Webware

Google has built real-time search results into Google+, giving people the ability to watch a live feed of Google+ activity about a given subject.

In addition, the company wired real-time search up to the idea of hashtags, popularized on Twitter by the company's own Chris Messina as a way to flag particular themes. He called for Google+ hashtag support in July, and now when people add the hash symbol in front of a term--"#ios5," for example--it links to search results for that term.

The new features are gradually being enabled for Google+ users now, said Vic … Read more

Months of work on "chromoting" have reached fruition with Google's release on Friday of a new Chrome extension to let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network.

The Chrome Remote Desktop beta version, which arrived Friday, is a browser-based equivalent of remote desktop software for conventional operating systems. Such software is handy for IT administrators managing employees' machines, people taking care of their relatives' computers, or individuals getting access to their own machines from afar.

"Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another … Read more

This week, cloud-based advertising company Flite will be launching FliteHub, an ad component marketplace allowing brands and agencies to include applications directly in advertisements.

According to Flite CEO Will Price, advertisers can use FliteHub to "program" their ads via application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable deeper integration and dynamic updates based on metrics, location, or other criteria. For example, if a movie studio wants to push an ad that includes showtimes, theater information, and ticket purchasing, it can easily adjust it to better target customers in real time.

Display advertising remains one of most profitable Internet businesses, with … Read more

Windows 8 will offer people the option of logging in with a Windows Live ID, giving them the ability to access the same files and settings across multiple PCs.

Describing the new integration in the latest Building Windows 8 blog post, Katie Frigon, group program manager of Microsoft's You-Centered Experience team, pointed to the obstacles people face today when using more than one computer. Each PC may have its own unique Windows settings and customizations and store different files and documents, creating a challenge when switching from one computer to another.

To remove that challenge, logging in to Windows … Read more

Windows 8 will let users more easily and seemlessly bridge the gap between online and offline by directly tapping into Microsoft's Windows Live service.

In an Inside Windows Live blog posted yesterday, Chris Jones, vice president for Windows Live engineering, shared some of the features and benefits of the new Windows Live integration in Microsoft's upcoming OS.

Right off the bat, Windows 8 prompts you to log in with your Windows Live ID. If you allow it to do so, Windows Live can then automatically store your Windows profile, settings, and other key files in the cloud. This gives you the ability to synchronize those settings with any Windows 8 PC in which you're logged in, ensuring that you retain the same preferences from one PC to another. Microsoft is also promising the same synchronization between PCs and mobile devices running Windows Phone 7.

Windows 8 will also integrate more smoothly with SkyDrive, Microsoft's online storage site. Documents, photos, and other files that you create locally can be saved to SkyDrive, accessed from any PC, and even shared with other people that you designate. Microsoft will reportedly still limit SkyDrive users to 25 gigabytes of space for most files but offer unlimited storage for photos or Office documents.… Read more

Google+ has a hidden feature that lets people who start a hangout evict others from the video-chat feature, raising the prospect that Google's social network will get better moderation tools.

Programmer Mohamed Mansour, of Facebook data export fame, brought the hangout eviction feature to light late last night.

"The Google+ Hangout DOM [document object model] has an invisible kick button (just remove its visibility style) and when you click on it, you will see a nice kick bar!," Mansour said in a Google+ post.

The feature is one of a series of tweaks to Google's social network site. More substantive changes--corporate profiles or the ability to search Google+, for example--remain in the offing. In the meantime, the dominant social network, Facebook, is changing, too.

Yesterday, Facebook added the ability to follow another person's public posts, something easily done on Google+ and Twitter. It's also developed "smart lists" to better categorize contacts and added a group chat feature. … Read more

Windows 8 will come with Windows Live SkyDrive built in, giving people quicker, easier access to their online files.

Tweaking its SkyDrive Web site this week, Microsoft has unveiled a couple of demos to try to show just how Windows 8 and SkyDrive will play together.

Access to SkyDrive will be directly integrated into the new operating system, requiring you to sign up for a Windows Live account if you don't already have one. From there, you'll be able to upload and download your files directly between SkyDrive and Windows. Access to SkyDrive should be even faster and … Read more

Google thinks it's time to look beyond JavaScript, the programming language that gives Web applications their brains. The company's project to do so behind closed doors with a new language called Dart, though, has spurred something of a backlash.

The company piqued Web programmers' interest last weekend with the news that it would offer details about Dart, which it calls "a new programming language for structured Web programming," at a conference in October. But immediately after, a leaked 2010 memo about Dart--at the time called Dash--raised hackles by spotlighting how Google often develops Web technologies … Read more

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more