| Google Discontinues Some of Its Earliest Specialized Search Products Some of the earliest and most useful search verticals in Google have been discontinued. Google search for Linux, Microsoft and BSD (Chrome license) blogs and forums have been shut down along with those for Mac, "About" Google and Uncle Sam about the state and location information. In a message to Search Engine Roundtable, Google said that it is shutting down these verticals because "search quality has advanced tremendously, and based on our analysis we've found that in most cases you're better off looking for this kind of specialized information using the regular Google search box."
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Manage Your Household Bills, All in One Place, with Manilla As much of our lives are now conducted online, we still all receive a surprising amount of paper in the mail. Even with the advance of online banking and bill pay, much of what we lug in from the mailbox is related somehow to our personal finances. And even if we can pay some of our bills online, they're often separate transactions. That's what Manilla promises to address: the organization and the simplification of our household bills.
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You Can't Always Get What You Want: Apple's Disappointing Music Announcements at WWDC There was a lot of buzz prior to today's announcements at WWDC about the deals that Apple had reportedly struck with the major record labels. Even before any Apple executives took the stage, many industry observers had crowned Apple the heir apparent to music in the cloud, decreeing that its offerings would surely trump those recently announced by Google and Amazon. But now that the dust has settled and the glimmer has faded from today's keynote at WWDC, we have to ask, has Apple really triumphed here? Did we see the future of digital music unveiled onstage?
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How Twitter + iOS 5 Will Change Mobile Apps A deep integration of Twitter and iOS 5 was among the many things announced by Apple today but it's not just that you'll be able to post to Twitter from inside official Apple apps like photos and maps. Any 3rd party iOS developer will be able to leverage a number of Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make their apps better and more social. After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices. The features that app developers will have access to closely resemble what other platforms make possible with Facebook integration, and Twitter's being the one to land this deal is a pretty big deal for the world's 2nd place social network. Twitter Developer Relations leader Jason Costa wrote this afternoon on the Twitter developers email list that the points of integration will "create huge opportunities for both Twitter and iOS developers." Here's what that might look like.
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iOS 5 Explained: The New Features & The Implications of Apple's Latest Mobile OS Today's keynote at WWDC, Apple's developer conference included a number of major announcements, including an update to the Mac OS, its new cloud service and MobileMe replacement iCloud, and - the "one more thing" - its new music matching service for iTunes. But as Apple opened the keynote touting its strong sales figures - and the checks that it has cut to Apple developers - it's arguably the company's mobile operating system that has quickly become one of Apple's most valuable and important assets. iOS head Scott Forstall took the stage today in San Francisco to tout some impressive figures for the operating system: now installed on over 200 million devices worldwide. So it was the unveiling today of iOS 5, the newest version of the operating system that's worth examining in closer detail, and we've got the primer for you below with all the important details about today's announcement and its implications for the mobile market and developer ecosystem.
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Apple's iCloud Foreshadows a Future of Quantum Computing Apple announced a slew of updates to its Mac OS, to its mobile iOS and to its relationship with the web in the form of a new product called iCloud today. A key over-arching trend across all the new technology announced is that it is intended to make everything you do with data and devices faster, easier and more friction-free. Someday, quantum computing may change all of this; it's a paradigm in which the spin of a single quantum bit in an atom is instantly reflected by a change in the spin of another quantum bit far away, making transfer of data an instant change of state. For now we have iCloud and it looks pretty good. But in the future we'll not just move away from software install disks and USB syncing to Wifi and remote server farms (as Apple did today), we may instead get rid of the whole thing by entangling the bits on multiple devices and syncing those. That might sound crazy and it might be a long time in the future, but if we're going to talk about the magic of wireless data transfer, let's talk about its logical conclusion, shall we? There's no better time, as iCloud was announced just a week after the first ever commercial sale of a quantum computer. Below is a summary of some of today's key announcements and some thoughts about what they mean in the context of history.
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Wikipedia in Tug-of-War Over Palin's Version of Revolutionary War (UPDATED) Last week, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a highly idiosyncratic (read: inaccurate) portrait of American revolutionary figure Paul Revere to the media. Now, a struggle has broken out on Wikipedia over Ms. Palin's version of history. Her version was that Paul Revere rode through Boston, ringing a bell, to announce to the British that the colonials were preparing to fight. This is not remotely true. He rode silently, to let the revolutionaries know the British were en route. Update after the jump.
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The Personal Cloud Will Be A $12 Billion Industry in 2016 Personal computing has become complicated. Consumers and IT managers face dozens of services for a single functionality and users are increasingly using smartphones, tablets, and different PCs for home and work. It is hard to juggle it all. "The personal computing experience is a victim of its own success" research company Forrester says in a report outlining a strategy for consumers and corporations in approaching the "personal cloud." Forrester predicts that the personal cloud will be a $12 billion dollar market by 2016. What is the personal cloud going to look like and who are the leaders going to be?
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Nigeria Shuts Off Internet & Mobile For Inauguration (UPDATED) Sources indicate the Nigerian government shut off the country's Internet and mobile communications networks in the capital of Abuja for 12 hours during May 29th's presidential inauguration. OpenNet Initiative outlined the incident. The election saw interim president Goodluck Jonathan elected for a full-term. Nigeria is not noteworthy for its repressive attitude to the Internet. In fact, Jonathan was the first presidential candidate anywhere to announce his candidacy on Facebook. Update after the jump.
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China Slams Google For Being a "Tool for Political Contention" Google claimed last week that China was behind a massive phishing hack of Gmail accounts that included U.S. government officials, human rights activists and journalists. China has fired back at the search giant, warning Google to stay away from being a political tool. The People's Daily, an official Chinese newspaper, says Google; "should not become overly embroiled in international political struggle, playing the role of a tool for political contention," according to Reuters. Then came the warning: "For when the international winds shift direction, it may become sacrificed to politics and will be spurned by the marketplace."
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