TechBlog

David McCandless recently gave a presentation about data visualization in which he unveiled this graph, which tracked 10,000 Facebook status updates to determine precisely when people in relationships broke up. The results look like this: Note the huge surges around Spring Break, the beginning of Summer, and two weeks before Christmas, as well as the sharp decline on Christmas Day itself. The majority of the breakups are announced on Mondays (Garfield was right – lasagna is awesome. Non sequitor.) The graph also doesn’t show what happens when someone in a relationship makes a detailed graph about ending relationships, but I’m guessing that’s been an instant breakup one out of one times. ...

Mozilla Labs: In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment. Finding a word in Firefox has always been easy because Firefox will move you to the new word formed by your last keystroke. This means you do not need to type out a word then click a search button to try finding a word that you might have misspelled. Firefox will let you know immediately if the new letter you pressed does not form a word that is on the page. ...

Firefox 4 Beta 2 has been released and you can download it in 10 languages on your Android or Maemo device. The new version comes with a wide range of fixes and improvements. The install size of Firefox Beta has been reduced by 60% (from around 43 MB to 17 MB). A new theme has been included in this version, that gives Firefox a fresh new look and the ability to easily share links with your friends from the Site Menu and the ability to undo closing a tab. Checkout the complete change-log below. ...

For Google Chrome users, viewing PDFs in the browser has been a colossal pain for lo these many moons. That’s why we are (and you should be) thrilled to learn that Google is rolling out a better way to look at PDFs in Chrome. For the time being, Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer will be available through the beta version only. If you’re using the non-beta version of Chrome, you can download the beta to get the PDF-related improvements or enable the PDF viewer by typing about:plugins in address-bar and enable PDF viewer. ...

Mashable: A beta version of Google Instant is now available on many U.S. iPhone and Android mobile devices. According to the Google Blog, the Instant search option is presently on Android 2.2 devices, as well as iPhones and iPods running on iOS 4. As of right now, Google Instant is only available in English, although Google plans on adding more languages and bringing the service to other countries and devices. ...

Mashable: Today marks exactly three years since Google and a slew of hardware and carrier partners officially announced the Android mobile operating system. It was almost a year after that before the first major Android handset was released – the G1 on T-Mobile – and not until late 2009 that the Motorola Droid, complete with an aggressive ad campaign, catapulted the platform into the mainstream consciousness. Today, a wide variety of manufacturers are producing Android phones, and they’re sold on all major carriers in the U.S. In fact, in aggregate they’re now outselling those running on Apple’s iOS, with recent numbers putting Google’s share of the mobile operating system market at nearly 20%. ...

Mashable: Months ago, Twitter released a clunky tool called Blackbird Pie for embedding tweets in blog posts. Today WordPress has radically simplified and improved tweet embedding with a new feature, also named Twitter Blackbird Pie. Beginning today, WordPress.com users simply need to copy a tweet’s URL and paste it on a line by itself to embed it in a blog post. Pasted URLs are converted into full tweets, which means these embedded tweets look as good as screenshots, but include the link back to the tweet, a link to the source and a retweet option. The new feature will also save users time — letting them avoid the much more manual process of snapping screenshots of tweets. ...

Mashable: It looks like cross-browser, bookmark syncing service Xmarks won’t be going out of business after all. Just over a month after announcing that the service would be closing its doors and shutting down operations come January 2011, the company has announced that it is in the final stages of selling Xmarks to a new owner who is focused on keeping the tool running smoothly. Xmarks announced the news on its official blog, noting that exact details can’t be revealed just yet, but that the service is alive and “things are on track for a ‘new and improved’ Xmarks.” The Xmarks blog says that the Xmarks service will evolve into offering free and premium components. Details about what will be included in the premium offering are promised to come at a later date. ...

Mashable: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sold 12% of his stake in the tech giant in a transaction worth over $1.3 billion. According to a filing with the SEC, Ballmer has sold 49.3 million Microsoft shares over the last three days, bringing his total ownership to 358.9 million shares, or approximately 4.2% of the company. Essentially, he sold 12% of his shares at a price between $26 and $28. Knowing that the media would notice such a large transaction, Ballmer posted a statement on Microsoft’s website, saying that he sold $1.3 billion in Microsoft shares for financial diversification and tax planning. ...

Will believe that? I hope you don’t