Latest Posts from Download Squad

To kick off his keynote at SXSW, Evan Williams, Twitter's CEO, announced the @anywhere platform.

This platform will allow site owners to integrate Twitter information and features directly into their sites. For example, a blog with @anywhere integration would allow a user to hover over the blogger's name to pop up a Twitter box where the user could see if he/she was following the blogger, follow them if not, and even tweet the blogger directly from the site.

Additionally, the @anywhere platform can act as a login provider, similar to Facebook Connect.

This will be launched soon on a number of sites including; Bing, The New York Times, Amazon, Meebo, Youtube, Salesforce, Digg, Yahoo, etc.

"Beyond Algorithms: search and the semantic web" featured some heavy hitters in the search world talking about the future of search, including:

• Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri and because of the recent aquisition, Twine
• Carla Thompson, Senior Analyst for the Guidewire Group
• Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director of Wolfram Alpha
• Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land
• Nova Spivak, Founder of Twine and now LiveMatrix.com
• Dag Kittlaus, Co-Founder and CEO of Siri
• Barney Pell from Bing
• Gil Elbaz, Founder of Factual.com

With a heated start to the discussion over the usefulness of the word "semantic", the most interesting statement was made by Dag Kittlaus, saying his time in the Valley has revealed a surprising lack of creativity around the search topic.

Here are some of the more interesting parts of the rest of the conversation...

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It appears that Microsoft's partnership with Nokia to port Silverlight to Symbian will soon bear fruit.

Microsoft posted the developer tools and the beta version of the code on March 11th but then quickly pulled them down again. Mary Jo Foley thinks it may launch at Mix next week.

Mobile may be the killer app to get Silverlight in more users hands. With Silverlight being heavily integrated with the up coming Windows Phone 7, soon with Symbian and even talk of a port to Android, Microsoft will significantly expand its reach with the platform.

The MIX conference next week will certainly be interesting as Microsoft pushes to reclaim the mobile space.

[via ZDNet]

With a large Windows Phone 7 Series sign calling me I set out to find an actual working example of a new Windows powered phone. With a little finagling was able to sweet talk my way into the Microsoft's blogger lounge at South by Southwest Interactive.

While there seems to be only one example running around here somewhere, which I'm working to track down, there was a demo of the OS on a touch screen TV.

Here are some of the features that stood out....

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Next Tuesday French lawmakers will vote on a bill dubbed 'Loppsi 2' that will give the authorities the power to force ISPs to block access to any web address.

The intention of the bill is to allow French authorities to block sites in order to prevent the distribution of child pornography, but ultimately gives the government unilateral control to filter the internet. Amendments to the bill requiring a judge to review the list of filtered sites every month and making the filters temporary to review their effectiveness were rejected.

Under the current language, the blocked list will be kept secret with no judicial oversight. Theoretically, the administration could decide to block Google, Facebook, or any internet address that they consider to be in violation.

The bill has been deemed 'Urgent' so as to bypass the usual four readings before a vote -- and will instead go to the French Senate for a final vote next week, if passed.

Is it me, or are more western democracies looking a lot more like China and Iran then they should? Seems to be a lot of blocking going around the nets these days.

You can read more about the legislation here and from Le Monde here.

[via Slashdot & Good Gear Guide]

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If you hate the Facebook inbox as much as I do, this will come as welcome news; according to TechCrunch, Facebook will soon be launching a full webmail client.

Dubbed Project Titan it will be a full blown mail client similar to Gmail with full POP and IMAP support. According to Michael Arrington your address will be your current Vanity URL @facebook.com.

With 350 million active Facebook users automatically getting a new email address all other webmail services are about to get a monsterous new competitor.

If you ever find yourself doing repetitive task on your computer, pay attention. Sikuli is an important step toward removing the barrier between the average computer user and programming.

Normally, to make a computer do a repetitive task, you'd need to understand a programming language like Java, Objective C or C#. To perform some remedial task like starting iTunes and kicking off a play list you'd need to write a whole mess of code and understand the API's for that application.

Sikuli gets around this by using picture based computing. Instead of needing intimate knowledge of a particular API or language you simply use Sikuli script to take an action on an area of the screen it finds by you giving it a picture.

Read more »

Competitive? Run a website? Curious to see how your favorite sites rank? I have just the thing.

WooRank is a new service that summarizes your entire website in one decidedly useful shot. Highlights include:

• Traffic estimation numbers using Google data, Alexa & Compete rankings
• An internal site SEO analysis with a Text/HTML ratio
• Off-site SEO with link counts from Delicious, Digg, Twitter & Wikipedia as well as a back link count total -- Nice
• It even does a Whois lookup and shows if the site is using compression

Good stuff. It summarizes all this using some behind the curtains wizardry to create a single score they call the woorank. Without knowing more about the algorithm it's hard to say if this number is meaningful but from their About page I would assume it's based heavily on search criteria Google finds relevant.

They appear to be adding features rapidly; in the last 24 hours a PDF feature appeared that will send the summary to an email address. The current services are free with unspecified premium features coming soon.

Yesterday Google launched a personalized search suggestions technology for Google Maps. These suggestions are based on your previous Google web history.

Using previous web as well as location searches, Google Maps attempts to find results tailored to you. An example from the Google Earth and Maps blog: "...if you've looked at cafes on Google Maps with past searches, you might see them as suggestions when typing the word 'coffee'". So like web search it will look for related words. Pretty smart.

Useful stuff, but since today is International Data Privacy Day, it's probably worth pointing out that while this feature can certainly be useful, it's also a good reminder that Google is collecting an awful lot of data about you.