Web 2.0

Real time search engine OneRiot, celebrated its one year anniversary on Friday by shedding its beta status. The change is notable considering OneRiot was a complete overhaul of the social site Me.dium, making this the full fledged version of the product.

With the change comes a new look for the site, along with a new back-end technology the company is calling the "trending topics engine." This new engine takes the entire public data feed from social sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and groups together what it considers to be emerging topics. These topics are then … Read more

Web-based image editor Picnik, which is now a part of Google, has long been the built-in editor for Yahoo's Flickr photo-hosting service. And if you've found yourself wishing it was just as simple to edit other images around the Web, you're in luck. A relatively new Firefox extension called "Instant Image Edit with Picnik" lets you edit any image on any site, using Picnik--all with little more than a right-click.

The extension was built using a new part of Mozilla's Jetpack API, which lets developers add items to the contextual menu of a user'… Read more

In one of the clearest examples so far of just how much Flash is threatened by next-generation Web technologies, Scribd, a service for hosting and sharing documents online, is moving to a future that doesn't require Adobe Systems' plug-in.

"After three years of building on Flash, Scribd is starting over and moving everything to HTML5," said Scribd co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jared Friedman in prepared remarks for a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo. "I think it's the largest deployment of HTML5 to date, and it's a bet-the-company decision for us." … Read more

This past weekend I was at a wedding where the bride, groom, and both of their families came from different sides of the Pacific Ocean (Japan and central California to be precise). At the party the night before the ceremony a few of us broke out our phones to play with translation apps, which of course, led to comical results.

One of the highlights was when the groom-to-be (who happens to be bilingual) looked at my attempt to translate "I think you've had enough beer," from English to Japanese and said "That's good, but far … Read more

Readers might remember hearing about Threadsy last September, which is when the catch-all social aggregator first debuted. Its promise, which was made in a short demo at last year's TechCrunch50 conference, was that it would pull together correspondence from places like Twitter and Facebook alongside your Web mail from multiple providers. Eight months of beta testing later, it's finally open to the public. But has it been worth the wait?

Before answering that question, let's first take a look at the problem Threadsy is trying to solve. If you're the type of person who has a Twitter and Facebook account, as well as multiple e-mail accounts, you've probably got several tabs running throughout the day that keep these sites open. Threadsy's solution is to put all the messages from those places into one interface, which has been done with some elegance.

Social updates from Twitter and Facebook sit on the right of the page, where you can see the latest items from both networks mixed together. If a user has linked to a photo, Threadsy will give you a nice large preview. The same goes for linked audio files and updates from various Facebook applications.

Web mail has been handled with a similar level of simplicity. When first setting up the service, you give it access to your various e-mail accounts, which at least for Gmail, can be done without giving Threadsy any of your account credentials. Instead, you just authorize it to get access to those messages--just like enabling connections to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Threadsy then blends together all the messages from your Web mail accounts along with direct messages in Twitter and Facebook into one big in-box.

Unfortunately, for all its simplicity, the universal mailbox breaks down in terms of how easy it is to create new messages compared to using each service's proper messaging client. Gmail, as well as Facebook's messaging service, offer really excellent auto-complete for contacts, but on Threadsy it's just not as good. In my testing it was able to pull up people I was Facebook friends with, but not frequently e-mailed family members. It was also unable to do its magic on last names, which may not seem like all that much of a hindrance, but it is. … Read more

Brad Abrams, a project manager involved in several of Microsoft's core programming technologies, has taken a job at rival Google.

"I needed a change personally, to learn something new, see the tech world from a fresh perspective. And what better place than Google!" Abrams wrote in a blog post Monday. "As I look at where things are going in the industry (and where I think they should go), it is clear that the Web, and cloud+devices specifically, are the dominant trends of the future. Working at Google will give me an opportunity to have a … Read more

RealNetworks may be best-known for its audio- and video-streaming technologies, its stake in the Rhapsody music service, and the recent drama of its RealDVD software litigation, but the company hopes to be just as well-known for its new social-gaming platform.

Officially launched at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, "GameHouse Fusion" is a platform for developers to build social features into their games with minimal effort. Think of it like what companies like Aurora Feint and Ngmoco have done for iPhone games--but for every platform.

The service creates a profile for gamers based on … Read more

The facial recognition technology that powers Face.com is now available to third-party developers. Those who are interested in using it inside of their applications will be able to take advantage of an open API that the company is making public Monday morning.

For consumers, Face.com's technology brings some very interesting things to the table. Face has already offered a tagging tool, as well as a recognition-based alert service for Facebook. But not everyone keeps their photos there. Using the new API, developers could build similar facial recognition tools into both desktop and Web based photo organizing apps … Read more

"The geolocation feature is now available in Chrome 5.0.375.25 (Official Build 45690)."

With those words, posted Thursday at the bottom of a Chrome issue tracker item, the developer version of Google's browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux catches up to Firefox with one important new component of the Web. That component, geolocation, lets a browser tell a Web site the location of a person's computer once the person has given permission. (See illustration below.)

It's a handy feature, most notably for mapping or including your location in some message where it's … Read more