Focus on: Twitter

So.. everybody during these days seem to have finally realized the power of this social platform.. Especially medias..

Let’s start with some numbers.. The usage of twitter is becoming always more high. in less than one year the number of tweets per day doubled.. It’s considerable assuming that this site in July already handled 25 Million updates per day. People are always more interested in it and always more accounts are being subscribed. Everyday there are 300.000 new accounts and twitter has already 105 Million Users.

Take a moment to think on how much hidden power has Twitter.. And think about how much it could grow in the future..

Their administration seems to have done it and they have come out with some new very interesting ideas.

First I want to talk about “promoted tweets”. Even twitter such as other companies in this sector has decided to monetize by using ads in their site.. They are entering in Google, Facebook and Apple business: Advertising.

How they are going to do that? Simply.. They are going to make arrangements with some other companies such as Starbucks in order to publish some promoted tweets in each of our public time lime.. It’s a very clever idea because the ads will be integrated in the system appearing like a tweet from someone we are following and we could even retweet that if we think the ad is interesting.. Giving it the possibility to become even more visible. A great opportunity for companies and a bigger one for twitter to improve their incomes and to grow.

There is also another way to take advantage of twitter  that some firms are already doing, that is by creating a company account and posting their promotions or giving updates on their new products. And believe me.. it’s a great way to follow your favorite brands.

The other quite interesting fact happened just yesterday is the opening of  the developer page by twitter.. A great piece of news for devs in fact twitter could offer a so wide range of opportunities that we couldn’t even imagine. Twitter is giving the documentation to develop any kind of application online and offline using the features offered by this site. For example try to think of an application that gives you in real time (because this is the real power of Twitter) the exact position of the tweets by using the geolocalization.

It’s very interesting because once twitter was used only to post what were you doing, now it has become a huge source of news from all over the world.. If anything it’s happening anywhere and someone writes about it on twitter, in few seconds the world will know that! Think about how important news could spread so simply.

Another point for twitter is the 140 characters limitation that often could give someone a hard time, but it really helps to improve your mind and your ability to summarize your thoughts and it also contributes to the immediacy of the message.

My only concern is that twitter will become a trend like Facebook which is full of idiots, because today from my point of view twitter is used mostly by smart people who like to be updated and give their points of view.

BTW, I would really invest on this company because they are surely going to grow a lot in the next future.

There would be a lot of other things to say but I like to leave them to you.. My only intention is to make you think 😉

New slow/fast motion feature on youtube..

I just noticed this new feature in the youtube player..

I think it only works if you are using HTML5

Google Docs new Upload Feature..

Google has finally introduced a file hosting feature that many of us was expecting.. You can upload any kind of file you want and share it with anybody.

Just simply click on the “Documents” tab on the upper bar of google home page and you will be immediately notified of the new uploading feature..

File size is limited to 250MB and the amount of space at your disposal is 1 GB but you can uprade to bigger storage limited by paying..
These are the prices
20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card

The end of Flash?

I hope.. 🙂

I’m not teasing.. Adobe flash is one of that things that have changed our way of surfing the web.. You can see a flash animation in quite every site, every video you see on youtube for example is thank to Flash..

So what’s the problem? Flash is becoming always more powerful, but this power must be taken from somewhere, and that place is your CPU and your ram.. The result is that every time you watch a video or do something “Flash addicted”, your machine will become very slow (unless you have a very powervful machine obviously).. Without speaking about the other huge amount of problems that Flash causes.

Until now I and many others were using a nice plug-in for Safari that blocked every Flash animation until you decide you want to see them with just one click, and coverted quite every video on youtube in h264 which uses a lot less CPU with the same quality (sometimes even better) of a video watched with flash player.

But today it comes a real revolution..Thanks to the Google support, Youtube has finally become HTLM5 enabled, so if you are using a browser that runs on web kit and/or support html5 you can go on youtube at this URL www.youtube.com/html5 and gain the advantage of no more using flash on the most popular videos site.

I really hope that HTML5 will become a real substitute of Flash. Maybe Adobe will understand that they should develop better their application from the lightness point of view and not only focus on pure power.

A personal thought..

Apple decided to go without Flash on iPhone.. Maybe they already thought about the future and didn’t waste time and money on developing something that won’t be used anymore? Who knows..

Virtual Private Cloud by Amazon

It seems that cloud computing service is a trending topic of the last period between the most famous “internet” companies.

And probably this will regard consumer in the not so far future..

After Ubuntu and Apple (the ones I remember most) are going to develop their own cloud computing services here it comes Amazon, the world famous books and music online retailer.

More specifically Amazon is going to release to the public (to all users of its EC2 cloud-computing services) its Virtual Private Cloud as a beta. This release follows a limited test that began in August. Amazon says that the VPC is one of the most requested feature from enterprise customers.

[more infos]

Google launches Google Public DNS

Google has lauched a new service: a new public DNS resolver.

The Google Public DNS IP addresses are as follows:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

This will make you web pages to load faster, which is a very good news for these days of highly structured HTML web pages full of multimedia contents and any kind of flash widget.

I”m testing it and it seems that it really brings some improvements and speed to the browsing.

In my humble opinion this is very useful for google wave that is still very heavy and slow..

Here is an extract of the google code blog post announcing this service

• Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.
• Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.
• Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.

And here there’s a nice guide to setup your system in order to gain the advantages offered by this service.

Google always more similar to bing..

It’s since yesterday that google.com is testing a new home page with a more modern look than the actual old school one, and even a new result page.

This one is very similar to the result page you can find on bing.. with a new column on the left for applying filters to your searchs.

It seems that google it’s beginning to feel the competition from bing, and they are trying to take some ideas from their rival.

Here are some screens..

Site suggestion: 9Gag

just found this site..

I think it’s a very good concept of site.. very simple, minimal and user friendly..

There you can find very funny pictures or photos, save your favourites and share new ones..

Hope you like it.. Click on the image to jump to it 😉

Apple store down..

All the global stores are down since few minutes..

What should we expect?

Maradona Website Hacked

Hackers 1-0 Maradona

Diego Armando Maradona is in a very very hard moment of his life (are we sure this is the only one?!?)…

During last months Diego and his Team (Argentina… ndr) are fighting hard to get the ticket for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa…

Saturday Night, the Peruvian National Team make Maradona fear and trembling with the goal for the 1-1 after 90 minutes, but over an unbelivalbe flood, Martin Palermo scored the goal for the final 2-1 (92′) to give Maradona and his Team a little chance for qualifying…

The “Elite Peruvians”, an hacker Group from Perù didn’t like Maradona’s exultation on Saturday Night… And this is the Revenge… Hackers modified the Golden Pibe’s Web Site on Monday (12 October 2009)  with this phrase:

“For the biggest cry baby of all time. We didn’t win at the football – but we did on the web…”

But this isn’t all… They have put a new photo on the Home Page, that picture shows Diego snort the football court lines… LoL…

Fable’s Moral –> Don’t make a Nerd get angry…

See you soon…