Amazon threw down the gauntlet against terrestrial competitors today by announcing that Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow and purchase Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States.
In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.
Pandora, the customized Internet radio streaming service, has pushed out a redesigned interface to all users. The new UI comes with an added bonus: the company has removed its infamous 40 hour listening cap, enabling users to streaming an unlimited amount of music for free.
The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.
Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.
The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.
Alongside all the announcements of new user features for Google Plus, the latest big news out of the Google camp is for advertisers. The +1 button is coming to Google Display Network ads, hinting at the first monetization channel for the social network and enabling Google users to personalize their ad experiences. Google has shown +1 buttons on search ads since the button's launch in March.
Ads now join other Google content as part of the company's personalization efforts with Plus. "A single +1 applies to the same content across the web, no matter where it appears," the announcement says, meaning that clicking +1 on an ad, a search result, or a Web page has the same effect on one's interest graph. The +1 button will start appearing on AdSense for Mobile Content text and image ads by early October. Users who don't want their personal +1 data to be used in ads will be able to opt out in their personalization preferences, even before the ad features go live next month.
Secure Socket Layers and Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) is the foundation of Web security. Banks, travel booking sites, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, email services and a plethora of other industries built their security based on the fact that it is very hard to crack SSL. Yet, a group of researchers has figured out how to do just that.
SSL encryption protects data in transit from the client to the server. This communication happens very rapidly and the encryption effectively makes a secure tunnel for information. The researchers that have cracked SSL used a vulnerability that until now was considered only a theory. Like wormholes.
Just ahead of Facebook's f8 Conference, Google has announced nine new features for Google Plus, and there are some doozies. First of all, the social network is now open to the public. No sign-up required. Just go to google.com/+ and join the party. (New to Google Plus? Here's how to use it.) For the past 12 weeks, the network has been in "field trial" mode, but Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra says that it is now "ready to move from field trial to beta." Open sign-ups is touted as the 100th feature of Google Plus.
Hangouts - the video chat feature - have come to mobile, currently supporting Android 2.3+ devices, and iOS support is "coming soon." Hangouts also now have an "On Air" feature, which allows any Google Plus user to tune in and watch. Furthermore, Hangouts now offer screensharing, a shared sketchpad, and names for Hangouts. But perhaps the killer app is Google Docs in Hangouts, which will open up the possibility of live collaborative work (especially once Google Apps accounts get access).
HipGeo, a location based social network that I wrote about in February, started and invested in by a group of Yahoo veterans and advised by a team of corporate data rockstars, has launched its iPhone app and it's really impressive. I'm having some performance issues with it but the potential is clear and the user experience is strong.
The app tracks your travels, then stitches together your photos, comments and pinned locations into an animated diary of each day. It lets you roll back time to see what you did on any day in the past and offers other sophisticated features in a beautifully designed interface with a well thought-out user experience. The company's launch was quiet, but if they can amplify their marketing I think HipGeo is something that will appeal a lot to many people. The startup said it was going to build a "Mint.com for your location" and this first version of the app looks like it's well on its way to delivering on that promise.
Software engineer Mohamed Mansour has released a proof-of-concept app for the Google Plus API called Stream+ that tries to bring some order to the chaotic Google Plus stream. "It uses machine learning algorithms to automatically classify the posts into categories," Mansour says in a public post. Stream+ is among the first releases to take advantage of the parts of the API that Google made available last week.
The app itself is not very useful yet, but it's a start. "Some categories are not meaningful," Mansour says, "and I am trying to optimize it further which is quite difficult." But Mansour's insights after developing for the API are instructive. On the Stream+ website, he says that the API was "very easy" to learn and use, but that it suffers from "extreme slowness" in practice.
In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament.
The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.
App developers who launch their projects on the Facebook platform have created 235,644 jobs and contributed $15.7 billion to the economy, says a study released by the University of Maryland.
Using statistical evidence provided by Facebook and apps developers, researchers at the Smith School Center for Digital Innovation, Technology and Strategy show that the boom in games like Farmville and the creation of productivity apps are boosting at least one corner of the economy.
