Initially, Bing has selected some thousand prominent Twitterers from different domains. The selection was based on the number of followers and the volume of tweets they produce.

Some of the prominent personalities include:

• Search analyst, Danny Sullivan
• American environmental activist, Al Gore
• American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest
• Actor, Ashton Kutcher
• Technology journalist, Kara Swisher, etc.

Bing will use Twitter’s public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.

How does it work?

• Just search for some of these names with the word Twitter. For instance: “Ryan Seacrest Twitter” or “Ryan Seacrest Tweets” or even “@ryanseacrest”
• You’ll see their latest Tweets show up in real time on Bing’s search results like
  • Person’s latest Tweets
  • A link to “See more tweets” from that individual

Unlike other search engines, Bing will display multiple tweets within a single defined box, a search for say “Kara Swisher Twitter.”

Bing happens to be the first major search engine to integrate with Twitter in this way. Hopefully this move would keep the buzz alive.

(Source & Image credits: Bing search blog)

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This new feature will allow you to drag and drop your emails to the labels. If you log in to your Gmail account for the first time after these changes are made, a new Gmail promo will greet you. The labeling features are slowly being rolled-out, so if you don’t see them right now, maybe it’s on its way to your Gmail.

Changes to Gmail’s labeling toolkit

• New location for labels
• Label hiding and showing
• Drag and drop

Features

• Gmail seems to have moved labels in a new location, i.e., on the left of the Inbox. People using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail will see the labels on the right.

• The labels do not have their own little section anymore, rather appear above the chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels.

• With this new feature, you can set your own choice of labels to show on your screen. Gmail will show you the most commonly used labels by default, and will hide the rest, that you could access anytime using the “more” link.

• The exact same thing as “Move to”, you can also label by simply dragging in one simple step:
  • messages into labels
  • labels onto messages
  • labels into the “more” menu to hide them (and vice versa).

How does it work?

• To drag an email, just click and hold at the left end of the email (where you see the little dots), and drag and drop that email to any of the labels.
• To show, hide, or delete a label, click the down-arrow to the left of that label.
• To make many changes at once, go to the Labels tab under Settings and edit labels in bulk.

The new features will make labeling easy and more organized for the users, Gmail hopes. Tell us what you think.

(Source & Image credits: Gmail blog)

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These changes follow the recent announcement of new privacy controls on Facebook to hide updates from unwanted audience. The changes will be tested with 40,000 Facebook members in the US and will probably appear over the next few weeks everywhere else in the world.

Twitter Threat?

Many believe that Facebook, in the recent past, has been facing stiff competition with the growing popularity of the micro-blogging site Twitter. As a result of this, the social networking site is making all possible attempts to catch up by making its tools simpler for its members to use.

With this move, Facebook hopes that people will be more comfortable posting items as easily and freely as they do on Twitter and other services.

Effective Privacy

Facebook is tailoring its privacy controls based on 3 principles:

1. Control
2. Simplicity
3. Connection

Condense, Simplify!

Less than a quarter of Facebook users regularly adjust privacy settings. These changes on Facebook will help condense and simplify the existing 40 different options on more than six pages, and bring them all into a single, easy-to-navigate page.

• Now you get to decide your audience by simply going to one page. All you need to do is set who all should have access to your posts, updates or personal information on Facebook – friends, people in your network, everyone.
• You also have the option to change settings for each piece of the content you post on Facebook.
• By using the recommended setting, you can make your basic info and content posts that you don’t mind anyone to view, public.

Not as “simple” as it may sound?

Although the new system is bringing with it some pretty cool options, but the question that arises is, how many people would want to bother themselves with it or will realize the implications of public sharing? By giving the users too many options, you give them many choices to choose from. This inadvertently makes the process more complex.

Do share your comments on what you think.

(Source: Fb blog)

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Vizerra

Vizerra is the first world’s first 3D educational portal which enable its users to travel to different historic locations Old Town Square, Macchu Picchu and Angkor Vat directly from your computer. This software is useful for those lazy guys and girls who are curious but do not want to spend their money on traveling to particular destination. Besides offering high quality 3D copies of these sites, it also provides audio guides with detailed description made by reputable publishers and museums. Each model comes with a comprehensive description (just like Wikipedia) that provides users more information such as the history, culture and many more.

According to Vizerra, they have launched many locations and they have focused on launching 3 different locations per month and about 30 locations by the end of 2009.

(Source: Vizerra)

[Editor's Note: This post is submitted by our guest blogger Dinesh Verma, alias WorldOfQuest. Dinesh is passionate about blogging and tries to provide all what people need today- WEB2.0 through his blog Teen Tech Guru.

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

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What does Google Toolbar for IE do?

• The feature automatically detects the language of the web page that you are on.
• It then checks for your default language setting.
• If the language differs from your default language, then the toolbar gives you the option to translate the content with just one click.
• If you navigate to another page in the same language, the toolbar will continue to translate the content for you.
• For dynamic content, the translations will happen in real-time.
• If Google observes that you are translating content in mostly one particular language, then the toolbar in the future will allow you to translate that language automatically without any extra clicks.

Features

• Instant web page translations with the automatic language detection.
• Faster browsing and instant suggestions as you type in the search box.
• Easy launch of apps and websites with the Quick Search Box.

There is more good news for all. This feature will soon be on Firefox as well.

Click here to learn more about the toolbar.

Link: Dowload toolbar

(Source & Image credits: Google blog)

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Here is what pages contain:

• Full names
• Locations
• Most recent tweets
• A one-click follow button
• Drop-down menu of social actions like:
  • @replies
  • Direct messages
  • Blocking
  • Mobile update subscription
• A collapsed “List View” added to the traditional “Expanded View”

As per the Twitter blog post:

“When you click on the Following and Followers links from your Twitter home page, you’ll notice that we’ve upgraded the design of these pages and added features. Instead of a basic list, there are now actions you can perform that provide a better overall experience. For example, you can turn on SMS, unfollow, mention, block, direct message, and more. Tip: You can also view the accounts that someone else is following and follow them yourself.”

Hopefully the changes that have been rolled out will make it easier for people to work with their ‘follower’ and ‘following’ lists, which is directly from the web interface now. Check it out and share your feedback on what you think.

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The Pirate Bay - trapped in legal issues

The acquisition seems hardly surprising. The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as the plaintiff and as the defendant. On 17 April 2009, The Pirate Bay was trapped in a trial of nine days, after which the company founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of millions of dollars (app. $3.62 million).

GGF hopes to turn the site into a legal source of free music, movies and other content, using a new business model.

Says Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF:

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site. The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers need faster downloads and better quality.”

Site’s basic ethos to remain the same

The Pirate Bay site’s basic ethos should not be affected due to the sale, which connects BitTorrent networks to allow users to swap music, video or game files. However, the operators of The Pirate Bay will allow users to delete their accounts on the torrent-tracking site, since many users have requested for this after the deal to sell the site was announced.

The Pirate Bay is a website which allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download the data files from other users. It is one of the 100 most visited websites in the world. Global Gaming will be looking to cash in on the site’s popularity.

However, from here on, the sail for Pirate Bay in the turbulent ocean might not be as easy as it sounds.

(Source: GGF)

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The authorities seem to have gone a little too far.

International criticism

Thankfully, due to the international criticism it faced, China has backed down and officially announced a delay in the “mandatory installation of the filtering software- Green Dam Youth Escort on all new PCs in China.” We, however, do not yet know how soon this mandate will be restored. The software will probably be further improved, upgraded before it is made compulsory again.

The software will, however, be available for download from 1 July, i.e., today, and will be installed on computers in schools and internet cafes.

Bizarre results

Green Dam Youth Escort is basically a content-control software developed in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Under a directive from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the PRC, it was mandatory to have either the software, or its setup files pre-installed on, or shipped on a compact disc with, all personal computers sold in Mainland China, including those imported from abroad.

The software works by not only tracking key words but also color, leading to some off-the-wall results.

Security vulnerabilities

On 11 June 2009, Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan located “various security vulnerabilities that can allow “malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet” and “the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process”.

• Buffer overflow vulnerabilities may occur when the software performs URL filtering or updates its blacklist filter files due to the use of fixed-length buffers.
• It can corrupt the execution stack.
• It can allow execution of malicious code.
• The feature of automatic filter update opens door to the computer being remotely controlled by the software’s makers.

They recommended that users uninstall the software immediately for protection.

In addition to security vulnerabilities, Wolchok, Yao and Halderman also found that a number of blacklist files used by Green Dam Youth Escort were taken from the censorship program CyberSitter, from Solid Oak Software Inc.

More than $7 million has been spent by the Chinese Government in developing the Green Dam Youth Escort. If we were to go by the rumors, then the censorship officials have a financial stake in the company that produces it.

(Source: xinhuanet)

(Image credit: Garfield)

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To bypass this countdown timer, a wonderful firefox addon is out by the name of skipscreen.

SkipScreen skips unwanted pages on popular filesharing sites like:

# Rapidshare
# Megaupload
# Mediafire
# Uploaded.to
# zShare
# Sharebee
# DepositFiles
# Sendspace
# Divshare
# Linkbucks
# Link-protector

Above is the official list on Skipscreen Site. To bypass timelimit on 4shared install  auto download script from Crimechamber.

Free users will now find rapidshare more fun. Just open the url on multiple tabs and sleep. Skipscreen works for you.

Install addon from here

If you have problems installing the addon or have issues with functioning, please report, we will take this to the attention of Skipscreen Admins.

Links: Crimechamber | Userscripts | Mozilla

[Editor's Note: This post is submitted by our guest blogger Srinivas Rajkumar. Srinivas is a a medical student, a Blogger and a Web-addicted Linux user from Cape Comorin. He blogs at Crimechamber that mainly covers the topic of  medicine, and also deals with technology related posts from time to time.

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

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World wide real-time Firefox downloads is a micro site developed to showcase the amazingly fast canvas rendering capabilities of Firefox 3.5. This page uses no applets, no flash or any other plugin to render real-time firefox downloads on a world map! It actually plots graphs in real time at a lightning speed using a magical blend of server and client side magic! Try dragging/scrolling the Canvas map, its really nice work. Here is another fabulous example of what can be achieved using the canvas element and its improved rendering capabilities. This is a first person shooter game (remember Wolfestine 3D?) completely coded using JS and Canvas. Whats surprising is that the code size of this whole game is just 13.33 kb!

Had enough of the canvas element. Well, there is more to the new Firefox apart from canvas and fast rendering JS. Session Restore is one such feature. As quoted by Mozilla, “If Firefox or your computer unexpectedly closes, you don’t have to spend time recovering data or retracing your steps through the Web. If you’re in the middle of typing an email, you’ll pick up where you left off, even down to the last word you typed. Session Restore instantly brings back your windows and tabs, restoring text you entered and any in-progress downloads.”

Video tag support is what all of us were expecting, however its really amazing to watch it in action. Checkout this embeded video to understand what I mean (will work only on Firefox 3.5). Apart from a demo of the HTML5’s video tag, the video content will also give you an overview of a lot of other interesting features.

(Source: mozilla.com/firefox, some bit of Googling and tweets by John Resig)
(Image credits: lifehacker.com)

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

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