Archive for: November 5, 2009

A Wednesday outage on Google's Blogger service has prompted the site to promise detailed information about future outages on its status blog within three days.

"Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger Status blog within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future," Eddie Kessler, Blogger's engineering manager, wrote in a blog post.

Blogger users in Europe were unable to connect to the site for about 10 hours Saturday due to a "configuration issue," according to Blogger.

"A DNS configuration issue in a new datacenter in Europe caused requests to blogger.com and .blogspot.com to be sent to an invalid IP address," Blogger said. "Affected users throughout Europe were unable to connect to either Blogger or to blogs hosted by Blogger at blogspot.com."

Posting to a Blogger-hosted Web site about a Blogger outage would not be very helpful to those who cannot access the site, so in the event of another site-wide outage, Kessler said that Blogger will alert users via its Twitter feed.

"We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you," Kessler concluded.

Think you've got what it takes to be included in the Getty Images collection on Flickr? The Yahoo-owned photo site on Thursday announced that users can now submit their own photos for consideration.

Starting today, you can submit up to 10 images to the Flickr Call for Artists page.

"The Getty Images creative team will regularly review the photos in the group pool, looking out for images they feel are marketable based on their industry expertise, and inviting new photographers to join the collection," Flickr said in a blog post.

Getty announced in July 2008 that it will be trolling Flickr to find shots worthy of a commercial licensing deal. Invited Flickr members are given the opportunity to participate in a collection created by the photo house, and Getty becomes the exclusive commercial rights manager of the photos. Getty started rolling out invites to the program in January.

Since then, the Getty Images collection has amassed more than 60,000 images, Flickr said Thursday.

Earlier this week, Flickr also announced its own app store of sorts, dubbed the App Garden. Flickr launched its API in 2004, but the resulting apps have not had a central location, until now. More detailed information on how to contribute to the App Garden is available on Flickr's developer's blog.

Bringing together a very popular game franchise with a very popular social network platform is pretty much a win-win: EA today announced a Facebook version of Spore, called Spore Island; it's a "survival of the fittest"-type multiplayer competition.
 
Said Caryl Shaw, Senior Producer of the game: "What sets Spore Islands apart from other social games is that it offers a different kind of social interactivity where a player's gameplay experience is directly affected by the choices and decisions their friends make. It's an ongoing game, so player's creatures and islands will be active at all times, whether the player is logged into Facebook or not."

Want to give it a try? Facebook users can play Spore Islands here.

Just as Samsung promised, a Windows Mobile 6.5 OS upgrade is now available for the budget Samsung Jack smartphone.

The upgrade adds Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which gives owners direct access to browsing, buying, and downloading Windows Mobile apps over the air. It also includes an upgraded Internet Explorer Mobile with basic Flash support--which has been iffy in my testing on various WM 6.5 devices, but at least it's there now.

The OS upgrade also enables AT&T Wi-Fi access, so Samsung Jack owners can hook into 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots across the country. Finally, it adds Vlingo for Windows Phone, which lets users send messages, call friends, search the Web, and more just by speaking a command into the phone.

Samsung Jack owners can grab the update by heading to Samsung's support site.

Wondering if your Microsoft-powered smartphone can do the same thing? Be sure to check out our comprehensive guide, Upgrade Your Phone to Windows Mobile 6.5.

The RealNetworks staff is taking another hit this week. The company is laying off 70 workers--roughly four percent of its 1,700 person staff. The announcement, expected to be made official this morning, follows Microsoft's recently announced 5,000 job cuts.

Both companies, according to All Things D, are laying off employees in order to "realign the work force after the recent economic downturn and to control costs." Real laidoff some 130 employees roughly a year ago.

These days, when people ask me how to get to Sesame Street, I tend to just suggest they fire up Google Maps. It's fitting, then, that everyone's favorite non-evil corporation is celebrating the Show's 40th anniversary in style. Rather than including driving directions to Gordon's house, however, the company is offering up Sesame Street versions of its doodle logo.

Yesterday the site had Big Bird's red and orange legs standing in for the Google "L" (which, incidentally, recalled the Google 11th birthday doodle we saw, earlier this year). Today Cookie Monster's google eyes are standing in for the Os.

The celebratory logos will continue until November 10th, Sesame Street's real anniversary.

Twitter last night offered up a brief blog post highlighting its new tweet notification feature, which alerts users to new messages on their follower list, without having to update the page.

The feature is similar to one currently available for searches, which notifies the user of how many messages on the topic have been posted since the search was first performed. Twitter will be rolling out the feature for all users in the near future.

Little known fact: once upon a time, Google used to be a search company. Crazy, right? The company today rolled out new search property aimed at retail sites. Arriving just in time for the holidays, Google Commerce Search is designed to make retail site browsing easier and more customizable.

The search is hosted by Google and lets users sort by brand, price, category, and any another category the business chooses. The service also features a built-in spellcheck and provides suggestions for the customer. You can find out more information about the service on its official Google site.

That whole "don't be evil" thing is all well and good, but when a company's whole goal is cataloging the world's information, it would--at the very least--be nice to know what Google knows about you. The company has just launched Dashboard, which aggregates the different information its gathered from 20 different Google products, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, and Latitude.

You'll need to sign in to view your own personal information. Users can also edit account information from the page, such as privacy settings. Of course transparency doesn't mean that you can't still pat yourself on the back. Writes Google,

The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this--and we hope it will become the standard.

Digg is experimenting with a new voting model. The Web site unveiled a beta version of Digg Trends, a "voting experiment" that will bring active stories to the homepage for a limited voting period.

Trends will identify stories that are getting a lot of attention on the site, either through Diggs, comments, favorites, or shares. When Digg sees a trending story, they will put it on the homepage for 10 minutes and ask users if they think it deserves the attention. To follow the activity, Digg set up a Twitter account that will notify people when a new Digg Trend has been posted.

"The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not," Digg wrote in a blog post. "We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible."

Google on Wednesday added some features to its Friend Connect product intended to help webmasters provide a more customizable experience.

First, Google added an "interests" section that lets webmasters ask people site-relevant questions when they sign up for the site or via a poll gadget.

"For instance, if you have a music website, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they discover new music," Google wrote in a blog post. "Or if you run a hiking site, you can ask them about a favorite hike or national park."

Google also added the ability for people to send private messages to one another.

Webmasters will be able to see all the data entered by their members in a new "Community data" section of their account. With that data, they can then create customized newsletters that can be sent out to all members or a specific segment based on the answers they provided.

On the back-end, this will also allow webmasters to serve up customized links to people based on their responses, as well as ads through AdSense.

In other Google news, the search engine giant is leading up to the 40th anniversary on Sesame Street on Nov. 10 by using imagery from the popular TV show on Google.com. First up - Big Bird.

AllRecipes.com is arguably one of the Web's most popular recipe search engines and social networks for food. A number of other food Web sites draw their recipes collections from AllRecipes or just point their recipe searches at AllRecipes instead of building a database of their own.

Recently AllRecipes updated one of its most popular features, the Recipe Box, to allow you to store more recipes of your own that you've custom-entered to the site and recipes you've found on other sites. The goal is to make AllRecipes your hub for all things food, and to help give you one central location on the Web to store your recipe collection.


Recipe Box is the AllRecipes feature that allows members and users to save recipes they find using AllRecipes search, and to enter their own recipes. You have to create a free account at AllRecipes.com to use the Recipe Box. Previously the service allowed you to save only those recipes that you found on the site, along with your own recipes.

AllRecipes has added a social component to the new Recipe Box. Now you can submit your recipes for storage and upload your own custom or home-made recipes, but also share those recipes with others, search recipes in other members' Recipe Boxes, and add recipes you find on other popular cooking sites around the Web. If you find a recipe you love on the site of a particular chef or cooking show that you can't find on AllRecipes, you can still add the recipe to your Recipe Box for future reference without having to bookmark the page or search for it all over again.

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