N. Korea rally heightens tensions

About 100,000 people gathered in the North Korean capital Pyongyang on Sunday to denounce South Korea and the U.S., heightening tensions over the sinking of one of the South’s warships.

Chrome Extensions Get Desktop Notifications [Google Chrome]

While a few extensions have had desktop notifications for a little while now, Google has finally built a desktop notification API for extensions, making it easier for developers to add it to their extensions and keep them universal across extensions (and operating systems). While there doesn’t seem to be a list of extensions that have added this new functionality, we tested it with the Gmail Notifier extension and found that it worked quite well. Of course, we would have preferred they add support for already existing desktop notification solutions like Growl for Mac and Windows, but if you’d rather get notifications from your browser than a separate system tray application, it isn’t a bad solution. More »









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Yeah, Natal Probably Won’t Be Called “Wave”

wave 650x291 Yeah, Natal Probably Wont Be Called WaveRemember when I said Project Natal losing its code name in favor of being called “Wave” made no sense? Well, if I was probably right before, I’m almost certainly right now that this site (pictured above) has been brought to my attention.  Yep, that’s Microsoft Wave, “the site that brings you the freshest developments and products to come out of Microsoft.” And one of the featured fresh developments is Natal. Yeah, Natal is not gonna be called “Wave.”

[via made2game]

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Google Lists the 1,000 Most Visited Websites, Excludes Porn

1000 most-visited sites

Google has released an exhaustive list of the 1,000 most visited sites on the Web. Facebook, Yahoo!, Live, Wikipedia and MSN made up the top five, pulling in over 1.99 trillion unique visitors every month. With the list, Google is giving advertisers the option to cherrypick where they want their ads in order to improve placement for their products or services. What’s fascinating, though, is the traffic breakdown by scale and type. A brief glance reveals Facebook’s dominance over the Web’s attention with over 570 billion monthly page views. (Web powerhouses Google and YouTube are both excluded.) Social networks, portals, online apps, e-mail and search reign over the first 100 spots.

Search Engine Land reports that Google used data that was taken from its Ad Planner tool and aggregated from millions of users (who opted-in), content publishers and its own Google Analytics service. Google will continue updating the list monthly as traffic changes. [From: Google and Search Engine Land]

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Google Lists the 1,000 Most Visited Websites, Excludes Porn originally appeared on Switched on Fri, 28 May 2010 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s iPad goes on sale internationally

Today Apple’s iPad officially goes on sale internationally in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.  Japan was the first to receive the iPad, opening earlier this morning in a frenzy for the new gadget, as posted by the Wall Street Journal.

The device was announced…

"Reshare" in Google Buzz

Posted by Sam Goto, Software Engineer

The other day I posted this video to the version of Buzz we use inside of Google. A few people commented on it, 13 liked it, and 68 of my coworkers thought it was interesting enough that they wanted to share it with their own followers. Collectively, thousands of people watched it, many of whom were many degrees away from me.

For the last couple weeks we've been testing reshare — and today we’re excited to roll it out to everyone. If you don't see the "Reshare" link quite yet, hang tight. It should be on for everyone by the end of the day.

How reshare works

When you find an interesting buzz post you want to reshare, instead of copying and pasting it (and maybe attributing the original poster with an @reply along the way), you can now reshare posts with two clicks.

First, click “Reshare”:


Then type up anything you want to add and click “Post”:


Your post will include a link to the original post:


Note that this only works for public posts; private posts won’t have the reshare link since the original poster intended to limit the audience of their post.

A little more background

Reshare has been one of our top user requests, so we hope we’ve made a number of you happy. We realize that just as many will likely wonder why we decided to implement it the way we did. So, here’s a bit more background for those who are curious:

  • First, back to those two clicks: one click vs. two click reshare was a hard choice (I know, it doesn’t sound so hard, but we spent a lot of time on this!). Ultimately, we chose to go with two clicks because we want people to be able to reshare publicly or privately and also encourage resharers to add their own new content to the post.
  • If you follow a bunch of people who all reshare the same thing, the last thing you want is for that same post to appear over and over again. When this happens, similar posts get collapsed, so you should only see each thing once.
  • You’ll notice that resharing creates a new post, effectively forking the conversation. To fork or not fork was a decision we debated for a while. Ultimately, we think forked conversations help create more varied, intimate discussions around a single item. We realize people may want a non-forking version too, so we’re thinking about how to do that as well.
  • When there is a chain of reshares, the names of all of the people who publicly reshare the post appear on the original item, even if they’re not directly connected to the original author. If you share something that ends up getting passed around by lots of other people, it’s pretty cool to see that.
  • If you “like” a reshare, you don’t automatically also “like” the original post. Imagine what would happen if I reshare a very positive movie review and write “What a joke! This movie was terrible!” Someone who likes my post probably doesn’t want their “like” showing on the original post praising the film, too.

Overall, we’ve made a lot of progress since my original ASCII mockups…


…and after a lot of debate, we even settled on what to call it…


…but reshare is still very much a work in progress. We wanted to launch and iterate so be sure to let us know what you think in the forum or on Buzz.

Tips & Tricks: Comments in Google documents

In April, we launched a new version of Google documents. One feature that makes collaboration easier is improved commenting.

Connecting text to note
Comments let you make suggestions about the text in your document without modifying the document itself. When you click on a comment, the text it’s referring to is highlighted. And vice-versa — when you select highlighted text in your document, we identify the associated comment.

Additionally, when you move highlighted text around within the document, the comments will follow the text and re-arrange to keep your annotations in order.

Comment on the sidelines
Comments live outside the margins of the editing space — but are linked to text in the document. This means you can leave notes for others without cluttering the document.

We’ve also made it easier to hide comments in your document. You can show or hide all comments by checking or un-checking the Show comments menu item.

A detailed view of the comment box
Finally, we think the comment feature will give you flexibility to work with your notes in an intuitive and user-friendly way.

You can delete a comment by pressing the trash can icon above a comment. Or, you can respond to a comment by pressing the reply arrow, and it will show up just below the comment you’re responding to. You can hide a comment by marking the “X” button at the top of the comment.


Collaboration at the next level
The new version of Google documents is a built around collaboration, allowing you to work in real-time and to see what others are typing character by character. The new comment features makes it much easier to keep track of your ideas and notes while you work closely with others.

To try out improved commenting and other features, you’ll need to take the new preview version of Google documents for a test drive. You can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.

Posted by: Edgard Lindner, Software Engineer

Facebook’s New Privacy Guide Explained

New Facebook Controls Revealed

Responding to user backlash, Facebook today unveiled its overhauled Privacy Controls. On first look, it’s a radically different set of tools with a redesign control setup than what you’re used to. The now “classic” granular settings are still in place, but a new set of umbrella options lets you quickly change several options at once as a first line of privacy defense. The strategy appears to be centered on making users more comfortable with their sharing settings, while providing more control over their online profiles. History has shown us that Facebook changes like this are never easy, so while the changes won’t roll out for a few weeks, read on to learn how to use the new controls when they arrive.

Continue reading Facebook’s New Privacy Guide Explained

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Facebook’s New Privacy Guide Explained originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 26 May 2010 18:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WeTab street date pushed back to mid-September

WeTab, WePad — whatever name you use, it’s obvious that the gang at Neofonie doesn’t exactly run the tightest ship. (And yes, we’re still feeling a little stung from the product launch, where they tried to pass off Windows 7 as Linux.) If Amazon.de is to be believed, it looks like the €460 ($566) wonder won't be available now until mid-September. This isn't exactly the sort of thing that inspires confidence in pre-order customers, but who knows? Maybe some amusing behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding as we speak. You know how we love our schadenfreude.

[Thanks, Sebastian]

WeTab street date pushed back to mid-September originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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