Category: Web 2.0
STREET VIEW SNAPS #3: Drunken Aussie
Lately we’ve seen houses burning down and people flashing knickers on Google Street View, but spare a thought for this poor chap, known only as “Bill”.
Facebook adding filters to news feed
Facebook have added a new feature to the big ol’ river of crap that is the homepage news feed. Previously you could tweak it a little bit, allowing you to display just status updates, or photos, but after a quick check of my Facebook account, there’s now a wealth of options available…
BBC's iPlayer upgraded to H.264 codec – download speed and picture quality boosted
The BBC has been blowing your license fee on further developing its iPlayer service, announcing today that it’s starting to use the open source H.264 codec for its streaming telly service.
This has allowed the Beeb to boost the encoding bitrate of streamed shows from 500kbps to 800kbps, so it should all look a little sharper and cleaner when you catch up with such classics…
Yahoo launch Fire Eagle location-based internet… thing
Last night Yahoo finally took it’s long awaited (by nerds) Fire Eagle out of private beta so now anyone can sign up and use it.
But… What is it? Like everything web 2.0, the name doesn’t describe it very accurately. Basically it’s a system designed to act as the middle-man between you and a whole load of location-aware applications, so that you only have to log your location once and it’ll syndicate it with every other Fire Eagle equipped location service you use…
Look who's stalking: FindMe now supports s60 Nokias.
Facebook stalkers everywhere will be delighted to learn that Electric Pocket has finally got around to releasing a client for FindMe, the Facebook stalking geo-location application, for s60 mobile phones (ie: most high-end Nokias).
FindMe has been available for Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices for ages, and can be used to “tag” locations (“home”, “work”, etc) and automatically update your Facebook profile with your location. Somewhat uniquely, it doesn’t require your phone to have GPS to function – it works out your position based on nearby mobile phone masts alone. Whilst this is perhaps slightly less accurate than GPS, it does mean that more phones are compatible…
Qype to add events listings and support for the little guy
Web 2.0 user reviews network Qype is adding a couple of new features for its growing community as of September this year.
To the under-educated, the idea behind Qype is that it’s essentially Facebook with a purpose with a good dose of Fancyapint and Beerintheevening thrown in. The idea is that people – those like you and me and those unlike you and me too – add little written reviews along with a quick star rating to basically anything from restaurants, pubs and cafes to football stadiums, hairdressers, your local park and probably even the bus stop at the end of your road if you can get a picture of it on a geo-tagged Googlemap.
It’s supposed to be a comprehensive review site with all the non-bias and integrity of a blog. Ok? Right, consider yourself educated. So, from September they’re adding an events listings feature
Midnight Madness – get your nob face into a Chemical Brothers video
I love all this music 2.0 business and it seems I’m not alone. Usually it’s Radiohead doing something innovative to keep both them and their music streets ahead of anyone else but today the Chemical Brothers are having a stab at it, probably motivated as much by laziness as creativity, and why not?
To herald the release of their single “Midnight Madness” and the LP in September, “Brotherhood”, the band, who go by the real names of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, are inviting us all to upload photos and videos of our own, geotagged on a Google map of theirs…
COMPETITION: 12seconds – the Twitter of the video world
12seconds is to YouTube what Twitter is to Facebook. That’s where I’m starting with the explanation of this one. It’s the microblogging of video.
As you may have guessed by its name, you get 12 seconds to make a tiny little video blog about, well, about whatever you like…
Google Street View invades privacy of fire. Fire says it has right to smoke in its own home
Something tells me that the Google Street View pictures of Eagle Point Drive in Sherwood, Arkansas are going to be rendered out-of-date slightly quicker than Google might have hoped…
