Google on Tuesday added a small but welcomed feature to its Reader service: favicons. These are the little square icons provided by sites that show up both in your address bar and open tabs (in most browsers at least). Google Reader users can now opt in to see them in their feed source list, where previously, feeds just showed up as little blue RSS signal logos. According to Google it was the top requested feature from Google Reader's product ideas mini-site.
In many ways favicons are a logical step in simplifying the feed reading process, since you can now find a particular feed in a long list of sites without even looking at the names. This is especially important since Reader displays feeds out of alphabetical order. However, some might find it to be sensory overload; luckily there's a quick toggle to turn them on and off right form the subscriptions list.
Google's choice of where to put the favicons is a tad strange though. For now, they exist only in the source subscriptions page, and not on the article pages where most of the reading is done. This is most apparent when cruising down a list of mixed items from various sites where users will still have to rely on the site names to identify where the content is coming from.
Also worth noting is that users of the Better GReader Firefox extension by Gina Trapani (formerly of blog Lifehacker) has long had an option to add site favicons to Google Reader's interface.
A bland list of blue feed icons in Google Reader gets the favicon treatment, an optional feature that can be turned on and off.
(Credit: CNET)
Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.
Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, although unlike size-based systems it's not as immediately clear which tags are more popular or common. Users can also delete tags, but only their own--meaning that if there is a bad tag placed by another user there's no way to report it.
Hulu's new tagging system is part public, part private and works on all content.
(Credit: CNET)Tags are made public and can be seen by other users immediately, although they do not yet appear to be an integrated part of Hulu's search engine. Instead, users can search for a specific tag within the tag section of each video. It's also worth noting that some content on Hulu has an expiration date, so you can spend all the time in the world tagging videos, but something you tagged a few months ago might not be able to be watched at a later date.
One thing Hulu could do with tags (but probably won't) is add timing to the mix. Recently-launched (although still in private beta) AnyClip organizes movie clips by what's happening in them. Hulu could do the same thing with its content by giving users a way to tag by time the way video host Viddler does. Though again, this wouldn't be nearly as useful as AnyClip due to Hulu's frequent content expirations.
Worth noting is that competitor YouTube has long had tags for its hosted movies and TV shows. However, it does not let users add them.
(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn / CNET)
Buying off of Craigslist can be quite a process, and of all the things for sale, the cars and trucks section is one of the most daunting. Unlike digital cameras and random bits of furniture, cars are (usually) expensive and come with an important history both from the owner, and the manufacturer.
That's why browser extension Craigslist Car Research is so useful. It adds an entire layer of data on top of each listing to make it easier to both find out more about the car, and others like it for sale on Craigslist; all without having to leave Craigslist.
The extension works the same for Firefox and Chrome. Users with Greasemonkey installed can also just add it to their list of scripts. Once it's up and running, every car listing on Craigslist gets a few extra pages of data below whatever the poster has provided, including things like:
• Car reviews from CarSurvey.org and Edmunds.com
• Recall or safety notices
• Price estimates from places like Motor Trend, Automotive.com, Kelly Blue Book, and the Canadian Black Book
•Other similar listings on Craigslist (with prices)
• A quick way to check and see other listings that seller has up on Craigslist.
All of this information can be hidden, either all at once or by specific feature. The extension also scans each list for problem words or phrases, and will tip you off on whether it's worth following up with the owner to see if it's been in an accident.
With the extension installed you get comparison shopping for other cars on Craigslist, as well as a heads-up on whether it's worth looking at other things for sale from that seller and if you should call to see if the car's been in an accident.
(Credit: CNET)Along with this extension, developer Tech4Computer has another script that can figure out the price of importing a car from the U.S. into Canada. There's also a version of the car and truck shopping extension for motorcycle buyers.
Adobe Systems on Saturday will be unveiling a slightly sleeker version of its Acrobat.com hosted-application service.
The site, which combines a number of tools, including word processing, PDF conversion, spreadsheets, and live Web meetings, has been reworked with a new architecture the company says will help it scale beyond its 6 million existing users. Currently, it is garnering about 100,000 sign-ups a week, with about half those coming from the United States.
Saturday's release includes 35 new features, all of which have been suggested by Adobe's customers through its Reddit-like Ideas page, which lets anyone vote up or down user-generated suggestions. The most notable addition is a new organizer, which consolidates all of the user's files and projects saved on Adobe's servers.
In a phone call with CNET earlier this month, Acrobat.com Director of Project Management Rick Treitman, said the organizer was the No. 1 most requested user feature. "It used to be confusing. We had three organizers, or places where users could organize files. Now there's one," he said.
The new file organizer adds some subtle changes, the most apparent being a white background, which goes against the company's infatuation with using black or dark-gray backgrounds in its products, but which makes it easier to differentiate the text and file types. Treitman said users overwhelmingly complained about it being too dark and hard to read.
Users also wanted a way to search through their files, Treitman said, so the company has added file-searching capability, albeit at a limited capacity. You can, for example, search by file name, but not within the contents of each individual file, something Treitman says is planned for a future release.
The new file organizer, a sea of white, features a new search tool that lets users wade through their files.
(Credit: Adobe Systems/CNET)Other organizational niceties include a way to create lists, which Treitman compared to the playlist feature in Apple's iTunes software, since you can add files to multiple lists without changing their organization in your main file explorer. Files can either be dragged and dropped into these lists, or added through a right-click contextual menu.
Along with improvements to Acrobat.com, Adobe is also launching its first mobile application for the site, designed for iPhones and BlackBerry handsets. The app itself was actually built by ScanR, and it looks about the same as the company's existing mobile tool. It lets users view and convert any file they have stored on Adobe's servers, as well as convert it into a PDF or send it as a fax. Users can also snap a photo with their camera and have it sent straight to their Adobe storage.
Treitman told us the next big plan for Acrobat.com is to add a work spaces feature that offers an area in which multiple users can collaborate on documents at once and keep track of any changes made. This should bode well for the company's business users, who may have been wooed by tools from Google or Box.net, the latter of which is doing more and more to keep its users within the confines of its file storage service with features like a built-in document editor and a news feed that tracks collaborators' changes.
The new features will not change the price of Adobe's Acrobat.com paid services, which run anywhere from $15 a month to $390 a year, depending on which of the two plans users choose.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore discusses his hopes and fears for the future of the smart grid.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)SAN MATEO, Calif.--Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore hopes that America's next-generation power grid will be a lot like the Internet. Or at least that's the plan.
How close we get to that goal depends on what happens in the next five years, Gore said in a speech here on Thursday evening at blog VentureBeat's GreenBeat conference, where he outlined many of the challenges the United States faces in upgrading its power grid. Along the way, he made comparisons to how the advent of the so-called smart grid will enable the kind of solutions and business innovation that the Internet brought during the 1990s.
"The analogy to the Internet is quite an exact one. Not completely exact, but it's very relevant for lots of reasons. We are moving inexorably toward a widely distributed energy generation and storage model. We are still locked into the old centralized energy generation model," Gore said. "The rapid development of new generations of new smart storage systems are going to make a tremendous difference in connection with the smart grids." Those systems are designed to enable easier storage of unused electricity for peak times, when supplying it to large groups of customers can be difficult and more expensive.
Gore also foresees an entirely new set of devices and instruments to help utilities and consumers control and monitor usage--technology and business models that may not yet have been imagined. "(It's) much the same way the Internet made it possible to see this generation of Internet-ready devices that did not even exist before the Internet began to build out," Gore said.
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Popular online shopping site Woot is set to expand its network of sites into new territory: deal hunting.
Unlike some of the site's other properties, which offer a new item for purchase either on a daily or weekly basis (be it gadgets, wine, T-shirts, or kids toys), the new Deals.Woot service gets a steady stream of things to buy throughout the day. It's also run almost entirely by Woot's community. There are sponsored deals that have been hand-picked by Woot's editors, but users do the rest.
Users can add deals they find elsewhere on the Web through a simple submission form that pulls in photos and sometimes pricing information from the source page. Others can then vote these up or down (like links on Reddit), with the most popular (be it in total votes, or in vote velocity) rising to the top.
Woot's new Deals site lets users vote up or down user-generated deals.
(Credit: CNET)To keep marketers from gaming these rankings, the site has a members-only status for the time being; users can't vote deals up or down unless they've purchased something from Woot before. The site is also limiting who can access the deals site while it remains in private beta, beginning by first inviting longtime-registered users, then working backwards toward those who have recently joined.
Along with deal submissions and the forum threads that go with them, the site is also a question-and-answer service. It's not as structured as the rest of the site, and acts simply as an open forum about deals, deal retailers, or off-topic items. It, too, has the same up or down voting system, both for individual threads and replies. Together with this and the community-sourced deals, the site tracks some of the top deal submitters and forum commenters. There, users can see which deal has been the fastest to rise to the top of the charts, as well as how long it took to get there.
Woot's Deals leaderboard gives a behind-the-scenes look at what's happening on the deal-finding site.
(Credit: CNET)Woot's upcoming deal site remains an invite-only private beta, but the company hopes to launch it officially before Black Friday (which is next week). As previously mentioned, Woot members will be getting early access invites by e-mail depending on when they first registered for one of the company's services.
See also: Fatwallet, Slickdeals, RetailMeNot, Ebates, Dealnews.
New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.
What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.
The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.
In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it's searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.
Whew. Got that? Great, here's an example of what it looks like in motion, as seen on a basic search for Sarah Palin on Twitter:
One of the Factery Labs example applications is a search engine that finds facts from Twitter source results.
(Credit: CNET)Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?
The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."
Along with maintaining a blacklist of these bad sites, FacteryLabs also keeps a list of good sources, or ones that continuously deliver. The more often an author successfully recommends a usable page, the faster they'll accumulate rank among the results.
What you can play with today
As for applying that technology to some consumer products, Factery Labs is launching with a handful of development partners, each of which has already built a tool that makes use of FactRank. The most notable one comes from Sobees which is using the service to add relevancy to Twitter and FriendFeed search results--something that's no small feat.
Users can do a search on Sobees' Silverlight-based Twitter client as usual, but there will now be a FactRank button that can sort through those tweets. It does a quick once-over of all of the results, and will filter the most relevant information to the very top. Included in each of its results is also a shortlist of the facts it finds on every page.
One of the first third-party apps to make use of Factery Labs is Sobees, which is adding its fact finding filters and relevancy tools to Twitter and FriendFeed search.
(Credit: Factery Labs)Advanced users might find more utility in an updated version of Ultimate Info, an extension for Firefox that does a number of things with on-page data. Starting Tuesday, it will let users select links on a page, each of which gets the fact-finding treatment using FactRank.
In our demo, Gaddis used Ultimate Info on the front page of popular site Drudge Report, highlighting about six or seven URLs that were on the page, then running a FactRank query, which brought in its fact results in just a few seconds. As Pedersen explained, users could run something similar on a long article (or several long articles about the same subject), and FactRank's algorithm would be able to provide a fact summary in short order.
Not launching on Tuesday but where the company expects to see the most development is on mobile devices. "Our analysis shows that mobile devices are a prime target for this technology because the latency produces a lot of resistance in the browse experience," said Pedersen. Instead of a user just getting back a link dump of all the URLs it finds, the FactRank engine will go out, process those results, then deliver users with a summary of the best selection of facts--a move that will save the end user from having to wait for any extra pages to load.
If you want to give some of the third party Factery Labs tools a run, you can find them on the company's implementations section. There you'll also find a test search engine that's running off of Twitter's index.
(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)
Ever wondered what some of the graphical differences are in games that make use of the newer hardware in the latest versions of Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch? So were we. That's why we put together a screenshot comparison gallery of 13 games, all of which are either packing extra OpenGL ES 2.0 goodies, or that more complicated graphics modes that run a whole lot better on the beefier hardware spec.
As for our testing, we ran each title on an iPhone 3G and a third-generation iPod Touch, the latter of which packs the faster innards required for some of the advanced OpenGL effects.
To our surprise, there were very few apps on the App Store that made use the new graphical spec, and even fewer that required a standalone version of that application to do so. However, many of the developers we talked with said that they were cooking up new titles that would be pushing these new devices a little further than what they had already created. That's good news for those with a newer iPhone or iPod Touch, but a definite thorn in the side of those who might not be able to play some of near-future App Store releases on their original iPhone or iPhone 3G.
Click on our slideshow link below to get started. We've also included links to each version of each app (in case there are variations), all of which open up in iTunes. Also, in case we missed any, feel free to leave them in the comments and we'll try to add them later.
Update: We've added bonus screenshots of Ravensword, the upcoming 3D RPG, as well as top-down pinball game Wild West Pinball.
See also:
The future of iPhone games
For games, no big rush to speedy iPhone 3GS
iPhone developer: 3G S graphics will be sooo much better than PSP's
Video host Vimeo on Wednesday is launching support for users on iPhone/iPod Touch and Google Android devices. The company has re-encoded the entirety of its staff picks and HD video showcase, both of which are the most heavily trafficked areas of the site from Vimeo's members, and referrers like Twitter.
"We've been working on it for the last few weeks," Blake Whitman, Vimeo's director of community told CNET News. "This is sort of the prelude of offering Plus members iPhone support; and in the future, an app," he said. In the meantime, the only member videos that get chosen to get the mobile encoding treatment are those that get picked by the site's editors. "In the future, like the next several weeks--maybe longer, we'll be offering Plus users the option to transcode their videos to an iPhone version too." Whitman says those special encodes could end up as a download option alongside the links to the source file, letting users save a copy that could be played back offline.
Even with the change, Vimeo continues to face stiff competition from Google-owned YouTube, which automatically encodes an iPhone-friendly version of any video that's uploaded. The popular video-sharing service has also re-encoded most of its back catalog to make its videos playable on it, and other mobile devices that don't run Adobe's Flash player. That said, YouTube had a leg up on many of its competitors (Vimeo included) by being built into the phone's OS.
The new feature, and mobile-friendly version of the site should be live right now. Whitman says that those on iPhones/iPods and Android devices will see a special mobile version of any video page for those that have been re-encoded, however some videos that work on iPhones and iPods may not work on Android right out of the gate.
Some Vimeo videos can now be watched on iPhones, iPods, and Android devices.
(Credit: CNET / Vimeo)
(Credit:
Mozilla)
It's been just under four months since Mozilla launched its pilot program for contributions, a way for users to donate to add-on developers for their time and effort.
The program was launched in tandem with a redesign of Mozilla's add-ons site that gave developers their own profile pages. Many add-on makers were already running donation programs through their own sites, but wanted the option to show up in Mozilla's catalog too.
Already it appears to be working, but on a smaller scale than some developers might have hoped. For the half dozen developers that CNET News talked to, none has made enough from it to, say, quit their day job. While Mozilla would not reveal specifics on which developers are getting the most contributions, it did provide us with the total amount given: around $20,000. An organization spokesperson said that most of that came in September and October.
Of the 500 or so developers who are participating in the program, the average contribution falls somewhere between $5 and $6, with the largest thus far being $150. All have gone through PayPal, which is the sole way to pay through Mozilla's add-on site. PayPal then gets a small fee out of each transaction, something that comes out of the developer's pocket, although this varies based on how much the user gives.
Other ways to make money
Some developers believe Mozilla has gone about the payment problem in reverse. With the current contributions program developers are given the chance to ask for money before the user even downloads the free add-on. So why not give them a way to ask for a contribution after a user has downloaded and installed it?... Read more
