Powerset brings the Semantic Web to Wikipedia
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Amid speculation that Microsoft is looking to make an acquisition, Powerset launched a public beta of its Wikipedia search engine. It brings a new, rich semantic dimension via natural language query processing to Wikipedia that greatly improves the search and reading experience.The company calls it a first step in changing the way users search and consume Web content. "It's a complete shift. You see this and you want to experience all content in this way," Barney Pell, co-founder and CTO of Powerset, told me. "And, as an introduction, it will drive huge investment in semantic and linguistic technology, just as investments were made in information retrieval and scalable databases [...]Go to site
Posterous is a new blogging tool that forgos some of the traditional dashboards and will simply let you write the post in your favorite e-mail tool. Any photos, music, or videos you attach to your message will show up in a new blog post, which can later be administered on the Web. There's no sign-up, and in fact the first time you send a message to post@posterous.com it'll automatically create your blog and Posterous account for you.Once registered you'll still get a way to create posts in your browser. There's a simple WYSIWYG editor, and a way to go back and edit previous creations. Like Tumblr, there's also a network of other users you can subscribe to, so their posts show up in a centralized stream. In many ways, Posterous resembles Tumblr, albeit with less structure when it comes to figuring out what you want to write about.Writing blog posts via e-mail is definitely not a new thing. Google's Blogger product has had this for quite some time now, and will support both links and images that get pushed straight to a live post. Hosted WordPress blogs and Tumblr itself also support this feature. However, none of these products support comment forwarding, which lets you keep track of community discussion while you're away from your computer. In Posterous' case you'll get a new e-mail for every new comment with the option to reply. If you do (through your e-mail client of course) that reply will be pushed live as a threaded comment. Not too shabby.
An example of a finished Posterous post. Any included photos get slapped into a photo gallery.(Credit: CNET Networks)
A look at the NYT's forthcoming widget generator.(Credit: Silicon Alley Insider)There's also reportedly more in store for Blogrunner, a Techmeme-like start-up that the Times acquired and has worked into its technology coverage to pull in headlines from around the Web. And the Times will also be developing iPhone applications for the new app store that Apple will be unveiling with the new iPhone 3G.What wasn't revealed was a timeline, for the most part. So these remain projects in the works, and we'll likely see gradual beta launches before they're readily available.
Wonder how Mozilla feels about that logoTo Tripwolf's credit, the page layout helps ease the burden of slogging through so much content, and information is presented in a useful hierarchy. Destination pages start with professional content (Tripwolf is backed by MairDumont, Europe's largest publisher of travel guides), then show friends' recommendations for that city. User-added comments and content pulled from outside sources are left to the bottom of the page. It makes sense: When I'm planning a vacation, I want an expert source to provide background, and I want to know if my friends have any specific recommendations about the place I'm visiting. Only after I've taken those factors into account will I turn to reviews written by random strangers on the Internet.As you choose locations to visit, you can drag and drop their listing information into your Scrapbook (located on the left navigation bar) for future reference. Unfortunately, the Scrapbook's location is static, so adding items from the bottom of the page requires a lot of scrolling back and forth. Once you've finalized your itinerary you can e-mail your Scrapbook to friends or have Tripwolf create a customized PDF city guide. The latter is better in concept than in execution--my "customized city guides" featured each listing on a separate page, which is a terrible waste of paper. It'd be better to download Tripwolf's pre-existing PDF city guide, which is essentially a digest of the information that's available at the site, plus a map and specific recommendations from a local expert, dubbed a Trip Guru.Aside from the travel guides, Tripwolf incorporates some pretty standard social networking features: you can add friends, send messages to other members, post your status/location, and mark your favorite places to visit. There's also a Journal section, which is essentially a blog platform that also incorporates a map of places you've visited and would be especially nice for extended travels. Surprisingly, the site launched without the Trips section, which is still in development. (Then again, it is a beta.) This section will eventually provide flight- and hotel-booking services. Overall, Tripwolf incorporates plenty of elements that other sites do better. But as one of the only sites shooting to become a one-stop shop for travel planning and travel-related social networking, it may yet find a passionate audience.
Both companies have been given optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to help them better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash, Adobe said in a statement. Search engines already index static text and links within Shockwave Flash files, but rich Internet applications and dynamic Web content are elusive to search engines because of their changing states, Adobe noted.Adobe's technology means that millions of pre-existing RIAs that use Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without alteration by companies or developers, Adobe said. Google has already added the optimized Flash Player to its search engine, while Yahoo plans to add the technology to a future update of Yahoo Search."Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn't better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It's great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation," Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineLand.com, said in a statement. "The changes should help unlock information that's previously been 'invisible' and will likely result in a better experience for searchers."
Quickaccess lets you edit your documents from home computers and folders in the cloud in a standard directory or in this visual interface which gives you a preview of each document.(Credit: Quickoffice)
My New Yorker colleague Caroline McCarthy insists there's not a single safe street for bicyclists in New York. Don't tell that to Ride the City though, a mash-up for bikers who don't want to end up road kill in the streets of one of the busiest cities in the world. Like Google Maps you just plug in your start point and destination and it does the rest, although instead of simply giving you the fastest way there it will map out a route that takes advantage of streets with dedicated bike lanes, and completely avoids things like freeways, toll bridges and tunnels. If your route does require going through a "trouble zone" it will be highlighted to tell you.Other little perks include map icons highlighting bike shops close to your route which might help you get back to business if you get a flat or break your chain. There's also an option to reverse the route, which may change if you took any one-way streets or bike paths on the way there.The service is currently limited to the greater NYC area, although as its FAQ suggests you can get similar services across the country in Portland, Oregon with byCycle.org. If you're a resident of Berlin, Germany there's also BBBike.
Map out the safest route for you and your steel horse in the mean streets of New York with Ride the City.(Credit: CNET Networks)
If you're a frequent Webware reader you might remember Grooveshark, and Grooveshark Lite--two different but equally awesome music sharing and listening tools. From those same folks comes TinySong, a bit of a play on large link sharing services like TinyURL. However, instead of sharing Web sites with your friends you're linking them straight to the track. The service uses the same built-in song search found in Grooveshark Lite, and will simply jump whoever opens the link right to the Web based jukebox. What's nice is whoever is searching will have the short link copied to their clipboard automatically. For popular songs there's also a fairly good diversity of variations and remixes.One thing missing from TinySong is a way to make multi-song playlists, but you can simply use Grooveshark Lite and share the playlist link with a friend. See also services like MuxTape and Mixwit for such a task.
TinySong lets you search for songs hosted on the Web and share them with friends using a small, sharable link like you'd get on services like TinyURL.(Credit: CNET Networks)
Any TinyURLs on a Twitter post or elsewhere on the Web will automatically be converted with shortText.(Credit: Shorttext.com)
(Credit: CNET Networks)While not nearly as cool as the Muxtape playlist viewer we wrote about a few months back, if you're looking to add a little extra eye candy to your bookmarks folder it's worth checking out an extension called Bookmarks Preview. When installed it adds two new views to your bookmarks folder that let you surf your bookmarked sites with small thumbnail previews. You can either view them in a large grid, or Apple cover-flow style which will scale up each thumbnail to a maximum of about 440 pixels wide. Each time you bookmark a new site a thumbnail will be created and stored away. It will also go back into pre-existing bookmarks and grab thumbnails the first time they're added, giving you a rather large library to look at. My collection took about five minutes to get converted and came up about 50% blank. There's currently no way to have it go out again and fetch newer, updated versions--something I hope is added in a later version.Related: Five ways to master bookmarks in Firefox 3
In the 1960s, Dr. Lawrence Roberts invented computer networking via data packets, which led directly to the development of ARPANet and the Internet . And now Dr. Roberts is trying to fix one of the Internet's biggest problems: network overload caused by peer-to-peer file transfers
Not Al Gore.(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5% of the Net's users are running P2P transfers and taking up 80% of its capacity, which is dramatically limiting the available bandwidth available to everyone else. Roberts' company, Anagran, is able to detect which "flows" are P2P traffic, and reduce the bandwidth available to these communications when other users' systems want it. Roberts says that Anagran's technology even functions with P2P transfers are encrypted. I'm not going to pretend I understand exactly how this works, but it has something to do with keeping information about the flow of data between all computers connected through an ISP in memory in the Anagram appliance, and then leveling off traffic of P2P communications as needed - and throughput only, not latency. Judging by the reaction of the audience of infrastructure geeks sitting around me, Roberts is on to something. "He's the real deal right there," the guy next to me said at one point, pretty much gazing up at the stage in awe.Roberts claims that the Anagran devices also ensure that high-priority traffic, like VOIP and video streams, can be guaranteed better performance. Is leveling bandwidth rates between P2P and non-P2P users fair? ( surveys)Roberts was clear that he has no desire to punish P2P users, but rather he wants to make sure that they - and everyone else - get their fair share of bandwidth. That share, he believes, cannot be 80% of the Net's capacity, especially if the other 20% has to be allocated to the 95% of the Net's users who aren't using P2P. You'll find Anagran bandwidth fairness boxes (also called FR-1000s) in university settings now, where the P2P file transfer problem is most acute. Anagran doesn't currently have any commercial ISP customers, but I'll bet that they're all looking at them.Roberts has no position on the legality of content being transferred over P2P links. "Illegal or legal is not the issue at all." It's about fairness, he says: Equal capacity for equal pay. What do you think?
Anagran FR-1000: The shape of bandwidth to come.(Credit: Anagran)
Web site maker Wix opened up to everyone earlier today. What the site offers over some traditional tools is SEO optimization that somehow works despite the very flashy pages you end up with. All of these pages are created with an editor that gives you some really gorgeous results as long as you're willing to work within the constraints of the templates, or dig into the tools provided. One of them being a MySpace editor that will let you create very dynamic page elements with no coding knowledge required.Wix's core product goes far beyond MySpace though, and is a surprisingly advanced site creator. There are templates for artists and musicians or simple start pages for people to put up their resumes---the kind of things you find on competing sites like Jimdo, Synthsite, and Weebly. The idea is that anyone can build a page and push it live with just a click if they're proficient with something like Microsoft PowerPoint.However, one thing I found to be missing is an undo button, meaning if you accidentally delete a page element (or an entire page) you have to go re-create it from scratch. This can be a total show stopper if you're working on something important, and should really be in every workflow-based Web application these days.Like Blogger in its old days Wix has an explore section that's worth checking out. Here you can see what others have created with the tool then copy over the code to place it wherever you want. Missing however is the edit option, so hopefully you like what you see.You can see a demo of the site creator after the break. 
Making sites in Wix is easy peezy as long as you've worked with something like PowerPoint before. (Credit: CNET Networks)
2. Yahoo's singing yokel. If you remember the 1990s you'll remember this wonderful yell--the sound of the Yahoo yodeler. To hear it any time just click on the ! at the end of the Yahoo logo on Yahoo.com. One thing to note is that this doesn't seem to work in Firefox 3, although if you're using IE7 it plays just fine.3. JetBlue wants a sandwich. The infamous peanut butter jelly time dancing banana (background) was briefly a part of JetBlue's travel search site. Typing in "PBJ" into the search box while holding shift and clicking the search button would pull up a clip from Fox's Family Guy with the dog Brian doing the dance. It was removed shortly after it was discovered. You can still see a shot of what it looked like here.4. Google Easter eggs (3 parts)Google bombs come and go. Their very nature depends on search relevancy, so no one Google bomb will stick around forever. Two of the more prominent ones had to deal with the George W. Bush presidency, including the infamous faux 404 page for "Weapons of mass destruction" and the search for "miserable failure" which would link up to Bush's profile at the White House Web site. A more humorous iteration exists using Google's built-in calculator in relation to Douglas Adams' masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Searching for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" yields 42, which you'd understand if you had read the book.Google Moon. Google's mapping services are chock full of secrets. For a while Google Moon had a really great one. When zooming too far into the surface of the moon it became cheese, something that was later removed probably by NASA's request or improved topography. Here's a video someone captured of it by KoolAidGrenade at Metacafe.Is The Moon Made Of Cheese?!? ACCORDING TO GOOGLE.COM - video powered by MetacafeRidiculous languages in Google Search. Remember the Swedish Chef from The Muppets? Why not make him your liaison to the world of search? Amidst the myriad of language options in Google you'll find "bork, bork, bork" which serves up your results in the gibberish language of the fictional Swedish Chef. Believe it or not Google gets over a million page views a day in Swedish Chef according to Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience.If Swedish ain't your thing, there's also Elmer Fudd from Loony Toons and Esperanto, the language that belongs to no nation or people. However the best of all is Google for h4x0rs (hackers), which you can get to by going to 600673.com (Google spelled out in leet speak). Continue reading for 5-10.
Spore.com's 404 page is made with in-game creatures.5. Awesome 404 pages. Typing in a URL for a place you're not supposed to go usually yields a boring 404 message but some site creators have gone the extra mile to make sure you feel like you're getting your time's worth. Smashing Magazine has compiled lists of cool 404 pages here and here, but one of my favorites that changes every time you use it is from 3D Realms, the makers of the Duke Nukem series. Going to a page not on the site map takes you to a page with a picture of staff members around the office with the colors reversed to look like an old film negative. It changes every time you refresh the page, which is creepy but cool.Also worth a mention is the recently launched Spore.com which spells out 404 with animals made using the Creature Creator if you go somewhere you're not supposed to.6. Tumblr's listen box. If you're a Tumblr user, typing "listen" into your keyboard from your dashboard will bring up a link to launch the "sound box" which plays audio tracks from everyone on your Tumblr friends list who has posted audio. If you're on Tumblr and trying to figure out why it's not playing anything, you might want to make sure you start following a friend or two.
7. Flickr in Pirate speak. We blogged about this back when it happened for "international talk like a pirate day" but a special one-day-only language option for "Arrr!" appeared on the Yahoo-owned photo host Flickr. Clicking it would convert nearly everything on the site into pirate-jargon. Expect the folks at Yahoo to do it again come September 19th matey.8. Moo.com's massive, Internet-wide Easter egg hunt. More of a marketing move than anything else, back in March Web printing service Moo.com ran a contest to find little Easter eggs hidden around popular Web sites and in real life. Included were sites like Boing Boing, Picnik, Etsy and others. If you found certain eggs you could pick up one of 3,500 prizes including cool Moo swag and Flickr pro accounts.
9. Amazon's hidden employee page. At the very bottom of Amazon.com you can click on the directory of all stores link. Directly below the copyright date is a small box that's invisible unless highlighted. If you click on it you'll be taken to a special page dedicated to former Amazon.com employee David Rishers by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. 
10. Random subjects in Yahoo Mail. Can't think of what to title your message? Let Yahoo do it for you. If you're using the newer version of Yahoo Mail (not the classic mode) clicking on the subject button next to the open field will generate a random subject line for you. Useful for all those times you've got writer's block.If you're a Yahoo Messenger user there's also an entire set of "hidden" icons which you can find here. These won't show up in the emoticon selector, but will pop up if you enter them alongside your usual chat. You can feel special, but they were probably left out of the menu to preserve UI simplicity, not because they're particularly useful.
Dashwire (review), a dashboard for synchronizing and managing the contents of your mobile phone online, has let loose with Dashwire 2.0 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6. Tuesday's release enriches the syncing client application with photos and with Facebook and Twitter updates.
Sharing media and status messages makes Dashwire way more fun.The previous version of the downloadable Dashwire app, which opens the syncing channels between the phone's content and the online dashboard, was pretty much a blank placeholder--all back-end functionality and very little front-end personality. Now the screen displays your primary photo, status message, and a media ribbon of the photos and videos stored on your online dashboard. The status entry field on the Dashwire client can easily become a direct artery to Facebook and Twitter. After a quick set-up from the dashboard ("Your status"), status updates made from the phone can automatically supplant a user's Facebook status, post to Twitter, or both. Another addition sees the media ribbon along the bottom edge that serves as an on-demand photo and video gallery, but which also has new privacy and interaction controls. The content can now be titled, shared, or set as wallpaper directly from the phone. When privacy mode is on, photos are invisible to the public unless they're given individual permission. 
Privacy controls keep you in charge.In another twist, photos will soon be able to climb up from the Mac or PC to the dashboard, then autosync to the media ribbon on your phone. When that happens, users will be able to upload full-size images through the Photo tile. Dashwire will then autosync these a much smaller scaled version of the hosted image, about 20 KB, to the client. The result is a neat feature that grants access to media not even stored on the phone. Translation: more precious memory for you. Unfortunately, it's only running on Dashwire's development servers at the moment, but is expected to bridge that gap with a general release within three weeks.To get Dashwire 2.0, point your Windows Mobile browser to http://m.dashwire.com, and to sign up for an account, visit www.dashwire.com from your desktop. Support for Symbian S60 is expected to debut within the next two months.
Today, Evernote 3.0, the note-taking application I raved about in March, opens to the public. I highly recommend this product. It's functional and useful, and beyond that its architecture is also interesting. It's a true three-platform play: it works very well, and somewhat differently, on desktop computers, mobile phones, and over the Web. On a PC, Everynote is a good note-taking application. The current version also fixes some issues I had with earlier betas, and I'm seriously considering finally dumping OneNote, the note-taking application I use now, for this new product.If you have the Evernote application running on your camera phone, it will automatically upload your snapshots to the Evernote server, creating a useful archive of them. But the killer feature is that it also does OCR (optical character recognition) on your images so you can find them later by searching for text in them. Use this tool to snap pictures of products you see in stores and want to remember, to grab whiteboards in meetings, and to take pictures of people with name tags at conferences. I haven't yet lived with this product but I've tried it enough to know that it works, and it's one of those utilities that might just change your life.
Evernote makes short work of blending notes from your PC and browser, and pictures snapped with your mobile. (Web version shown.)Finally, everything you do on your phone and on your computer gets synchronized to your Evernote account on the Web, so you can always get to your info. And if you want to run the desktop application on a second computer (or if you ever need to re-install it on your current machine), as soon as you log in it automatically grabs all your data, since everything you do on the platform is always synced.There's a free version of Evernote with a 40MB a month upload allowance and unpredictable OCR performance. For $45 a year you get a 500MB a month allowance, priority OCR, better security features, and support.I like the way Evernote blends local software with Web-based utility, and how it keeps all your devices in sync. The price for the premium service is reasonable. I continue to recommend this product.See also:Apple launches Web 2.0 infrastructure: MobileMeLive Mesh consumer app is a work in progress
On a site you like? Don't bother with keyboard shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy), just hit the new star button in the address bar. It'll quick save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping the "edit this bookmark" dialogue that usually pops up when you try to squirrel a link away.If you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you'll get that same drop down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply remove the link from your bookmarks.
Save typing and a visit to figure out what a site is about with tags.(Credit: CNET Networks)Step 2: Use tagsTags are helpful. If you're bookmarking a site you think you're going to keep around it's worth tagging. The biggest reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar, meaning if you tag this article "awesome" typing awesome into the bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It'll also take any tags you've previously added an autofill them for you as you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly an efficiently.To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you've typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and folders to discover new contentAre you an iTunes user? If so you may be familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that lets you do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning this isn't as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop down menus, but the good news is that there a ton of pre-built options you can simply copy and paste. Smart bookmarks: Smart bookmarks are a grouping of links that change based on what values you plug into them. To make your own click on bookmarks then "organize bookmarks" (you can also hit Ctrl+Shift+B). Highlight "bookmarks menu" from the source list below, then right click on it and select "new bookmark." All the magic for making a smart bookmark is in the location field, which is where you'll be dropping in a line of code that does all the heavy lifting. These codes can range from simple queries to a string that will search a domain and give you the latest stories, or simply those related to a keyword. The possibilities are nearly endless. The sad truth is that this method is complicated. MozillaZine has a huge thread on the ins-and-outs of how to build your own code strings, as does Cybernet News, just keep in mind you'll have to have some basic coding knowledge to build your own from scratch.
Saving sites you've been to in a certain genre can be a time saver. Smart bookmark folders let you do this the easy way.(Credit: CNET Networks)Smart folders: Smart folders are similar to smart bookmarks but require far less work. There are a few ways to make smart folders for things like your browser history and browsing habits, but one of my favorite uses for it is to create little folders of bookmarks based on where you've been. To start just get back to that organize bookmarks menu (Ctrl+Shift+B) and use the search box on the top right. By typing a name it'll search both history and bookmarks. You can pick either of those, or both categories and save it as a search, which will now reside in your bookmarks toolbar as a smart folder. If you add or visit a site with that word or domain in the name it will automatically show up in that list, saving you from having to re-categorize it again. These are incredibly useful if you drop them down into the bookmarklets bar, since they'll act as drop down menus that will save you crucial screen real estate.
Firefox 3 keeps multiple backups of your bookmarks, but so should you.(Credit: CNET Networks)Step 4: Import/Export and backing up your bookmarksThere's nothing worse than having to try and remember all the things you've bookmarked in case of a hard drive crash or corrupted file. Save yourself the trouble and make back-ups from time to time.My way of doing this is to use two of Google's service's Gmail and Google calendar to bundle reminders and file storage in one place. Step one is setting up a Google calendar reminder every month for a back-up. Now, every time you get the reminder just go organize bookmarks, then click on "import and backup." Save the backup JSON file to your desktop and e-mail it to yourself in Gmail. Be sure to set up a bookmarks label and tag every backup with it so you'll save yourself some time searching later on. Now, what about if you lose everything and need to re-import? If you've got a copy of that JSON file laying around you just import it using that same menu you just used to do the backup. Likewise you can go back to previous versions of your bookmarks by selected an earlier date from the drop down list, although I wouldn't recommend doing it unless you've made a mess of the ones you have.
Step 5: Make it social
ScrnShots is a community for hosting screenshots. It's a companion to a desktop application that will grab and automatically upload in a similar fashion to Plasq's Skitch. Both sites have a social element, with commenting and tracking popular shots. The big difference is that ScrnShots is cross platform and will work on both Macs and PCs. You can also simply use it as an image host if you're using another screenshot utility like TechSmith's SnagIt, or OS X's Grab.The service launched in private beta back in April, and has since opened up to everyone. I've been exploring it this morning and have come across quite a few gems just from its discovery pages, which like Flickr will highlight some of the more interesting shots based on community involvement either in page views or comments. If you find something you like, or would like to share one you've taken, there's a simple embed option to stick it on a blog or social-networking page. One thing to note is that these embeds are for specific sizes only, either close to full-size or a small thumbnail, like I've embedded below.
For power users, the integrated desktop applications offer the convenience of uploading without having to visit the site. You can also do things like add URLs and related tags--the latter of which is made far easier on the Mac version, as it will pull up tags you've used in the past and auto-complete them for you as you begin to type. Both sit in your system bar and can be called upon no matter what application you're using.While regular users will bask in this simplicity, ScrnShots isn't the perfect solution for bloggers, what I consider to be ScrnShots' target audience. It's missing a way to annotate and edit your shots. Skitch and SnagIt offer this, and I find it a hugely helpful feature--especially for some of the shots I take and use for my posts on here. Also missing is a way to set up captions and credit on shots that are embedded elsewhere, meaning site owners will have to set up custom CSS and coding into the embedded item if they want to do either of those two things. Until it gets these features I wouldn't ditch SnagIt or Skitch just yet.Related: Iterasi goes live with personal Web-archiving tool
For example, the site reads: "It is with great 'sadness/glee/self-interest' that I ask you to accept this letter as my official resignation from Yahoo!"As you know, for some time now I have been desiring 'more time with my family/a more challenging position/you guys quit destroying all my net worth' and thus I feel the time has finally arrived for me to 'move on/take a new direction/tell you to go f*** yourself.'"Though it seems like the site could have easily been created by a disgruntled Yahoo employee, Network Solutions Whois registration data points to a Mathew Honan, who could be a contributing editor at Wired. An e-mail to Honan was not immediately returned, so it's unclear if it's his creation.Still, some points in the letter are obvious hyperbole. In one of the menu options, the letter suggests that Yahoo doesn't understand how to run a taco truck, much less a $30 billion business. The company's not worth quite that much.The rants may reach Yang himself, but that's unclear, too. The form letter is addressed to Jerry Yang @ Yahoo (without the typical "inc" at the end of the address) with the subject line "Get bent."
With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way--iPhone 3G, I'm looking at you--there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services. The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up that is still in private beta.Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes will become part of Nokia's Software and Services division, and its technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.It's good news for the Berlin-based Plazes. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging."When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before," a post on the Plazes blog explained. Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google--and instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite, many of which do more or less exactly the same thing, have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray, and in effect, has ensured that it won't go under as some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will."If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices," the Plazes blog post read. It'll still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.
A look at Google's Android mobile operating system.(Credit: Google)Last we heard, we'd be seeing phones powered by Google's Android open-source software in the second half of 2008. A report Monday from the Wall Street Journal has narrowed that down somewhat: Those handsets will start appearing in the fourth quarter of this year, a later time frame than expected.And according to the Journal, some handset manufacturers are "struggling" to get Android on track even for a fourth-quarter launch. Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, the world's largest cell carrier, reportedly won't be able to put out Android-powered phones until next year. Other carriers, like T-Mobile, claim their Android phones are still on track.Some mobile application developers, on the other hand, have been sidetracked by the announcement of the iPhone 3G, the second-generation version of Apple's ubiquitous handsets. With a lower price point, a developer kit already released, and a concrete launch date of July 11, not to mention faster Web access and a built-in GPS chip, the appeal of the new iPhone may have pushed Android to the back burner for some companies.