| Checkins Coming to Windows Phone via New Live Messenger App? A Microsoft employee was spotted testing what appears to be a new check-in service on Windows Phone, according to his Twitter updates from an app called "Windows Phone(viaWindowsLive)INT." The app's name, when clicked in Twitter, simply redirects you to the main Windows Phone 7 website. It's also mapped to a test version of the Windows Live Messenger service, according to AllFacebook's Facebook app tracking service. The "INT" likely means "internal." This news is notable not only for the checkin component, but also because, currently, Microsoft does not have a Windows Live Messenger client for its Windows Phone mobile operating system. It only has an official app for iPhone, and officially sanctioned thapps for Windows Phone and Android.
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Zite Gets New CEO, Updates to Cooperate With Publishers Social aggregation magazine Zite (our review) released an update to its application this morning that is a direct response to the Cease & Desist letters it received from news publishers after launching the application in late March. The company also announced that it has a new CEO as Mark Johnson replaced founder Ali Davlar as chief executive. Davlar will step into the role of president "where he'll lead the publisher relations team to explore innovations in publisher monetization," according to a post on Zite's blog.
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SETI Suspends Its Search For Alien Life Sad news for astronomy and for alien research, and even worse news if there is in fact intelligent life out there wanting to contact Earth. The SETI Institute, which operates the Allen Telescope Array in northern Californa (made famous in the Jodie Foster film Contact), says that due to government budget cutbacks, it no longer has the funds to maintain its search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The giant field of radio dishes has scanned for signals that might possibly emanate from alien civilizations for almost four years now. But last week, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson sent a letter to donors saying that the array was going into "hibernation" because of inadequate government support.
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"No Timeframe" for Playstation Network Return After Hack The Sony Playstation Network hack that has plagued the video game platform since April 20 has forced the company to shutdown the service indefinitely while it works to rebuild the platform. The Playstation blog, a space normally used for gaming updates, tips and anecdotes, has been updating the status of the network about once a day since the initial attack brought down the platform last week. It said April 25 that the company does not have a timeframe for when the service will again be available.
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YouTube Expanding On-Demand Movie Service with Mainstream Hollywood Titles According to a report from the Hollywood-tracking news outlet The Wrap, Google's YouTube will soon be expanding its on-demand movie rental service to include mainstream Holloywood films. Major movie studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal are all said to be on board, as are a number of independent studios. The sources cited by The Wrap are "movie executives with knowledge of the deals," but YouTube itself said it would not comment on rumor and speculation.
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TweetDeck v2.0: A Complete "Re-imagining" Of The iPhone App Calling it a re-imagining à la Hollywood's recent Batman movies, TweetDeck has released a redesigned iPhone app. The new version takes "the essence of what made it so popular" (TweetDeck that is, not Batman) and ses that to rethink the app's design and functionality. For those who use TweetDeck on your desktop computer, you'll probably agree that that means a focus on columns. The standard columns are still available: Mentions, DMs, Lists and so on. But now you can also have combined columns (adding your Home, Me, and Inbox columns so you can see updates from multiple Twitter accounts you might have). You can also customize the appearance of feeds in your columns.
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How TV & The Web Are Merging: Al Jazeera's New Show, The Stream As television continues to adapt to the Web, expect to see new forms of content emerge that are a hybrid of traditional TV and the latest Web technologies. Last week, television news network Al Jazeera launched a new TV show and website. Called The Stream, it's an indication of where mainstream TV news is heading.
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Yolink Brings Full-Featured Search to WordPress There are very few, if any, content management systems and blogging platforms with a praised, out-of-the-box search solution and WordPress is no exception. Just look on Google - there are about 10 million results for "WordPress search sucks" and nearly as many for "WordPress search plugin." Today, there's one more addition to the search results for "WordPress search plugin," as customizable WordPress hosting service WP Engine and search-within-a-search engine yolink team together to provide a
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Facebook Deals Launches Tonight & Groupon Doesn't Stand a Chance (Updated) Facebook will unveil its group deals program tonight in 5 US cities according to an embargo-breaking slip-up by the New York Times caught by TechCrunch. Facebook Deals launched 3 months ago in Europe. Tonight, according to reports, the feature will go live in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco. This, after learning from the early rocky roads traveled by competitors and Facebook's own tests in Europe. Update: Facebook PR contacted us and clarified two things noted below - and the updates are a little surprising to me. Comparisons to the mega-successful (if dreadfully boring) services Groupon and Living Social are inevitable. But Facebook Deals is going to be much, much more interesting for everyone - especially for retailers who will offer deals. (Who likely won't have to pay a cut of the revenue to this deals platform at all.) If Facebook can execute this feature well (and there's no guarantee it can) then it's hard to imagine what some of today's fastest growing businesses on earth are going to do to compete. Look at what Facebook Deals has to offer, below. Groupon and Living Social are seriously at risk of being roadkill.
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Gmail Labs Now Offers Tool to Speed Up Your Email The Gmail Labs team announced this afternoon a new feature called Background Send, which will...wait for it...send emails in the background of your webmail experience. If you turn the Labs setting on and select the new feature, your interface won't hang while it sends one email before you can send the next. You can just sit there and crank out emails like you were Tweeting tweets or sending Instant Messages. Initial tests do not indicate any increase in speed of responses or any additional hours in the day to respond to emails. To be honest, I can't tell the difference yet - but I hope I will be able to in the future. The old days of slow computing are past us now - elegant and memory managed technical (if not mental) multi-tasking is a big frontier for the future. Check out Background Send and tell us if you can tell the difference yet.
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