Archive for the ‘Technology and Gadget’ Category
Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook Messages is not an email killerFacebook has ramped up competition with AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google with a product to rival their email services.
Facebook Messages aims to tie users more closely to the social networking site at a time when everyone is battling for their attention.
The product will merge texts, online chats, and emails into one central hub.
Facebook said traditional email is too slow and cumbersome and needs to step into the modern world of messaging.
“This is not an email killer,” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters and analysts at an event in San Francisco.
“Maybe we can help push the way people do messaging more towards this simple, real time, immediate personal experience. Email is still really important to a lot of people. We think this simple messaging is how people will shift their communication,” added Mr Zuckerberg.
‘Killer app’
In a case of bad timing, reports surfaced hours after the Facebook launch that Gmail suffered an outage.
The new service is seen as offering an alternative to Gmail, the fastest growing web service in the past year with over 193 million users according to data tracker ComScore.
Email remains one of the most popular means of communicationThe irony was that ahead of the announcement, speculation was rife that Facebook’s new product would be most crippling for Gmail. Mr Zuckerberg said he did not see it that way.
“In reality they have a great product.
“We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say ‘I’m going to shut down my Yahoo Mail or Gmail account’.
“Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out people will start to say this is how the future should work,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
AOL which at the weekend previewed changes to its once popular web mail service disagreed email is doomed.
“Email remains one of the killer apps on the internet,” said Brad Garlinghouse, AOL’s senior vice president of consumer products.
Industry analyst Augie Ray of Forrester agreed.
“Research we have done shows we know that in the US 90% of adults check their mail at least once a month and 59% of adults say they maintain a profile on a social networking site.
“There is a big gap between the reach social media has and the reach email has.”
Ease of use
At the heart of Facebook Messages is an effort to ensure users “see the messages that matter”.
The new feature will simplify how people communicate whether it be via text, instant messages, online chat or email. All these messages will come into one feed known as a social inbox allowing users to reply in any way they want.
All 500million plus users will eventually be offered an @Facebook.com addressFacebook said around 70% of users regularly use it to send messages to friends and and that a total of four billion messages pass across the site every day.
“We really want to enable people to have conversations with the people they care about,” Facebook’s director of engineering Andrew “Boz” Bosworth told BBC News.
“It sounds so simple. We have all this technology that should be enabling that but it’s not. It’s fragmenting that. So I have one conversation on email with my grandfather and another with my cousin on sms and all these things don’t work the same way.
“I shouldn’t have to worry about the technology. I should just have to worry about the person and the message. Everything else is just getting in the way,” added Mr Bosworth.
The new system will be modelled more on chat than traditional email which means there will be no subject lines, cc or bcc fields.
Liz Gannes of technology blog AllThingsD said she believed users will have a bit of a learning curve on their hands.
“I think the product is just different enough from what people are used to that it will feel really weird to users for a while.
“The lack of subject lines will get people upset at first and then of course they will probably realise they never wanted them anyway.”
‘Game over?’
Other features include being able to store conversations so users can have a complete archive of communications with friends and family. Mr Bosworth likened this to a modern day treasure trove of letters stored in a box.
Incoming message will be placed in one of three folders – one for friends, another for things like bank statements and a junk folder for messages people do not want to see.
The product will also represent a challenge to Yahoo with over 273 million users and Microsoft which has nearly 362 million.
“For me today represents the day when Facebook truly becomes a portal on the level of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL,” Charlene Li social media analyst with the Altimeter Group told BBC News.
“They now have to start making their inboxes more social. Friends are the new priority as opposed to the conversation. This makes Facebook so much more functional.”
The new product will be introduced slowly over a number of monthsRobert Scoble technology writer and founder of Scobleizer.com said this product gives everyone something to aim for.
“This is a new kind of communications system but its not game over for Yahoo and Gmail and all the others because it will take decades to get people to stop doing traditional emails.
“However this is something new and very powerful because Facebook can tap into my social graph and ensure that only my friends are there and I won’t get spammed.”
Facebook said this product was the biggest the social networking giant had worked on to date.
The company will also offer an @facebook.com email address to every one of its more than 500 million users.
Facebook eyes mobile domination
Posted on: November 4, 2010
More than 200 million people are now using Facebook across various mobile platformsFacebook has set out a strategy to make it as dominant a force in the world of mobile as it is in social networking.
At the heart of its plans is making the mobile phone a more social experience and offering shopping discounts.
The company announced the opportunity for businesses to offer deals to users via their phone.
Facebook also revealed plans for a single sign-on that lets users log in to applications once with their Facebook name and password.
Third party developers are also being offered the chance to add a social layer to their applications, the company said at an event at its Palo Alto offices.
The bid to combine “mobile, social, local” comes as the number of phones proliferate throughout the world.
More than 200 million people are now using Facebook across various mobile platforms, with the company claiming that this is bigger than the iPhone or Android user base.
A year ago, the social networking giant had 65 million mobile users.
Mobile users are also twice as active on Facebook as people who are logging on via personal computers.
“There is obviously a lot of change in the mobile space and also a revolution happening in the social space,” said Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg says Places differs from other location products“What we have seen is you can rethink any product and rethink it to be social. Mobile is a big area of expansion and a huge new space.
“Combining those things together brings big opportunities for new companies to be built and for industries to be disrupted.”
Game changer
Industry watchers at the event said the single biggest disruption that Facebook introduced was the ability for businesses to offer deals to users who check into the site’s Places feature.
That product was launched in September and allows users to share with their friends where they are and figure out who is nearby.
One of the first partnerships Facebook announced was with the clothing company Gap. It plans to run a campaign offering a free pair of jeans to the first 10,000 users who check in to their local Gap store using Facebook’s mobile application.
In total, Facebook has partnered with 22 major retailers including H&M, Starbucks, McDonalds and the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas.
Small and medium sized businesses with a Facebook page will also be able to offer deals through Facebook’s mobile application.
“This deals product is a game changer,” said Augie Ray from analyst firm Forrester.
“When you consider that check-in sites like Foursquare has five million users and Facebook has 500 million, you begin to get a sense of where this can scale.
“While so many people were eager to try out Facebook Places, it didn’t become that widely adopted because there was no end benefit to the user. That all changes now and helps make Facebook the dominant force on mobile right now,” Mr Ray told BBC News.
Susan Etlinger, a senior analyst with Altimeter Group, said the deals feature takes Facebook in a whole new direction.
Together the deal means access to around 1 billion users“Facebook is moving into social commerce for real. This will take Facebook out of its comfort zone in a lot of ways and bring them closer to brands.
“They need to be careful. The first group of deals looks nice and looks like they offer value. They will have to continue to maintain that experience because they have a lot of brand equity riding on this,” Ms Etlinger added.
Google and Yahoo are also aggressively trying to tap into users on the go and competing for a share of the growing mobile advertising market.
Analysts have estimated that mobile advertising revenue in the US, for example, will rise to $3.1bn (£1.9bn) in 2013 from $320m in 2009.
Privacy concerns
As always when Facebook introduces new features or products, the issue of privacy reared its head, with concerns being centred more on the developers using third-party applications to extract users’ data.
“While I think Facebook does a good job on this issue, I worry that third parties might accidentally disclose information inappropriately,” said Larry Magid, co-founder of ConnectSafely.org.
“Facebook is, in a sense, endorsing their application developers and the developers are getting access to location information. The concern is what level of security do the app developers have in place to make sure that information never gets out to the wrong people.
“It’s bad enough if people’s posts get out there, but location is something very special and Facebook understands that it needs a better level of protection,” said Mr Magid.
Facebook’s vice president of mobile Erick Tseng tried to allay fears.
“Nothing has changed with the announcement today in terms of security and privacy. It is the exact same model that we have had,” he said.
“Today, we have 550,000 different games and applications running the same single sign-on model. Whenever any application violates our terms of service we will shut down that app.”
Last week, Facebook pulled the plug or denied access to “communications channels” on around a dozen application developers who violated their terms of service.
Following an investigation into online privacy by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook said last month that, in some cases, user IDs were inadvertently being passed onto applications, which is against the company’s policy.
Facebook phone
At the Palo Alto event, Mr Zuckerberg also killed off the constant industry chatter that Facebook will release its own smartphone to compete with the iPhone and Android devices.
“What a novel idea,” Mr Zuckberberg told reporters and developers.
“Our goal is to make everyone social. If you are building an iPhone your goal is to get as many phones out there. Our goal is to be social.”
Those hoping for the company to announce an iPad application were disappointed.
“The iPad? The iPad isn’t mobile. It’s a computer,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
“It’s not a mobile platform the same way a phone is.”
Microsoft said it had been an “exceptional” quarter.Microsoft has announced a 51% rise in first-quarter profit, thanks to higher sales of its flagship Windows and Office software.
Net profit for the three months to September came in at $5.4bn (£3.4bn).
Revenues increased by 25% to $16.2bn – a company record for the first quarter.
But Microsoft said that in the same quarter last year it had deferred some revenue from Windows sales. Had it not done so, its net profit would have been only 16% higher in comparison.
“This was an exceptional quarter, combining solid enterprise growth and continued strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windows 7, and Xbox 360 consoles and games,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft.
Windows sales rose 66% on a year earlier to $4.8bn, while Office and other business software brought in $5.1bn, a 14% increase on last year.
‘Firing on all cylinders’
Microsoft shares rose 2.8% in after-hours trading.
Its stock has fallen 14% so far this year as investors worry about its ability to adapt to new ways of computing.
Last week, its chief software architect Ray Ozzie unexpectedly resigned, and warned that the company must think “beyond the PC”.
But its latest results were better than analysts had expected.
“Microsoft had a very good quarter,” said Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar.
“Windows is still doing well, Office is doing well, and servers and tools are doing well. The big three businesses are firing on all cylinders as the PC upgrade cycle continues.”
About the Web Behaviour Test
Posted on: October 25, 2010
In the 20 years since its creation, the World Wide Web has had a profound impact on our lives. But what impact is the web having on our brains? That’s what the Web Behaviour Test aims to find out, writes Dr Ian Rowlands.
The Web Behaviour Test is designed to answer the question: are people who use the web a lot different to people who don’t?
In the space of less than a decade, the web has moved us from a state of ‘information poverty’ to one of ‘information affluence’ on a scale that would have been truly incomprehensible at any other time in human history.
How are we handling this massive transition? Are there possible downsides as well as the very obvious benefits?
These are important questions and we need your help to answer them.
The web and you
What did you do on the web today? How long did you spend online and how many sites did you visit?
Perhaps, like me, you received an email from a popular social networking site, prompting you to check out how an old friend was doing. Did their latest blog entry inspire you to book your summer holiday? And while you were thinking about it, buy a Spanish phrase book and check out the best deal on travel insurance as well?
And all this without leaving your chair?
The web has become so deeply embedded in our lives that for most of us it offers a completely seamless experience, weaving the virtual and the real into a continuous and largely indistinguishable thread.
We might surf while watching TV, tweet our friends during a particularly boring college lecture, or check out the best prices for a new laptop while listening to music on an iPod.
So how much concentration did you really give to searching information on the web today? When you picked that search engine result, what were the cues that triggered that first click? How confident were you – really – about the information that came back?
And what was more important: convenience or content?
What is ‘web behaviour’?
A new area of science is beginning to emerge that looks at questions of how real people behave online. How effective are we are at gathering and evaluating information and turning it into action?
This area of science is so new, we don’t even have a name for it yet, so let’s just call it `web behaviour’ for now. One thing seems fairly certain: it’s going to become really, really important as the web’s tentacles stretch further and further into every aspect of our lives.
How exactly do people find information, from the latest celebrity news to self-diagnosis when we feel unwell?
Frankly, we know alarmingly little about how people really interact with the web. This is disturbing, given our colossal investment in information and communication technologies.
At the core of our new science of ‘web behaviour’ lie some very simple questions:
- How able are we to filter the enormous amount of information delivered to us by search engines?
- How confident are we in our ability to find the ‘right answer’ when looking for information on the web?
- How much do we concentrate when we’re using the web, even when we’re using it to make potentially life-changing decisions?
- What is the role of memory in shaping what we do on the web? (How much of today’s online journey do you actually remember?)
- How influential are ‘super brands’ in defining the choices we make online?
- How do we decide on the reliability or ‘authority’ of information provided by others online?
By taking part in this exciting online experiment, you will be helping to answer these and other important questions, opening up whole new areas of research and improving our understanding of the changing world.
An image of debris ejected from Cabeus Crater and into the sunlight, about 20 seconds after the LCROSS impact. The inset shows a close-up with the direction of the Sun and the EarthThere are oases of water-rich soil that could sustain astronauts on the Moon, according to Nasa.
The impacts kicked up large amounts of rock and dust, revealing a suite of fascinating chemical compounds and far more water than anyone had imagined.
A Nasa-led team tells Science magazine that about 155kg of water vapour and water-ice were blown out of the crater.
The researchers’ analysis suggests the lunar regolith, or soil, at the impact site contains 5.6% by weight of water-ice.
“That’s a significant amount of water,” said Anthony Colaprete, from the US space agency’s Ames research centre.
“And it’s in the form of water-ice grains. That’s good news because water-ice is very much a friendly resource to work with. You don’t have to warm it very much; you just have to bring it up to room temperature to pull it out of the dirt real easy.”
And he added: “If you took just the 10km region around the impact site and say it had 5% water – that would be equivalent to about a billion gallons of water. I’m not saying that’s what’s there, but it just shows you that even at these small concentrations there’s potential for lots of water.”
The LCROSS spacecraft followed closely behind the spent rocket stageThe Nasa-led team has published six papers in the American journal describing the findings of the 9 October, 2009, impacts of the LCROSS spacecraft and its companion rocket stage.
The pair was targeted at the Moon’s southern pole – at Cabeus Crater, a depression so deep and dark that the odds of disturbing ice were thought to be very good.
The rocket stage went in first, followed a few minutes later by the LCROSS probe which gathered imagery and other data just before it too slammed into the surface.
Another spacecraft, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was passing close by. It also was able to study the plume of material ejected into sunlight more than 15km above the rim of Cabeus.
Moon’s ‘archive’
The suite of instruments deployed on that day has determined as much as 20% of this dust plume was made up of volatile compounds, including methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
In addition, the instruments saw relatively large amounts of some metals, such as sodium, and mercury. There was even a signature of silver, but this was tiny.
Scientists say the water and mix of volatiles could be remnants of comet or asteroid impacts through the eons, but they reckon a number of quite complex chemical and physical processes are also working to cycle and migrate these substances around the Moon.
“The LCORSS mission provided some surprises with significant implications for the creation, transport, collection and archiving of volatiles below the shadows of the south pole,” said team-member Peter Schultz from Brown University.
“We’ve opened this lunar closet and discovered things we just didn’t expect. And just as the Earth holds its clues to the past climates in the ices at its poles, the Moon also holds clues to past impacts and perhaps even the last stages of lunar volcanism.”
Daytime temperatures at the Moon’s southern pole. The shadowed parts of some craters are among the coldest places in the Solar SystemThe water-ice is not uniformly distributed across the southern pole. Rather, it is held in pockets.
Some of these oases are, like in Cabeus, to be found in shadows where LRO’s Diviner instrument has sensed temperatures down to minus 244C. Under such conditions, ices will stay fixed for billions of years.
But the research indicates there is probably water-ice even in areas which receive some sunlight through the year, provided it is buried in the soil.
“We’ve dubbed these newly discovered regions ‘lunar permafrost areas’; and they’re very extensive,” said David Paige, Diviner’s principal investigator.
“This could facilitate future human and robotic explorers in their quest for understanding of the lunar ice, as well as its potential use as resource; because rather than having to brave the cold and dark conditions inside permanent shadow, they could land much more conventionally in areas where the sunlight is shining – at least for part of the year – and then dig a small distance below the surface and access the ice.”
Yossi Fadhli World News and Entertainment 