SuperSite Blog : Internet

Microsoft Reveals Bing Video Experience

pthurrott — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:26:51 GMT

Microsoft today expanded the capabilities of its Bing decision engine to include a new Bing Video destination that combines Bing video search and quality content from MSN Video.

The integrated experience provides a new online video destination that delivers a comprehensive and faster video experience with video search tools from Bing. This new experience offers the widest selection of high quality video services on the web including TV shows, videos, and content from top sites such as Hulu, MSN, ABC, and YouTube. The new Bing Videos experience begins rolling out today and will be fully available on both Bing and MSN by mid-November.

Here's the word from the Bing blog:

Turn off the lights (literally), share with your friends and kick back…you are about to see the latest Bing videos experience.

Starting today and rolling out over the next few days Bing videos will provide a new unified online video destination that delivers a comprehensive, organized, and high-quality video experience. This change will combine the powerful search experience of Bing, with the expertise of MSN video all into one destination.

With the New Bing Video you can now access videos from across the web, MSN’s array of high-quality videos, and videos from sites such as Hulu, ABC, and Youtube. Bing videos viewing options are nearly endless.

Check out the cool new home page which makes it easy to search and browse for the videos you want to see.

Twitter Comes to Bing

pthurrott — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:48:47 GMT

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, President of Microsoft's Online Services Division, announced a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter's real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.

According to Microsoft, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:

A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what's going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by "best match," where Bing considers a Tweeter's popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, they select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.

More info can be found on the Bing blog:

Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.

Search needs to keep up.

Today we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out.

Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support

pthurrott — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:57:27 GMT

This is big stuff, and if there's anyone actually paying for MobileMe a year from now, well, you already looked like a fool, so what's the difference?

The Google Mobile Blog reports today that Google has added push email support to Google Sync, which previously provided that support for Google-based contacts and calendar on the iPhone (and iPod touch), Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia S60 devices. Here's the word:

Earlier this year, we launched Google Sync which allows you to synchronize your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with your iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 devices. Today, we're adding Gmail support to Google Sync for iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile devices.

Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone. Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Sync works with your phone's native email application so there's no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.

To try Google Sync, visit m.google.com/sync from your computer. If you're already using Google Sync, learn how to enable Gmail sync.

Good stuff. Enjoy!

Google Chrome 3.0

pthurrott — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:08:31 GMT

Just one year into its life and 2.8 percent market share later, Google Chrome hits the big 3.0...

Thanks to a full year of great feedback from our users, we're kicking off our second year of Google Chrome with a brand new stable release. This stable release incorporates many of the improvements and features that we tested out in our most recent beta release, including a 150% increase in Javascript performance since our very first beta, a freshly redesigned New Tab page, an improved Omnibox, Themes capability, as well as HTML5 features.

If you haven't tried Google Chrome recently, we invite you to give it a whirl. Many of the improvements in this release were inspired by the responses from users, so we're all ears if you have any feedback. If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon, but if you're itching to try this right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.

More info at the Official Google Blog ...

This new release of Google Chrome is faster than ever, as we continue to provide a modern browser that starts up quickly from your desktop, and is fast to load web pages and web applications.

Notably, we've improved by more than 150% in Javascript performance since our very first beta, and by more than 25% since the most recent stable release.

When you download and fire up this latest release of Google Chrome, you'll notice that the New Tab page sports a new look. We've redesigned the New Tab page so that it's easy to use and easily customizable, following some rigorous testing.

We've also improved one of the most used and loved features of Google Chrome, the Omnibox. Because it's a search bar as well as the web address bar, the multi-talented Omnibox helps you get to the sites you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. With this release, we've optimized the presentation of the drop-down menu and added little icons to help you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.

We're very excited about HTML5 becoming standard in modern browsers, and continued to add HTML5 capabilities to this stable release. We're particularly excited about the <video> tag in HTML5, which makes embedding videos in a page as simple as embedding regular images. The <video> tag also allows video playback without a plug-in.

After testing out Themes for Google Chrome in the beta channel, we're finally releasing it in this stable release. Themes allow you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns and images. We'll be bringing more Themes for the browser soon, but in the meantime, you can change the theme of your browser by visiting the Themes Gallery.

Going Google: It's not a slam dunk yet, sorry

pthurrott — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:22:00 GMT

Google has started up an interesting ad campaign in four major US cities (including Boston) in which it touts the benefits and simplicity of moving to Google Apps. Here's some info about this from the Official Google Blog:

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email.

The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better.

Here at Google, we have a term for the moment a company realizes there's a better way and goes for it: "going Google." Over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have gone Google — including Motorola, University of Notre Dame, the Mercy Corps and many more — and each day, 3,000 more organizations join them. We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we're telling the story in a new way. We're kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks. The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually — you guessed it — goes Google.

Visit www.google.com/appsatwork to get more information about the benefits of going Google. Already gone Google? Tweet your story and check out our tools to help spread the word.

In keeping with my recent talk and Microsoft Gets FAMiliar with Cloud Strategy article, I should point out the following observations. Gmail and Google Calendar work primarily because they are simple and efficient. (Though they can be made less so with various "labs" add-ons now.) This is exactly why I use these solutions myself. They're just superior. Microsoft's web-based version of Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA) does not work because it is big, busy, and slow. It is in fact, too much like the desktop version of Outlook, which also does not work (for me at least). But at least OWA does get away from that "tied to one machine" issue that dogs desktop Outlook. So for online activities--email and calendar--I feel that Google has already won. Gmail and Google Calendar are better.

For productivity applications, there is Microsoft Office and then there are older versions of Microsoft Office. Nothing else compares, and that includes OpenOffice.org (and its many derivatives), iWork, and, yes, Google Docs. Microsoft, of course, is busy porting four Office 2010 apps to the web as part of Office Web Applications (also, awkwardly, OWA). Office Web Apps will be free. This solution is vastly superior to Google Apps. It's not even close.

So. Where does this lead us? Ultimately, the conclusion is the same as almost any debate about cloud computing. While some Luddites believe that desktop-only solutions (Outlook, Office) are all they'll ever need, and starry-eyed idealists (myself, certainly sometimes) believe that the future is all-cloud, the reality is that, today certainly, hybrids solutions are best. So for all those guys supposedly "going Google", I bet a huge percentage are using Gmail/Google Calendar in the cloud, but also using Microsoft Office locally. (Go figure, but that's what I'm doing.) It's not about idealism, it's about using the best solution. And right now, neither company--Google or Microsoft--has one across the board. Office Web Apps will keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, at least partially. But it won't help the email/PIM picture at all. Nor will stem the flood of people who are, in fact, moving to the cloud.

Microsoft's proposed browser ballot screen

pthurrott — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:53:05 GMT

I'm embarrassed to say I missed this last week, but when Microsoft announced its proposal to let EU customers choose a browser via a so-called ballot screen, they also provided an image of what that screen could look like. Here it is.

Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world. As requested by the Commission, we will be publishing our proposal in full here on our website as soon as possible.

The icons above were no doubt the inspiration for Opera's newest complaint, that icons should not be used because IE's blue "E" logo is, to many people, the Internet. I suppose a more valid argument could be made about the order in which the browsers appear. In the shot above, the browsers are listed by usage/market share, with IE first.

Browser ballot screen isn't just for Windows 7

pthurrott — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:48:58 GMT

Mary Jo Foley reports on an interesting tidbit I missed while traipsing around The Netherlands this week: Microsoft's proposal to let EU users choose from competing web browsers isn't relegated to Windows 7. They'll offer this capability on Windows XP and Windows Vista as well.

The “ballot screen” isn’t for Windows 7 users only. Microsoft is proposing that it be allowed to provide the ballot screen to European users running Windows XP, Vista and/or Windows 7.

The ballot screen — which will include a list of browsers including IE, plus a number of choices from competing vendors — will be delivered to current and future XP and Vista users over Windows Update, according to Microsoft’s proposal.

Microsoft is advocating that the ballot screen include 10 or fewer of “the most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows with a usage share of equal to or more than 0.5% in the EEA (European Economic Area).” The choice of browsers should be presented “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way” a display of icons and “basic identifying information” on the Web browsers. The top five of the browsers listed (by market share) will get additional “prominent display,” Microsoft is advocating.

XP and Vista users will get the ballot screen three to six months after the European Commission’s final ruling in the Opera antitrust case. For XP users, Microsoft plans to designate the ballot screen a “high priority” update when it pushes it out over Windows Update; for Vista and Windows 7 users, the ballot screen will be designated “important,” the proposal says.

Here's to hoping that this condition leaves Opera off the list. I'm not sure if I mentioned this here in the blog yet, but I'd advocate a boycott of Opera if I thought anyone was actually using the damn thing. I'm so tired of these complainers. Here's a new example why. The people have spoken, Opera. Please go away.

Microsoft shutting down MSN Soapbox

pthurrott — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:37:48 GMT

No big surprise, since I was apparently the only non-Microsoft employee to ever use the service. (Never heard of it? You're not alone. It was Microsoft's "answer" to You Tube.) Here's an email I received this week:

MSN will no longer offer Soapbox, the user generated video service within MSN Video, as of August 31, 2009. Beginning on July 29, you will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox. People who have uploaded videos to Soapbox will have until August 31, 2009 to download them. Please make sure you download your videos by this date if you would like to keep them. We will have a notice running in the Soapbox service to remind you to download your videos. It is our goal that you download and keep all of the videos you uploaded that are important to you. Online video is a key part of the MSN experience and we will continue to offer a rich experience on MSN Video. We will also continue to invest in delivering great customer experiences, while keeping a keen eye on our business objectives during this tough economic climate. Thank you for your support of MSN Video. More details and download instructions are available at: http://video.msn.com/shutdown.html

Thank you for using Soapbox.

The MSN Video Team

Firefox 3.5.1

pthurrott — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:58:23 GMT

Not a huge deal, but Mozilla has bumped up Firefox 3.5 a bit in the past 24 hours.

What’s New in Firefox 3.5.1

Firefox 3.5.1 fixes the following issues:

Several security issues.

Several stability issues.

An issue that was making Firefox take a long time to load on some Windows systems.

Please see the complete list of changes in this version. You may also be interested in the Firefox 3.5 release notes for a list of changes in the previous version.

How to download a web browser in Windows 7 E (which doesn't come with its own browser)

pthurrott — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:57:36 GMT

Rafael offers up an interesting step-by-step guide to finding a web browser in the supposedly browser-less Windows 7 E Editions, which will be afflicting folks in Europe in about 3 months:

Mom and Dad will likely get a pre-built machine, by either a popular manufacturer or their kids, so this isn’t a problem for them. Us, on the other hand, are incredibly lazy. We won’t want to bend down and grab one of a million USB fobs. Or put yet another executable on our NAS. Or heaven forbid, waste a CD. We need something clever.

Step 1 – Launch (and configure) Windows Media Player

Step 2 – Search for your browser, using the Windows Media Guide

Step 3 – Click an ad, download your browser

Read the original post for the full details, of course. Good stuff.

My advice, however, is to just avoid this silliness and download a browser before installing Windows 7 E, copy it to a USB thumb drive or whatever, and just plug it in after the OS is up and running.

BTW: Anyone who mentions the word "Trident" like that's news just doesn't get it. Windows Media Player has long been documented to use the IE rendering engine. And Microsoft has been very upfront that the Windows 7 E Editions do not have IE, the application, but do have the underlying rendering technologies required by other applications.

Chrome OS to be free, Google says

pthurrott — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:03:34 GMT

The Google Chrome Blog comes to life again with the following tidbits...

Google Chrome OS is an open source project and will be available to use at no cost.

The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

There are even some job openings if you're so inclined.

Microsoft integrates Bing with Hotmail

pthurrott — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:49:46 GMT

From Microsoft:

Bing – Microsoft’s decision engine – has come to Windows Live Hotmail through a new feature unique to Hotmail, called quick add. Gone are the days of shuffling between multiple windows to search for a map to email to party guests or the latest viral video to share with friends and family. Quick add – powered by Bing – puts an end to the multi-window chaos so you can accomplish tasks faster, and allows consumers to ‘Bing and decide’ from the comfort of their Hotmail inbox.

Windows Live Hotmail customers can find and share information more easily with quick add:

Search for maps, restaurants, movie times, images, videos and business listings, all within your Hotmail inbox.

Insert maps, business addresses, restaurant and business reviews and more directly into the body of an email in a few simple clicks.

Preview and insert videos and images from the web without leaving your inbox.

To try it firsthand, visit hotmail.com and check out the right-hand side of the screen when composing a new message. Or, check out this demo and this blog post for screenshots of quick add, and more information about how Hotmail’s integration with Bing makes it easier for consumers to share information via email.

Nice!

Worst blog post ever? Or worst blog ever?

pthurrott — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:46:28 GMT

I used to think of lazy bloggers as being the bottom feeders of the web. (You know, people who blog about absolutely nothing and then end the post with, "Thoughts?" or "Discuss!" in some weird bid to get an actual conversation going.) But this one takes the cake.

In a post to the new Chrome OS Leak blog, this guy posts supposed pics of the Chrome OS and then says...

I am putting my career and notability on the line in this!

He then proceeds to sign the post anonymously. LOL. Way to put yourself out on a limb there!

BTW, the pictures are lame too. :) But the post is worth reading, assuming it's real.

UPDATE: It's not real. What a loser!

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

pthurrott — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:38:01 GMT

Well, it's official. Google will take on Windows, not with some based on Android (which is dumb, and curious, in my opinion), but with yet another OS based on the Chrome browser. Here's the full announcement. The bolded bits are my work, as I think those are the core bits.

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

I'll have a news story up about this shortly...

Firefox 3.5

pthurrott — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:11:18 GMT

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 today as previously expected. There's a lot of info out there:

Product overview

The Fastest Firefox Yet

Things move quickly online, and we’ve beefed up the engine that runs Firefox to make sure you can keep up: Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2.* As a result, Web applications like email, photo sites and your favorite social networks will feel snappier and more responsive.

More Ways to Keep You Safe

Keeping you safe while you surf is our top priority, which is why we’ve upgraded our anti-phishing and anti-malware technologies and have added private browsing and “forget this site” options to ensure your privacy.

Plus, our open source security process means we have experts around the globe working around the clock to keep you (and your personal information) safe.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Everybody uses the Web differently, so why should your browser be exactly like the next guy’s? Whether you’re into chatting, cooking or coding, Firefox has more than 6,000 add-ons to help you customize it to fit your exact needs.

Advancing the Web

We’ve been working hard to make sure Firefox 3.5 brings you the best of the modern web. With new features like private browsing, tear-off tabs and enhancements to the Awesome Bar, plus major performance enhancements, you’ll enjoy life on the cutting edge.

See How We Stack Up

We’ve told you about what makes Firefox great, but how do we compare against Internet Explorer? Check out our handy browser comparison chart to see for yourself.

Plus, you can watch a Firefox 3.5 video tour. Or just download it.