As we reported last week, Facebook's users clearly disliked the latest updates to their homepages, and now, Facebook is giving in to pressure from its most vocal users. According to Facebook, its users were especially unhappy with the lack of filtering mechanisms for the news stream on their homepages, and yesterday, Facebook's Chris Cox announced that the company plans to tweak the current design in order to give users greater control over what updates appear in the news stream.
Evernote, the popular note-taking, cataloging, and bookmarking service has been busy over the past month, cranking out a number of updates. In this short period of time, they've added support for Safari, integrated with Mac's Growl, updated the Android version, revamped their Web Clipper, and partnered up with business card and receipt scanning service Shoeboxed. Oh, and they started a podcast too.
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Over the past two years, we at Wistia have spent a great deal of time helping businesses effectively use web video. We continue to be amazed at the innovative ways people are using web video to help their companies. The vast majority of these companies, surprisingly, are not media companies: they're businesses that incorporate video into their sales, marketing, or training to help scale those processes more efficiently.
Xobni, the Outlook email plugin that makes your inbox a more social experience, is finally leaving their beta phase after 10 months of testing. The company is also announcing they've taken in an additional investment of $3.2 million to bring their series B round to over $10 million.
According to the UK site Blogstorm, Google has started ranking Twitter search pages for topics (think hashtag-style words) higher, often making the front page for certain queries. This is despite the fact that Twitter blocks Google's spider from indexing search result pages. Which begs the question, how is Google determining that these Twitter topics merit a high ranking?
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard - Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla's new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity - fit into the big picture. In this post we'll focus on the near future of Firefox.
The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That's right - the White House has a Digg clone! At least for the next two days. Activity on the site will culminate in Obama addressing the top questions on Thursday, March 26.
TextFlow, the visually stunning collaborative document editor we reviewed last November, just announced a major update today: online editing and back-end file storage offerings to augment its unique and easy to use Adobe AIR application. Prior to this announcement, TextFlow was limited to only being able to work with local files.
Skimmer is a design-focused new Adobe AIR application from Minneapolis Ad Agency Fallon. Part of a broader push for the company in revamping its image online, Skimmer is a very functional lifestream aggregator and media browser in its own right. Skimmer pulls feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, and allows posting to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well. But focusing on the underpinnings of this application would be doing it an injustice - it's got a handsome face, and that's the point.
The CBS-acquired streaming music service Last.fm announced this morning that it will "soon" require users outside of the US, UK and Germany to pay €3.00 per month to keep the music rolling. In blog comments on the announcement, the company explained that those three countries were the only ones where ad sales were proving successful enough to monetize the free music that way; elsewhere the money will have to come out of listeners' pockets.
It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.
