It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.
A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.
The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."
"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."
But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5 is out, just eight days after the browser updated to version 3.5.4. For Windows, Mac, and Linux, the new version of the browser fixes three bugs: one critical bug across all platforms, and then one lower priority one for Windows and one lower priority one for Mac.
The critical bug addresses crashes in the GIF decoder that was not present in version 3.5.3, while the Windows bug fixes a security runtime issue and the Mac bug fixes an HTML parser error. Mozilla Evangelist Christopher Blizzard tweeted that although the critical bug wasn't security related, it was annoying to many users. The full changelog can be read here.
The stable build of Google Chrome has been updated from version 3.0.195.27 to version 3.0.195.32. This update introduces five stability improvements, including problems with how the browser managed content from Adobe Acrobat Reader, returning to Google Maps data via the Back button, and three others.
One of the security fixes addressed not warning users of some file types that could run JavaScript, such as SVG, XML, and MHT. The other one plugged a hole that could allow for memory corruption and subsequent malicious code execution through Google Gears. The full changelog can be read here.
The developer's build of Google Chrome for Mac was also updated earlier Thursday, introducing several user interface improvements. The Copy Image feature is now fixed, auto-updates are more transparent, and multiple keyboard problems have been fixed. The full changelog for this update is available here.
Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.
"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."
Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.
The issue crops up just as Microsoft plans to formally launch Bing. Among its planned promotions is a huge ad campaign as well as an event Tuesday night at Seattle's Space Needle.
The IE6 issue was noted earlier on Tuesday by Search Engine Land.
Correction and update:This post was updated at 1:53 p.m. with a corrected headline (the word "patched" was missing) and additional and winnowed information on the security holes.)
Mozilla published a critical security upgrade for Firefox Friday evening. Version 3.0.8 for Windows, Mac, and Linux fixes two security holes listed as "critical."
One patched an arbitrary code execution hole through an XUL element, and the other corrected an XSL stylesheet exploit. Both fixes patch crash-based security holes in which remote codes could have been run.
The release notes for Firefox 3.0.8 are available here.
Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.
With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.
"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes a problem sending mail from Yahoo Mail, he said.
The patch is in Chrome 1.0.154.46, which also fixes a severe security problem.
Matt Cutts, Google's chief Web spam fighter and a high-profile company blogger, was less delicate about the Hotmail issue. "Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter," he said in an online comment about the matter.
To which Omar Shahine, evidently involved with the Microsoft service, had a rebuttal: "That's a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a Web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it's doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out-of-band release? We've already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction."
Cutts responded, in effect, that Google knows plenty about running big Web sites, thank you very much. "Google runs Web services with many users and servers too and we launch changes weekly or faster," he said.
(Via Google Blogoscoped)
The past 24 hours have seen Mozilla Firefox (download from CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac) getting another security hole plugged, while its social-networking derivative Flock (also at CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac) earns a minor behavioral bug fix.
Firefox's most recent safety snafu is another JavaScript engine security problem that was causing the browser to crash during JavaScript garbage collection. Although there was no indication that this error was exploitable, says Mozilla, other similar errors in the past were. Not to mention the benefit of not having your browser randomly going kablooey.
Flock's fix involves repairing the People sidebar. For many users, Facebook friends weren't populating in the sidebar and now they should be. Of course, if you're like me and you lack not only Facebook friends but a Facebook account, too, then this was never an issue.
UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.
Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."
It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.
Mozilla's bug-munching mascot
(Credit: Mozilla)Mozilla on Friday released the third update to Firefox this month, version 2.0.0.11, to fix a stability problem in the previous version.
"We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release," a post on the Firefox developer blog said.
The open-source Web browser update arrived swiftly after version 2.0.0.8, released October 18, version 2.0.0.9 from November 1, and version 2.0.0.10 from November 26. Which explains why I'm getting a lot of software update messages from my Web browser.
Version 2.0.0.10 broke a feature that lets images be displayed with special effects such as rotated pictures and image reflections, according to Mozilla's bug-tracking site. The problem was fixed within a day and distributed within five, but not before some whose sites were affected by the bug had voiced frustration.
"Customers are complaining because their Firefox automatically updated to 2.0.0.10 and now they can no longer order photo prints in our shop. I think this is a very serious problem and I hope it will be fixed immediately in a 2.0.0.11 update," a post by Klaus Reimer said.
In an indirect response, Firefox coder Nick Thomas pointed to mailing lists that people can use to test their sites with imminent new Firefox versions. Thomas also said that the five-day turnaround is "the fastest turnaround between Firefox releases to date."
As long as the Mozilla coders are stamping out bugs, one that's annoyed me has become more prominent of late because it shows up when I install a Firefox update.
When I restore my Firefox browser sessions upon rebooting my computer, it's impossible to get rid of the "You've been updated to the latest version of Firefox" page. Even if I close that tab, it comes back later, so I have to start with a clean browsing slate to make it go away. It's not a stability or security problem, but it's not a credit to what is a notably influential project.
Mozilla released the first beta version of Firefox 3, called Gran Paradiso, less than two weeks ago. The second Firefox 3 beta should be done in "late December" if all goes well, according to another Mozilla developer blog post Friday.
Today it is possible to mash together Web services into a passable site with only a hobbyist's knowledge of programming. Tools like Yahoo Pipes get you started with the concepts, and then the APIs for products like Google Maps make things like the Chicago Crime Map buildable without requiring a large investment in original technology.
The same has not been true for hardware, but Peter Semmelhack at Bug Labs wants to change that. The company is releasing a hardware development system made of sensing and input modules that snap into a low-cost central Linux-based core, allowing you to mash up your own gadget. The main core, the BugBase, is bit larger than an iPhone. The modules that snap into it are half that size and a standard BugBase has four ports for modules.
Special-purpose modules snap into the BugBase.
(Credit: Bug Labs)Say you want to make some sort of gizmo for your car that records location and acceleration and displays stats on a screen. You could try to write a program for an existing GPS gadget, or you could snap together the necessary Bug Labs modules, write your own code in the Bug Labs system for your device, and go from there.
Bug Labs' system is meant for prototyping, and all the pieces of it are open-source. This means that once you've got your gadget working, you can use the Bug Labs hardware schematics as the basis for your own mass-produced version of the gadget in question. (You can also use the actual Bug circuit boards in your products, since they screw together nicely even when liberated from their plastic snap cases. However, this would be an expensive way to produce hardware.) The development environment is Eclipse. I'm not familiar with it, but it's open-source and looks to be philosophically similar to the Bug hardware--that is, highly modular.
All input/output to the modules is done via Internet protocols, and each hardware component has its own URL. This will make building mesh or networked devices that aren't physically connected to each other relatively easy, and it also means that all Bug-based gizmos are, by default, Web appliances.
The first four modules, and the base.
(Credit: Bug Labs)Bug Labs may get into the business of helping developers make Bug-based prototypes into actual mass consumer products, by embedding Bug-standard hardware with developers' code in more permanent cases.
But you can also just get a bunch of modules and hack around in them for fun (the first modules are: GPS, camera, touch-sensitive LCD, and accelerometer; the company plans to release four new modules each quarter). Bug Labs is very much like Lego Mindstorms: A collection of hardware modules you can snap together and then program. You don't need to sell your work to have a whole lot of fun with this system.
Bug Labs hardware should be available by the end of the year.
See also HeathKit (historical) and CompuLab. Also, Engadget has more Bug specs.
WeatherBug knows how to get around. The detailed weather reporting application for most combinations of desktop and mobile downloads, plus a WAP site, has let iPhone into the club. Now iPhone users can check out seven-day forecasts, animated radar maps, and real-time images from street-level weather cameras.
Incidentally, I learned an interesting factoid about WeatherBug. It began as educational curriculum and still has a strong program for schools and organizations subscribing to its weather warning alert system (e.g., "chance of lightning, soccer canceled.") That explains why the view of Sunnyvale, Calif., is taken from what looks like the roof of the South Peninsula Hebrew Day School, a small private school, rather than this well-known landmark.
