Bing announced today that it has released an update to its Windows 8 app that includes touch-friendly video results, in addition to web and image results. The update is available in 12 countries.
The video results, of course, feature infinite scroll.
“Scrolling through one giant page of video results is a nice start, but we don’t stop there,”saysBing senior product manager Sara Borthwick. “Who wants to wait for a video to load before finding out if tit’s worth watching? We don’t that’s why this update includes our exclusive Smart Motion Thumbnails that let you watch a preview of results without having to wait for the video to load. Simply tap a video result thumbnail with a play icon in the lower right hand corner, or mouse over the thumbnail image, to start the video preview. Tap again or mouse away to stop the preview video. Click on the text description to the right to go to the full video.”
“If the search results aren’t exactly what you were looking for, Bing has made finding related searches even easier,” adds Borthwick.k “Just place two fingers on the search results screen and pinch to get related search queries. This feature is called Semantic Zoom and is also available for the web and image results.”
Frankly, I find it a little odd that this wasn’t included with the app to begin with. Windows 8 is, after all, Microsoft’s creation. Better late than never, I suppose. There was always Bing.com anyway.
Sunday’s Super Bowl was interesting for a couple of reasons apart
from the actual game, and the Facebook data proves that. According to
Facebook’s data analysts, two of the top three most-talked-about moments
of Super Bowl XLVII had nothing to do with football.
But the top trend did. The top moment from last night’s spectacle, in
terms of Facebook chatter, occurred when the Ravens won the game. The
second most-talked-about moment was Beyonce’s halftime show, followed by
the Superdome Blackout in third place.
Facebook says that mentions of Beyonce across the network started to
rise around 8:00 pm ET, and by the time it was all over mentions of her
name had increased over 49,000%. As soon as her former Destiny’s Child
bandmates joined Beyonce on stage, mentions of “Michelle” and “Kelly”
spiked 10,000%.
One of the most interesting spikes in popularity was the phrase
“killed it,” which saw a 40,000% spike after Beyonce finished her
performance. I guess we know how she was received by fans on Facebook.
And when the lights went out, mentions of the word “lights” skyrocketed (as you may expect) – 66,000%, to be exact.
As far as specific players go, Ray Lewis won the night with the most
chatter. Following Lewis was Ravens QB Joe Flacco, who won MVP honors.
Coming in third was 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick.
Here’s your complete top ten moment on Facebook from the big game last night:
1. Ravens win the Super Bowl
2. Beyonce’s halftime performance
3. Blackout in the Superdome
4. Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard kickoff return for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
5. Joe Flacco’s 56-yard pass to Jacoby Jones for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
6. Joe Flacco’s 13-yard pass to Anquan Boldin for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
7. Frank Gore’s six-yard run for a 49ers touchdown (and David Akers’ field goal kick)
8. Destiny’s Child surprise appearance with Beyonce during the half time show
9. Ray Lewis’ retirement
10. David Akers’ field goal kick from 27-yard line
SAN FRANCISCO: Google launched a global science fair by inviting students around the world to present ideas that could change the world and perhaps become the nextAda Lovelace. Lovelace was a teenager in the early 1800s when she became fascinated with math and went on to write what is considered to be the first computer program. "Many great scientists developed their curiosity for science at an early age and went on to make groundbreaking discoveries that changed the way we live," Sam Peter ofGoogle's science fair team said in a blog post. Examples included Louis Braille inventing an alphabet for the blind at age 16 and telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell experimenting with sound while he was still in his teens. Partners in the third annual Google Science Fair include European research organization CERN and toy maker LEGO Group. The Internet powerhouse known for investing in unusual projects such as self-driving cars and glasses linked to the Web said that students ages 13 to 18 can vie for top prize in the science contest. Challenges tackled by prior fair winners included early diagnosis of breast cancer, cataloguing the ecosystem found in water, and enabling people with hearing loss to better listen to music, according to Peter. Science fair prizes include a $50,000 scholarship and a trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic Expeditions. The deadline for submissions is April 30 and top finalists will be brought toGoogle's campusin Mountain View, California, where winners will be announced during an event on September 23. More details were available online at googlesciencefair.com.
Rounds (formerly 6rounds.com) has announced the launch of an interactive video chat platform for Facebook Platform. Users have already been using Rounds to video chat in real time while engaging in various social activities and real-time games. Offering it for Facebook obviously opens up the door for a great deal more use, given that Facebook has half a billion users.
"We created Rounds to give online social networking and social gaming more of a real-time, fun, and collaborative feeling," Dany Fishel, co-founder and CEO of Rounds tells WebProNews. "Rounds bridges the gap between real life and the online world by helping people feel close to one another no matter how far apart they are geographically."
Rounds was founded in 2008 and has raised $2 million in venture capital funding from Rhodium and Startup Factory investment groups. "Social networking and social gaming continue to grow in popularity, but with Rounds, social networking just got a lot more social," Guy Weltsch, Managing Director at Rhodium tells us. "We were attracted to Rounds because its technology is unlike anything on the market today. Rounds will help take social networking to the next level."
As Rounds prepared its Facebook launch, Facebook launched its own Facebook Live video channel. "Seems like Facebook is trying to dial up the engagement level through video and Rounds definitely ties into this trend," a company rep says.
With the Rounds Facebook app, users can participate in video chats with no download requirements. The company suggests the following use cases: take snapshots of yourself and share them on Facebook, jointly browse Facebook content with friends, watch YouTube videos together, play real-time multi-user social games, Collaborate on virtual whiteboards, or co-browse with Google Maps. source: webpronews.com/topnews/
Yahoo made a significant announcement at its Hadoop Summit today. The company says it's made significant enhancements to the open source software, accelerating the potential for enterprise-wide adoption by mainstream businesses.
"Hadoop is where science meets big data – it's the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world's most-advanced digital canvas," says Blake Irving, Yahoo Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. "Yahoo!’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo! to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users." Yahoo says Hadoop plays a key role in its home page, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and other properties.
"Businesses across all sectors are looking for ways to leverage the vast quantities of data they are accumulating, and Apache Hadoop is an efficient solution for processing data at scale," says Melanie Posey, research director at IDC Research. "Now organizations of various sizes can leverage Yahoo!'s Hadoop investment and deployments to run it on their own systems and build out their own Hadoop deployments without starting from scratch on internal science experiments."
Specifically, Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, the company's workflow engine for Hadoop. This means enterprises will benefit from better controls for managing business-sensitive data, according to the company.
PayPal has announced that it now accepts credit cards in apps. The company's payments platform, PayPal X, now has a Guest Payments feature.
"With this new feature, developers will now be able to accept credit card payments without requiring customers to open up a PayPal account," a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.
Guest Payments is a product of PayPal's Adaptive Payments API, and has been a heavily requested feature for users. PayPal says Guest Payments eliminates the complications merchants, developers, and startups face in accepting credit cards.
"We're aware that no matter how innovative the ideas are, our developers look to us to provide the features to make it all possible," saysNaveed Anwar, senior director of PayPal's Developer Network. " We're thrilled to provide this new functionality to meet this need and look forward to seeing the ground-breaking apps our developer community will create with this."
Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft). Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.
"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."
Features of the template designer include:
- 15 new templates (with more on the way) - Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns - Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto - Customizable colors, fonts, and more.
"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.
Today, PayPal announced that it is making some changes to its user agreements and pricing. The changes are specifically related to refunds, chargebacks, and Amex payments.
PayPal senior director of SMB Merchant Services Eddie Davis outlines the following changes:
Refund Prices – Starting August 10, PayPal will retain the transaction fee (typically $.30) when a seller issues a refund (U.S. and Canada merchants).
Chargeback Prices – Starting August 24, we’ll be increasing chargeback costs from $10 to the typical industry rate of $20 (U.S. merchants only, eBay merchants enrolled in the PayPal Preferred program are exempt).
American Express Card Acceptance – On July 13, PayPal and American Express will enter into a new card processing arrangement that requires merchants to establish a direct contractual relationship with American Express. You’ll need to accept a new agreement with American Express if you want to continue to accept American Express cards directly through Website Payments Pro and Virtual Terminal. PayPal will continue to service American Express transactions. As part of this new agreement, the fees we charge for American Express payments will change to be on par with their typical industry rates. You’ll also need to make sure that you comply with other terms in the agreement with American Express. As part of this new agreement, American Express pricing will change to be on par with their typical industry rates. You’ll also need to make sure that you comply with other terms in the agreement with American Express. This only applies to taking American Express credit cards directly. There’s no change if a consumer chooses to pay with PayPal, no matter how the account is funded
Davis notes that standard transaction fees for PayPal payments and direct credit card payments for Visa, MasterCard, and Discover will remain unchanged.
Google has been named in a new class action lawsuit filed by Carp Law Offices on behalf of Galaxy Internet Services and it WiFi users in Massachusetts.
The suit is focused on the collection and storage of WiFi information by Google's Street View team. The suit alleges Google had covert packet sniffing WiFi receivers to help gather data on WiFi users. The suit says the practice is in violation of both federal privacy laws and Massachusetts's new data privacy law.
Google has admitted it did collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using its Street View cars. Google says the collection of private data from WiFi networks was unintentional.
"Google had no reason to collect WiFi information, despite their rationale that they had not used the information and that the 'payload data' they collected was only network information available to anyone," said Robert Carp of Carp Law Offices.
"It is our client's belief and the belief of the class action members that the data they extracted was private information, and they have violated both Federal and Massachusetts state privacy laws."
The complaint asks for class action certification, and for an injunction to prevent Google from destroying any of the data that could be used for evidence in a class action trial in Federal court.
Google says it has stopped its Street View cars from collecting any WiFi network data and it also has introduced SSL encryption on its search engine.
The Google PowerMeter energy monitoring tool may be ready to go from interesting experiment to omnipresent product. Google announced today that it's entered a partnership with Current Cost, the largest global supplier of real-time displays that monitor energy usage.
Neither organization is wasting time on paperwork or small-scale tests. A post on the Official Google.org Blog explained, "Current Cost will now offer devices that are compatible with Google PowerMeter. They will also offer upgrades to existing customers so that they too can monitor their energy consumption anywhere online with our software."
The post then continued, "Devices that integrate with Google PowerMeter will first be available in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand." Plus, "E.ON, one of the UK's largest utilities, has also teamed up with Current Cost to offer its customers a Google PowerMeter compatible energy monitor as part of its free 'Energy Fit Starter Pack.'"
These developments should put Google's name in front of a lot more people on a regular basis, acting as free advertising. They constitute fantastic PR, too, considering that Google PowerMeter promises to help folks both go green and save money.
It'll be very interesting to see what sort of adoption rate the PowerMeter/Current Cost technology achieves in the weeks and months ahead.
Google has released a really cool playable doodle of PAC-MAN to celebrate the game's 30th birthday.
The Google Blog offers all the fun details. "Today, on PAC-MAN's 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it's too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the 'Insert Coin' button or just wait for a few seconds."
Google says it has included all the original sounds and graphics of the original PAC-MAN along with an easter egg for Ms. PAC-MAN. source : www.webpronews.com
Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.
In the post, Google addresses some of the privacy concerns people have been having, and improvements they're making based on user feedback.
Update: Google has uploaded the entire Google Buzz launch event. If you are interested in seeing the new product unveiled, you can watch it below:
Article starts: Google held a press event to announce the most "buzzed" topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google's new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we've discussed repatedly.
Editor's Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after liveblogging the press event.
Google says Buzz has five key elements:
1. Auto Following 2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience... 3. Support for public and private sharing.... 4. In-box integration 5. Just the good stuff...
Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them "big and fast". If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can "like" and "unlike" stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.
Public/Private sharing - The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it's public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google's real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.
In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use "@" for replies like with Twitter.
While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:
1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android 2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com 3. Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.
Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world's most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android's popularity is growing quickly too.
Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.
When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you'll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."
What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.
"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."
Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:
- public profile data - pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server) - a public key - other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each) - a URL to an avatar - profile data (nickname, full name, etc) - whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com - or even a public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google's Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.
For a week or so, some Twitter users have been seeing a new feature called Local Trends. This feature shows users things that are being heavily talked about at the city and state levels. Twitter has now announced that the feature is live for all users.
"Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations. It's interesting to know that one topic can now spread across the world in real-time, and Trends help us discover which of those topics are paramount on a global scale," says Twitter's @jennadawn. "As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them."
At this point Local Trends are only available for the following areas:
"The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?" she continues. "Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you."
The feature could prove especially helpful for bloggers and journalists covering local news. At the very least, it will show what people are most interested in, in any particular area.
Twitter says it will be improving the feature over time by providing more locations, languages, and data through the Twitter API. There aren't many locations available yet, but once the feature gets built up it should present an interesting picture of what people are talking about everywhere, which could be quite interesting.
Google has launched a new feature for search called "answer highlighting." This is based on Google Squared, Google's structured data project announced last year at the company's Searchology event. What it does is highlight answers to applicable queries within the search snippet.
For example, if the query is "empire state height," it will bold the actual answer for that, in addition to the words used in the query. Previously, it would have only bolded those words.
"Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web," says Google. "Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called 'answer highlighting.'"
Don't expect answer highlighting to be present in all search results, because in many cases, it just doesn't make sense. You are more likely to come across it when there are specific answers or data involved.
Google also launched rich snippets for events today. To learn more about the RDFa, which helps Google find content for rich snippets. Google has been using rich snippets for things like product reviews, and people information, but now events will sometimes utilize them. For example, if you search for a concert venue, you may see a few upcoming concerts listed.
Toy maker Mattel said today it is set to roll out a new product in the fall called "Puppy Tweets" that will allow dogs to send tweets to their own Twitter account.
Puppy Tweets is a plastic tag with a sound and motion sensor that attaches to a dog collar and connects to a USB receiver in a computer. The pet owner creates a Twitter account for the dog and then can receive tweets on a smartphone or desktop.
The tag features a number of pre-recorded tweets that are activated by a dog's activities. If the dog is running around a tweet might read, "I finally caught that tail I've been chasing and OOUUCHH!" Everyone knows that if dogs could tweet that's how they would sound.
If the dog is resting it will tweet "Somedays it feels like my paw is permanently on the snooze button!" If the dog is barking it will tweet "Yahoooooo! Somedays you just gotta get your bark on."
"Puppy Tweets capitalizes on two popular trends - the use of social media and real time communication, as well as peoples' extreme love for their dogs," said Susan Russo, Mattel's director of marketing.
Puppy Tweets will be available at retailers in the fall for $29.99. No word yet if there will be a similar product for cats or if Puppy Tweets can alert dog owners if their pet is having an accident on the carpet. source from :www.webpronews.com
Five reporters from radio stations in in Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland are going to spend five days locked in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It's not a lame reality show, but an experiment looking at the quality of news from social media.
This experiment may be flawed from the start. One can almost imagine that people will purposely put out false information via Twitter and Facebook just to mess with these people (they can be followed on Twitter [updates in French]). Reporting on this story, AFP's Marie-Dominique Follain asks if social media is really a serious threat to established media.
It appears that the credibility of social media as a way to get news is what is coming into question (not that this is the first time that has happened). "People tweet about fake events. Social media is rife with hoaxes," people will say. Yes, that's true.
People do put out false information, but what seems to be overlooked is that Facebook and Twitter are just the platforms for people posting their updates. They often are accompanied by links to blogs and traditional news sources. While the group have agreed to only connect to the outside world through Facebook and Twitter, and no web surfing, they are reportedly still allowed to follow links to outside sites from these social networks. With the 140-character limit of Twitter in particular, linking out is often very necessary in getting the whole story across, or at least gaining access to that story from the reader's perspective.
Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I don't see any possible result coming from this experiment that indicates social media is not useful for finding news. I don't believe social media threatens traditional media. It compliments it, in a variety of ways.
Sometimes stories break there before they are reported by a traditional source...that's a source for that traditional channel. It could just as easily come from someone saying something in a crowded bar. If it's newsworthy, it might be worth covering, but it might be a lie, and facts are worth checking. It's just that with channels like Facebook and Twitter, those bars are as big as the entire world, and the patrons aren't all there to relax, drink, and have a good time (though some of them certainly are). Not all news breaks on social media (although the ever-increasing accessibility to social media through mobile seems to be greatly narrowing the margin), but social media is always there for open discussion about the news, which tends to make for a more rounded outlook on any particular event. It doesn't eliminate the bias, but it provides a means for all biases to come together to form a more complete view of the story. Open discussion allows for points to be made that wouldn't necessarily be made by a traditional news outlet because maybe that outlet does have some kind of bias, even if it strives not to. Some say everyone has some bias.
The fact that people do turn to social media for news emphasizes the fact that they do want a look at the whole picture, and do want to have open discussion on matters. True, some of that is pointless noise, but strewn throughout that are often important facts and otherwise unconsidered viewpoints. source from : www.webpronews.com
Original Article: Google has created a new web crawler specifically for Google News. What this means is that publishers who do not want Google News to index their content can more easily control that. That also applies to publishers who don't wish to completely cut out indexing, but wish to limit/restrict certain elements of their content from being indexed.
Google offers this new crawler at a time when Google's relationship with online news is a heavy focus of discussion throughout the industry, with the FTC's meeting of the media minds taking place. This week Google already announced some changes to how it handles paid content (by offering a five-article limit for the "first click free" plan). Now the company appears to be further extending its olive branch to concerned publishers (whether or not that will be enough is another discussion).
In the past, publishers have been able to block Google from content via robots.txt and the Robots Extension Protocol (REP). They have also been able to keep content out of Google News and stay in Google Search, by using a contact form provided by Google. Now, Google is making it so publishers don't even have to contact them.
"Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," says Google News Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP."
"While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been," says Cohen. "It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index."
Cohen says Google News users shouldn't notice any difference in their experience with the service. It will be interesting to see the reaction from disgruntled publishers, and whether or not this will make any significant difference in how they view Google News.
Heavy users of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook will soon have to do a lot less tab-toggling. Microsoft has introduced something called the Outlook Social Connector, and early next year, LinkedIn will become the first networking site to support it.
As you'll see in a moment, the Outlook Social Connector is an accurately named offering. A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained that, with it, a user will be able to "[k]eep up with LinkedIn connections right from your email inbox." You can see a picture of what that'll look like below.
Then comes click-saver number two: the ability to email LinkedIn contacts straight from Outlook. The Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder with all of their info, and automatically fill in "to" fields when users start to type out people's names.
Finally, while using Outlook, it'll become easier to forge new connections. The post suggested, "Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail's sender."
We'll admit: there may not be a huge market for this sort of thing. But in certain sectors (HR, PR, etc.), the Outlook Social Connector's tie-up with LinkedIn should come in handy, and will likely increase the profiles of both entities.
Google wants webmasters who offer video content to be able to get their videos displayed in search results more easily. The company has announced that that it now supports Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa, which are both markup formats that allow webmasters to specify information that is important to video indexing.
"While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters," says Google's Michael Cohen, Product Manager for the Video Search Team.
The formats cater to simple things like titles and descriptions within the HTML of a video page. Google by the way also suggests that webmasters make their markup on video pages appear in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.
On top of supporting the aforementioned formats, Google has also kicked off a series of Webmaster Central Blog posts, which are aimed at giving tips to get your videos indexed. One subject they have already discussed is the submission of video sitemaps.
Webmasters can submit their video sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. The video sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, but it also has additional video-specific tags. The details on how to create a video sitemap are explained here.
Keep an eye the Webmaster Central Blog for further tips in the near future. You can see what Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa look like here.
