I guess I could kind of take this as some kind acknowledgement of the article I wrote the other day in one way or another. The most recent BlackBerry Connection Newsletter which was sent out yesterday makes note of two new apps coming for Business users. I'm not so sure Twitter qualifies as a tool for business users specifically, but it was on the list as well as Linked In for BlackBerry.
The newsletter states that both apps will be arriving on the BlackBerry platform soon and offers up links on how to be informed of each applications release. While the newsletter certainly doesn't offer much up in the way of a timeline, it does offer me that slight hope we'll see both arrive soon. But I guess we are stuck waiting to find out what Research In Motion's definition of "soon" is. For me, it means today or tomorrow. I'd even go so far as to say next week. Anything beyond that you are no longer in the "soon" timeline.
CrackBerry.com's feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Twitter For BlackBerry And Linked In Apps Coming Soon According To RIM Newsletter
by Alex Massie
Poor Armenia. Just about the only time that wee country gets a mention in Washington is when the perennial Recognise-the-Genocide issue comes up. As tradition demands, the Secretary of State lobbied Congress to avoid passing anything resembling or hinting at any such thing. Nevertheless the Foreign Affairs Committee voted 23-22 in favour of the annual motion acknowledging the ghastliness. Whether it makes it to the floor remains a moot issue.
Everyone, I think, recognises the practical and political difficulties in siding with the Armenians or, as may be the case, handing a sop to the American-Armenian community. Turkey matters more than Armenia. And Turkey is touchy and macho and quick to take offense. No surprise then that their ambassador to Washington has been called back to Ankara for "discussions".
This is, then, an annual rigmarole from which few people escape with any great measure of credit. This includes the current President who promised not so long ago that...
I also share with Armenian Americans – so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors - a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history. As a U.S. Senator, I have stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Emphasis added. In a better world it might be tough to walk back from that.
To be fair to Obama he is little worse than his predecessor who also raised Armenian hopes only to pass the issue on to his successor. But this issue should also be a reminder that you cannot wholly leave the campaign behind once you assume office and that you should, perhaps, be wary of writing cheques you cannot cash. Otherwise you look like a chump at best and, more probably, a duplicitous fraud.
Sure, yes, this is, in many ways, vastly more trivial than recent improvements in Yerevan-Ankara relations. It may well be that, as was true last year, passing the resolution and gaining Presidential approval might set back the bigger, broader, better picture. But this too should be a memo to 2012 candidates: don't make cheap commitments you have few intentions of honouring.
Previously on Armenia and by me: here. Maybe I'm wrong, of course. You tell me! Write to alexmassieATgmail.com
Are the Google gloves coming off? After the furore yesterday over the Apple/HTC lawsuit, and the quick assumption that the Cupertino legal team actually have Google and their Android platform in their sights, the search giant has stepped up to the plate with a statement of support for their HTC pals.
“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it” Google spokesperson
Apple specifically referred to a number of Android-based devices in their lawsuit – while several Windows Mobile handsets were also mentioned, they are only ever referred to obliquely as “DSP Devices” – but fell short of naming Google. The crux of Apple’s argument is that HTC have overstepped the mark on 20 iPhone-related patents; however, the patents themselves generally cover OS-level functionality, something more within Google’s realm than HTC’s.
Google haven’t detailed exactly what their pledge to “stand behind” both Android and HTC might entail in the long run, but if – as widely speculated – Apple hoped to drag them into a legal fight then it looks as though they’ve succeeded. We’re hoping to hear more from HTC soon; yesterday’s statement was a basic acknowledgement of the lawsuit, since the company only heard about it through media reports.
Relevant Entries on SlashGear
Located in Hall 7, App Planet was an "event within an event" at last week's Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. According to the GSM Association, the event was an opportunity to "explore the many dimensions of the dynamic and critically important mobile applications market." The event also stood as an acknowledgement by the organization that applications, especially on smartphones, are quickly becoming critical to the evolution of wireless--as highlighted by the astounding success of Apple's iPhone App Store (over 140,000 apps and counting). The App Planet venue boasted more than 50 app-specific exhibitors in one place. So who was there, and what were they showing? Slideshow
One Facebook feature which many users are still unaware of is status tagging, which lets you reference your friends within each of your updates.. We get regular emails from people how to accomplish this and while the functionality may feel normal for Twitter users, most people still aren’t on Twitter, which makes tagging your friends a less intuitive feature. In this article we explain how to tag your friends and why you’d want to.
Tagging your friends in a status update or any other post to your profile is pretty easy. In the publisher, you simply use the “@” sign and begin typing your friend’s name (as pictured below). Facebook enables users to tag their friends as well as Facebook Pages that they’ve become fans of and events that they’re attending.
After selecting the item that you want to tag and clicking on the event, person, or page that you want to tag, the object will automatically become hyperlinked within your status update (as pictured below). While this process is pretty obvious for Twitter users, many Facebook users still have yet to figure out how to take advantage of this feature.
So why would you want to tag your friends, events? It’s pretty straight forward. In the case of friends and Pages, it’s a form of acknowledgement that encourages the other party to interact with you. However, in the case of events, you may simply want to raise awareness of something you’ll be attending in the future or recently attended.
Simply put, tagging provides additional context to what was previously limited to the reader’s interpretation. Currently the Facebook tagging feature is limited to status updates and cannot be used within comments however numerous people have requested this capability. While there’s no timeframe on Facebook adding this feature, we’d expect them to include it eventually.
Have you already taken advantage of the status tagging feature? Do many of your friends use it or do you think it’s still limited to Facebook power users?
I had this article “Ask.com Comments on Google-Aardvark Proposition in Search” in my to-do pile for a week. The comment that jumped out at me – well, a modest jump – was a comment allegedly made by Doug Leeds, President, Ask.com-U.S.:
“Google’s purchase of Aardvark is simply an acknowledgement that Q&A is the future of search. As the #1 brand in Q&A, we’ve been passionate about investing in this next phase of search for a long time. Our current technology is unmatched at answering questions using content we’ve crawled and indexed from across the web. In Q2, we’ll also beta launch a Q+A community that will route the questions we receive to real people with relevant knowledge. This community will reach search engine scale – able to handle more than a million questions a day, faster than Google or any of our competitors. We’re singularly focused on Q+A because, in the end, we believe that consumers rather Ask a question, than Google one.” -
My question, “Why didn’t Google buy Ask.com?”
History maybe? also remember Ask.com because of its search journey: buying Direct Hit, selling the template system as an enterprise product for customer support, the Teoma.com technology, the wild and wooly architecture talk I heard from an Ask.com rocket scientist, the shifting to niche search, and the reintroduction of the butler in the UK.
In the late 1990s, AskJeeves.com entered the search market with its question-answering service. My recollection is that there were “templates” against which a user’s question was matched. Over time, AskJeeves.com morphed into Ask.com and the question-answering angle came and went and came again. Over the years, Ask.com’s Web traffic was stable and it was consistently lower than Google’s. Even Microsoft’s Web search has pulled more traffic than Ask.com. I recall one azure chip consultant telling me that Ask.com was the next big thing. I forget the person. I remember the comment because it underscores the failure of some so called search experts to know much about the world before these pundits discovered Google. Sigh.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2010
No one paid me to take this walk down memory lane. I suppose I must report having forgotten to charge someone to write this short opinion piece. Who’s in charge? Maybe the VA? I forget. But I still remember that azure chip consultant who told me Ask.com was the next big thing. Perhaps.
