DoubleSixx

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Source :

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html

AUSTIN, Texas–Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the “@Anywhere” platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.

A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off “hovercards” that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.

“Discovery is one of the hardest challenges,” Williams said. “It’s putting these in context where you’re already aware of them…Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.” The company has 13 launch partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing. As Williams describes it, “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.

Williams was interviewed onstage by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab in what was arguably the most highly anticipated event of the SXSWi lineup. A massive event hall at the Austin Convention Center was filled to capacity, with a line snaking through the hallways half an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin.

The Twitter CEO was sketchier about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year.

“Inevitably, it’s going to take experimentation,” Williams said. “Google started out thinking that they were going to sell search services.”

A report circulated last month that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi, stemming from comments that the company’s head of product management made in a conference panel. Company executives had heretofore been ambivalent as to whether they would start rolling out ads any time soon–or ever.

SXSWi is more or less Twitter’s birthplace: the company made its debut there in 2007, and became an instant sensation with the early-adopter geek crowd. It took about two more years before it could be deemed a legitimate, mainstream sensation, but SXSWi is its home turf.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20000474-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The Internet is in the running for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has confirmed. Championed by Wired magazine in Italy, the nomination has been backed by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte.

Italian Wired suggests that the Internet should receive the highly regarded prize for helping to advance “dialogue, debate and consensus.”

The nomination from Wired has been dismissed by some as a publicity stunt — and the support of long-time Wired columnist and investor Nicholas Negroponte is hardly surprising. Although currently seeing some success with the One Laptop Per Child program, Negroponte’s past projects have included such dubious endeavors as as Swatch Internet Time.

The award is to be given to the person (or organization) who has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The creators of the World Wide Web — Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Roberts and Vint Cerf — have been nominated, too.

The final nominations will be now be considered by the Committee with the winner due to be announced on October 8, while the awards ceremony will take place in December.

Do you think the Internet should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? Or should it go to a person or organization? Is Wired’s campaign just a PR stunt? Have your say in the comments below.

http://mashable.com/2010/03/10/internet-nobel-peace-prize/

TiVo has updated its offerings, introing two new set-top boxes, the TiVo Premiere and the TiVo Premiere XL, which will finally bring high-definition to the DVR range.

In a nutshell, the web-connected TiVo Premiere boxes offer cable TV, movies on demand (from Netflix, Amazon and Blockbuster) and web videos from YouTube (). In the coming months, they will also offer music from Pandora (), along with existing services from the likes of Rhapsody () (which will also be available to Series 2 and 3 box owners).

In addition, TiVo is not letting the demand for apps pass it by; the boxes will offer access to more than 1,000 apps from FrameChannel with widgets for news, weather, sports, social networking sites and more.

As far as the difference between the two boxes goes, the Premiere has a 320GB harddrive — said to be good for 45 hours of HD storage or 400 standard, while the Premiere XL has 1TB of storage space and boasts 150 hours for HD and more than 1,000 for SD, as well as some THX tech for all kinds of optimal audio and video reproduction claims.

The boxes cost $300 and $500, respectively, and will be on sale in April. Also due soon from TiVo is a Wireless-N Wi-Fi adapter, and an unusual, slide-out QWERTY TiVo remote that will be offered as optional extras.

The idea of bringing the Internet into the living room is becoming more common as of late. Hardware products such as the soon-to-be-released Popbox and Boxee Box are all about getting Internet content on your television, and Yahoo’s Connected TV offering for web-enabled televisions will bring web widgets to the living room. Heck, Samsung has even introduced an app store for televisions.

These products and innovations, along with TiVo’s newest venture, just serve to demonstrate how attached we are to the Internet (Case in point: 13% of viewers were surfing the web during the Olympics’ opening ceremonies).

Source :

http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/tivo-apps-premiere-dvrs/

Picnik, which makes an online photo editor, announced on its blog Monday that the company is being acquired by Google.

The editor works directly with online photo libraries like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa Web Albums. Users can also upload files to the service and download them again when they are done. The editing capabilities it offers are a natural complement to a Picasa, even though the technology appears to be a mismatch: Picnik works in Flash, while most advanced Google apps use the slower JavaScript. (Google, however, is working to improve JavaScript performance with its Native Client technology.)

Neither Picnik nor Google provided financial terms of the deal in their blog posts.

Flickr uses Picnik by default. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo, which owns Flickr, deals with the new owner of its preferred photo editor.

Picnik is a Webware 100 winner. It competes with Pixlr, Fotoflexer, and Aviary.

Picnik brings photo editing to the browser.

Source :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10461627-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

This is what Google had in mind when it acquired DoubleClick.

Google unveiled its rebranded display ad serving technology Monday, bringing together the DoubleClick DART for Publishers and Google Ad Manager products under a new name: DoubleClick for Publishers. The new ad-management software has a redesigned user interface, links to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and APIs for company developers to build applications on top of the technology.

The idea is to give Web publishers that run “Ads By Google” a better way to control where their clients’ ads appear. Similar work on search ads has made many a millionaire at Google, and the company believes it can give display advertisers the same amount of precision and analytical tools that are available for text advertisers.

Hence the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2008. Last year Google unveiled the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which matches ad buyers looking for a discount with ad sellers hoping to fill excess inventory.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10457609-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

RSS technology makes it possible for anyone to keep up with fresh content without having to visit the site in question. Now the same holds for webpages without RSS thanks to a new Google Reader feature.

Today Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google ReaderGoogle Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. So you can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.

Should you put the new feature to work, you’ll start to receive short snippets for any updates made to the pages, and GoogleGoogle asserts that it’s committed to improving the quality of these tiny blurbs over time. On the flip side, webpage owners can choose to opt out by adjusting a few lines of code.

So when might this come in handy? While most companies have their own blogs, receiving automatic notifications any time there’s an update to the homepage or product pages of a business of interest could prove to be vital. For example, with Apple releasing a “new product” and potentially news about the iPhoneiPhone on Wednesday, you bet that I’m going to create some custom feeds.

Source :

http://mashable.com/2010/01/25/google-reader-custom-feeds/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_content=Twitter

As part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recently posted about how to pick a smart password. Having a strong password goes a long way in helping to protect your data, but there are a number of additional steps you can take to help you keep your Gmail account secure:

1. Remember to sign out. Especially when using a public computer, be careful to sign out of your Google account when you’re finished. Just click the “Sign out” link at the top right corner of your inbox. If you’re using a public or shared computer and want to be extra thorough, you can also clear the browser’s cache, cookies and history. Then, completely close the browser. On your personal computer, you can also lock your computer with a password-protected screensaver if you need to step away momentarily. Learn the best ways to lock your screen in Windows or in Mac OS X. Forgot to sign out? Open up a new Gmail session on another computer and use Gmail’s remote sign out feature to close any sessions that might still be open elsewhere.

2. Be careful about sending certain sensitive information via email. Once you send an email, you’re no longer in control of the information it contains. The recipients, if they so choose, could forward the email or post its contents in a public place. Even if you know and trust the people you’re emailing, that information may become exposed if their accounts become compromised or they get a virus on their machines. As a rule of thumb, should you need to provide a credit card number or financial account number to respond to a message, provide it over the phone or in person — not over email. And never share your password with anyone. Google does not email you to ask you for your password, your social security number, or other personal information — so don’t send it!

3. Enable “Always use HTTPS.” Any time you visit a webpage, your computer needs to send and receive information across the Internet. HTTPS is used to encrypt data as it is transmitted between computers on the Internet, so look for the “https” in the URL bar of your browser to indicate that the connection between your computer and Gmail’s servers is encrypted. We use HTTPS on the Gmail login page, and you can choose to protect your entire Gmail session with HTTPS as well. HTTPS can make your mail slower, so we let you make the choice for yourself. Open Settings and choose “Always use HTTPS” on the General tab if you want to turn it on.

4. Be wary of unexpected attachments.To help protect you from viruses and malware, Gmail automatically scans every attachment when it’s delivered to you, and again each time you open a message. Attachments you send are also scanned. That said, no system is foolproof, so if you happen to get an email from a friend with an attachment you didn’t expect, don’t be afraid to ask the sender what it is before you decide whether to open it.

5. Make sure your account recovery information is up-to-date. Your account recovery information helps you regain access to your account if you ever forget your password, or if someone gains access to your account without your permission. We currently offer several paths to account recovery. Every Gmail user must select a security question and answer — be sure to choose a combination that is easy for you to remember, but hard for others to guess or come across by investigating. Don’t choose a question like “What is my favorite color?” as others may easily guess the answer. We also encourage you to provide a secondary email address and/or a mobile phone number, so we can send you a link to reset your password if you lose access to your account. You can find additional security tips for Gmail in our Help Center. Learn more about protecting your computer, website, and personal information by checking out our security series on the Google blog or visiting http://www.staysafeonline.org.

Source :
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/gmail-account-security-tips.html