realtime

Twitter to Google: You broke the Internet!

Now that Google has made it possible to personalize searches with social information from Google+ and Picasa, some of its social-media rivals are getting hot under the collar--starting with Twitter.

The microblogging service today fired back at Google's new "Search plus Your World" feature in unusually blunt terms. Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray, who formerly worked at Google, tweeted:

Bad day for the Internet. bit.ly/Am5bqz Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.

— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 10, 2012 Twitter followed up with this formal corporate statement:

For … Read more

How microneedle sensors could watch your blood chemistry

Patches of tiny needles have already been shown to effectively deliver medications painlessly, and without a bloody mess. Now the tiny needles could also be used to monitor body chemistry in real time.

The new tech, developed by a team of biomedical engineers out of North Carolina State University, the University of California at San Diego, and Sandia National Laboratories, employs electrochemical sensors in the hollow channels of microneedles to detect certain molecules. The researchers reported their findings in the chemistry journal Talanta.

Current body chemistry monitoring involves taking samples, often before or after an event. Wearable micro-sensors, on the … Read more

Google disables Realtime search

Google said today that it has temporarily disabled its Realtime search function in the wake of the introduction of its social network Google+.

The feature was developed to integrate real-time data from Twitter and other social-networking sites. The option for the feature has been removed from the right side of Google's search bar, and the feature's Web page now contains a 404 message.

"We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned," the company said on its Google Realtime Twitter feed.

Google began indexing real-time … Read more

Real-time location-sharing with Glympse

Glympse is a brilliantly conceived mobile application that lets you share your real-time location via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook. It's a useful, easy-to-use tool that doesn't require you to sign up, create any profiles, or invite contacts.

Imagine asking a friend to meet you at a new restaurant in your neighborhood. With Glympse, you wouldn't text her the address; you'd merely send her a Glympse of your current location, and with a tap on her screen, she'd navigate her way there. Or if you're not yet at the restaurant, you might send her … Read more

At-a-glance stock info

If you find yourself constantly checking the Web for the latest and greatest stock information or for updates on your own stocks, you'll certainly appreciate what StockPoint has to offer. We're not exactly experts when it comes to the stock market, but we still found the program intuitive and easy to use.

StockPoint offers a tabbed user interface that keeps your stock information organized and easy to find. The various tabs are organized into three categories: Research, Earnings Releases, and Browser. The Research tab let us quickly find stocks with the help of its Screener Options drill-down feature. … Read more

Facebook eats up patents for the 'feed'

Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology, more specifically "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved.

The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent. Twitter, as AllFacebook points out, is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology.… Read more

Yahoo turns on the Twitter firehose

And then there were three Twitter search customers.

Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

Google and Microsoft announced similar plans months ago at the Web 2.0 conference. Yahoo will continue to integrate Twitter content into … Read more

Will people leave Facebook for Buzz? Fat chance

Let's say you'd constituted a drinking game for the aftermath of Tuesday's unveiling of Google Buzz, the odd new mishmash of status messages, geolocation, and social-media aggregation: Take a drink every time some pundit says Google is trying to "kill" Facebook, Twitter, or any number of the "geo" start-ups out there.

You'd have been totally blitzed.

The cries of "It's a Facebook killer!" and "It's going to kill Twitter!" are tedious, but completely understandable considering that this is one of the first big pushes from Google, … Read more

New UI, features highlight McAfee 2010 suites

Security suite vendor McAfee debuts its 2010 product line today, introducing an overhauled interface and new features in a bid to remain competitive. The change to its interface is as dramatic a shift as the one that Avast introduced in its 2010 suites, although McAfee's look is drastically different from any major security program currently on the market. Most of the features in McAfee AntiVirus Plus, McAfee Internet Security, and McAfee Total Protection are not new, but the presentation is so radical that the improvements are likely to be glossed over. Users of older McAfee should note that VirusScan … Read more