Webware

TweetDeck's new column navigator.

(Credit: TweetDeck)

The latest version of TweetDeck is out, and although it's a minor update it also introduces some useful changes worth noting. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Adobe AIR, the biggest change in TweetDeck 0.33 is an alteration to the program's guts that gives it more Twitter API breathing room.

TweetDeck now uses OAuth for calling Twitter's API. The API calls are how TweetDeck gets your tweet information from Twitter's servers, so this means that users can have TweetDeck update all their columns more regularly. In the previous version of TweetDeck, the API limit had been below 200 per hour. Now, it's shot up to 350 calls per hour.

There's also a new column navigator that lives at the bottom of the window. The navigator is made up of several bars, each one analogous to a column in your main window. Clicking a bar will jump you to the top of that particular column. For users with more columns than can fit onscreen, this should make jumping around much easier. Mouse over one of the columns and you'll see the column name, the service icon, the account attached if relevant, how long until the next update, and the current API usage. This can be good to know in case you're worried that one column is consuming too many calls.

TweetDeck 0.33 adds more media previews, including YouTube, Flickr, TwitGoo, MobyPicture, and Posterous, and also allows users to edit search columns without having to delete and then re-create them. The Help window has been revamped completely, as well. The full list of bug fixes and improvements can be read here.

Google is getting ready to add social-networking features into Gmail as it attempts to jump-start its social Web strategy.

Gmail users can already set their status within the service, but Google plans to expand that into a stream of status updates found in services like Facebook and Twitter, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. Users will also be able to share photos and videos through the service, which is expected to launch shortly.

Google has doubled down on its social Web strategy in recent months, with new hires and plans to devote more energy to understanding the social-media phenomenon. The company has tried to get momentum behind its ideas for several years, but hasn't gained much traction to date.

Separately, Google is building Google Wave as a similar stream of updates designed to improve collaboration. That service, which is unrelated to the Gmail status updates Google is preparing, is expected to become completely open sometime this year.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Google's plans for status updates inside of Gmail.

One key factor surrounding Google's plan will be the degree to which the service works with other popular social-networking services, namely Twitter and Facebook. Users who are already accustomed to sending updates across those services won't switch to the Gmail interface unless they can get all their messages in a central spot.

Yahoo offers something similar inside Yahoo Mail, letting users see updates to services like Twitter and Flickr from their contacts within the Yahoo Mail home page.

Is "poke" the new Konami Code? Maybe not literally, but one Electronic Arts executive has hinted that at least one of the gaming behemoth's titles is headed to Facebook, further blurring the line between social-networking applications and the game industry.

In a Bloomberg TV interview, EA Sports President Peter Moore obliquely said, "you'll see us on Facebook, going forward," with regard to its storied "Madden NFL" franchise.

Blogger Nick O'Neill of Social Times quotes someone anonymous saying this does, indeed, mean that there will be a Facebook version of "Madden NFL" (rather than, say, Facebook Connect notifications from the console) and that it will be a "simpler experience" of the original game.

No further information is available thus far, but it's easy to imagine that perhaps more of EA's titles could get a Facebook presence.

EA acquired Playfish, one of the predominant manufacturers of social games on the Facebook platform, for about $300 million late last year. In doing so, it became the first of the gaming industry's titans to really acknowledge the muscle of social games, and now it has a stellar Facebook game development team in its ranks.

But so far, social games have proven to be of a separate vein than their console and PC siblings--unless you count the obvious influence of the "Sim City" franchise on the likes of Zynga's Farmville. Free to play and reliant primarily on the sale of virtual goods, these games have roped in demographics completely different from the young males who propelled "Madden" to success.

Facebook has been the big hub for the rise of these games. But at the same time, social-game manufacturers are pushing to get their titles onto the Web at large--outside of Facebook's confines.

Hot on the heels of a visual face-lift, Facebook on Friday announced that the prototype version of its photo uploader, which was introduced in mid-November of last year, will soon be rolling out to all users.

Unlike the existing version of Facebook's photo uploader, the new uploader requires the installation of a browser plug-in. This inconvenience is rewarded with the option to leave Facebook entirely, while the photos continue to upload in the background. Previously, users would have had to leave that window or page running while the uploader did its magic.

Facebook says the new uploader will be in your hands soon.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook also said the new uploader supports a few extra photo formats, though it did not specify which ones. The company has, for some time now, had unofficial support for a handful of alternate formats, including raw images. However, on its official spec sheet the company says only .jpg, .gif, .bmp, and .png files will work.

Facebook currently gets 2.5 billion photo uploads per month. To put that in perspective, the company hit the 10 billion mark in October of 2008, a whole three years after first introducing the photo-sharing feature in 2005. In other words, any small change that makes it easier for people to get their photos onto the social network could end up having a big effect on how fast Facebook's photo collection will continue to grow.

If you can't wait for Facebook to activate the uploader on your account, you can do it yourself. Just head over to Facebook's prototype page, and turn it on.

Microsoft and Facebook announced earlier on Friday a big change in their search and advertising relationship: that Facebook will handle all of its own graphical ads, ending a 2007 advertising agreement with Microsoft that accompanied Redmond's $240 million investment in the social network. At the same time, a more enhanced version of Microsoft's Bing search engine will be available through Facebook.

But Facebook, as it turns out, is getting rid of traditional banner ads altogether.

"We recently stopped displaying Microsoft's banner ads in some international markets. After additional talks with Microsoft, we have agreed to stop running all banner ads on Facebook," a statement from Facebook read. "Ad formats that feature social actions perform better and provide a better user experience since they are more consistent with the look and feel of Facebook."

The company would be referring there to Facebook Ads, the product that it originally unveiled in the fall of 2007 and has since groomed into the "engagement ads" frequently seen on the site. These ads often involve members sending virtual gifts, voting in a poll, or signing up to an advertiser's "fan page" on the social network.

"Facebook ads can also be targeted to people based on the information they provide," the statement continued. "This combination of targeting and social relevance is the primary driver behind the shift in strategy. Microsoft has been a great partner and we continue to work with them in other areas, including search."

My big prediction now that Facebook's officially on its own in terms of ad sales? The company is overdue for the hire of a high-profile, prominent sales executive who can really work Madison Avenue--the sort of role that Tim Armstrong, now the CEO of AOL, used to play in his days at Google. With a continued shift away from the display ads that are more familiar to the media industry, Facebook will need to have someone who's able to give the hard sell and has the industry connections to match it.

Currently, the company's most prominent sales pitches come from Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer--also a former Google sales exec--who presumably has a whole lot else on her plate. Facebook, meanwhile, has plenty of rank-and-file ad sales positions listed on its jobs site, but hasn't said anything about whether it's ramping up hires.

Facebook has gotten another face-lift.

The popular social-networking site has tweaked its home page yet again. This time around, the redesign puts more of Facebook's core features and settings right on the home page. The goal is to spare users from having to jump from one page to another to access their favorite features.

The redesign was rolled out to the first group of users on Thursday, Facebook's 6th birthday. As of Thursday evening, 80 million out of Facebook's 400 million customers should have received the new home page, according to Inside Facebook.

A guide to Facebook's new home page

(Credit: Facebook)

The top menu of the Facebook home page now displays icons for requests, messages, and other notifications. The icons turn into red bubbles when you've got new requests waiting for your attention. Just click on one of the icons, and a drop-down menu appears showing you all the items in that list.

The right side of the top menu now displays links that take you home or to your profile page. A new account menu lets you quickly access your account settings, help center, and related pages.

In the middle of the top menu is a new search field, through which you can find names, subjects, and other items of interest. Type the name of a friend, for example, and you'll find recent posts, photos, and other content for that person. Type the name of a subject, such as Haiti earthquake, and you'll also find groups and pages devoted to that cause.

The left side of the new home page offers links to your news feed, messages, friends, and photos. But there's a twist here as well. Click on the Friends link, and the Friends page pops up in the center. Click on the Photos link, and your own photo albums and those of your friends appear. The center of the home page essentially stays the same by displaying your news feed, though you can now bounce between top news and most recent news.

But a home page redesign isn't the only thing on Facebook's mind. The company is reportedly also ready to jettison its internal e-mail program and replace it with a full-featured Web mail application, according to TechCrunch.

Known internally as Project Titan, the new e-mail effort could please many Facebook users who have complained about the limitations and clumsiness of the current e-mail feature. TechCrunch says the new e-mail system will support both POP and IMAP, so you can use it outside of Facebook. You'll also be able to set up your own Facebook vanity URL as your address, for example, joe.smith@facebook.com.

No word yet on when the Titan will be launched to the public.

For a reason beyond any fathom I can measure, I failed to follow Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Twitter. Now I am attempting to kick myself. I am missing.

You see, Schwartz decided that the best way to tell folks that he was leaving Sun-- recently purchased by Oracle seemingly because Larry Ellison still can't find a hostile way to grab the Golden State Warriors by their Nikes--was to confirm rumors of his departure in a tweet.

"Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it," he wrote at Twitter.com/OpenJonathan. Then he added, mystically, "Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."

One assumes that the haiku upon which Schwartz ended, after suffering from this painful haiku d'etat, was accompanied by a sum of money that will not prevent Schwartz from visiting his favorite hairdresser as often as he would dare. However, one wonders if his former employees were charmed by this disarming farewell.

I think, therefore I tweet.

(Credit: CC Texas Mustang/Flickr)

What would you do if you were to attempt a twittering haiku as your public farewell? Might you, instead of offering a sweetly self-serving, self-referential reminder of your thwarted, or perhaps Schwarted, excellence, offer a small good-bye--in true haiku form or something a little less true--to your fellow man and woman?

Something like, "Wish you got/As much as I did/Sorry you won't."

Or perhaps, "I climbed/On the back of good people/To riches."

Or even, "Gosh/You're all screwed/I'm so sorry."

I am sure that Schwartz believes that he has been deeply progressive by using Twitter to announce his move on to, no doubt, better things. But, when he was CEO, how might he have reacted, if one of his employees had decided to take a hike(u) and tweeted a resignation?

Say, "Useless management/On to better things/FU Sun."

I have a feeling that the looser parts of him might have twitched. Still, perhaps he has, indeed, started a progressive trend, one that might encourage freedom of speech on departure. Perhaps corporate lawyers will soon be unable to keep up with an avalanche of this new style of adieu.

Be a Twitter quitter. It makes you look good. It makes you feel good--about yourself, that is.

New iPhone app Assemble has one simple purpose, and manages to do it well. It lets you send out your location to a group of friends (or just contacts), along with a personalized message with any special instructions. In turn, they can use the app to navigate directly to you.

Instead of using SMS messages or e-mail, Assemble wisely makes use of Apple's push notification service. This is handy for your cheapskate friends who aren't on a messaging plan, but more importantly, clicking "view" on that message jumps them to a Google map of your location. There they can grab directions.

The one caveat here--and it's a big one, is that whomever you're sending your alerts to also needs to be a registered Assemble user with the app installed. Which means they also need iPhones with push notifications turned on. I don't know about your friends and family, but for mine that seems like a tall order.

Assuming your buddies do have an iPhone, and don't mind using a proprietary messaging system, it's a piece of cake. Advanced users can also set a location invitation to expire after a certain amount of time. This means that if someone opens your invite later on, and it's past the time slot you set, it simply tells them you're not there.

There is one big tweak on the way to make Assemble a little easier to use. The next version will be making use of Bump, the popular content and contact swapping tool. That will let people add others as contacts to the app without having to stand there and swap information. In the video below you can see how it will work. For now, it's been taken out for Bump to get its servers ready.

It's worth noting there are a handful of other apps that share these basic friend-finding and navigation features. Most notably Zhiing, which is not only cross-platform, but also includes an in-box to manage friend invites, and spoken turn-by-turn directions. Assemble also faces competition from apps like Foursquare, which is also able to send push notifications when you check in somewhere. However, that assumes your friends are tech savvy enough to look up the location on their mobile phone and find their way there with whatever mapping tools they have.

In the future, I'd love to see Assemble add log-in hooks for Twitter and Facebook so as to not require signing up for yet another service. It would also be great to be able to send an e-mail or an SMS with your note to friends who aren't registered with the service, because as simple as it is to sign up, it's asking a whole lot for people to: have an iPhone (or iPod Touch), install this, register, add you as a friend, and have their push notifications toggle turned on.

Assemble is free, and weighs in at just under a megabyte. It works on both the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Droolr is the newest single-serving site from the folks at Stateless Systems, the makers of BugMeNot, TrendsMap, and coupon site RetailMeNot. The site, which went live early Wednesday, caters to online shoppers who may not follow gadget blogs, but that still want a steady influx of shiny things to look at, and maybe even purchase.

The site takes a page from places like Digg, and the recently launched Deals.Woot site in letting users submit, and vote up items of interest. In this case, it's tech products, which are then categorized by whatever tags are provided by the submitter. The most-voted on items then jump to the front page where they'll hopefully garner more votes.

When an item is voted up and into popularity, it earns the user who submitted it karma (just like Reddit). For now, karma doesn't yield any special perks beyond a number that sits next to your user name and a spot in the top karma-getters box on the front page of the site. Stateless says that in the future, certain features could be added to the site that only high-karma count users will be able to access.

Droolr lets users vote up items they like and add them to virtual wish lists. That's about all it's good for though.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Other features include a way to round up items into a wish list, which can be shared for others. You can also recommend items to people you follow on the service. These recommendations, along with items you note as "wanting" can be spit out as updates to your Twitter or Facebook account.

Notably missing from the system is a way to monitor the pricing of any of these items. Instead, the site acts as more of a place for new or otherwise noteworthy consumables to get attention. To be honest, there are enough of these sites around, and Droolr doesn't add a whole lot in the way of features to make itself stand out. I would, for instance, like to see prices included on each item, along with a stringent dupe detector, as I was easily able to submit the same item twice. Considering there's no way to flag items as being a duplicate, or inappropriate, it leaves the onus on Stateless to keep Droolr clean.

It would also be great to see an automated roundup of where items have shown up in press/blog mentions, as most of the front page items I saw while testing had appeared in gadget blogs from the past week. This may seem insignificant, but those posts tend to have a lot more information and/or an editorial touch that the person who submitted that item does. Gadget site Gdgt does this to some degree, although its users add these links manually.

Another feature that's missing is a way to see if there are any coupons or discounts for that item from an online store. This one makes a lot of sense given that Droolr's sister site is RetailMeNot, which specializes in online coupons and rebates. Bringing together those two ecosystems seems quite logical to me, and would give the site more staying power. As it stands, there's not much to keep users coming back for that next hit of gadgety goodness.

Somewhat related: Stateless tells me it's shuttered its PDFmeNot site, which was launched nearly two years ago. The site would convert hosted PDF files to run inside an Adobe Flash-powered document viewer. If you're looking for something similar, check out the recently launched PDFmyURL.