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When we were designing Glue, our goal was to create a simpler way for people to connect around things they are interested in online. In this post we discuss the design choices that we’ve made and why we made them.
What am I missing? And more importantly, what am I missing that other people are seeing? It's those kinds of questions that drive millions of people to the Web - and to social news sites - on a daily basis. Because of that, any number of companies are racing to find ways to accurately answer those questions.
One of the companies was Me.dium, a browser add-in that provided real-time access to what others were surfing. Me.dium incorporated its technology into "social search," releasing an alpha of its search engine earlier this year. Today, they're relaunching that social search as OneRiot.
A newly launched service called near.ly sends you links to news and blogs posts that are happening in your area. The news items ("nearlies") are sent to you via a Twitter direct message that consists of a quick headline and a bit.ly-powered URL. Yes, this service is a Twitter app, but it was built to demonstrate the potential of the brand-new Outside.in API. The API was built around Outside.in's "news around you" feature called Radar which delivers news, stories, and blog posts that are located within 1000 feet of a particular location.
VMware Brings Virtualization To Mobile Phones
VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.
It stands to reason that people who are "starting to come down with something" often take the opportunity to search for information on what ails them, even before they discuss their symptoms with a healthcare professional. Who gets more of those searches than anyone? Google, of course.
When Google started looking more closely at anonymous aggregate searches for "flu symptoms" and the like, they discovered that - after cross-referencing that data against information from the Center for Disease Control - they had the ability to predict flu outbreaks by monitoring search patterns. And now, they've published their findings as Google Flu Trends.
Wesabe and the UK Telegraph Think You Might
Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though.
Google today announced a major update for Gmail: video and voice chat. To make this work, users only have to install a small browser plugin. Google will start enabling these new features for all Gmail and Google Apps users at 12pm PST today. As is typical for new releases in Gmail, Google will roll this feature out to all users over the "next day or so."
The new chat functionality will work on PCs with Windows XP or Vista, as well as on Macs with OS X 10.4 or later. The plugin will work with all the major browsers, including Google's own Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
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What do you get when you move the head of digital media at one of the world's leading old-school press outfits into the CEO's office of an even hipper large music and news organization? We don't know, but we're excited to find out! Veteran media exec Vivian Schiller announced today that she's leaving her position as head of NewYorkTimes.com to become the new CEO of National Public Radio (NPR).
We're excited about it from a technology perspective, but media industry analyst and RWW Jobwire guest editor Sam Whitmore discusses the move in terms of what it means for the Times as a business as well over in the Jobwire Featured Hire of the Day (sponsored by VisualCV).
Search engines are great at retrieving textual information, but even though a lot of search results today are actually videos, most search engines still only display a text link to those videos. A new Greasemonkey script from VideoSurf changes this by adding small film strips to every video that appears in your search results on Google and Yahoo, as well as to every video on YouTube's search results page.
