Webware

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.

Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.

Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.

One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.

LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.

(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.

See also: Find the right used car for you: 24 sites

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.

Salesforce Chatter gives a social-networking angle to the company's Web-based business services.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced a social networking service called Salesforce Chatter for its customers' in-house operations, giving a corporate flavor to a technology that's largely been for personal use.

Salesforce Chatter lets employees set up profiles to connect with coworkers, issue status updates to say what they're up to, and subscribe to feeds from people--and from applications. Also for collaboration, it lets people join groups to share updates and content. And the service integrates with today's two hot social-networking services, Twitter and Facebook.

Chief Executive Marc Benioff announced the service in San Francisco at the company's Dreamforce conference, which he said drew 19,000 attendees. Salesforce.com is a high-profile proponent of the idea of Web-based services, broadly called cloud computing.

In a statement, he said the service is working for his own company internally: "Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need."

IT consulting and analysis firm Gartner expects social networking to catch on widely in corporations, and some services such as LinkedIn have a business angle.

Salesforce Chatter is due to arrive in 2010, the company said. It will be included in some paid services, but the company also will sell a specific Chatter Edition for $50 per user per month that includes Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content, and Force.com services.

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.

Don't like something about an app? Don't just sit there--pitch a fit.

(Credit: CNET)

Want great software for your mobile phone? Keep up the complaints. That was the message at a Tuesday session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference here in San Francisco aimed at developers. But it's a dictum that applies to all smartphone owners.

In the symbiotic relationship between the application developer and the user, a well-placed critique is key to a good programmer improving their mobile application. The motto of the squeakiest wheel getting the most grease may seem obvious, but the importance of user feedback becomes even clearer when articulated in dollar signs and numbers.

A single-star rating for an application on a review site or storefront can severely limit its chances of getting downloaded, and therefore of making money.

"This is the curse of the one-star," said session speaker Stephen King (not that Stephen King), CEO of app testing company Mob4Hire.

His company's research suggests that the bulk of users feel comfortable downloading new mobile software that gets four stars or above. With 69 percent of people discovering apps based on rankings, reviews, and friend recommendations, and the mobile app industry growing 26 percent year over year, according to Juniper Research, there's real money to be made or lost. Addressing peoples' complaints isn't just a best business practice; it may directly affect the bottom line.

Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.

According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."

That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"--a measure of people's "most important social ties"--have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."

Social media is also helping people expand their social interaction. According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently "are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race." Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.

Do you know your neighbor?
Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don't use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent "more likely to belong to a local voluntary association" than those who don't blog.

Perhaps most important, Pew found that just because someone is a heavy Web user, that doesn't mean they remove themselves from traditional social activities like visiting a restaurant or hanging out at a bar on a Friday night. According to the study, Web users are "45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park." Later on, the study reported that social-networking users "are 40 percent more likely to visit a bar, but 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution."

So, next time your grandmother tells you that the Web is ruining the world, you might want to tell her to check out Pew's study. For more on these figures and many more, click here.