Are you subscribed to enough people on Twitter, Facebook, feeds and other inbound information that you're pretty sure you miss a lot of good things? New York startup KnowAbout.It launches out of private beta today and is now freely available to anyone who would like to tackle that problem.
The service brings in all your subscribed content from major social networks, then offers a number of different ways to sort what it finds. My favorite is the filter called "Potentially Missed - links from people who don't share a lot of links." All of the different sorting options make up a smart system based mostly on thoughtful permutations of publicly available, structured fields of data. How well does it work? I'm not sure yet, but I really like the idea.
Security software and analysis company BitDefender is stepping up its product suite with the release its Total Security 2012 application. In terms of complete security coverage, not many companies put it all together the way BitDefender does, with features including Android security, a desktop application, coverage of Facebook and Twitter and even its own small Linux operating system with a built-in browser.
We wrote about Safego, BitDefender's Facebook security application, when it was released in public beta last October. Safego remains one of the only third-party security applications that protects users, more or less, from themselves. BitDefender does not plan on stopping at Facebook though as the company will release a Twitter security app within the next several weeks and have ideas for both LinkedIn and Google Plus. Social spam is on the rise, and BitDefender takes a novel approach to keeping users safe.
It pains me to say this, as I was very excited to try HP's TouchPad, but the combination of the webOS mobile operating system packaged in the form factor of the TouchPad tablet is far from being any sort of iPad killer. That's not to say that webOS doesn't have its perks - for example, the fast app switching involving stacks of "cards" you can swipe through on the homescreen, system-wide notifications that appear at the top right with just the right amount of interruption, a nifty "touch to share" feature that lets you move content between a Palm Pre and TouchPad.
But everything that's great about webOS comes in a heavy, chunky, plastic-y and cheap feeling TouchPad. It's a disappointing experience that detracts from the great features of the operating system. And this is only one of the problems with the tablet - it also has issues with its Web browser, Flash, a still paltry app catalog and more.
Apple released the iPhone app for Google's red hot social network, Google Plus, on the iTunes store this morning. (link) Enthusiastic Plus users appear very excited to take advantage of the native app, which offers features like photo uploading, Huddle conversations and push notifications - in addition to the features already offered by the mobile web interface.
Unfortunately, the app has a lot of shortcomings. Most of those shortcomings are true of Plus's Android App as well, but the fact that Google had to wait three weeks for Apple to approve the Plus app couldn't have helped the development cycle relative to early feedback on Android.
Document hosting and sharing site Scribd is venturing into the mobile space in order to give its publishers an opportunity to attract more readers. With a new mobile reader application called Float, Scribd aggregates content from news sites, magazines, blogs, and Scribd.com as well as from your social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can also save items you find online to read later in Float, with the use of a specialized browser bookmarklet.
But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.
One year ago this Spring I wrote a blog post titled "Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-In: Rapportive" and for many of us who did, Gmail plug-in Rapportive is now an essential daily tool. The service displays social media profile and activity data for people you're corresponding with in the sidebar of your Gmail threads. It's awesome.
Today Rapportive got even better. No longer content to serve up information about people who have already emailed you, the service now runs ahead of your conversations and puts profile information in your sidebar as soon as you start composing an email. It might sound like a small thing, but it's really not. Check out the demo video below. You can get this feature now at rapportive.com/compose.
When the iPad was launched, people across the geek-o-sphere condemned it as a dumb chunk of glass "for consumption only" - a tool incapable of facilitating content creation and possibly a threat to the future of human creativity. "The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing," wrote Alex Payne. "[If] I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today."
That may very well be, but the new iPad app that popular web exploration network StumbleUpon released this week goes a long way towards compensating for whatever risks to creativity that the device poses. If you've got an iPad, I think it's a must-have app. That's true for everyone, including for kids.
Short form, long form, there's a time and a place for reading all kinds of articles but wouldn't it be nice if you could have some very long things made very short, automatically, and still get the gist of them? Such is the promise of Trimit, a London-built iPhone app described as "an automatic text summarizer and editor for iOS."
This 99 cent app can take copied text or URLs (like links I've favorited on Twitter, for example) and apply an algorithm that shortens bodies of text thousands of characters long down to one thousand, five hundred or 140 characters automatically. How well does it work? It works well enough for me to appreciate it. Check out the demo video below.
The Cheezburger Network of comedy websites has released a free iPhone app (iTunes) that aggregates the images from across more than 40 sites of curated humorous content. It's a handy way to peruse the wide range of content, though the app is a little bit buggy at launch. The content displayed is limited to the images posted across sites like The Daily What, Failblog, Failbook and ROFL Razzi, and in some cases the images really need the text that accompanies them on the Web in order to make any sense.
For at least The Daily What, accessing the site in mobile Safari works better.
Popular iPad magazine app and Apple's iPad App of the Year Flipboard has just released a new version featuring a handful of updates, including one which has the company rethinking a user's first-time experience with the application. Now, instead of having to configure Flipboard with your favorite sources for online news, photos and other topics, a new content guide lets you immediately start browsing well-known websites formatted in an easy-to-read magazine-style layout.
Flipboard has also added built-in search, LinkedIn integration and has reformatted how the links from Twitter appear. But the company's biggest update is still yet to come.
