Tabs, tabs and more tabs, crawling all over your browser; impossible to sort, eating up system memory - what part of using a browser is more maddening than tab overload? Mozilla is trying to solve that problem with a big design challenge. One hundred and twenty eight teams entered the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer '09, five winners were announced today, and I'm not sure anyone's really nailed it yet. But the attempts are quite interesting.
"Most Innovative" was won by a University of Michigan team that designed a pretty awesome radial display for tabs spawned by tabs. It doesn't work very well yet and it's not clear that it really solves the problem at hand, but some of the other winners are worth a look too. There's even a 3D/Augmented Reality entry! What do you think, do any of these look like they could fix your tab troubles?
Leeks, celery, carrots, cannellini beans and some herbs. Epicurious says put all that together and you'll have an excellent vegetarian cassoulet. User comments strongly suggest using vegetable stock instead of water. But what about the wine?
Two year old wine social network Snooth announced today that it is now powering wine recommendations for the 25,000 editor tested recipes on Conde Nast's food site Epicurious. Snooth says this is just the first of a number of big sites that its custom algorithm will power recommendations on. That cassoulet? Snooth suggests you serve a Montevina Terra d'Oro Syrah 2002 ($15) with it. Nice.
Facebook announced today that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. If it maintains this kind of growth there will be more Facebookers than people living in the United States by early November. The man who ostensibly rules this kingdom is 25 years old.
Could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples' lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world. Is Facebook too big? That seems like an important question.
Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing's search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.
George Hotz (aka "geohot") recently made a name for himself when he released a software utility called purplera1n that gave Windows users the first usable iPhone 3GS jailbreak. The reason why this became such big news was not just because he had produced the first jailbreaking tool for the new iPhone, but because he had beaten the iPhone Dev Team to the punch. (The Dev Team is the group of developers who release the utilities to unlock and jailbreak iPhones and iPod Touches.)
Now it seems Hotz is at it again. Although this time around he's not first, he is claiming that his new software, "purplesn0w," is a better unlocking tool for the iPhone 3GS than what the Dev Team has put out.
Xobni, the makers of an Outlook add-in for a "smarter inbox," have just released a slew of new premium features in a package called "Xobni Plus." For the most part, these new features aim to bring more advanced search tools to your inbox, including the ability to build advanced queries, search within conversations and networks, and create Boolean searches. Also new are auto-suggest and filtering features. The question now is will users pay $29.95 for the upgrade?
Yesterday we explored an emerging trend called "Cross Reality", one term for when sensor networks meet online virtual worlds.
As this trend becomes more common over the next few years (and it will, as both Web-connected sensors and virtual reality ramp up), what are the implications on how people use the Web? How will it change our interactions in both real and virtual life? In this post we'll explore some of these issues and offer some ideas: for example a bookstore that offers you personalized, contextual information on your mobile phone, in real time and with virtual reality.
Bill Tancer, Hitwise GM of Global Research recently wrote about MySpace's departure as a top traffic generator for entertainment and music sites. Says Tancer, "MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to entertainment - multimedia sites providing over 35% of traffic to the category...that percentage now hovers below 10%."
According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone due to funding, legal issues and lack of users, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.
Would you pay $25 per month to belong to a social network for "sex positive" Burning Man types, with extensive privacy controls and real-world events planning? Former enterprise collaboration software marketing exec Sam Lawrence has co-founded a new company that launches tonight and has raised $1 million in funding in the belief that enough people are looking for exactly that.
Blackbox Republic argues that the transaction-focused dating site market is unfulfilling for millions of people around the world.
