Google starts shrinking URLs (on purpose)

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	View online  | Share on Facebook	December 19, 2009

	Google gets into the URL-shrinking biz with Goo.gl Google ventured into new territory this week with the launch of a new URL-shortening service called Goo.gl. Unlike some existing and high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Goo.gl is not a general-purpose link shrinker that users can access by going to a standalone site. Instead, it's been built into Google products, beginning with Google's browser toolbar and its Feedburner RSS service. Both of those services can now create shortened Goo.gl URLs that link to the source content while using fewer characters. This is especially important for sharing on places like Twitter, where there are size limits. In an introductory post on its official blog, Google said it may eventually roll out the service as a standalone site, but that for now it's being built into Google products. Such a feature would likely allow third-party sites to build Goo.gl link shortening into their own products. Read more Josh Lowensohn Associate Editor, Webware.com New on Webware.com Google project shows when Web content is hiding Posted by Stephen Shankland Google published a tool Wednesday called Browser Size that lets Web developers gauge how much of their pages are visible in people's browsers. With its own analysis, the search giant found that a lot of people couldn't see the download button for Google Earth because they had to scroll before it would show in their browser. Revamping the page increased download rates 10 percent.  Read more  Blippy launches the Twitter of personal finance Posted by Rafe Needleman Blippy is one of those ideas that at first sounds so hilariously misguided that you'd be forgiven to think it a joke: It's a service that hooks into your credit card so everything you buy gets broadcast to your friends. Eventually you'll even be able to Twitter your spending. Ack!  Read more  Get started with essential Chrome extensions Posted by Seth Rosenblatt Even without extensions, Google Chrome's market share grew phenomenally during its first year. Now that the No. 1 most-requested feature comes baked into the Windows and Linux versions, it's time to look at some of the best extensions available for the upstart browser.  Read more  How to hide your Facebook friends list Posted by Larry Magid Last week Facebook announced new privacy settings that give users some additional control over what information they share, while taking away the ability to hide a few pieces of information from the general public. One particular piece of publicly available information--users' friends lists--caused a bit of an uproar from a number of sectors, including business people who don't necessarily want to expose their professional networks to the public and their competitors. It is also a concern to some parents who might not want their kids--or a list of their kids' friends--to be widely available. We show you how to hide yours.  Read more  TwitVid gets a real-time search engine, analytics Posted by Josh Lowensohn TwitVid, a free video host for Twitter, launched two new, useful features on Monday. The first is a real-time search engine that will let users sort through videos both on TwitVid and YouTube. The other is an analytics engine that lets video owners know more about who is watching their uploaded clips, and where they're from.  Read more  What's next for browsers: Browser makers hope WebGL will remake 3D Posted by Stephen Shankland If you want to see the scale of browser makers' ambition to remake not just the Web but computing itself, look no further than a new 3D technology called WebGL. The WebGL vision is simple. You're running around in a video game universe, blasting radioactive aliens--but you got there by visiting a Web site, not by installing the game on your PC.  Read more  HTML groups tackle Webcam support Posted by Stephen Shankland The groups responsible for standardizing the language used to build Web sites have begun tackling technology to provide a direct interface to Webcams. The move marks another step expansion of the scope of the Web standard. Advocates are trying to make it a foundation not just for static Web pages, but for interactive Web applications; the latter benefits from the direct access to hardware that applications running natively on a PC enjoy.  Read more  More Webware  Webware RSS feed  The Webware 100  About Webware.com
	Copyright 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. CBS Interactive, 235 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.

Google, Yahoo get real-time search

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	View online  | Share on Facebook	December 12, 2009

	Google and Yahoo tap Twitter for real-time results This week both Google and Yahoo launched search tools that tap into Twitter and other social media services to provide real-time results. Users of Google's search engine got the feature first. On Monday the search giant began rolling out a new section called "latest results" that automatically refreshes Internet content from sources like Twitter. These show up alongside Google's normal results. Yahoo joined the real-time party a few days later, though did not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query. So why is implementing this extra stream of data important? Read on to find out. Read all real-time search posts  Read about Yahoo's announcement  Read about Google's announcement Tom Krazit CNET.com New on Webware.com How to fix Facebook's new privacy settings Posted by Rafe Needleman When logging in to Facebook Thursday, I, like millions of other people, got the directive to update my privacy settings to fit in to the new, "simplified," scheme. But at their core, the Facebook privacy settings have not been simplified. Beyond the set-up page, Facebook's privacy controls are now more complex and more powerful.  Read more  Offline Gmail access now a full-fledged feature Posted by Stephen Shankland After more than five years as a publicly available test version, Gmail shed its beta label in July. Now one feature key to the Net giant's cloud-computing aspirations, offline access to Gmail, also has grown up less than a year after its debut.  Read more  Norton Online Backup 2.0 hits the Web Posted by Harrison Hoffman Norton has put together a very solid offering with version 2.0 of Norton Online Backup. It is introducing support for Intel-based Mac for the first time with this release. This is huge, especially when the company is trying to offer a solution for the whole household. Where most other online storage or backup services focus on serving one user, Norton has placed the focus on protecting the whole family or household.  Read more  Hands-on Chrome beta for Mac Posted by Seth Rosenblatt Google released the first beta build of its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux earlier this week, and it's hard not to be impressed when putting the Mac version through its paces. Chrome for Mac still lacks some of the key features that are currently available in the Windows beta, but this is a browser that most people should feel comfortable using.  Read more  Most people say no to slow online video Posted by Don Reisinger About 81 percent of Web users leave an online video page if they encounter mid-stream rebuffering, a new study from video analytics firm TubeMogul has found. Rebuffering has become a major issue for most Web users. And even though TubeMogul found that just 7 percent of streaming video is slow-loading, it said Web video still can't quite match TV-quality viewing.  Read more  Up your Web note taking game Firefox note-taking add-ons are Web supersavers Posted by Dennis O'Reilly Web pages aren't getting any smaller, but there are usually not more than a few paragraphs or a couple of images of particular interest on any given page. Firefox add-ons ICyte, Wired-Marker, and Trails let you save all or sections of Web pages and share your snippets with others.  Read more  Three more ways to slice and dice the Web Posted by Dennis O'Reilly There's no reason to take the Web as it comes. Not when there are Firefox add-ons that turn Web pages into putty that you can shape as you wish. These three--Zotero, MashLogic, and RSVP Reader--let you gather and store all or parts of Web pages, open a customizable info box for whatever topics you encounter, and convert a block of text into a string of phrases that flash in a box at a speed you control.  Read more  More Webware  Webware RSS feed  The Webware 100  About Webware.com
	Copyright 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. CBS Interactive, 235 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.