Internet News

New Twitter Homepage

Today Twitter reveals their new homepage. Go to twitter.com to check it out.

Steve Jobs On His Liver Transplant

Steve Jobs talks about his life saving liver transplant at around the 13:00 minute mark.

What Type of Sites Get The Most Traffic?

To get a rough estimate of how the Internet is actually being used, the BBC charted the top 100 sites by unique users in January 2010. The study involved the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, U.S., and Australia.

Among the Top 100 sites, here’s what’s getting the traffic…

And among the Social Networking sites…

And for the Shopping Sites…

Office 2010 Coming May 12. iPad Available April 3.

A couple of product launch news items for you…


Microsoft Office 2010 Available May 12

Business users will be able to get Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010: May 12. Consumers will have to wait until June to buy the product online and at retail, Microsoft officials said on March 5, via a post to the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog. Microsoft also began offering users who are purchasing Office 2007 a free upgrade to Office 2010, as of today, March 5.


iPad Available April 3

Apple officially set the release date early Friday, after months of speculation about when the device would become available to the public.

Wi-Fi models will be available in the U.S. on April 3 and models with Wi-Fi and 3G will be available in late April.

Customers can pre-order any iPad, for a starting price of $499, from Apple’s online store beginning March 12, and an iBooks application for the iPad will be available as a free download on April 3, according to a company statement.

Confused About Google Voice?

If you are like many, new products and features can be confusing. However, at the very same time it can improve your lifestyle immensely. Here are videos on the top 10 features Google Voice has to offer and also a brief introduction.

What Is Google Voice?

Google Voice Features:

Voicemail Transcription

One Number

Personalized Greetings

International Calling

SMS To Email

Share Voicemails

Block Callers

Screen Callers

Mobile App

Conference Calls

Facebook Is The Top Spot To Spend Time

According to new figures released yesterday by Nielsen, Facebook is the web’s top place to spend time. The average U.S. Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined.

Not only is it the top spot, the numbers are jumping upward from just six months ago. In June 2009, Nielsen estimated that the average U.S. user spent 4 hours and 39 minutes on Facebook per month. That’s about 9.3 minutes per day in a 30 day month. In August, that number rose to 5 hours and 46 minutes, or 11.5 minutes per day. In January 2010 however, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook jumped to over 7 hours. Each American Facebook user spent an average of 421 minutes on Facebook per month, which amounts to over 14 minutes per day. Even if you lump together the time spent on Google (1:23), Yahoo (2:09), YouTube (1:02), Microsoft/Bing (1:35) Wikipedia (0:15), and Amazon (0:22), it still doesn’t beat Facebook. Maybe it’s YOU making this happen.

Declining MySpace Loses CEO

First, the audience it stole from Friendster left for Facebook. Now, Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive Rupert Murdoch hired less than a year ago to reverse the site’s declining fortunes, has also left, MySpace announced late Wednesday night.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta will be replaced by “co-presidents” Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn who, like Van Natta, joined MySpace last April.

The bell has been tolling for MySpace for years, with users leaving the site pretty much as they found it: as a place to hear what a band sounds like and see what they look like in a matter of seconds, rather than as a place where they establish an online identity and communicate with friends.

After signing on last April, Van Natta wisely acknowledged this change in how people were using MySpace — as a media site rather than as a social network — by doubling down on the ad-supported MySpace Music service. However, the company was not able to fix problems with the service including poor integration with existing band pages, which left many users confused or uninterested in the service.

According to an Ad Age source, Van Natta bailed on MySpace because he was frustrated by the company’s “slow pace of change” and “entrenched culture.” A dearth of fast, competent, loyal software engineers in the Los Angeles area reportedly slowed things down even further. MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, in southern California. Facebook, which evolves its design and feature set so often that some users can’t keep up with the changes, is located in the more technology-oriented Palo Alto, California.

VIA: wired.com

Check Out The Olympic Slopes Via Google Street View

Marketing stunt or just plain fun? I’m guessing both played a part in this. Now you can check out Vancouver with Google Street View.

Could Google Be Your Next ISP?

Google announced today they are looking to expand their business into being an internet service provider. Not only will they compete with Comcast and AT&T, they are claiming they will be able to boost speeds at an incredible rate. Watch out for Google fiber optics coming to a neighborhood near you.

Google Launches New Social Application: Google Buzz

Today Google announced its latest social application, designed to bring the fire hose of social media and status updates down to a useful trickle of the most “interesting” bits. Dubbed Google Buzz, the service is designed to offer easier ways to share links, photos, and other information, corral all those things shared by friends and other connections, and integrate well with other services in an open way.

It’s “a Google approach to sharing,” according to Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz.

While the rumor was that Buzz would be Google’s “Twitter-killer,” it would actually be missing the point to describe it that way. Buzz offers a way to share status updates, if you want to use it that way. It can also be used to share links, videos, photos, and more—in this regard, it’s more akin to Facebook posts or even quick-blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous. Buzz can also integrate with other social services to share any publicly accessible things you post to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, and any service that offers an RSS feed.

Buzz also offers a way for anyone you’re connected to via your Google contacts to comment on the things you share, much like your friends can on Facebook. Further, it adopts the de facto standard of using “@replies” to send notices to specific users.

In addition, Buzz gives users control over how information is shared. Posts can be made public or private. You can create groups of contacts, such as “co-workers” and mark items as shared with only that group, multiple groups, or just a single contact.

Everything that is shared publicly is instantly indexed by Google search index, and Buzz streams and comments update in real time.

Google Buzz is being rolled out over the course of the next few days. Gmail users should see a notice when they log in once it has been activated on their account. We’ll be sure to share our thoughts once we have an opportunity to put it through its paces.

VIA: arstechnica.com