TechBlog

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...

Microsoft’s Hotmail rolled out its new service that allows streaming mail from other vendors like Gmail and Yahoo, in an attempt to make Hotmail the primary destination for email management rather than just a repository of spams. The new service is a feature that is borrowed from Microsoft Outlook that allows adding accounts from other email services. Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager at Windows Live Hotmail, said in a blog post: “We understand. You already have at least one email address and you probably don’t need another. You may also use your existing address for things other than just email, such as signing in to online shopping sites, which makes changing even more challenging. Also, you might have an address that you really like, but a similar name might not be available on another email service. “ ...

Sophos has released a free antivirus product for consumers using Mac OS: Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac. Although commercial antivirus products for Macs have been available for some time, Sophos’ offer is one of the very few free ones. The Internet security firm took its existing enterprise antivirus software and slimmed it down to reduce complexity. Interestingly, the company has no plans to release an equivalent free version for Windows. Windows threats are in the millions while the number of strains of Mac malware is in the thousands. ...

Google Docs may soon be getting an update that will help it better compete against Microsoft’s latest cloud based Office product and make its upcoming Chrome OS a whole lot more useful. Top among the new features is cloud printing, which will let you print documents — whether web-based, on a mobile device or desktop — to any Internet-connected printer anywhere in the world. The cloud printing service was announced a few months ago as part of its web-centric operating system’s capabilities, so the update to Docs makes sense if Google wants to make Chrome OS + Docs a better rival to Microsoft’s Windows and Office, for example. Basically Google is doing away with the need of locally stored drivers by keeping them on their servers and simply sending the print job to the appropriate printer. ...

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Geographic and Local Services, joined in 1999 as the company’s 20th employee. During a recent 22-minute interview on Digg Dialogg, Mayer was asked “What do you think Google’s biggest mistake has been during your presence there?” Mayer’s answer pertained to three products: Wave, Dejanews.com, and Gmail. “Wave. Certainly there are things we’ve learnt from that, certain things we would have done differently,” Mayer said without any hesitation (this one we’re not really too surprised about). “Shutting down Dejanews.com at 11am on a Monday morning, and not having anywhere to post to or browse usergroups was perhaps a mistake,” she also admitted (Dejanews was a discussion group website on the Usenet network which Google shutdown and silently archived to its Google Groups service). “Launching Gmail on April Fools day was widely misinterpreted,” she added as a final thought (Google often “launches” ridiculous products on April Fools, so many thought Gmail was a joke until they realized it was still around the next day). ...

Details of Intel’s upcoming Sandy Bridge-based i3 processors have leaked out, and there’s one particular model that has caught people’s interest: it features a tiny TDP. Specifications for the Core i3 2100T chip were obtained by Fudzilla from an unnamed source, and reveal an interesting chip for Intel’s lower-end range: featuring two 2.5GHz processing cores and HyperThreading support for up to four simultaneous threads, the Core i3 2100T also packs a beefy 3MB of shared cache. ...

Jared Smith: It’s here! It’s here! It’s really here! Fedora 14 has been officially released! Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release approximately every six months. Fedora 14, codename Laughlin, is now available for download. Join us and share the joy of free software and the community with friends and family. We know you can’t wait to get started with Fedora 14, so simply follow this link to download it today: ...

Google Scribe may not seem very useful, but it’s one of the features that could significantly improve virtual keyboards from mobile phones. Instead of showing suggestions from a dictionary, Google Scribe can provide contextually-relevant suggestions. Scrybe is a free Android keyboard that uses Google Scribe to generate suggestions. It’s not developed by Google and it uses an unofficial Google Scribe API, but it’s an interesting application. Scrybe needs to fix many issues to become really useful. If you delete some letters from word, Scrybe is not able to detect that you’re not writing a new word. Another problem is that you can’t type very fast because Scrybe tries to fetch the suggestions. ...

Avira started shipping the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Avira AntiVir 10 yesterday! This Service Pack fixes plenty of minor bugs we found in version 10 and thus makes AntiVir 10 more stable. Also, the developers added some optimizations to improve the speed a little. After installing SP1, all currently known issues should be gone. Since yesterday at 11:30 O’clock a product update is available for AntiVir Personal Free, Premium and Premium Security Suite in English and German over the automatic update. ...

Let’s take a look in the Email I got from Google right now: Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year. Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case. ...