New Gmail leaked

A version of Gmail used by Google employees has been revealed in a screenshot included with a Chromium OS bug report, and the image reveals more than a half dozen changes to the Gmail most of us are using today.
The blog Google Operating System posted the image yesterday, and we’ve also featured it below. Note that Google Operating System originally posted it as two images — the top bar that says “report issues” and so on was its own image, so we’re not sure how it’s really oriented in relation to the rest of the stuff you see.

Also remember that this internal version of Gmail may differ from future public versions.

Savvy Gmail users immediately picked apart the screenshot looking for new features and interesting changes. Most notably, Mail, Contacts and Tasks have all been featured in the top left as the three pillars of the user experience. Right below those, you can see that “Compose Mail” is now an actual button, not just a text link. That’s simply an aesthetic change, but it’s an interesting choice regardless.
Following that theme, there are no longer text links to actions such as “Select All” or “Select None” — those appear to now exist under a textless drop-down box above the Inbox. Drop-down boxes are ubiquitous in general, actually. Note that the e-mail address at the top menu is accompanied by a drop-down box — could that be the Gmail account switcher that Google promised? We’ll all find eventually, I’m sure.

Look in the chat window and you’ll see a new “Call Phone” button. That might be Google Voice integration. You’ll also see two little buttons in the top-right corner of the Google Talk window; one of those could be a rejiggered settings menu, but it’s hard to tell for sure.

Do you see anything else interesting in this image? Let us know in the comments.

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Google

Gmail

Google Talk

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Shoutitout translate launches live

Shoutitout has launched translate, sites like Twitter have already had this feature for sometime as Twitter works in Italian, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and of course English. Shoutitout plans to launch new languages such as Swedish, French, and Spanish but are also taking request via comment on there blog post OR sending @feedback a mention.

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Shoutitout

Twitter

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Russia is racist, Bans Youtube

A court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has demanded a Russian ISP block access to YouTube because the site hosted “Russia for Russians,” which was judged to be an extremist video.

The court’s decision also applies to the Internet Archive and three online libraries, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, all of which were found to host writings by Adolf Hitler.

With this ruling, Russian authorities join a long list of governments that have blocked access to YouTube at some point or another, including China, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. YouTube material has also been censored in the U.S. and U.K.

Generally, these bans are instituted because the videos on the popular hosting site show something a government would rather its citizens not see, from state police brutality at a protest to unflattering depictions of its leadership to “immoral” or sexual content.

However, this particular ruling stems less from a desire to protect a country’s internal PR and more from a desire to keep Russian media — including citizen-generated and social media — free from the possibly harmful influences of ultranationalist, racist and xenophobic speech. The phrase “Russia for Russians” itself is a slogan of hatred used against the multi-ethnic society that exists in Russia today, and searching for the phrase “Россия для русских” on YouTube will return a number of disturbing videos typical of the white nationalist movement around the world.

But intentions aside, this ruling still constitutes what many other governments would consider a prohibition or restriction of free speech.

The owner of Rosnet, the ISP affected by today’s decision, is Aleksandr Ermakov. He spoke to media today, saying essentially that the court had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

“All of mankind is using this website. And providers like ours do not violate Russian law. But we are still being forced to close the website so that our users can not log on and watch the videos. This is absurd! According to this logic, we have to demolish all buildings that have swastikas on the walls. Or when two people are discussing a bomb over the phone, we have to take away the phones from all people across Russia.”

More on Rosnet’s legal position can be found at this website.

Moreover, a Google rep told the Moscow Times, “To limit access of Rosnet users to the whole YouTube.com site, not to a particular video, breaches the right for freedom of information, guaranteed by Article 29 of Russia’s Constitution.”

What’s your opinion of the court’s ruling? In attempting to safeguard ethnic diversity, did they go too far in the direction of inhibiting free speech and free information? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Google

YouTube

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Facebook Q&A launch

Facebook has begun the rollout of a new feature, Facebook Questions, which will allow users to get answers to their queries from the entire Facebook community.

Similar in concept to Yahoo! Answers, Quora and Mahalo, Facebook Questions gives users the opportunity to ask questions just by clicking the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Questions is also available on friends’ profiles just as you would post on someone’s wall.

We first learned of Facebook’s Q&A feature two months ago, when the company started asking for volunteers to beta test the product. The world’s largest social network even went so far as to promise beta testers a trip to Facebook’s offices to meet with the Q&A team.

I had the chance earlier today to discuss the new feature with several Facebook employees. Questions has several defining features:
Photo questions: For example, if you take a picture of a bird, but don’t know what species it is, you can post the picture on Facebook Questions and get your answer.
Polling: If you’re simply looking for the answer to Which city is better: Chicago or Dallas?, you can get your answer by creating a poll.
Tagging: The company seems to be placing a lot of emphasis on tagging questions based on category or topic. The goal seems to be to make Q&A discovery an easier and faster process by making it simple to look up questions on cooking, photography, San Francisco or a variety of other topics.
Topic exploration: Facebook described this as a roulette-type feature that allows users to browse Facebook’s eventual mountain of Q&A. Under the “Questions about” drop-down menu, there’s a feature called “Everything” that allows users to browse the company’s catalog of questions.
Following: You can follow specific questions for updates and new answers.Updated homepage: Facebook Questions does actually change the homepage, adding a new bar at the top of the page where you can choose to update your status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.

There was one more thing that Facebook made clear to me: Facebook Questions is not an advertising product. While brands with Facebook Pages will eventually be able to answer questions, it’s not meant to be a promotional platform; it’s meant to be a useful and insightful product for users.

Facebook Questions will roll out to a limited group of beta testers today, but the company promises to “bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can.” The entire feature is public, so we don’t suggest posting those awkward bedroom questions on Facebook.

Will Facebook Questions prove to be more useful than Quora or even Twitter as a Q&A platform? We think so, if only because it the biggest advantage of them all: 500 million users.

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Facebook

Mahalo

Quora

Twitter

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Google uses Yelp to take on Yelp

Earlier today, we noted that an update to Google Maps for Mobile was the clearest sign yet of Google going directly after Yelp. But it’s actually even more interesting than we thought.

Key to the new Google Maps for Mobile is Places, the new establishment-centric area which Google has been building up for about the past year or so. Places is basically an evolution of Google Local, which had been around for some time to pull in the best content for various local businesses. Previously, with Google Local, Google was using content they licensed to populate their review excerpts area. But apparently, that’s no longer the case. Google doesn’t have such an agreement with Yelp and yet Yelp content is appearing in Google Places.

And not only that, Yelp data often constitutes a lot of the review content.

Google actually used to have a partnership with Yelp to use their licensed content (read: customer reviews) a few years back, we hear. But Yelp apparently pulled out of that deal after Google was being too aggressive in promoting their own landing pages rather than those of the partners providing the content. But a few months ago, Google changed it policies, and began using content from sources they didn’t have agreements with — this brought Yelp data back into the mix.

And that’s what’s so interesting here. Google Places is now clearly going after Yelp, and the main way they can do that is by providing users with solid restaurant reviews. Some of that content is coming through Google’s agreements with outfits like Zagats and TripAdvisor, but a ton of it is coming from Yelp content that Google is simply getting by crawling it with their search spiders. And the only way Yelp could block this content from Google’s all-seeing eye is by no-indexing their entire site — a move which would effectively kill them since so much of their traffic comes from Google Search results.

And that’s the key to all of this. It’s not just Google Places, Google appears to be squeezing Yelp out of the game across the board. As Google continues to refine their search results pages, they’re clearly putting an emphasis on Maps (and soon, Places) for results. This highlights Google content, rather than third-parties like Yelp. These are being pushed farther down the results page.

And even though Google is using a good amount of Yelp content to populate its review areas, they’re shoving the reviews to the bottom of the results, below the reviews from licensed partners. The problem here is pages like this one for a burrito places in San Francisco. Of the 61 reviews listed, something 30-something of them are from Yelp. And yet the Yelp ones are all displayed below other ones from TripAdvisor, CitySearch, etc. Here’s another example — Yelp reviews start on page 11.

Obviously, the ramifications of this go far beyond Yelp. While the New York Times op/ed a couple weeks ago went a bit far in suggesting the government should oversee Google’s algorithm, their main point of Google using their power to bolster their own offerings and squeeze out competitors is a very real concern. And that’s exactly what this Yelp situation is all about — it’s just an especially sexy story since Google tried to buy Yelp last year and were scorned.

Speaking of which, some people will probably try to argue that perhaps Yelp should have seen this coming when they walked away from the $500 million+ offer from Google late last year. But this just seems unusually cruel. It looks a lot like Google is using Yelp’s content to bolster their offering — and paying them in swift punches to the face.

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Google

Yelp

TripAdvisor

Zagat

Google Maps

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Twitter getting its own data center in Utah

As you may have noticed, Twitter has had some reliability issues over the past few months. Part of this was related to the World Cup, part of it is because they just continue to grow at a fast pace — 300,000 new accounts are created a day now. It has gotten to the point where Twitter needs their own warehouse for tweet storage. So they’re building one, in Salt Lake City.

While it undoubtedly won’t be as large as Apple’s forthcoming billion-dollar data center in North Carolina, Twitter says they have been working on a “custom-built” one that will be opening later this year.

“Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter,” Twitter’s Jean-Paul Cozzatti writes on the Engineering Blog today.

“Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications,” he continues.

Up until now, Twitter was using data centers built by NTT America in the Bay Area. “We’ll continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint. This is our first custom-built data center,” a Twitter representative tells us.

This move follows Facebook announcing its own data center back in January. That center is in Oregon, where many other companies have data centers as well — including Amazon and Google. The reason? Cheap power, a good climate (read: cooler), and tax incentives for companies to build these centers there. I’ve asked Twitter if similar reasons are behind the decision to build in Utah.

Twitter appears to be on a massive PR offensive to explain to users why they keep going down (or keep shutting off certain features — like the ability to sign-up). Twitter has a post on its main blog about this, and another post by Cozzatti that goes into the issues in detail.

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Twitter

Facebook

Apple

Jean-Paul Cozzatti

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Shoutitout gets a new badge

Shoutitout has just launched its first new badge since badges came out on the site, the badge is called the Megaphone bade and is awarded to users who forward 10 checkins to Twitter or Facebook.

The badge is most likely to help promote there network because with the checkins there is a link which of course goes back to Shoutitout. The badge is yet to be unlocked though a few years like @willy are close to getting it.

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Twitter

Facebook

Shoutitout

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Twitter is missing @replies

Yesterday, users and developers started complaining of missing @replies in Twitter streams. At first Twitter infrastructure engineer John Kalucki wrote in the forum that the mentions timelines were updating with additional latency but the issue should be fixed. However, developers and users continued to not see missing @replies on the network.

Twitter just confirmed that @ replies have disappeared from some timelines for no apparent reason and are currently working on a fix for the problem. According to the recent post: Some users are experiencing an issue in which they’re not receiving all of their @ replies; we’re working on a fix.

It’s unclear what the cause of the issue is but Twitter has been experiencing major downtime due to increased traffic from The World Cup. However, it seems that @replies started to go missing yesterday, a day which didn’t include any major World Cup games. Last week, the network even slashed its API rate, taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175 for third party developers. And the network just rescheduled its ‘oAuthcalypse’ thanks to the downtime.

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Twitter

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Short.to shutting down

Short.to the small but not tiny link shortener is shutting down. The site did get a good 60-70k views a month which is a decent amount. Its links appear to still work and if you used Twitdroid or any other app that uses short.to to shorten Twitter links it still works. The links already shortened threw the site also work at the moment. The site itself shows a small message saying that the services is shutting down and that they need to use bit.ly instead. We will update you if we get more information.

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bit.ly

Twitter

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Dailybooth now lets you connect with other sites

As Twitter launched the option to find your Facebook friends a few days ago, then it got blocked, and hasn't been fixed yet, Dailybooth has done the same but thrown Gmail and Twitter in there two. You have to login then connect to which ever site you are using, then you login and it refreshes the page with the users that are on Twitter and Dailybooth that you are following emails or Facebooking. You can then follow the ones you aren't following! We aren't sure how Dailybooth finds out whos Twitter is whos because when I tried it I know I have more people I follow on Dailybooth and Twitter but whatever its still a great feature!

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DailyBooth

Twitter

Facebook

Gmail

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Which is nicer Cliqset V.2, Youtube re design or Shoutitout V.2.0

Some large sites we love to right about have rolled out new designs, now allot of sites including Google have done this but 3 most major re designers this year so far have been Youtube, Cliqset, and Shoutitout.

Youtube:

Pros:

First of Youtube, Youtube has launched a new version with better player designs and pulling in the liking option along with the option to not like something a feature Facebook has been pounded for not having. The new design also allows features from other sites including @mentions in the comments of videos. It also lets import social media such as Twitter and Facebook and get short URLs at Youtubes link shortener youtu.be which launched about half a year ago.

Noes:

Youtube users don't like change. They protested when Youtube switched from there original channel design to the new "beta channels" a year or so ago, and they complained about this. The "links in the sidebar" phrase is gone now because the description is now below the video box so all those videos saying that are lying! The new phrase is "links below" or "links in my pants."

Cliqset:

Pros:

The new version of Cliqset supports more social networks than it used to with 80 instead of 70, Friendfeed the leader at the moment in that department only has 58 and you can't forward to them and lifestream.fm the 3rd place holder has 32 imported services. The new design also bring in the new versions of the internet with fancy java and HTML5 use, plus new ways to log in!

Noes:

The site is a little over cluttered and it takes a little longer to login I think, it is also a little hard to find your way around on because certain options such as which services you have connect used to be on the homepage and are now a few clicks into the site.

Shoutitout

Pros:

Shoutitouts new layout was an upgrade into the JAVA world with extreme design improvements. This is when Shoutitout really got into location, though they already offered location posts, they had dent gotten into the Checkin option in till this roll out. They also launched badges for checkins, likes and subscribes, which is something no other site at this time has. This also allowed new video sites like Vimeo and Metacafe to connect and allow Shoutitout users to post onto the site threw Shout and brought in the Like and comment options similar to Facebook.

Noes:

They have had design issues and allot of over capacity since the new design. They have also spent allot of time maintaining this design so they have rolled out less features than they were and are taking longer to roll out new features.

So which is better? Youtube, Shoutitout, or Cliqset? You vote!

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Cliqset

YouTube

Shoutitout

FriendFeed

lifestream.fm

Vimeo

Metacafe

Facebook

Twitter

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Cliqset rolls out new design

Cliqset the site expected to take over the Friendfeed market has rolled out a new design, though allot faster and fancier it is a little jammed packed. This is a picture of the new user page,

The site now offers New users along with its Popular users feature that was already out. They also allow some type of Google Buzz search. We aren't sure what it is yet we think it lets you search users that are connected to Google Buzz. I think Cliqset is defiantly the next Friendfeed and needs some competition! This is Cliqset tutorial video.

Cliqset - Getting started from cliqset on Vimeo.

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Cliqset

FriendFeed

Google Buzz

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l.pr not working

l.pr the smaller link shortener and official link shortener of Shoutitout seems to not be working. The site itself is up but when you enter a link and hit the button to convert it, it simply loads the page again without the link. If you enter the option to customize the link the same thing happens. L.pr doesn't have a Twitter therefore we aren't sure what is up. We have emailed them telling them there site is un active and asking them why but they have not answered yet. We have used L.pr before but prefer to use bit.ly or ow.ly. Just to make sure it isn't just our browsers wifi hosts or computers leave a comment if you are having the same problem!

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OW.LY

bit.ly

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Disney goes dancing

Tapulous has been acquired by Disney. The iPhone gaming startup with several hits on its hands was founded by Bart Decrem, who will join Disney as a VP. COO Andrew Lacy is also joining Disney as a VP. Disney is very interested in social and mobile gaming, having recently invested in Playdom’s $33 million round.

Tapulous is a hot iPhone gaming startup which has raised only $1.8 million from angel investors including Marc Benioff, Jeff Clavier, and Andy Bechtolsheim. Legendary Silicon Valley mentor and Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani, who passed away last year, was also an investor. Its flagship game, Tap Tap Revenge, has numerous versions which have been downloaded millions of times. The basic game, which lets players tap to the rhythm of songs with their fingers is free, but players must pay for new songs. Its latest game is Tap Tap Radiation for the iPad.

Tapulous’ music-oriented games appeal to a younger crowd in particular. The company puts out versions of Tap Tap Revenge featuring the songs of specific artists such as Justin Bieber Revenge, Lady Gaga Revenge, Nickelback Revenge, and Nine Inch Nails Revenge. Its other mobile music, Riddim Ribbon is also a hit.

Disney Interactive Studios sells a slew of video games built around Disney movies and characters such as Toy Story, Cars, and Hannah Montana. Most of these games are for consoles like the Xbox, PS3, or GameBoy. Buying Tapulous gets it into the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad gaming platform and gives it a strong presence in music-related games.

(More details coming)

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The Walt Disney Company

Tapulous

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iPhone

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