This morning, after President-Elect Obama laid out the key parts of his economic recovery plan during his weekly address, he turned to the Internet and told the country that he intends to "renew our information superhighway." "It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm President - because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world," he said. Sponsor Last month, we highlighted Obama's use of the Web; his...
Filed under: Sports You know high-def is well on its way to "arriving" when the World Junior Table Tennis Championships secure HD coverage, don't you? While the vast majority of you will likely laugh this off as some sort of promotional stunt, we can't help but be pleased at what this could signal about HD adoption overseas. For the first time in the history of the tournament, viewers in Spain with access to the high-def version of Canal+ will be able to see the team and individual finals in astounding clarity. Negotiations are currently underway to get the HD feed...
Oh Gmail, quit playing games with my heart. A new post on the Gmail blog said Google is announcing “Gmail on your Desktop,” but it’s not what you think — at least, it wasn’t what I thought. It sounded like Google might finally release the long-rumored support Google Gears support for Gmail, eliminating the last major barrier to Gmail adoption by allowing users to access their emails offline. (Though that functionality is already supported through email programs like Thunderbird). Alas, it turns out that the desktop in question is Google Desktop, the downloadable application that lets search and add Google...
By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed) In a very quiet announcement in a bug request on Google today, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, announced the popular microupdate service would switch the status of implementing OpenMicroblogger support from "Accepted", to "Won't Fix". In the words of Payne, "We've considered this request, and we feel that OpenMicroBlogging doesn't map cleanly onto the services and methods that the Twitter API provides, particularly as we expand our set of methods in the next release."We previously covered Twitter's initial plans to offer OpenMicroblogging support here before. With Twitter's attendance at Steve Gillmor's...
Facebook announced today that it will hand over the reigns on its Marketplace application to Oodle after a year in which listings in Facebook’s Marketplace dwindled to nearly 10 per day even in very popular markets like San Francisco. Unlike other applications developed in house by Facebook like Photos or Events, Marketplace never gained widespread adoption. While Facebook Photos and Facebook Events are more tightly integrated with users’ friends, Facebook Marketplace has primarily been organized around Networks instead of being more deeply integrated with the social graph. Why? “In many cases, finding good homes for items we are no longer...
Just a month after the public launch of the Flock 2.0 browser, Flock has announced the addition of OpenID to the Flock 2.0 browser today. I've been saying for a long time that if OpenID wants to succeed, they have to get it into the browser so when you hit a site that offers OpenID login, it could be as close to seamless as possible. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop jointly developed OpenID for Flock which should help the Flock browser gain additional user adoption. OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension...
MySpace, Flock and Vidoop have developed OpenID for Flock. I’ll skip the talk about standards which you don’t care about, cut to the chase and tell you what it does. Now, when you browse with Flock and open a web site that has OpenID support, Flock will collect and manage OpenID credentials, and automatically alert you if you can use a stored OpenID to log into it. You can choose which OpenID you can use to log into a particular site and later view the login history for each OpenID-to-site relationship you’ve created. Or, if you’d like an even shorter...
RSS Feeds have become an essential way to keep up-to-date with many different online sources of information – in fact without it, tracking blog updates would be next to impossible. To those of you with a feed addiction, it may come as some surprise to learn that RSS adoption is still surprisingly low across web users– even those who spend a lot of time on the internet. Most people are unaware of the technology or if they are – even less interested. A lot of people simply prefer email subscriptions and depending on the target audience of a blog this...
The theme for the latest episode of the SitePoint Podcast was the pros and cons of web application development and deployment on rich media platforms like Flash and Silverlight. A lot of people believe that desktop applications are migrating to the cloud and the computing experience of the future will be one in which we interact with programs that are actually running and storing our data elsewhere. Adobe and Microsoft, with Flash and Silverlight respectively, are among the leading candidates to provide the development platform on which many of these next generation rich Internet applications will be built. However, even...
I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?) There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it deserved to have its plug pulled. I stopped using it when: 1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords. 2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up. The biggest problem with Pownce was: 1. It couldn't handle even a modest load....
