Web 2.0

Report: Official Twitter share button on the way

Twitter will reportedly soon get its own external sharing tool that will help both users and publishers share content on the popular social publishing platform.

Based on internal company documents, blog Mashable on Wednesday unearthed details on the "Tweet Button" program, which centers on an embeddable sharing button. When put on third-party sites, it will allow users to share whatever content they're looking at, while it keeps track of how many times that particular URL has been retweeted by other Twitter users.

Sound familiar? If you look at the top of this post, you'll see that … Read more

Twitter's new deceased-user policy vs. Facebook's

Consider it a sign of the times, or even just success that Twitter now has a policy in place to handle ownership of a user's account once they've died.

As expected, interested parties need to send in several pieces of information about how they relate to that person before Twitter will take action. Once the proper credentials have been sent to the company (via e-mail or snail mail), Twitter is then able to do one of two things: either remove a deceased user's account entirely, or provide an archive of all that user's tweets so family … Read more

Google revamps contact management in Gmail

Google on Tuesday announced that it is giving the contact management tool found inside Gmail an "overhaul."

The enhanced version of Gmail's contact manager, which Google says is already in the process of going out to users, brings with it a number of small tweaks, the biggest one being automatic saving. So, if you're making changes to a contact, you can be halfway through making edits or additions and if you close the page, or move onto something else, those changes get saved without any user input required.

Also included now are Gmail's standard keyboard … Read more

Karaobird brings karaoke hijinks to YouTube

Remember a few weeks ago when YouTube made a big deal about its new music video page that sorts out every single music video that's hosted on the service? You can now put it to far better use with a new Firefox extension called Scrolling Lyrics Player (SLP) that turns each video page into a honest to goodness karaoke player.

Once installed, SLP will sit just to the right of any YouTube video and do a search for the lyrics of whatever music video or song recording you're watching. It then syncs that up with the timing of … Read more

U.S. contracts fund next-gen satellite imagery

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the U.S. government that oversees satellite imagery collection for military and intelligence work, has awarded two satellite imagery companies contracts worth more than $3 billion each.

The two 10-year contracts are part of a program called EnhancedView to produce a new generation of satellite imagery. GeoEye, based in Dulles, Va., was awarded $3.8 billion, and DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo., was awarded $3.55 billion.

Each contract is paid annually, subject to congressional approval, and can be canceled annually. The long-term funding paves the way for development of next-generation satellites with … Read more

Thousands of Evernote users affected by data loss

Online note-saving service Evernote on Monday acknowledged that it had suffered a hardware fault at the beginning of July that resulted in potential data loss for more than 6,000 of its users worldwide.

The issue was first reported by blog Techwave, citing a report from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. In a Monday note to Evernote users on the company's blog, Evernote CEO Phil Libin explained that the loss stemmed from bad server hardware:

"Every user's data is stored on a 'shard.' A shard is made up of a server together with a redundant fail-over server. If there is any problem with a server, the system automatically fails over to the second server in the shard. We currently have 37 shards. Shard 22 was the one that had problems last month."

Evernote's back-up system stores user data in up to six different places using both on- and off-site servers as well as locally on the user's copy of the software. Though in the case of the problem, which lasted four days, user data was simply being overwritten due to one of these systems not having a working failure routine. "Basically, the shard kept failing over back and forth between two servers over the time period causing some of the data created during that time to get overwritten," Libin explained.

In a call with CNET on Monday morning, Libin said that of the 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back.

Evernote's software saves a copy of a work in progress before syncing it up with whatever was stored online, so the company was able to pull the complete copies of various files once the problem had been addressed and fixed. However, those who had been working purely on Evernote's site, and whose work was being stored on the faulty shard, had no such protection.

As an apology, Evernote has provided affected users with a free year of the company's $45-a-year premium service. Those who were already premium subscribers get an extra year.

As for whether this could happen again, Libin said it's extremely unlikely."This was a freak of hardware failures. But we've changed the fail-over process so it won't happen again."

Data loss on large-scale Web services is uncommon, but can be extremely hard to recover from. In 2009, social-bookmarking site Magnolia suffered a massive data corruption that resulted in the loss of all its user data. It has since started from scratch with a new version of the site. Prior to that, one of the most high-profile outages was a multi-hour downtime for Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, which many sites use as their built-in storage solution.

At a press conference three weeks ago, Evernote announced it has reached 3.7 million users since launching in June of 2008. In that time, its users have saved 145 million notes, which Libin said works out to 312 new ones every minute.… Read more

Fluther launches 'Federated': Q&A for any site

Questions-and-answers service Fluther is unveiling a new platform on Monday that lets companies integrate the Fluther community, and its real-time Q&A interface into their Web sites.

The platform, which is called Federated Fluther, can be skinned to match whatever site it's on, bringing the same feature set and functionality found on Fluther.com. Any questions that are asked on that site can then be answered both by its users, and those back over on Fluther. Likewise, the answers from either community end up in the same bucket--something that for sites with a smaller community can mean those … Read more

Flickr's photo page redesign now live for all

Flickr's redesigned homepage, which increased the size of photos as well as moving and highlighting several of the service's features, is now live to all users.

The new look was launched as an opt-in beta back in late June. Back then, Matthew Rothenberg who is Flickr's head of product, told CNET that the plan was to roll it out to everyone after a month of testing. Just a week late on that estimate, the company now says it's been released to 100 percent of users as the default style.

According to a post on Flickr's … Read more

Google rolling out multi-account sign-in to users

The shuffle of having to log off, then back on to your Google account to open up Google services from different accounts, but in the same browser instance, is soon to be a thing of the past.

As noticed by the Google Operating System blog, and later confirmed to CNET by a Google spokesperson, the company is in the process of rolling out a new feature that lets users cycle through up to three of their registered Google accounts without having to re-identify their credentials. Even better, they'll be able to switch from one to another with a simple … Read more