I may be a scruffy, untrained blogger but I can still appreciate the work of traditional professional technology analysts. SageCircle is an analyst analyst firm, they track the analyst industry. Their emails and podcasts are an inspiration - dense with information and loads of fun. (If you like that kind of thing.)
SageCircle has been maintaining a list of tech analysts with Twitter accounts and the list is now up to 724 active users. It's a cool list and I thought it would be a good thing to put into TweepML, a wonderful Twitter group-creation service we reviewed earlier this month. The link for following all the analysts is below.
We've chronicled semantic web service Twine's birth, checkered youth, and recent woes in terms of traffic waning and criticism waxing.
We've been given screencasts of the new version of this knowledge management application - screencasts of both the consumer- and developer-facing facets of the site. Take a look, and let us know if the new Twine lives up to expectations. This new version, we are told, will be live by the end of the year.
There are those old-fashioned folks who still prefer to talk by phone, believing that "synchronous audio communication" is sometimes better than email or even - gasp - Twitter. The problem is cost, particularly for those not tethered to a land line or a laptop with Skype. Paying for 1,000 cell phone minutes per month is not exactly recession-friendly. So, is there an alternative to jail-breaking your iPhone or waiting for Apple and AT&T to file for divorce? Yes, there is, and I have been using it for a couple of months now in three different countries, and it works a treat. Here is my user report.
Mint, the popular personal finance site that was just acquired by Intuit, just released a major update to its iPhone application (iTunes link). While Mint's iPhone app was always quite good, this new version brings a number of new features to the app that make it more useful and, most importantly, more secure. The new features include the ability to edit transactions on the phone, mobile access to Mint's newly enhanced budgeting features, and the app can now also receive push alerts which can be customized on the service's website.
Google just announced that all the content from Google Books is now searchable from the Search Options panel the company introduced earlier this year. Until today, users could only use the Search Options panel to restrict searches to videos, forums, and reviews. This move should give Google Books a boost in visibility. It will also make it easier for users to search for books and magazines right from Google's default search page. There have been some rumors that Google plans to sell eBooks on Google Books by the end of this. Maybe this is a step in that direction.
A few weeks ago, Google announced the beta launch of Caffeine, the company's next-generation search infrastructure. At that time, Google said that most of the changes in this update were under the hood and that users wouldn't notice a difference in search results. At its core, Caffeine is basically a major overhaul of the Google File System. There have been some discussions about whether this update will bring any other major changes to page rankings or the importance of certain categories in the search results. Summit Media, a UK-based digital marketing agency, compared search results for 9,000 keywords (PDF) in Caffeine and Google's default ('vanilla') search and, interestingly, didn't find any major differences between the two.
Real-time computing is not new. This is the third generation of real-time:
• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.
• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.
• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.
In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.
At an investor conference held earlier this week, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker revealed that they were looking at new ways to help monetize their joint venture, the video-streaming service Hulu.com. The site, a popular web destination featuring movies and TV shows from content partners including Fox, ABC, Disney, and, of course, NBC Universal, reaches anywhere from 9 million to 42 million users per month, depending who you ask. Although the hosted content is currently ad-supported by way of commercials interspersed into the video streams, the company is interested in exploring other revenue options as well, specifically subscription services and pay-per-view programs.
A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other's email messages and some were even able to see another student's entire inbox. The issue occurred at a small handful of colleges, admitted Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, but he declined to say how many other institutions were affected. However, according to Donald Tom, director of IT for support services at Brown University, one of the institutions undergoing the transition, he got the impression that a total of 10 schools faced the problem.
While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.
Earlier today we reported that Posterous, a popular minimalist blogging service, had added the ability for its users to import their Tumblr content. Tumblr is a competing 'light blogging' service - the market leader in fact. Other similar services include Soup.io, Noovo, Vox, Profilactic and even Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are used for this purpose (although they're more used for long-form blogging).
We're curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.
