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Posts Tagged ‘Page Users’

Google Now Includes MySpace Status Updates in Real-Time Search Results

MySpace and Google just announced that starting today, status updates from MySpace users will appear in Google’s real-time search. MySpace announced its real-time Stream API in December and Google launched its real-time search feature just a day before the MySpace announcement. While Google was one of MySpace’s launch partners (together with OneRiot), it took Google until today to include MySpace updates in its real-time search.

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Currently, Twitter dominates Google’s real-time search results, though Google also plans to include updates from FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca in its search results in the future. Google also has a deal with Facebook to show status updates from groups, companies and celebrities in its real-time search results.

Will these Status Updates be Useful?

Starting today, updates from MySpace users will appear in Google’s real-time search results on the default search results page. Users will also be able to see these updates by selecting the latest and updates mode in Google’s search options bar.

On average, MySpace users don’t tend to share as many links as Twitter users, so it remains to be seen how useful these MySpace status updates will be for Google users. For now, Google doesn’t offer its users the ability to filter real-time searches by source.

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Confluence Supports Google’s Open Social, Microsoft Office 2007

Confluence now supports Open Social, allowing users to pull in gadgets to check Salesforce contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar and other items.

The new features in Confluence 3.1, an Atlassian product, show that dashboard environments are certainly in vogue as the social web becomes a pervasive part of the business user’s daily work life.

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Wikis, though are not a marketing term that has as much resonance. Enterprise collaboration is the holy grail. The release from Confluence shows the importance of open, collaborative services that provides the ability to stitch different data sources together into one environment.

With its new release, Confluence is adding a number of new features:

Open Social gadgets may be added by pointing and clicking. The upgrade to Confluence 3.1 includes two gadgets. Confluence Activity Stream displays a list of recent updates from a Confluence site. Quick Navigation provides Confluence search capabilities and suggests results while typing.

Here’s an example of how a gadget is pulled into Confluence.

Attachments may dragged and dropped into the Confluence environment. The idea being that Confluence can act much like a desktop application.

Support is now provided for Microsoft Office 2007. Users may view attached Office 2007 documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets within the Confluence wiki page. Users may search inside files and edit documents.

Confluence is one of the leading service providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space. The service demonstrates how 2010 will see the continued integration of the open web within enterprise environments.

As Bill Arconati of Atlassian said in an interview:

“It’s all about interoperability.”

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Kindle Everywhere: Amazon Launches Windows Application

Amazon just released a free software e-book Reader for Windows PCs. The Kindle for PC application allows Amazon customers to read Kindle books on their Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. A Mac version will follow soon. The application was clearly designed to work on a wide variety of devices and works especially well on netbooks and touchscreen devices. Besides being capable of working with Amazon’s proprietary e-book format, the app can also display e-books in the .mobi file format.

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Features

The application itself is pretty sparse, with just a few buttons for sorting books and switching between downloaded and archived books. Amazon did not integrate the Kindle store into the application, though a prominent link in the app opens up the Kindle store in the browser. This comes as a surprise, given how easy it would be to integrate the store. While reading books, users can adjust the size of the font and bookmark a page. The app can display notes and highlights that were created on a Kindle or in the Kindle for iPhone app.

In designing the app, Amazon clearly had touchscreen and netbook users in mind. All the buttons in the app are large, and the left and right edges of the application can be clicked – or touched – to move between pages. To advance a page, users can also use their cursor keys or mouse wheel.

Users of the Windows application can not add notes or highlights to a book right now, though the company plans to add the ability to create notes and highlights in the application in the future. Amazon is also considering to add a search feature, as well as the ability zoom and rotate images. Another feature that is currently missing but that netbook users would likely appreciate is a full-screen mode.

Kindle Everywhere

Overall, the app is easy to use and works as advertised. The lack of a built-in store and the ability to add notes and highlights is a slight disappointment, though. Sony, Barnes & Noble and others offer desktop e-readers for OSX and Windows with more features. Amazon decided to keep the application as simple as possible.

For Amazon, this is an important move, as it give the company access to a wider market. While Amazon has sold millions of Kindles, the PC market is still far bigger and the popularity of netbooks could also give the app a boost. Reading a book on a PC or laptop is not as comfortable as on a hardware e-reader with an e-ink display, but the free desktop application will allow users to sample e-books and get accustomed to the process before buying an e-reader.

The desktop application also gives Amazon a presence on all the big platforms (except for the Mac) – so while other devices might be more open than the Kindle, this argument against the Kindle becomes less potent as Kindle users can now read their books virtually everywhere anyway.

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VMWare Fusion 2.06 hits the streets

Filed under: Software, Snow Leopard

VMWare has pushed out another update to Fusion, the popular virtualization app.

Version 2.06 was released yesterday. The 289 MB download includes multiple fixes for running Fusion in a 32-bit Snow Leopard environment. The release includes enhancements for better 3D performance on Macs with Nvidia cards under Snow Leopard.

There are also the usual assortment of other bug fixes.

You can download the update here for free if you’re a registered Fusion user. You can get detailed release notes from VMWare at this page. Users who upgrade should note that VMWare Tools does not automatically update when you do the upgrade. You’ll have to install the tools from the Fusion menu bar.

When I opened my older version of Fusion this morning I was not alerted to the update, which was a bit of a surprise. Your mileage may vary, so I and am passing the info along to you in case you don’t get flagged on it.

Happy downloading.

TUAWVMWare Fusion 2.06 hits the streets originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter’s a Mess: First the DDOS, Now Koobface Returns

Twitter can’t catch a break these days. Still reeling from the ongoing denial-of-service attacks that hit late last week (and have yet to let up), the company soon faced yet another threat: the return of Koobface. The Koobface internet worm, a deadly little piece of internet malware which got its start on Facebook, has long since spread to other social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, and Twitter. But the latest variant – the “new and improved” Koobface – is even more devious than before. And Twitter’s recently launched malicious URL filtering feature couldn’t put a stop the worm’s spread.

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The New Koobface

As before, the new variant of Koobface still points users to a fake Twitter page (or a a fake Facebook page, if you happened to come across Koobface on the Facebook social network). On the page, users are prompted to download a Flash Player update in order to view a video file. Of course, clicking the link to update Flash actually starts the malware’s payload downloading instead. In order to get users to this point to begin with, Koobface sent out tweets reading “My home video [URL].”

Recently, Koobace has ramped up its complexity and is sending out unique tweets that have some sort of random component added to the end of the tweet, with strings like "HA-HA-HA!!", "W.O.W.", "WOW", "L.O.L.", "LOL", ";)" or "OMFG!!!"

What’s even worse about the latest Koobface variant is that the landing page for the malware attack was also adding a random component to the URL, allowing it to get shortened to a different bit.ly URL each time a message was posted. As of late last week, security firm Kaspersky Lab had identified nearly 100 unique IP addresses hosting the Koobface worm. They’ve since been able to take the main Koobface site down to stop the current set of attacks, but don’t be fooled – there’s no doubt that it’s only a matter of time before Koobface relaunches with yet another dangerous twist. In fact, that’s been par for the course for this piece of malware which has been attacking social networks since July 2008. Taking down one Koobface vector of attack is like playing a game of “whack-a-mole” – you hit one and another pops up to take its place.

The Real Problem: Short URLs

One of the main reasons Koobface was able to so easily spread on Twitter was due to its use of the bit.ly URL shortener, now the default on Twitter. Not only was Koobface varying its URL to ensure a unique bit.ly link each time, Twitter’s new malicious URL filtering system doesn’t help protect users against pre-shortened URLs.

As we mentioned before, without a focus on shortened links, Twitter’s filtering system is simply not good enough. It’s far too easy to use bit.ly’s website or a third-party Twitter client to shorten a URL before it ever hits Twitter’s web interface to be checked. And naturally, this is precisely what malware writers do. The only malicious URLs Twitter’s current system protects us against are those posted by unsuspecting Twitter users themselves. The bad guys certainly know better and Koobface is a perfect example of this.

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