News

If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here’s a stat for you: the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That’s more than six texts per waking hour. According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding. ...

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced on their blog that the site will soon be offering new features and controls. The features include New Facebook Groups, a Dashboard for Applications, and the ability to Download Your Information. #1 — Why the “new” Groups? According to Zuckerberg, people frequently tell them: “I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss.” Now we thought that’s what Friends Lists are for… but then, even Zuckerberg has admitted that Friends Lists are too difficult for most people to effectively manage. So this “completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups” is really mostly the same old Groups that we’ve been using since early 2009, with some PR spin. ...

Some people didn’t like his comments about downloading… Two of Gene Simmons’ official sites were shut down after hacker attacks by a group called Anonymous, associated with the 4chan.org forum. The attacks were in response to comments by Simmons about how the music industry should have been tougher with illegal downloaders. Both SimmonsRecords.com and GeneSimmons.com were taken offline briefly due to the attacks. Simmons had made the comment, “The music industry was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.” ...

Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions. Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software’s global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera’s competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already. ...

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user’s circle of friends into Bing’s search results. In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends’ opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the “likes” of a user’s friend list into search results. ...

Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team! Also, on the Sunspider benchmark, Mozilla is only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there’s Kraken, where we’re still solidly in the lead.

Welcome to our first release of the new Mozilla about:support add-on. about:support was developed by Siddharth Agarwal with design input from Bryan Clark and testing by Roland Tanglao about:support is based on Firefox’s about:support code, hence the name. It has been modified for Thunderbird to include email account specific information along with the normal preferences and add-ons. You can access about:support from the Help Menu: Help -> Troubleshooting Information which opens a new tab containing all your troubleshooting information including the Thunderbird specific IMAP, POP, and SMTP settings. The account information is often difficult for users to gather and deliver during the Thunderbird troubleshooting process. With the about:support add-on, the troubleshooting information is presented to the user such that it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into a Thunderbird support forum like Get Satisfaction or emailed directly to others. ...

Windows Phone 7 officially launched 11Oct at a press event in NYC Monday morning. You can check out more here – http://www.windowsphone7.com By the way, if you have any doubts about the platform or it’s responsiveness, you should really watch this video here – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=wp7_unveil03&WT.z_convert=Share Seriously, watch the video. The responsiveness of the device is just flat out amazing. No lag whatsoever. If you’ve been a Windows Mobile user, this is a VERY, VERY good thing to see. I currently have a HTC Touch Pro 2 and the delay is soooo irritating. It’s even faster than my ZuneHD. Wait until you see the Bing Maps responsiveness, or the Bing Search (using Voice) feature. ...

As predicted Adobe AIR for Android is now available in the Android Market. Go get it.

Accessing Facebook from a public computer or Internet cafe can now be done more securely. Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely. “We’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.” ...