Instant upload automatically puts every photo and video that you take using your smartphone into a private album within Google+. From there, you can choose what to share (and importantly what not to share) with your circles. It’s a pretty great feature that takes away the pain of having to upload every single photo you take manually to the network.

Google+ product manager Anton Lopyrev elaborates in a Google+ post:

Instant Upload is only active while the Google+ iOS app is open, and for a brief period after you close it. Re-opening the Google+ app resumes your photo & video uploads exactly where they left off.

Google aired a new commercial during the Grammys on Sunday night called “New Dad.” The ad specifically touted Google+’s instant upload feature, making the case that it will help you “never lose a memory.”

Facebook tweaked its photo viewer interface, making it look a lot like its counterpart on Google+.

The new display helps make photos more attractive by showing them larger, moving comments off to the side, and graying out the background to minimize distraction.

The lightbox feature has slowly been released to pockets of Facebook users over the last week. The new display helps Facebook compete with other photo services and social networks that already offer bigger, crisper viewers that make photography shine.

In the beginning, photos were small and lived on the actual web page. Then Facebook introduced its Theater feature, which turned the photos into pop-ups. Now, the lightbox feature dims the whole Facebook page and subdues the comments box by moving it to the right side of the screen. When you click on any photo on Facebook, it will now fill your screen and the background becomes a light grey. The photo information and comments are displayed on the right, eliminating the need to scroll down to see comments. When you hover over a photo, two large buttons to like and tag a picture are also available. Ads appear in the lower right corner as well on certain photos.

The new interface has also taken advantage of some under-used advertising real estate and now shows sponsored posts below the comments. However, the advertisements are pushed down as more comments are added.

Photographers are enthusiastic about two other recent photo features on Facebook: the cover photo at the top of the new timeline feature and the new thumbnails. Ever since Google+ has come out and had success with the photography crowd.

Google+ allows you to upload photos up to 2048-by-2048 pixels; any larger will be resized down. In 2010, Facebook increased its maximum photo size from 604 pixels, to 720 pixels on one side. Then, in February 2011, it bumped its photo size to 2048 pixels as well. Whether or not the lightbox feature compresses them down for viewing, however, remains to be seen.

Google, which many people pointed out had the lightbox function first on Google+.

While the interface of the Yahoo! Calendar is new, all of the features you enjoyed are still there,  along with some enhancements. They have been announced that all users will be migrated to this new version of Yahoo! Calendar, and the current version of Yahoo! Calendar will be phased out entirely.

These are some of the key differences you may notice:

Updated Calendar toolbar: The toolbar that appears above your calendar has a new look and new buttons, but it still includes the same options to add an event or change your view (to Day, Week, Month, Year, or List view).

The new left panel: The new left panel includes three resources: a bird’s eye view of your calendar, a calendars list (which includes a list of your calendar “layers”), and your subscriptions list (a list of the calendars you’re subscribed to).

The new “To-Do” list panel on the right: This allows you to view the tasks on your To Dos list either all at once, or just those that are due or done. To change which items are displaying, click on “All To Dos” at the top of the pane.

Please note: Once your account has been migrated to the new Yahoo! Calendar, it will not be possible to switch back to a previous version.

Google keeps on slimming down its product line to focus on what CEO Larry Page calls its “big bets.” Today it offered updates on five products that will be going dark this year. It’s announced that it’s shuttering even more offerings, and one of them is Picnik, the excellent online photo editor which it bought in 2010 and the team will work on Google’s other photo products. Google is also shutting down its Social Graph API as its Google+ API slowly trickles out. Okay, it looks like Google really is serious about its oft-stated plans to focus on fewer services and do them better.

The closure isn’t abrupt or catastrophic. Google is giving Picnik users plenty of warning–the service isn’t going away until April 19th–and they’ll be able to download their photos. But unlike some of Google’s shutdowns, closing Picnik isn’t a tacit acknowledgment that a service never found an audience. (I never heard of Google’s Gmail Message Continuity and Social Graph API until the company said they were going away.) Picnik is popular, and it’s good, and the world will be a sadder place place without it–at least for folks who already know and love it.

Why is it going away? That’s not entirely clear. Google’s blog post says it’s so “the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. ” But when you go to Picnik, you get a message that “Picnik is moving its easy yet powerful photo editing tools to Google+,” which is a slightly different message. In either case, though, it sounds like Google thinks that photo editing is less of a destination, which is what Picnik was, and more of a feature.

It’s also worth noting that Picnik was Flash-based. This is just guesswork on my part, but it likely hastened the service’s demise. It certainly made it harder to integrate its features with other Google services, and probably even reduced Google’s enthusiasm for pointing to Picnik from elsewhere on Google

If Picnik had lived, it would surely have required a rewrite to become a pure HTML5 service, which would have been a major undertaking. I imagine that Google is busily working on improving its HTML5 graphics tools, and decided it wasn’t worth it to try and roll them into an all-new version of Picnik.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that Google circa 2012 is generally less interested in managing a bunch of destinations, and more interested in beefing up Google+. It wants to give you every possible incentive to join and use its social network.

Google will also open-source its Sky Map this year in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon university. The Google Message Continuity service, which backs up email for enterprise customers, will be retired in favor of Google Apps. The Needlebase data management platform will be integrated into other services. Finally, Urchin, whose product ultimately became Google Analytics, still had a standalone client-hosted version, which will be closed in March.

The United States government has been facing an intense amount of pressure, mostly from the entertainment and computer software publishing companies for years to find some method of stopping the online piracy that is allowing people to own copies of their merchandise for free. This is of course understandable, nobody wants to see something they worked hard on to create something of quality be disrespected by people gaining access to it for free.

However, what the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have planned for their respective bills is not a way of just putting a halt on online piracy. Tech giants such as Mozilla and Google who once supported these bills, now are on the offensive in trying to ensure they never get passed. Before going any further into how this affects the everyday internet users, let’s first get a good understanding about both bills.

What is PIPA and SOPA

PIPA

Let’s begin by first breaking down the first of the two bills that were introduced, PIPA. PIPA is an acronym for the Protect IP Act, and was first introduced to the U.S. Senate on May 12, 2011 by Senators Patrick Leahy, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley. It is also good to take note that PIPA is a re-written legislation, the original being the failed to pass Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) of 2010.

PIPA, if passed, will give U.S. corporations and the government the right to seek affirmative legal action with any website that they see as enabling copyright infringement weather of U.S. origin or not. Here is a breakdown of all that they will have the power to do.

Force U.S. internet providers to block access to websites deemed as enablers of copyright infringement
Seek legal action by suing search engines, blog sites, directories, or any site in general to have the black listed sites removed from their website
Will be able to force advertising services on infringing websites, and those supporting of them, to remove them from their advertising accounts
Companies will also have the power to sue any new websites that get started after this bill is passed, if they believe that they are not doing a good job of preventing infringement on your website

SOPA

SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and is a bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Represenative Lamar Smith on October 26, 2011. In similarity with PIPA, SOPA is a build on a previous legislation. This legislation being the PRO-IP Act of 2008.

SOPA, if passed, will work in conjunction with PIPA. As described by such entities as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, SOPA is nothing more so than the U.S. government and private corporations black list. Here is a breakdown of the power given to the government and private corporations.

The U.S. Attorney General can now seek a court order that would force search engines, advertisers, DNS providers, servers, and payment processors from having any contact with allegedly infringing websites
It will allow private corporations to create their own personal hit lists composed of websites they feel are breaking their copyright policies, ironically this doesn’t have any odd feelings of a legal mafia at all. These companies will be able to directly contact a website’s payment processors a notice to cut all off payment involvement with the targeted website. This payment processors and website of question will then have five days to act before it is simply taken down.
Payment processors will have the power to cut off any website they work with, as long as they can provide a strong reason of why they believe this site is violating copyrights

Where Do the Tech Giants Stand

Originally, the majority of technology corporations that put their input into these bills, were in support of it. Companies like Apple, Intel, Corel, Dell, Microsoft, Adobe, and 23 other big name tech companies are supporters under the BSA(Business Software Alliance). However, there is still hope in the realm of big name support of tech giants. Two of the biggest in Mozilla and Google, have gone public with their issues with these bills and their reasons why they can no longer offer their support after further research was done.

Mozilla is strongly against both acts because of its use of DNS filtering in both. Mozilla, like the majority of the tech world, believes that by using DNS filtering this will open up more security risks and slow down the system’s up and coming extension DNSSEC.

How Does This Affect You

Well by now one probably has gained a good understanding of what both PIPA and SOPA are, and is wondering how exactly will these acts will directly affect how citizens use the internet. Well in all honestly, a lot of things will change.

Blog Sites like jerwinpastoral could be blocked or shut down

As stated prior in what PIPA and SOPA are and what will they enable U.S. government agencies and private companies to do, the internet will become a hunt for any little bit of possible copyright violation. Of course the government loves blogs and bloggers, so it is only natural to think that they will receive a lot of special attention. These acts make it the blog owners responsibility for everything that is displayed on their site, including the comments of visitors.

So say an article is published one day featuring a logo, or trademark, of corporation and that corporation doesn’t like that it is being put on display on the site. Now the author of this article could have used it as a teaching method, critique, praising good design, or anything you can think of, it doesn’t matter. With these acts being only direct enough to give an area for attack, and vague enough to manipulate and twist seemingly any possible way, any type of accusation can be made and found true.

Say Goodbye to Innovation

These acts are stopping developers from coming up with the next big thing in the online market that could change how we use the internet. Let’s say that these acts were around back when the internet was started, how many of the most popular sites would still have come into fruition. There would be no Facebook, YouTube, MediaFire, SoundCloud, Twitter, DropBox, or any other site that can be targeted as a place where online piracy could take place. Is it even possible to think about what the internet would be like without sites like this?

Legal Action Over A Child Singing A Song

It is quite oblivious that none of the people on sites like YouTube have been given permission from record label execs to sing their favorite song, and then proceed to post it on a video sharing site. However will that be a problem for the record execs?

The site the child will have posted the video on will be put under pressure to resolve this issue, or face their site being put on the blacklist. This child, and her family, could also very well face legal action with either the site or the record label the song that was sung has copyrighted.

The U.S. Government Hope They Will Spark Global Change

The U.S. government officials and private corporations aren’t only concerned about how these bills will work out in America, they are hoping that they will have the influence to get other nations to follow suit with these acts passing. That means if these acts pass, then the next country this could be coming toward may be yours.

After 14 million downloads of WordPress 3.2, WordPress 3.3 is being released yesterday, Dec 12, 2011. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress software provides bloggers with a suite of editing capabilities that can be used by novices all the way to professional news organizations. The company allows bloggers to host their blogs on WordPress’ servers or download WordPress’ backend editor while working off of a different server. Multiples pages, linking, multimedia, photo galleries, tagging, search engine optimization fields and more make up what WordPress is capable of in the publication sphere. For those who are new to the service, however, WordPress can be a little daunting. For those who have been around WordPress for awhile, the software can feel cluttered.

This update addresses both of these needs. New comers are able to tour the software with pop ups that are reminiscent of Facebook’s “hey look at what’s new, want a tour?” tabs that point out any changes to your profile and news feed. On a more basic level, there is a new welcome screen as well as help tabs.

Those who have had their hand cranking the WordPress machine get a new multimedia tab, where you can drag and drop both photos and videos. You aren’t restricted to only one upload at a time either, you can drag and drop as many as you like. Drop downs on the side menu have been done away with, in favor of menus that fly out to the side. Before this the sidebar, which can become packed given the amount of pages you employ, starts to look like a word document with bullets, sub-bullets, more sub-bullets, Roman numerals, you get the picture. Instead it keeps the sidebar a little easier to navigate. Anyone who blogs for a publication with more than one editor will be happy to know that the warning prompt that says someone else is editing this piece will only show when someone else is really on that page, editing that piece.

You will also be able to import from your Tumblr with this version. Previously WordPress supported Blogger, Blogroll, LiveJournal, Moveable Type and others.

The company has also paid a little closer attention to its tablet offerings. It has revamped the iPad dashboard, with better touch functionality. Developers got more love as well, with a new application programming interface to play with. Full details on the developer changes can be found here.

Up to 60 percent of Vista Land buyers are Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), with the ability to amortize home acquisitions. Since it owns the most geographically diverse properties in the industry, Vista Land is able to offer projects to families of OFWs in areas of the country where its competitors are not present. The company’s development locations closely mirror the geographical distribution of OFWs.

Vista Land is the Philippines’ largest residential property developer with over 200,000 homes in 19 provinces and 44 cities and municipalities. Under its name are its distinct brands: Camella, Crown Asia, and Brittany.

Vista Land’s unrivalled expertise in space planning, and unequalled knack for finding accessible and attractive locations makes Vista Residences an ideal source for condominium homes.

Now, if you really want to turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings, you can do that at any time. Just click on the above link to go your Facebook Notification Settings and Uncheck the box to change your Email Frequency preferences as shown below.

You might as well want to change the Email Notification settings for individual category such as Photos, Groups, Pages and so on.

You can still use Google Gravity to search the web. Google Gravity turns of search experience into a fun filled playful one. You can play with the elements in Google Gravity, like the Google logo or the search box or links. You can drag them and throw them or do whatever you want.

I read on the official Delicious blog that the “YouTube founders acquire Delicious”. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have founded YouTube and sold it less than two years later to Google have acquired Delicious which will become part of their company AVOS.

A blog post on the Avos company website reveals that they have intentions to improve the site by making it “more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content”. For that, they “plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload”.

Delicious users who log into their account will be greeted with a “Delicious is moving to a new home” message. Users have to agree to transfer their bookmarks, account information and other data to the new company. Account data of users who do not agree to move and who do not log into their account in the migration period will become unavailable around July 2011. This screen is shown on every log in.

Users do have the option to export their bookmarks to a local computer

A FAQ has been put online that addresses several pressing questions. One of the interesting tidbits is that AVOS plans to build a Delicious extension for Firefox 4 and publish it as soon as possible.

It is likely that Delicious will lose a good chunk of its bookmarks, at least the private ones, during the transition period. First from users who once used an account but do not anymore, and from spammers who have auto-created hundreds of thousands of Delicious accounts to place links to their sites on the popular bookmarking service. It is not clear how AVOS will handle public bookmarks of users who have not agreed to move their data.

It feels logical that the company could use those bookmarks in anonymized form on the new Delicious, considering that they have been public all the time.

It seems as if AVOS has every intention to improve Delicious, and it will be interesting to read more about the company’s plans and see them in action on the site.

I noticed that the page fits better with white space around the left and the right side. In other words if you are using a bigger / wider screen the page will limit itself to a particular width which makes the Google Sign in page look much better as compared with the older one.

The New to Gmail and Create an Account links has now been shifted at the top and there is plenty of blank space below the Sign in Form. The content is the same and so are the links.

But the test actually dates back to at least April, when it was noticed on WebmasterWorld and discussed for about a week.

In all of the screenshots and examples that searchers have posted, the dozen sitelinks only show up on specific entity-related queries such as the exact company/organization/location name or its exact URL.

Google has released the “Preview Pane” as a Gmail Labs feature. This allows users to preview messages in their inbox using a layout similar to how Gmail looks on a tablet device.

“When I check my email, I often rely on the message snippets to figure out which messages to open first,” says Gmail Associate Product Manager Maciek Nowakowski. “Sometimes, though, I want to see more than snippets, which is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane.”

Like all Gmail Labs feature, you have to enable it in settings. Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a toggle button in the right corner of your message list. This lets you switch between preview and list views. The button looks like this:

“For those of you who have more vertical space you can also move the preview pane below your message list. You can enable this using the dropdown arrow next to the toggle button,” notes Nowakowski. “By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings.”

MEGA PHILIPPINES, INC. was formed to handle a comprehensive range of technical and professional services in such fields as Mineral Exploration, Core Drilling, Geo-technical Investigations, Geophysical Surveys, Water Resources Development and in specialized fields such as Bored Piling, Rock Anchoring, Soil Nailing, Micro Piling and Grouting.

Our company is suitably staffed with professionals, competent and well experienced in their respective discipline, acquired over years of hands-on work experience.
To date, we have successfully completed series of projects locally and overseas. Those projects involve core and non-core drilling for both mining and civil work applications.

MEGA PHILIPPINES, INC. sincerely wishes to share its experience and knowledge in both fields of surface and sub-surface exploration. We are determined to meet any and every requirements using our competence, expertise and project management skills for the benefit of our Clients.

Dream Weddings Philippines.com is now reborn as a social networking website dedicated to weddings. Our primary objective is to promote the Philippines as a preferred wedding destination and to promote the exceptional talents of our local wedding suppliers to marrying couples around the world.

Dream Weddings Philippines membership is exclusive to to-be-wed couples, persons with interest in weddings and wedding professionals. The aim is to create the perfect place for the couples and suppliers to meet and interact.

Dream Weddings Philippines features blogs, suppliers directory, photo gallery, vendor profiles , events, and videos and so much more. One exciting feature is the Supplier’s Online Product Catalogue that couples anywhere in the world can browse just like a regular magazine. The Online catalog of each wedding supplier will help couples peek through the suppliers’ individual works and style and learn about their products and services without having to leave the comforts of home. Just like a regular magazine, a couple can flip through its pages and be inspired by the tons of ideas they’ll find on every page. They can print only the pages they like or print them all for FREE.

DreamWeddingsPhilippines.com is soon to become every to-be-wed couple’s partner in achieving the wedding of their dreams. Whether they are Filipino couples or couples from other countries looking for the perfect destination wedding, Dream Weddings Philippines is just a click away.

Google Plus, or Google+, the much talked about and obviously the biggest topic inside the tech world last week (and still this week) is ready to accept more members.

PopHerald’s editor Carlo Raphael Diokno confirmed via Google Plus that the invite link embedded inside the new social networking project is still available. However, Google Plus encountered a problem yesterday, which was confirmed by Google’s Senior Vice President of Social Vic Gundotra.

The Google VP has apologized via his Google Plus account after their servers “spammed” some Google Plus users on Saturday afternoon with multiple notification emails. Gundotra blamed the problem on shortage of disk space that tracks the social networking site’s notification system. He also thanked the current members of Google Plus, he said, “Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.”

Apparently, Google Plus community is growing fast knowing that the SNS was only launched last week, and the way it accepts members is by invitation process only. Sources say Google is currently serving at least 4.5 million Google Plus members, and the number is growing fast. Google’s Eric Schmidt also confirmed in an interview that Google Plus already attracted “millions” of users after a week.

In related news, Business Insider is reporting that Google is not into “fake” names inside its new social networking site. According to the report, one Google Plus field tester was suspended after using his “second life avatar” as his name in Google Plus. The suspended member blogged about the incident in Flickr, and posted Google’s response regarding the problem, saying that Google believes that the name used “violated” the community standard of Google Plus, and suggested the user to ”use the name that (he) commonly go by in daily life.”

So basically, Google hates fake names because they’re currently polishing their Google Profiles record that is scheduled to go public on July 31st, which is also the rumored date of Google Plus public registration launch. Google also warned businesses and brands that are using a “consumer” account to create their own identity inside Google Plus.

According to Google’s Product Manager Christian Oestlien, Google is focused on optimising the consumer experience on Google Plus, but they’re still not supporting optimized Google Plus service for business profiles. He also added that Google will be running “a small experiment with a few marketing partners to see the effect of including brands in the Google+ experience,” in the next coming months.

Through the conventional social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, the idea of networking revolves around making posts on either your own or your friends’ wall. Something posted is normally viewable for all of your accepted friends to see.

With Google+, Google makes a point: Our comments are not always intended to be a public announcement as such but only for a select, maybe family and close friends.

Google+ builds in this area by giving the user more control over who he wants to share a comment/post with and is betting on this card to differentiate itself from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

The new feature is called +Circles which provides a tech-savvy interface displaying “circles” into which you may simply drag the people you want belonging to the groups you create whether it be “best friends,” “family,” “workmates,” etc.

+Sparks is another feature introduced in Google + which can be described as a search engine for comments or “sharing engine.” Reading comments from other users on topics that interest you ranging from a product, to a dish, to a trip is made easy with this tool.

+Hangouts can be described as “skyping” with several friends at the same time. A feature that allows live camera meetings or hangouts for up to 10 people will also be equipped with a set of live communication tools such as instant messaging.

+Mobile is a set of features that will allow this networking service to be taken to the mobile world. Google released an app for the Android and the mobile version is available for iPhones.

Currently Google+ and its features are available either by being invited into it or signing up and waiting for Google to set up an account for you.

The dashboard has been redesigned, with access to your most frequently viewed apps from the left-hand menu, as well as the option to see all apps in a summary view or search for apps from the dashboard.

“We have also made it easy for you to see important app information at a glance,” says Facebook software engineer Alan McConnell. “On the dashboard, you’ll see a summary of frequently needed app info including the app ID, app secret, and URLs. You can also quickly grant a user access token for your app, view Roles and see Insights.”

“We have reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields,” he adds. “Tooltips and field descriptions have also been added to help you better understand the requested information.”

You can also add admins, developers, testers, and insights users from the Roles interface by clicking the “Add” link. You can also use auto-complete to add friends and non-friends via email or Facebook UID. Autocomplete also works in the search box.

“We built the new Developer App to be cleaner and faster, with quicker load time, so you can edit and save changes to apps at an improved speed,” says McConnell. “The app now runs on the same high-performance architecture that powers Facebook and has a streamlined workflow, eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.”

Facebook is rolling this stuff out with a limited set of developers today, then will make it available to all over the coming weeks.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone to mention the ban bot fiasco in the comments of Facebook’s announcement. Francis Pelland wrote: “Will this help with the ‘ban bot’ going insane as of late? Not to mention the lack of data behind why it decides to ban apps randomly?”

If you’re unfamiliar with the recent ban bot ordeal, we discussed it at length here. Basically, Facebook banned a bunch of apps trying to clean up app spam, but took some legitimate apps out as well. We likened it to Facebook’s version of the Panda update. The developer of the popular app Profile Maker, which was one of the victims, shared his personal story about it in Web Pro News.

Facebook’s program manager for developer relations responded to Pelland’s comment by saying: “As mentioned on Friday’s post, the team is working to make changes to the process, improve the developer experience related to spam enforcement, and provide more data on negative user feedback via new App Insights. Please stay tuned.”

Facebook has said that it will release new insights around blocking in the next couple weeks.

Since then, it has set new standards for city living and redesigned the country’s landscape with its elegant multi-level, and multi-use developments offering a varied selection from low- to high-rise structures.

While Vista Residences is a recent entrant into the high-rise or multi-level property-development industry, it brings with it Vista Land & Lifescapes’ over three decades of building homes, developing property and creating communities.

Vista Land is the Philippines’ largest residential property developer with over 200,000 homes in 19 provinces and 44 cities and municipalities. Under its name are its distinct brands: Camella, Crown Asia, and Brittany.

Vista Land’s unrivalled expertise in space planning, and unequalled knack for finding accessible and attractive locations makes Vista Residences an ideal source for condominium homes.

Google unveiled details of Google Wallet this week. Google Wallet is an ambitious mobile payment plan designed to let your Android smartphone be your wallet, but you should consider very carefully just how secure your credit card data will be in Google Wallet.

Google understands the inherent security risks of storing credit card information, and it has gone to great lengths to ensure sensitive data is protected in every way possible. But, at the end of the security chain is an “authorized” Android app, and that is the Achilles heel of Google Wallet security.

Consider the whole system, and the steps of the process. On the processing end, you really have nothing to worry about. The NFC technology used by Google is not any different than the wireless signals used in many credit and debit cards, or gas station swipe-to-pay systems now.

That credit card data is also stored on the Android smartphone. But, Android smartphones equipped for NFC mobile payments have a separate chip to store the sensitive credit card data. The credit card information is encrypted and the chip itself is tamper proof. Seems secure enough, even if a thief has physical possession of the smartphone.
Then comes the weak link–the Android app. Here too, Google has done its part and developed a system that relies on a PIN from the user to open the app or initiate a transaction using Google Wallet. That alone represents one weak point in the Google Wallet security. Have you seen the kinds of passwords people use because they can’t be bothered to remember something more complex? How many Google Wallet PINs will end up being “1111″, or “1234″, or something equally trivial to guess?

But, even with a strong PIN in place, if there is one Android app that can access the encrypted credit card data and process payments, then it is possible for malicious developers to create other apps, or spoof the Google Wallet app somehow to access that sensitive data as well.

Jimmy Shah, mobile security researcher at McAfee Labs, points out in a blog post that the secure chip that stores the credit card information uses assymetric encryption for authentication–implying that the Google Wallet app contains the key necessary to authenticate and access the data.

Shah says, “The next step would be to create a malicious application that emulates the official Wallet app to fool the “secure element” chip into giving up your credentials. From here, the attacker can collect account information for sale or for attempts at cloning the data to new NFC cards.”

On an iPhone this might be less of a concern because of the walled garden approach and the fact that iPhone apps have to get past the Apple gatekeepers first. But, with the “open” environment of Android, and all of the various unofficial Android app marketplaces out there, distributing a malicious app capable of cracking Google Wallet might not be too difficult.

Having raised close to $50 million in venture capital, Friendster was acquired by Malaysian payments company MOL Global at the end of 2009 for a reported $40 million.

Fast forward to today, and it looks like Friendster won’t be so much about sharing with friends anymore. In a message to registered members (hat tip to @Mazi), the company is asking all users to install a custom application to export all their profile data, as most of it will be unequivocally deleted on May 31, 2011.

On the help forum, Friendster encourages all users to use the ‘Friendster Exporter’ app to download or export their profile information, friends list, photos, messages, comments, testimonials, shoutouts, blogs and groups. Options include porting content to Flickr or Multiply.

On May 31, Friendster will move to wipe out all photos, blogs, comments and groups uploaded or created by its users. The company will, however, keep all accounts alive, along with user friends lists, games details and basic profile information.

Friendster is making the changes under the guise of reinventing themselves as a service focused on “entertainment and fun” (which sounds exactly like Myspace when they started feeling the Facebook heat for real):

Our improved site is designed to create new profiles that allow you to connect differently with people and do things differently than other networking sites. Basically, the new site will complement your existing online presence in other social networking sites.

The new Friendster should be going live in the coming weeks and focus mainly on Asian users.
Just last week, MOL Global / Friendster CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah told ZDNet that he’s under the impression social media sites are increasingly being made irrelevant because the global social graph is increasingly dominated by Facebook.

He added that, as a result, Friendster will be repositioned as a social entertainment site for people to play games and music, and that it will leverage Facebook Connect.

Starting Wednesday, users who opt into the +1 button experiment (and soon everyone else) in Google Labs will start seeing a +1 icon next to each link in Google search results.

Google defines this action as a “public stamp of approval,” and it is exactly that. When you +1 something, your name becomes associated with that link “in search, on ads, and across the web,” according to the company. It also shows up in a feed on your Google Profile, which is required to use the product.The move builds on a number of social features that Google introduced in search earlier this year, such as the ability to see which friends have tweeted a given link in search results. Today’s move, however, is clearly something much bigger.

Beyond showing up in search results, Google plans to offer to publishers a +1 button that lets readers +1 something without leaving the publisher’s site. Facebook has a big head start here with its Like button — some 2 million sites and counting have it installed — but Google’s button will instantly have a lot of appeal, given the company says +1 data will directly influence its market share dominating search rankings. Similarly, we have to imagine that +1 is more bad news for content farms, whose content is less likely to be shared.

In another twist, users will also be able to +1 ad, which essentially adds a “recommended by friends” component to AdWords and AdSense. as the company explains on the AdWords blog.

“People are looking for answers; they’re not looking for links,” Yahoo executive Shashi Seth told reporters in San Francisco while demonstrating the new service on Wednesday.

The service, dubbed Search Direct, displays answers to queries in a pop-up box which change in real-time as a user continues typing in a search term. Google Instant, launched last year, predicts a search term after only a few words are typed, and immediately serves up relevant results.

Yahoo is talking to advertisers about new kinds of graphically rich ad formats and video ads that could appear inside the Search Direct box, said Seth, who is senior vice president of Yahoo Search and Marketplaces.

“Over the course of the next couple of months you’re probably going to see some of these ideas at play,” he said of the new ad formats.

Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving said Search Direct reflects Yahoo’s focus on improving the consumer search experience, after back-end Web indexing chores were outsourced to Microsoft Corp in a 10-year deal the two companies struck in 2009.

Yahoo saved hundreds of millions of dollars in annual costs through the deal. But Yahoo, whose overall net revenue declined about 4 percent year-over-year to $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter, acknowledged in January that the revenue boost expected from the search partnership had yet to materialize.

Yahoo’s share of the U.S. search market has also slipped — to 16.1 percent in February from about 20 percent in March 2009, according to analytics firm comScore.

Over the same period, Microsoft’s share rose nearly 5 percentage points to 13.1 percent, while Google’s grew to 65.4 percent from 63.7 percent, comScore data showed.

The idea of Direct Search, Yahoo executives said, is to provide answers to search queries based on content in Yahoo’s archive of in-house and licensed content, rather than links to outside websites.

The service offers answers in 15 categories — including sports, movies and weather — with more to be added in coming months.

Search Direct debuted in the United States on Yahoo’s main search Web page on Wednesday, and will gradually expand to the other parts of Yahoo.com, including its home page.

More than 50 websites are launching the Send button, including Gilt Groupe, 1-800-Flowers, The Wall Street Journal, Orbitz, Last.fm, The Huffington Post, People.com and The Washington Post. The Send button’s code is also now available on Facebook’s Developer Website. And as with the Like button, it only takes a few lines of code to get the Send button running on a website.

If the implementations we’ve seen so far are any indication, Send will become Facebook’s next Like button — which celebrated its first birthday last week and is installed on more than 10,000 websites every week. The Send button is designed to be Like’s companion, focused on private sharing rather than public sharing features. And since Send includes the ability to share articles via email, the classic “email to a friend” functionality available on millions of websites is rendered obsolete.

How It Works

The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother’s Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you’re training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.

The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don’t need to leave the web page they’re on or fill out a long, annoying form. Compared to the alternatives, the Send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and Groups.

Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says that Wednesday’s incident was a low-level root access breach. The company is reviewing its data logs to figure out what information may have been stolen and is working on patching any holes in its security. It seems unlikely that personally identifiable user information was taken during the attack, but Automattic has yet to complete its investigation.

“We presume our source code was exposed and copied,” Mullenweg stated on the company’s blog. “While much of our code is open source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.”

WordPress was the target of a high-profile attack in 2009 that utilized a security exploit in its popular blogging software to create new “hidden” administrator accounts. Today’s security breach is much different than the 2009 incident. If you host a WordPress.org website on your own servers, you shouldn’t be affected, but Automattic suggests that you make sure your various online accounts utilize a variety of strong passwords.

SOURCE: http://mashable.com/2011/04/13/wordpress-security-breach/

Check out the Video walk-through of Blogger’s new user interface design

Post Editor

Dashboard

I am speechless at Blogger’s new dashboard which uses the Webkit to give a polished look to deliver the latest in web technology. Everything at one place from Stats, Earnings, Comments and a lot more. The design reminds me of WordPress dashboard sidebar design, however Blogger’s new dashboard is much polished that WordPress.

Content Discovery

The content discovery feature lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading

After look at these feature, I am excited to see it live on our Blogger account.

Telephone lines are reported to be down for most of Japan, and getting a hold of loved ones is a difficult task to undertake. As reports surface, messages from Facebook and Twitter provide the latest news. Doing a bit of research shows how the human spirit can be found within the social media platforms.

Kotaku, a video game related site, posted an interesting article concerning how many japanese video game developers are tweeting their experiences. One developer went so far as to open their studio doors to strangers, relying on Twitter to accept invitations.

Masahiro Sakurai, a famous video game developer posted a startling image on Twitter of an almost always crowded Tokyo road being completely deserted.

George Takei, a famous japanese-american actor, has been tweeting non-stop trying to inspire people to donate to the Red Cross.

Obtaining information about where to find shelters has moved to Twitter as well, with locations being posted on Google Maps. And lists of locations becoming available as well.

A few days ago, Facebook updated its developer blog with a post called, “Platform Updates: New User Object fields, Edge.remove Event and more,” which explained that the company would start granting access to users’ mobile phone numbers and home addresses to third-party developers.
Granted, users would have had to provide Facebook with this information in the first place, and they would have also had to grant permission to any app or website trying to access it via the familiar permission box:

Still, the move raised some concerns. People don’t always read those permission boxes that carefully, when they’re just trying to move on to whatever task they’re trying to complete, and with so much of the web being integrated with Facebook, there’s no telling who all might collect your phone number and address, without paying explicit attention.

Facebook apparently decided that they agree with this. In a post to the company’s developer blog early this morning, Facebook’s Douglas Purdy wrote:

On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.

As with the other information you share through our permissions process, you need to explicitly choose to share this data before any application or website can access it, and you can not share your friends’ address or mobile number with applications. Also, like other data you make available to third party apps and websites, you can always clearly see and control the ways your information is being used in the Application Dashboard.

Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.

It remains unclear just what changes they’re making to the process, but acknowledgement is certainly a start. It probably also helps that they provided a bit of context for why you might actually want to grant your address and phone number to some sites or apps.

A post on the Official Google Blog explained, “Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine.”

You can see a screenshot of the feature in action below. It’s also possible to test it out for yourself here. Just conduct a search, then either click on a magnifying glass or navigate to a search result and hit the right arrow key to get started.

Admittedly, Instant Previews may not be the most indispensable thing ever created; searchers often don’t require a preview, and it’s not so difficult to click on the “back” button after investigating something, in any event.

Still, Google claimed, “In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit.”

Speed thrills
A faster email experience is at the core of Yahoo! Mail Beta. We built the product from the ground up to be fast so you can be more productive. In fact, Yahoo! Mail Beta is more than two-times faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail. You can learn more about how we enhanced the performance of Yahoo! Mail Beta at the YDN Blog.

Be gone, spammer!
Spam can be distracting, irritating and downright dangerous. We block more than 130 billion spam messages every month to deliver you a safer place to email. And, our focus on battling spam has earned us the highest marks among our competitors, as noted in a 2010 study by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute.

Yahoo! Mail everywhere
If you use Yahoo! Mail on the iPhone, iPad or an Android device, the look and feel of Yahoo! Mail Beta will be familiar. We designed Yahoo! Mail Beta to be sleek, elegant and consistent across devices.

Beyond email
There are many ways to connect with the people that matter to you. That’s why we invited Twitter into our social stream. Now you can read your friends’ tweets, retweet or compose your own 140-character message alongside Facebook posts and Yahoo! status updates all from the What’s New page. In addition, we made our IM and SMS features more productive because you can organize your conversations in separate tabs, switch between text and chat conversations and dock the conversation window when you are multi-tasking.

Photos and videos
Email is a great place to share private photos and videos with friends and family. Now you can browse rich slideshows from Flickr or Picasa links and watch video clips from Flickr and YouTube right from your email.

Find stuff faster
We’re using Yahoo!’s wealth of search science and technology to make email search faster. A new left-hand column helps you navigate, sort and narrow your search results by sender, attachment file, date or folder location.

We’re just getting started
As you can imagine, we have big plans for Yahoo! Mail Beta. Our engineers designed Yahoo! Mail Beta in a way that lets us make changes fast, so stay tuned as we release new enhancements over the coming months.

Now it’s your turn to try Yahoo! Mail Beta. You can switch back to your original Yahoo! Mail any time. And, please note that Yahoo! Mail Beta will not be immediately available for Yahoo! Small Business users or users on some older browsers and operating systems.

“Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little,” writes CEO Evan Williams. “The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”

Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site.

The first pane is essentially the single pane from today’s Twitter – the timeline. In the second pane, referred to as the “details pane”, users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page.

Making Twitter more appealing to the mainstream means greater value for businesses and marketers.

Ex-Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who parted ways with the company after failing to see eye to eye with executives on the direction Twitter needed to go in, had some interesting things to say about the redesign.

“While Twitter has been growing in mainstream significance and popularity, it hasn’t managed to adopt a strategy that clearly aims the company towards mass market success,” he writes. “I think #newtwitter changes that, turning the site into a rich information discovery platform, if you’ll excuse the buzzword bingo. The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it.”

“One of the striking things about #newtwitter is how clearly it’s designed to allow room for advertisements and promotions,” adds Payne. “As an early employee who heard a lot of internal discussion about monetization strategies that eschewed the typical Silicon Valley ad play, Twitter’s accelerating turn towards that business model is, on some level, a little disappointing. But as a stockholder and someone who wants to see the company survive and succeed, it’s clearly the most pragmatic way for Twitter to capitalize on its substantial and growing network. Ads have their role in the wheel of commerce, and just as Google’s text ads are more palatable than most forms of advertising, Twitter’s approach could end up being eminently tolerable, even useful.”

Search and the New Twitter

Danny Sullivan has a great article about the impact the Twitter redesign could have on search. This is obviously a key element for businesses to consider. Among his points:

1. The search box becomes more prominent.
2. More filtering options
3. “Save this search” becomes more prominent
4. Infinite scrolling on search results
5. People and company results more clearly separated
6. Tweets Near You feature
7. Tweets with Links feature
8. Searches for retweets by others, retweets by you, and your tweets, retweeted

Danny provides a detailed analysis of all of these items.

How Will Users React Once its Rolled Out?

The changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks as a preview. During this period, users will be able to switch back and forth between the new design and the old one, though frankly I can’t see any advantage to using the old one.

Redesigns typically get some amount of user backlash, and this will be probably fall in line with that tradition, but this particular redesign has some advantages. For one, many Twitter users are already using apps rather than Twitter.com anyway. Secondly, Twitter has left a lot of people wondering what the point of the service is. This has been a problem since it launched. This will help people understand its value more.

image credit: mozilla lab

image credit: mozilla lab

image credit: mozilla lab

This could make Facebook more attractive as a news reader, a way Facebook has encouraged users to use the service in the past, and a functionality that is probably more often associated with Twitter, though the capabilities are clearly both there with either service. Notifications of updates would only enhance Facebook for this purpose.
O’Neill shows a screenshot, which shows a simple link to subscribe to a user under their profile picture, and an update from that person appearing in the notifications along with all the other ones.

Keep in mind, this is just a feature they’re testing, and it’s possible that it won’t ever become available, but I can’t see too many downsides to it as long as users have to opt in to subscriptions.

Facebook also announced that users will soon have a new way to control their accounts, with a remote log-out feature (pictured above). Users will be about to log out of any Facebook session from another computer or device. More on that here.

While realtime search on Google itself isn’t new, there are still some new features Google has revealed along with the homepage.  Product Manager Dylan Casey writes:

On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.

In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.

Google has also added “updates” content to Google Alerts. You can now create an alert specifically for updates to get an email anytime a keyword appears in Twitter  or other sources Google uses for realtime search. You can also set them to email you once a day or once a week so your inbox doesn’t get flooded.

Hot Potato posted to its blog last 20th August this year that it has indeed been acquired by Facebook. “This wasn’t an easy decision, especially since we’ve built up a base of dedicated users,” the Hot Potato Team says. “If Hot Potato was going to sell to anyone, Facebook was the natural choice. Facebook is still small, moves fast, provides a great supportive environment for people to be entrepreneurial, and most importantly, Facebook builds great products. We’re looking forward to joining their team.”

Meanwhile, the company will be closing down Hot Potato’s actual operations. They will no longer accept new registrations, and they’ll offer a way for existing users to download info from the site. In about a month, they will close everything and delete all user data (none of which will be retained by Facebook, the team says).

As others have noted, Facebook’s acquisitions have generally been talent-based rather than product-based, and that appears to be the case here as well. The question is, what does this mean exactly for Facebook?

The obvious answer would be that Facebook Places will get more feature-rich. There may be some interesting new opportunities here for businesses at the product level (perhaps similar to Booyah’s offering, but on a Facebook scale) in addition to the opportunities that already exist with Facebook Places.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook paid $10 million for the company.

Mondy-Beller The majority of retailers (76%) said their customers are still price sensitive and are shopping for deals, while twenty-four percent say their shoppers are brand loyal, regardless of price.

“We are in a unique position to be in contact with so many top retailers spanning such a wide selection of categories — giving us a very complete picture of shoppers’ spending habits,” said Mondy Beller, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Shop.com.

“It’s not surprising to us that many of our merchants, regardless of their offerings, are saying that their customers are still cautious when it comes to their pocketbooks.”

When asked what strategies retailers are having the most success with when it came to online advertising, Search Engine Marketing (31%) and email campaigns (31%) were tied.  Email performance remains at average levels for most retailers (47%) while many are actually seeing an improvement over last year (36%), and only 10% are seeing a decline in performance compared to 2009.

Nearly half of retailers (49%) said they are seeing an increase in their affiliate marketing programs compared to 2009, and forty-four percent of retailers believe that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies will bring in about 5-20% of their sales, while only 24% believe that they’ll receive 20-50% of sales from SEO.

More than half (59%) of retailers rely on sites like Facebook and Twitter to advertise products and sales, while 64 percent use social media to communicate news, address customer service needs (34%) and provide a forum for discussion (43%).

Facebook is the most popular social media tool with retailers (82%) while Twitter (67%) and blogging (54%) follow. Only nine percent of retailers do not use any social media.

“We created Rounds to give online social networking and social gaming more of a real-time, fun, and collaborative feeling,”  Dany Fishel, co-founder and CEO of Rounds tells WebProNews. “Rounds bridges the gap between real life and the online world by helping people feel close to one another no matter how far apart they are geographically.”

Rounds was founded in 2008 and has raised $2 million in venture capital funding from Rhodium and Startup Factory investment groups. “Social networking and social gaming continue to grow in popularity, but with Rounds, social networking just got a lot more social,” Guy Weltsch, Managing Director at Rhodium tells us. “We were attracted to Rounds because its technology is unlike anything on the market today. Rounds will help take social networking to the next level.”

As Rounds prepared its Facebook launch, Facebook launched its own Facebook Live video channel. “Seems like Facebook is trying to dial up the engagement level through video and Rounds definitely ties into this trend,” a company rep says.

With the Rounds Facebook app, users can participate in video chats with no download requirements. The company suggests the following use cases: take snapshots of yourself and share them on Facebook, jointly browse Facebook content with friends, watch YouTube videos together, play real-time multi-user social games, Collaborate on virtual whiteboards, or co-browse with Google Maps.

The publication says the deal isn’t supposed to be announced until Friday, so I’m guessing we’ll have more details then.

Google buying a game company is not exactly a surprise. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was in talks with three more game companies – Playdom, EA’s Playfish, and Zynga.

There has been a lot made of Google’s plans to take on Facebook in the social media space (beyond the company’s existing products), and games have been expected to be at least one part of the strategy. An acquisition like this would appear to confirm this, as Slide’s games are already present on Facebook.

Right on schedule, Google has now formally announced its acquisition of Slide. On the company’s oficial blog, David Glazer says:

For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

The attack is spread via a “hilarious video” posted to Facebook walls, reports WebSense — when clicked, a form appears requesting your Facebook login.

The attack then returns you to Facebook, installs an app called “Media Player HD”, and asks you to download the “FLV player” — doing so installs malware on your machine. It gets worse: Depending on your location, you may also be presented with a contest to win an iPad … if you just enter your home address.

To avoid getting caught, simply remove the “hilarious video” if you find it on your Facebook (Facebook) wall. If you see it elsewhere on Facebook, don’t click it … and of course remember the obvious rule: Don’t enter your Facebook login anywhere other than Facebook.com.

If you already fell for the attack, change your Facebook password, uninstall the Facebook app (often called “Media Player HD”), and run a virus/malware scan on your computer.

The video below, courtesy of Websense, explains the attack.