedded-link structure--something newbies might want to steer clear of. The YouTube embed technology for HD videos is missing the option to view in full screen, but you can toggle it on from the Google service's hosted video page.
One thing to note is that some folks to whom I sent this had problems getting the clip to display on older hardware. On my Intel Core2Duo machine, my CPU usage shot up from around 10 percent to 40 percent, and it peaked at 70 percent. This also happens on other HD video sites, such as Vimeo and Dailymotion. If you're using a computer equipped with a chip less powerful than an Intel Pentium 4, you might run into problems.
Brownbook, a global business directory that allows users to edit information about companies, launched recently for visitors all over the world.
According to the company, Brownbook aims to combine the power of wikis, peer production, and social networking to change the way business directories are presented online. Instead of providing a directory for users, Brownbook allows users to edit and update business listings, provide reviews with video and photos, and receive rewards by commenting on businesses.
The premise sounds simple enough and some may think it's interesting, but after using it for a while, I'm not quite sold on its usefulness. I perused the site, looked for different companies, read reviews scattered across the service, and found myself asking the same question each time: what value does this site really provide?
It's not that a business directory isn't nice, but there are a slew of them across the Web, like Yellowpages.com and Yahoo's business directory, which present pertinent information in a much nicer package.
Brownbook claims that over 27 million businesses have already been indexed. But when I searched for a major firm like Wal-Mart, the site returned a results page that listed Canadian stores and their phone numbers, but little else. That may be fine for Canadian customers who want to know a particular store's phone number, but the rest of the world is left out. And after viewing incomplete information about each store, I quickly realized that it's much easier to use Wal-Mart's store locator to find important information instead of Brownbook.
Being able to add a business and comment on that business is the real draw of Brownbook. But after searching through the site for quite some time without finding any useful review, I can't help but wonder if people are willing to review a major accounting firm or Ford dealership like they review hotels on TripAdvisor or restaurants on Yelp. I doubt it.
That said, adding a review was made simple by clicking the "Add a review" link and changing or adding information about a particular company is as easy as filling out a form and confirming the changes. That simplicity was welcome and could help the company grow as more people learn about the site.
But at its core, Brownbook is a directory site and so far, I just don't see any reason to use it as such. The idea of having a place to find important information about a particular company or franchise like mailing address, phone number, and location is fine, but with other services across the Web that present that information in a much cleaner way, I don't see a reason to use the site. And considering Brownbook is inherently subject to angry customers and bias, I'm not convinced the site can become a trusted source of important business information.
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