Blog

Microsoft’s debut of the KIN yesterday has tech pundits talking about Microsoft’s mobile strategy, about the future of Windows Phone, and about the state of the “dumbphone” in general. It’s a compelling product. And because KIN comes from Sharp and Danger’s parent company Microsoft, the KIN drew a lot of comparisons to the Sidekick straight away. Yesterday, I called KIN the “Sidekick of the 2010s,” Ars Technica called it “Sidekick’s next of KIN,” and Wired said Microsoft wants to “update the Sidekick’s M.O. for a new decade.” ...

Google’s adding an intriguing new feature to its Twitter search options –- the ability to “replay” a moment in time to see what people were tweeting about a given topic at any point between the present and the advent of the microblogging tool. In a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?” ...

Avid readers of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog (and really, how can you not be?) know that yesterday, April 13th, marked the end of support for Windows Vista RTM, also known as Windows Vista SP0. We’d like to say that we’ll miss Vista RTM. We’d like to say that… but, well… Ctrl+Alt+Del On a related note, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will reach its end of support this summer on July 13th. There are more positive memories of XP SP2, largely because of its emphasis on security. ...

Disney’s ABC television network was the first in the industry to market on the iPad with their impressive app. Downloaders can stream TV episodes free of charge and early data is showing that they’re doing so in droves. According to data shared with the Wall Street Journal, the ABC iPad app has been downloaded 205,000 times and users have already streamed 650,000 television episodes. Those streams have translated into several million ad impressions for the network’s iPad advertisers, including AT&T, Sears and Target. ...

In an excellent blog, the people from Apache did a very good job analyzing and documenting how a security breach happened–going through all the stages of the attack and drawing conclusions. Should you ever become the unfortunate victim of an attack, this blog offers an example of how to document it! I quote:”If you are a user of the Apache-hosted JIRA, Bugzilla, or Confluence, a hashed copy of your password has been compromised.” So if you are a user, please act accordingly after reading this blog 😉 ...

Today the Library of Congress is announcing that it’s doing its part to digitally preserve each and every public tweet since the beginning of time … err Twitter. It fittingly broke the news on Twitter earlier today. As a federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress exists for research purposes, preserving every form of written word imaginable — and now that includes our tweets. The institution deems tweets important and hopes to use the archives “to learn about ourselves and the world around us.” ...

Metadata has long been part of Twitter applications. Viewing conversation threads or learning about a user’s location has changed how users interact with content and have provided third party app developers with great opportunities to innovate on Twitter’s platform. Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s director of platform, announced today at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference, that annotations can now be added to tweets. In other words, any kind of metadata can be added to any tweet; it’s up to developers to decide what kinds of apps they build to showcase what kinds of metadata. ...

Twitter has just announced a new feature and API for desktop applications: users streams. The revelation was made by Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver at the Chirp conference. The new API is focused around pushing out data to desktop applications in real time. There will no longer be rate-limits for data on desktops — tweets, retweets and all other updates will be streamed directly to the desktop. ...

Earlier this year we predicted that Twitter would use geotagging to identify physical places via Twitter, and today Evan Williams announced at the Chirp conference that the company is doing just that with its new Points of Interest feature. The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, but soon users will have the ability to click on a place name — included in geotagged tweets — to view the particular place on a map. Next to the map, Twitter users will see a stream of nearby tweets, giving them a real-time view of what’s happening in a particular place at a particular time. ...

“Faceparty is a UK based social networking site allowing users to create online profiles and interact with each other using forums and messaging facilities similar to email” – Wikipedia Faceparty does things a little differently to other social networking sites, however. Unlike most places where you register a username and password then start telling people how your farm is doing, to join Faceparty you need to send a text message to the tune of £25 / $38(!) and then enter your one time use password onto this page (warning: quite a few swearwords, because the site is indeed down with the kids). ...