Web 2.0

Last week, Facebook introduced a new service that lets its members ask their friends, or the Facebook community at large, any question in any topic.

It's not the first question-and-answer service, or the best--but with 500 million registered Facebook users who will get access to it in the coming weeks, it's got the potential to steal page views and users away from competitors.

To get a greater understanding of how Facebook Questions works, we're taking a quick look at what it does and how it stacks up to the a small segment of the competition in terms … Read more

Ever tried to set up an event or meeting while trying to balance the schedules of others? That's been made easy with tools like Doodle, TimeBridge and Planypus. But what if you're having a dinner party, or a picnic, or going camping, or any other real-world situation where you're grouping together your resources?

That's where Divvyus comes in handy. It lets you manage some of the chaos of assigning to-dos, or things to bring ahead of time. There's no registration required, you just need to send out the URL of the Divvyus, and whomever you … Read more

Long-video makers can rejoice, as YouTube has extended the allotted time of user uploads from 10 to 15 minutes.

According to a Thursday post on YouTube's blog, increasing the limit was the most requested feature by YouTube users, though it had to be put on hold while the company worked on other projects and behind-the-scenes infrastructure. In March, for instance, the company announced that 24 hours of video was uploaded every minute. That's up from around six hours just three years ago. Given the new limit, that's a metric that's likely to keep on growing.

When … Read more

Social news sites Digg and Reddit arguably have the same core objective: providing a never-ending stream of interesting links from around the Web. But there's long been grumbling among users on both sites about which site has a larger influence, and where each one gets its source material.

To answer these questions, and a few others, personal finance site Rate Rush watched both sites for two weeks and tracked who was submitting stories, which domains were getting featured on the front page, the most popular topics and words used in titles, and the velocity of links by hour and … Read more

If there was any doubt that Yahoo Japan is separate from Yahoo in the United States, let this dispel it: Yahoo Japan has signed a deal to use Google's search engine rather than Microsoft's.

The deal, reported Monday by All Things Digital, was confirmed later that day with a Google Japan blog post.

In the post, Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google's Asia Pacific and Japan operations, said Yahoo Japan will use Google search results and Google's technology for supplying the accompanying search ads. With such partnerships, revenue from the search ads is shared between the … Read more

Google has worked out a new way to embed videos that presents the right version of the company's YouTube video player depending on your system's capability.

Videos embedded with the new code will be served up in either an Adobe Flash wrapper, or in the company's HTML5 player, opening up viewing to a potentially broader audience and without any extra effort for the person who embedded a video in the first place.

According to the Google, the company plans to roll the new code format out as the new default for YouTube embeds, but is running it … Read more

As rumored last month, YouTube this week unveiled its latest partnership: a collaboration with ABC's local Bay Area news station that makes it easier for users to upload relevant local content they've snapped on their cell phone or other mobile video device.

On YouTube's blog, YouTube's news manager Olivia Ma says that ABC will then choose uploaded videos to run as part of local TV news coverage as well as on ABC7's Web site.

Alongside video content it's already received, or curated from known local YouTube users, ABC is encouraging users to go out … Read more

Vimeo, one of the first providers of high-definition video on the Web, has done away with a limitation that had its users paying to place an HD version of their video on external sites.

The business centered on charging its members for a certain number of HD plays on external Web sites, which ran anywhere from $9.95 for 1,000 plays, all the way to $199.95 for 100,000 plays.

In cases where a user ran out of plays, Vimeo would still let viewers watch the video in HD, though they'd have to come back to the … Read more

Google's resolution of its Net presence in China seems to have reached a stable point, at least for the time being.

A Chinese government official said Tuesday the country is satisfied with Google's resolution of how to balance a presence in China with censorship requirements.

"Google agreed...that it will respect China's laws and regulations," Zhang Feng, an official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told members of the press, according to an Agence France-Presse report. "That is to say, it will not provide any information that will endanger China's … Read more