AppScout

Google Tackles Social Networking, Facebook with 'Buzz'

2010-02-09T20:05:37Z

Google on Tuesday unveiled Google Buzz, a new social networking feature that will be integrated into Gmail and several mobile products.

Google executives framed the effort as a means to avoid all the "noise" currently present on social networking sites and only present the most important bits of information.

Buzz in Gmail will essentially add a "news feed" to the free e-mail service, pulling in information that friends have posted - videos from YouTube, photos from Picasa or Flickr, or updates from Twitter.

Gmail Buzz has five key features, Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, said during a presentation for the press: auto following; rich, fast sharing experience; public and private sharing; inbox integration; and "just the good stuff."

The service will start rolling out to all users today, and when it hits your inbox, Google will provide you with an option to sign up for Buzz after sign-in. Accept the terms, and Gmail with automatically follow the 40 people with whom you chat or e-mail most.

"We didn't want users to have to peck out an entirely new social graph" when joining Buzz, Jackson said.

If there's someone on that list you don't want to follow, drop them. You can also follow the public information of people you might not know personally.

In terms of the "rich, fast sharing experience," Google has added Gmail keyboard shortcuts to Buzz. The company also added a "custom photo viewer" that pops out photos added to the stream, much like they appear in Picasa. Added YouTube photos will also expand for viewing directly inside Buzz.

If you add a link to Buzz, it will pull photos from the Web site in question, much like Facebook's publisher option. To talk to others, use the @ symbol, like Twitter.

To avoid privacy problems, information added to Buzz can be marked as public or private. "We want to make it possible to publish your thoughts to the world and [get] instantly indexed by Google, but [we] wanted to make it possible to share privately, and switch back and forth," Jackson said.

How will you know about updates posted to Buzz? Information will be posted in your Gmail inbox, with the Buzz icon separating Buzz info from e-mails. If you open a Buzz and someone comments while it's open, it will update automatically in real-time.

Buzz Goes Mobile

Buzz will also be incorporated into Google's mobile offerings, said Vic Gundrota, vice president of mobile engineering at Google.

Get the rest of this story at pcmag.com.

Sirius XM Launches BlackBerry App Sans Howard Stern

2010-02-09T18:30:31Z

Sirius XM, the beleaguered satellite radio provider, has unveiled a new BlackBerry app that lets users listen to over 120 channels of commercial-free music, talk, sports, and comedy programming.

However, there's a catch. As FierceMobileContent reports, the new app lacks The Howard Stern Show, as well as live coverage of NFL, MLB, and NASCAR events--just like the iPhone and iPod touch app.

That little detail aside, the BlackBerry app lets users bookmark Internet channels using the Favorites function, and lets listeners browse current programming on other channels via the app's Lookaround feature, the report said. The app is available as a free download at www.siriusxm.com/blackberry; users can register for a 7-day free trial.

Navigon Adds Panoramic 3D to iPhone GPS App

2010-02-09T18:06:35Z

Navigon has announced an update to its MobileNavigator GPS app for the iPhone that adds social networking functionality, plus a panoramic 3D mode with terrain mapping.

MobileNavigator now lets users broadcast their current position, destination, and ETA to Twitter or Facebook. The Panorama View 3D mode, meanwhile, displays digitized cartography rendered from NASA height and terrain data, including elevations, shadows, and geographic images.

Finally, Navigon has added MyRoutes, a personalized route recommendation engine that analyzes individual driving data and designs customized routes based on the driver's driving habits, day of the week, and usual travel times.

Navigon is still running a sale, with MobileNavigator ringing in at $69.99 ($20 off the usual price) in Apple's App Store.

McAfee Suite Is Smarter, Faster, Prettier

2010-02-09T16:30:26Z

The newest McAfee suite has a brand-new user-friendly interface and a much smaller impact on performance than its predecessor. It's better in almost every area, though parental control is still weak. What it needs now is a bulletproof installer and even better malware cleanup.

Check out analyst Neil Rubenking's full review at PCMag.com.

Netflix: 1080p Streaming Not Coming This Year

2010-02-09T16:25:50Z

Oops. The dream of 1080p streaming for Netflix will have to remain just that--at least for 2010. CNET last night ran a roadmap of Netflix upgrades arriving in the coming year. Among the features on the list were 5.1 surround sound support and 1080p streaming.

Netflix has since denied the latter, stating that it "incorrectly acknowledged" the streaming, according to the site. 5.1 Surround support and closed captioning for HD videos are reportedly still on track to arrive later this year.

Motorola Droid Users Getting Android 2.1 Update This Week

2010-02-09T15:04:31Z

Here's a little bit of good news for all of those Droid owners out there with Nexus One envy--Google will start to roll out the 2.1 upgrade to Droid users this week, according to Motorola.

The OS upgrade was first introduced with Google's Nexus One, released earlier this year. Google stresses that the upgrade is "minor," featuring changes to the API and some bug fixes.

Not too many details have been released regarding any changes that Droid users may see once the rollout is complete, though there have been a slew of rumors about extended multi-touch functionality to the device, helping bring it up to speed with the Nexus One in that regard.

ClipSpeak Speaks Copied Text Out Loud

2010-02-09T13:00:00Z

If you're a fan of having your computer speak to you instead of having to read large blocks of text, ClipSpeak is a tiny application that can save you time and eyestrain. The app is free and runs quietly in the background until you highlight some text. When you copy or cut the text, ClipSpeak jumps into action and speaks the text aloud. The app is perfect if you have a long article or report that you want to review or absorb, but your eyes glaze over when you start reading.

ClipSpeak requires the .NET Framework 2.0 or higher to run, and is Windows-only. The app's light on resource usage, sitting in the system tray until it detects something's been added to the clipboard, at which point it reads the text and speaks it aloud. The install is under 1MB, and memory usage is about 1MB when ClipSpeaks isn't in use. Additionally, the app is portable, so you don't have to install it anywhere--just double-click the executable to run it. Since the app doesn't keep data in the registry and doesn't require an install, you can drop the executable onto a USB flash drive and carry it with you anywhere you go.

You can customize the voice that ClipSpeak uses to speak your text; choose between multiple voice synthesizers for a more natural human voice or the sci-fi robotic sound. The app also comes with key commands: You can suspend ongoing speech or quickly disable the app if you know you'll be doing some copying and pasting and you don't want it popping up to read everything you highlight. A quick right-click while ClipSpeak is speaking silences the app, and shift-right-click disables it until you re-enable it.

Finally, if you really like ClipSpeak or want to preserve the audio from one of its readings, you can save the speech to MP3 on your hard drive. I can see ClipSpeak being particularly useful if you're a fan of text-to-speech, if you frequently edit documents, or if you have tons of e-mail and want an easy way to slog through it all without making your eyes tired.

Reports: Gmail to Become Hub for Social Networking?

2010-02-08T21:45:12Z

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal report Monday that Google will be adding hooks to popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter via Gmail.

While interesting, a Facebook and Twitter plugin wouldn't exactly be game-changing. In fact, my early suspicion was that this might be a Gmail Labs plugin.

In fact, this sounds very very similar to Google's recent real-time search efforts, where Google Social Search provides real-time updates from people that you know. It's not that far from an active search for those updates to having them pushed, now that Google has a real-time framework for those updates.

It seems reasonable to assume that Google is stealing a page from startups like Threadsy, which tries to take feeds, streams, tweets, and other elements of your social networking life into one easy, manageable stream. If so, more power to Google. And that's exactly what you'll be giving the company if you sign on, unfortunately: the ability for Google to sniff a collection of inbound communications and updates, rather than just the Gmail and Google Reader feeds it previously only had access to.

Audacious Sound Editor Packs a Lot for Free

2010-02-08T19:57:36Z

If you're looking to record audio from the Internet or do some simple audio editing on your own, Audacity might be a perfect fit for your needs: It's an open-source app that can record anything you can play on your PC, and it offers a beat finder and simple tools for tasks such as cleaning up background noise.

Audacity doesn't offer the slickness or power of professional sound-editing software, but Audacity 1.2 is surprisingly full-featured for a free piece of software. Check out our in-depth review at PCMag.com.

AT&T Navigator 1.5i Hits the iPhone

2010-02-08T15:45:57Z

TeleNav has unveiled AT&T Navigator 1.5i for the iPhone. The latest revision to the popular turn-by-turn GPS app includes road speed limit signs, speed limit alerts, and improved route avoidance options that account for high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes and toll roads.

The app also finally includes a nighttime map mode, an improved pedestrian mode, and the ability to return to the origin of the last trip taken via the Recent Places Menu. Finally, AT&T Navigator 1.5i includes Shake-to-Go, which lets users shake the iPhone in order to instantly cue up a route back home.

I've been testing 1.5i over the weekend. So far it has crashed a couple of times, but the speed limit indicators were accurate across an 80 mile round trip, and the nighttime mode looked sharp.

I also noticed something odd with both AT&T Navigator 1.5i and the TomTom app: both of them continually lost position in eastern Massachusetts (near Boston), to the point where they were unusable, on my own iPhone 3GS. Both of these apps were quite accurate during my PCMag.com reviews last summer (on a different, loaner iPhone 3G). I'm currently investigating the issue.

Caveat Emptor Helps You Check for Recalls Before You Buy

2010-02-08T15:19:08Z

If recent recalls have you worried about buying the things you normally buy, Caveat Emptor is a Firefox extension that can help you check for active recalls on a product before you purchase it online, or anywhere else. The extension lets you quickly and easily search for recalls from the Consumer Product Safety Commission for any product on any Web site, so you know if there's a recall on it or on a similar product before you drop the cash or head out to the store to buy one.

Caveat Emptor isn't a terribly complicated app, but it does give you the ability to do something you may not do otherwise: search the CPSC's database of recalls and product defects before you buy something. Not many people remember that the database is public and can be searched at any time, so we often don't learn of a recall of something we own until after we've bought it and we're notified by the manufacturer, if at all.

Caveat Emptor allows you to simply right-click the name of a product on any site and search the CPSC database for that product. For the best results, you'll want to highlight the product's name and not necessarily the model number or any identifying labels. For example, instead of searching for a recall on a "Dell Latitude D820 2.2 Core 2 Duo" you may want to just search for "Dell Latitude D820" or even "Dell Latitude" to see recalls for all models of that type (if there are any.)

The app also gives you direct access to the list of products being monitored by the CPSC and to feeds from the CPSC if you're interested in staying up to date as products are added to or updated on the list of watched products. Best of all, Caveat Emptor allows you to search for product names on any site, not just shopping sites - the extension just passes the highlighted words along as a search query. If recalls and product warnings in the news have you down and depressed, Caveat Emptor might help you feel better while you shop.

4chan Founder: Verizon Blocked Us

2010-02-08T14:56:36Z

Did Verizon block access to the Web's most infamous message board? 4chan thinks so. Christopher Poole, founder of the site that brought the world rickrolling, claims that Verizon has been "explicitly blocking" access to 4chan.

"Over the past 72 hours, we've been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards," Poole wrote. "After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic... only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional."

Verizon over the weekend told Read Write Web that, while it was being bombarded with calls about the issue, it could neither confirm or deny that it had intentionally blocked the access to the site.

Eric Schmidt Talks Google's Understated Superbowl Ad

2010-02-08T14:34:19Z

Google's Super Bowl ad last night didn't exactly embrace the sort of excitement viewers of event are accustomed to. The whole thing was a bit understated, though it did manage to tug a bit at the old heart strings, like a search engine-based romantic comedy. Google CEO Eric Scmidt wrote a relatively rare (and rather short) post on the company's official blog to discuss the "Parisian Love" spot.

If the ad looked familiar, it's because video of the commercial has existed online for a few months now. "We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search," Schmidt wrote. "Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience."

Not a lot of explosions, no Jay Leno, and while, perhaps the contrary was subtly implied, everyone seemed to keep their pants on for the duration of the spot.

Hands On: Facebook's Revamped Homepage

2010-02-05T21:48:30Z

As we reported earlier, Facebook today rolled out a revamped homepage, providing new icons for notifications and extending the left-hand bar. The update is still rolling out to the majority of Facebook members, but a PCMag staffer who got the latest upgrade took a few screen shots of the new features for us.

Screen shots and more details after the jump.

The old Facebook include links to the News Feed, status updates, photos, links, and any of the friend groupings created by the user. The update streamlines that a bit, placing your photo and the option to view your profile on the left-hand bar, with links to the News Feed, messages, events, photos, and friends underneath.

This bar also includes abbreviated access to chat (lower left). By default, it shows only the friends with whom you chat most often, but that can be expanded by clicking "See All."

Facebook added a few icons atop the homepage. Scroll over them, and a drop-down menu will show you recent notifications.

The icon on the far left provides a drop-down menu of all your friend requests.

Friend requests and suggestions are still visible on the top right of the homepage, as you can see underneath the Account drop-down. Links for Home, Profile, and Account information have been moved to the top right. Click on Account to change settings or log out.

Also on the left-hand bar are links to more easily access applications ...

... and games. Each app or game also includes updates on friends who have the same apps or are playing the same games.

Google Tops Mobile Site Visits

2010-02-05T17:31:32Z

New data from The Nielsen Company shows that Google Search was the top mobile property in December with nearly 28 million unique visitors, according to MediaPost.

Yahoo Mail was in second place with 23.2 million, followed by Facebook at 18.8 million. Gmail and the Weather Channel were fourth and fifth, with 17.6 million and 13.8 million unique visitors, respectively.

Overall, the entire U.S. mobile device Internet audience was 62 million, the report said. That's about 25 percent of the installed base of wireless subscriptions.