Archive for September, 2011
Julpan bought by Twitter
An year old start up company known as Julpan is acquired by Twitter which will help them surface relevant results in the stream.Another important part is acquisition of the Julpan engineering team which also includes Ori Allon.
A better stream organization is the main objective of Twitter’s Julpan acquisition. Julpan’s technology was focused on precisely that sort of social update ranking.There is much more to Twitter’s acquisition than algorithmic technology. Presence of Allon and his team of 11 engineers is icing on the cake for Twitter.
Ori Allon was a former engineer in Google who left the company to pursue the Julpan project.His work entered a new high when his algorithm Orion was purchased in 2006.It still plays an important role in Google’s search rankings.
The details of the acquisition were not disclosed and the aquisition indicates a stronger focus on algorithmic ranking. Wait for for something new like tweet-optimization in the coming days.
+1 Buttons Now Available In Mobile Web
Google +1 buttons have found themselves everywhere and now they are also present in the world of mobile web. +1 buttons for mobile made it’s debut on select Android and iPhone browsers on Thursday.
Punit soni,lead product manager for Google said ” the button will automatically be visible to anyone on Android 2.1+ and iOS 4.0+ browsers.When you +1 something,it will be displayed publicly across the web as an annotation on the content you +1’d “.
Friend annotations, +1 sharing with Google+ circles and +snippets are other recent feature roll-outs before +1 button mobile. In more than one million websites, +1 button had been embedded and still there is plenty of improvement to be made.
Flash 11 and AIR 3 launching in October
On Wednesday, Adobe announced the availability of Flash 11 and AIR on variety of platforms that includes Windows, Android, iOS, Blackberry Tablet OS, Mac OS for early October.
The ability to run hardware accelerated 3D graphics inside the player is the biggest feature in Flash 11. Improvements have also been made in Flash’s 2D capabilities which enables 1000 times faster rendering performance over the previous versions.
Support for native extensions as well as captive run time means developer can automatically pack AIR3 with their apps which will simplify the installation process.
Rental and subscription options are available for for content publishers across all supported platforms including mobile platforms
You can check out the feature of Flash 11 and Air 3 in the below video.
Google + API’s launched by Google
The first developer application programing interface(API) for Google+ has been unveiled.The launch of API is the first step towards creating Google+ apps and integrating social network into existing apps.
Google Developer Advocate Chris Chabot said I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real-life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step toward bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs”.
Google has made it clear that the retrieval is available for public posts and public profile data.As stated by one of the developer,the API’s allow for querying of a single person or an activity in Google+. The API’s would not allow TweetDeck or Hootsuite to support posting to Google+.
After the release of API,many developers feel that Google+ can catch up with Facebook.The release of API is still a major milestone in the growth of Google+ which was launched just three months ago. Google + still has a long way to go and compete with Facebook.
Flight Search Introduced by Google
Google has forayed into the travel industry with the quiet launch of web-based tool Flight Search that allows you to find and book flights.
An early look of the service has been provided by Google with flights to and from major cities that includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas. The airlines which are participating are Continental, American, JetBlue and Delta. Flight Search is more user friendly and offered flight information when typed flight from one city to another in the search window.
$700 million purchase of ITA,developer of airfare search and pricing system QPX has helped Google a lot to make further inroads in the travel category
Have a look this video on Flight Search
Web Analytics Tool Released by Twitter
Twitter announced it’s new Web Analytics tool on Tuesday which will provide a clarity to the webmasters and website owners who rely on the information network for content distribution.
The new web analytics is powered by Backtype,a social analytics company which was acquired by Twitter in July.The web analytics from Twitter is intended to provide more data on the effectiveness of their Twitter integrations.
As explained by Backtype founder Christopher Golda,the analytics will help publishers and website owners understand three key things.How much traffic Twitter is sending,how much of their content is being shared on Twitter and how well Tweets are performing.
The tool is currently beta and is free. This week a small group of partners will gain access to Twitter Web Analytics and Twitter will roll it out for Website owners in few weeks. For the developers,an API will also be released.
100 Million Active Users in Twitter
There has been a recent debate on the number of active users in Twitter.With a population of 200 million registered users,Twitter has 100 million active users logging at least once a month and 50 million active users everyday.
Costolo during an informal chat with the reporters revealed that “Half of the total population of Twitter login monthly and this number is up by 82% since the beginning of this year”.
A lot of statistics has been offered by the CEO to prove that Twitter is growing like a weed on mobile platforms. 55 million users logon to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month and Twitter.com now has 400 million visitors a month.Twitter says they expect to add 26 million active users between now and the end of the year.
A new record has been hit with 8900 tweets per second and 230 million tweets everyday. The tweets were high expecially during Hurricane Irene.
Offline Versions of Gmail and Calendar launched
In order to increase the offline utility of the products,Google is launching a new Gmail web app and updates to Calendar and Docs.
Bringing the Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline has now become an essential step for improving productivity. Rajen Seth of Group Product Manager told “when the users need offline access to their email or calendar,they really need it”.
Gmail Offline is the new Chrome app that is launched by Google. With the help of this new app it is possible for accessing, managing and sending email while you are disconnected from the web.With the help of HTML5 standards ,the new app has lot of capabilities to make it work offline
The look and feel of the app is lot like a Gmail app for the tablets.The key features that is focused on the new app is including organizing, starring, lableling, archiving and responding to email.there is no access to Gmail labs feature and but it will get the job done.
Apart from the Gmail app for tablets,Google is rolling out the ability to access Calendar and Docs offline.This let you view the events and RSVP to appointments in calendar and view documents in docs.it does not have the ability to edit a document offline, but Google promises to find a make it work.
At the moment,the apps are available through Chrome Web Store and Google has also plans to release the offline apps to other browsers once they support the functionality.
Google Chrome celebrates third birthday
Chrome,Google’s web browser celebrates it’s third birthday and the milestone was represented by an interactive infographic and the list of improvements to the product in the official blog.
The browser has surpassed Firefox to become the second most popular browser behind IE in UK and has great market share than expected in many countries. Chrome’s adoption rate is nothing short of impressive compared to the great starts IE and Firefox had.
Chrome also changed the way web browsers are built and released making it tougher for its competitor to rethink their strategies.It took three years for Firefox to go from version 3 to version 4.
The infographics provides a clear detail on how the browser market has evolved over the past 15 years highlighting key innovations that has happened.
Let us know your comments and views on Chrome and it’s contribution to the browser market.