Comprehensive insights on tech culture.
Behind this barbarian title lies a very simple explanation.
The Net Index is powered by SpeedTest. SpeedTest is a tool that tests and measures your Internet connection speed: ping, download, upload. The Net Index is the world index for Internet connection speed based on millions of recent test results from SpeedTest and therefore from all around the world.
You can be sure that the data is precise. Plus, the site’s design is quite neat. Go check it out.
WikiLeaks opens governments. At least, that’s what their official Twitter account says.
Earlier, today, WikiLeaks published thousands (more than 91 000) documents, mostly reports about the Afghan war from 2004 to december 1st, 2009. But, before doing so, they gave access to these documents to three newspapers. The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel.
The newspapers had time to decipher every information and they now offer portals to browse the information.
Here, for Der Spiegel, over here for The Guardian and there for the NYT.
This is an incredible story. Sorkin’s movie shouldn’t be about Facebook but about WikiLeaks.
Aza Raskin is—literally—a designer. He crafts interfaces for Firefox and is the designer lead for the browser project. He came up with a new feature called: Tab Candy.
The idea is great: it’s a pure innovation—I’ve never heard of something like that before—and it applies to something that wasn’t improved since a long time: tabs.
Well, you use tabs all-day long. And so do I. Now, what is Tab Candy?
An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Great idea, indeed.
Oh, dear…
According to AppleInsider, Apple may be preparing an ad-supported OS. So what does that mean? The brilliant idea is that the OS would be free, or cheap. The, er, other idea is that in order to make such a thing possible, you, as an end user, will be exposed to ads. Like in YouTube videos. Yes, ads would appear, while you are innocently browsing the web, checking your mails or watching p… playing games, really.
I already hear the web crumbling under a wave of rage. Steve, please, do not let this happen.
Let me explain that.
Miio is a new social network. It’s a good idea because it displays messages related to your interests. Groups, if you’d rather. If you like burgers, cats or linux, you may find your happiness. Plus, you can meet new people. The key feature is that you don’t have to manually enter your contacts from other networks (yet, you can), you discover people.
What’s up with this gdgt relation? Last year, I wrote an article called: Why gdgt is the web idea of the year, explaining that if you’re looking for a new gadget, gdgt is your best friend:
The reviews are really personal, more accurate and there are a lot of ‘em. And that’s simply awesome. Awesome^100. Googol awesome. You’ll find, at gdgt, everything you need to know about a gadget and that’s it. And you’ll find out you don’t need more information.
Miio does roughly the same thing. If you’re looking for more human information about something, it might become your best friend, if the community continues to grow. And there’s even more, you could find new friends. Now, of course, Twitter can do the same thing, but sometimes, 140 is not enough. And that’s why Miio exists.
Now, Miio is not yet perfect. As RWW noted, Miio has too many features, and the navigation isn’t really clear. Please, Miio founders that never worked on cool places like Google or Twitter, focus on your main awesome feature.
A new search engine will be launched soon. Its name is Blekko and it wants to win. Or, maybe a little victory in one of the most competitive markets in Internet world: search.
The first thing you want to ask to Blekko’s CEO Rich Skrenta is: why? Why do you want to face Google? Well, his answer is quite simple.
So let’s just get this out of the way: there is no such thing as a Google killer. No company is going to play David to their Goliath and slay them with a well-aimed stone from a slingshot. Google is here to stay.
In my sense too, Google is here to stay. So, what is Blekko going to do? They’re going to focus on one category: categories.
With a technology called slashtags, on Blekko’s search, you can refine your search very easily: search for Apple /date and you’ll have the most recent Apple results; search for search Inception /twitter to get Twitter’s results, because Blekko is using Twitter’s API. Google can do similar search filtering yet, it’s a little bit more complicated.
Will they find success? We shall wait, and see.
Wolfram|Alpha, the computational knowledge engine, has unveiled a new feature. You can now ask Wolfram|Alpha about medical drugs treatment.
Yet, you don’t have to be scared about auto-medication, it does not give you the name of a brand, but statistics, name of the molecules and other scientific stuff.
Sometimes, daily life stories are way more incredible than Hollywood films. Some of the early YouTube viral videos or other websites growth are typical examples. Now, this, I must tell you, is a useless story that spoiled everybody’s time.
A folk filmed a double rainbow. He felt joy doing so. So much he began to ask himself existential questions—he went cuckoo, to say the least. Within a week, CBS reporters were interviewing the dude.
Ah, Twitter. Did you waste your time here? What does it mean? (i.e the rainbow video.)
Music needs to be like water. It needs to be ubiquitous. We need to understand that this is not about MP3 files anymore; the MP3 file has become the URL and through that unique identifier I can send you something and you’ll be able to know what it is and listen to it.
Has it, though? Well, the world is not yet thoroughly connected to the Internet. Even if the URL kills DRM-like issues, I think a lot of users would prefer to store their MP3 files.
Nathan Reed, the guy behing Popacular (the del.icio.us popular bookmarks listing website) has another cool project: The One Sentence Diary Project.
The idea is simple. You log in every day and you write a very short text (under 300 characters) about your day.
This project brilliantly uses by enhancing your daily memory management.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington must be happy. This scoop is great. What is Zynga? Farmville. Their revenue? Estimated 350m for the first half of 2010.
Will Google Games fail like Google Social stuff have failed? Probably.
Today, MobileMe has been deeply updated. The servers felt the update pain but now, everything seems to be functioning harmoniously. New features arrives, at last, such as support for external mail and a new navigation system. Know more.
One thing I never liked about Firefox is that it felt very un-elegant. Now, it seems the Mozilla team has made a very good job enhancing the design. Check some more, and get to know more about Firefox 4.0 new features.
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