StumbleUpon, the popular content recommendation service, just launched a major new version of its web toolbar, which brings the StumbleUpon experience to users without having to install a browser extension. The web toolbar is similar to Digg's DiggBar, and this new and enhanced version features a fully personalized experience as well as enhancements to its sharing features. While the WebToolbar doesn't quite feature the same functionality as the standard StumbleUpon toolbar, it does make up for this by being a lot more convenient to use, and, of course, you can use it on any computer as you don't have to install the browser extension to use it.
Earlier this month, a problem was discovered in Google's new web browser, Google Chrome, that would have allowed an attacker to launch and run scripts on a compromised machine. The issue, originally discovered by Roi Saltzman of the IBM Rational Application Security Research Group, had been given a security rating of "high." Interestingly enough, although the attack takes advantage of security issues in Google Chrome, the initial entry point for the malicious code would have taken place in Internet Explorer.
Goolge has now released a patch for this issue. If you want to make sure your browser is up-to-date, click through for the instructions.
If you need any more proof of how fast the mobile web is growing, just look at the latest numbers coming out of Opera today. The company is reporting a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. And the mobile web isn't just booming here in the Western world - it's also experiencing rapid growth in places like Latin America and Nigeria, too.
Nothing better illustrates the brokenness of the Internet's most traditional revenue model than the recent crop of ad-stripping services.
"Users want to have a clean layout to read a blog or news site," said TidyRead developer Matthew Chen. His Firefox add-on creates a sweet, hyper-relevant overlay as users browse through content, blocking out all the noise and distraction while leaving the cream of the content fully intact.
We'd like to welcome a new daily writer to our team of Web enthusiasts: Jolie O'Dell. Jolie is a journalist, blogger, and video blogger. In the past, she has worked on newspapers, on magazines, for book publishers, for serial entrepreneurs, on startup teams, at advertising and marketing agencies, and for enterprise blogs and websites. Jolie has a B.A. in Media Studies from Shenandoah University. She will be blogging daily during the week for ReadWriteWeb.
Smub.it offers a drop-dead simple social sharing and bookmarking tool that proves especially useful for iPhone and other smart phone users.
Smub, which stands for "smart multi-use bookmarking," requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.
The worst virus on Twitter isn't Mikeyy or any of its variants. It's the virulent strain of viral nuttiness that possesses people to jump at any dodgy opportunity to Get Thousands of Followers With Just One Tweet! Half of them are out-and-out Ponzi schemes, and the other half make the first half look reputable.
My modest proposal? Get Twitter to have a setting that allows you to specify the number of followers it will display on your profile. You want 50,000 followers? Key it into the field and hit submit - you got 'em! True, they're completely imaginary, but let's face it - so is any hope that the followers you get in one of these schemes are going to listen to a thing you say. (Unless it's a promise that you can get them even more followers.)
The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next "Google killer" from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype - though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a "Google killer." According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.
There are thousands of Google gadgets you can add to your iGoogle pages, from email checkers, games, even (wow, over 70) Twitter clients. The framework for these gadgets is flexible, allowing most of them to work not only in iGoogle but also on your PC using Google Desktop and in Gmail as a labs plugin. So when we write about a particular gadget, although it may not get as big as an iPhone app, there's still a lot of potential there.
The Google gadget called What's Popular came to our attention thanks to Steve Rubel's blog Micro Persusion. His take is that it has the potential to rival Digg. While we think that might be a bit ambitious, we definitely think the gadget is a lot of fun.
Last Friday was a hot day in Sebastopol, California. Eran Hammer-Lahav rolled into town hours after finding out that there was a security hole in his pet project for the last few months, a new way to use Twitter to log in to third party sites using the OAuth protocol instead of user names and passwords. Working as the Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo, Hammer-Lahav was relieved to have been told about the hole so he could help fix it. When he arrived in Sebastopol at a small event of industry leaders called Social Web FOO Camp, he talked with friends and colleagues about it.
At some point in conversation Hammer-Lahav realized that the problem went far beyond the Twitter implementation. The OAuth protocol had an inherent vulnerability; big companies like Google, Netflix and Yahoo had implemented OAuth and scores of tiny startups had too.
