Month: April 2010

Posterous Implements Facebook Likes

Choosing to waste no time, simple blogging-by-email platform Posterous has implemented Facebook Likes on all blogs via the new Open Graph API. You don’t have to actually do anything to benefit. The like button appears after each post (depending on your theme) and, when clicked, will share a link back to your blog on that visitor’s Facebook page. Great way to get new eyeballs on your content.

Regator Gets a Fresh New Design

Regator has a new layout in the works that takes the site to a whole different level. It’s cleaner, much easier and intuitive to navigate, and it just pops. Regator helps you find all the hottest blogs on the topics you’re interested in. It’s a very useful tool for finding quality blogs. To get the invite code for the preview, check out the coverage on Mashable.

YouTube Rolls Out New Flash Player

As Apple and Adobe continue to argue about Flash support on Apple devices, Google has quietly revamped their Flash player. First , Google changed the site layout entirely and created a new HTML5 player for YouTube. Now, they are enhancing the existing Flash player. New features include and auto-hiding progress bar and technical details about the video you’re watching. Check NewTeevee for more details.

AOL Sells ICQ

Remember ICQ? It was Instant Messaging before IM’ing was popular. It was how many people talked to each other long before Twitter came along. You didn’t even get a username, just an ID number that people would use to connect with you. AOL bought it for $287 million in 1998 and has finally been able to sell it for $188 million. The new owner is DST, a Russian Telecom company. ICQ, while pretty much dead here in the US, is still hot in Russia and DST’s CEO Yuri Millner had this to say:

“The acquisition of ICQ is a strategic enhancement of our business in Russia and Eastern Europe. ICQ’s long-standing brand name and its sizeable loyal customer base together represent a very attractive opportunity to further strengthen our position in the region.”

va RWW

Steve Jobs Tells Us How He Really Feels About Flash

If you were ever curious about why there is no Flash on the iPad or why it’s not supported on your iPhone, this letter by Jobs should explain. He really goes in on Flash in detail, starting from the beginning of the relationship between Adobe and Apple. You read the entire letter here.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center seem to be creating the ultimate Twitter client. Not because of the number of columns you can have, the types of URL shorteners it supports, or any of the other features that users and developers normally worry about, though. It’s because this particular client aims to make sense of the deluge of tweets many of us see on a daily basis. Even when following a few hundred people, there is a monumental amount of information to dig through and usually leads to information overload.

This new Twitter client, known as the Eddi Project, uses sophisticated algorithms to help you easily makes sense out of a large number of tweets. Rather than the normal routine of scanning through each tweet in your timeline manually and trying to parse everything in your head, Eddi will do it for you, picking out the topics of interest and giving you a clearer picture of what’s going on. The name comes from the idea of eddies in a stream, which indicate an area of contrary motion within a stream. Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, believes that people choose to dip in and out of their Twitter stream, but don’t necessarily want to consume it all at once.

The researchers have developed two primary ways of interacting with the Twitter stream. The first is a recommendation system. It finds tweets that a user might be interested in based on that users interactions with others and the content of the user’s tweets. This is somewhat similar to technology we already see in the wild for recommending new people to follow.

The second tool is a topic browser. This is the more interesting piece as it is at the heart of summarizing your entire Twitter stream, enabling you to quickly figure out what’s going on at a glance without reading every post. Figuring this out is not as easy as one might think. At the core of the problem is Twitter’s 140-character limit. Most natural language processing relies on having a good amount of text to deal with, but 140 characters is far from adequate. Researchers then realized that search engines have been dealing with this issue from the beginning and started looking at the problem from a different perspective.

The new system should be available for the public some time this summer. Until then, you can play with their recommendations engine Zerozero88, a robot which will help dig up news stories customized for you.

Lala is shutting down as of May 31st. Very disappointing news for many users of the service who actually preferred it over iTunes. The service is now closed to new users. Apple acquired Lala back in December of 2009 when it seemed that the cloud-based service was in financial trouble. This is after Lala seemed to be making big moves in partnerships with Google and Facebook that should have helped turn business around.

If you recall, Lala is behind Google’s Onebox feature, which lets you play and purchase music directly from your search results. It allowed you to play any song once for free and songs that you do purchase are available for play from your online dashboard. When I first covered Lala, I used the phrase “iTunes in the cloud.”

To understand the ramifications of this purchase, it’s important to understand what Lala really is: iTunes in the cloud. Instead of purchasing music from a website and downloading it to your computer, you simply buy what you want and play it instantly from your library in the cloud. Lala will also match the songs on your computer to the ones in their library and adds them to your online collection. You can even play any song for free, but only once. It’s only 10 cents to add a song to your online library and play it unlimited. 79 cents to download the actual mp3.

I also mentioned that users might benefit from Apple’s purchase of Lala in the long run. It was already pretty obvious that Apple would shut it down and this was simply a grab for talent and a way to remove a competitor. Why buy from iTunes for 69 cents to $1.29 per song when I can just pay 10 cents to Lala and play any song unlimited via the web?

For those who have invested their time and their money into Lala, the credits for your Lala web songs will be moved over to iTunes. If you have an outstanding wallet balance on Lala, it will also be migrated to iTunes. Gift cards will be moved to your wallet balance or otherwise refunded. In other words, you are now an iTunes customer so get used to it. We can only hope to see some of the features we loved about Lala being integrated into the new iTunes service when it does finally launch.

It seems that Facebook’s new Community Pages (how-to here) are part of a grander scheme to get Facebook users to connect with stuff. Remember all those random keywords you used to fill out your profile? Stuff like your favorite movies and books? Well, Facebook has basically turned them all into actual Community Pages. Instead of just listing Blade or The Science of Getting Rich as stuff you like and leaving it at that, Facebook has taken it upon itself to turn each of these words or phrases into a link. These links connect you to the Community page for those items.

You may have noticed a popup telling you to connect your profile with a bunch of stuff when you recently logged into Facebook. This is where the conversion part happens, where they turn your simple keywords into actual social connections and links. You can choose to connect to all the pages displayed or pick from them individually. I would suggest you do the latter because I noticed a few surprises while looking through my own choices.

Keep in mind, this is the opt-in part. When you accept these connections, people will see these links on your Facebook profile. They will probably believe these are things that you have chosen to be connected to. The links will lead to communities based around those things. What if you decide you don’t actually want all of that excitement on your profile? You just want to keep things simple and define yourself without all these 3rd party connections. The problem is that you can’t.

According to the Facebook FAQ “What if I don’t want to connect to all these pages?”

“If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don’t want to connect to.”

While you’re not really being forced to opt-in, the alternative is unacceptable. Either you connect to the pages or your profile will be blank. The affected sections include: Work and Education, Current City, Hometown, and Likes and Interest. You will have to make a tough decision between a blank Facebook profile and a profile that may not describe you exactly as you would like. It’s one thing to simply list something on your profile as an interest and totally another to actually connect yourself to an entire community on the subject.

Which will you choose?

more details at RWW

Google Follow Finder

Follow Finder is a nifty little app that will help you find people to follow. You plugin your Twitter username and it will scan your public social graph to show you people you might want to follow. It’s hosted on App Engine and makes extensive use of Twitter’s new @anywhere platform.

1. Tweeps you might like: We start with the list of people you follow, find others with similar lists, and then identify accounts you might also want to follow. If people with similar lists tend to follow accounts that aren’t in your list, we’ll recommend those additional accounts to you. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME, we’ll suggest TIME as a user to follow.
2. Tweeps with similar followers: We find people with similar public lists of followers to yours. For example, if ten people are following you, and the same ten people are following a second user, we’ll include the second user in this list. You may already be following some of these people.

Twitter @anywhere

Twitter’s @anywhere platform literally lets you put Twitter anywhere. You can add advanced integration features to your blog or website that will integrate it tightly into Twitter. Visitors can follow you with a click. You can automatically linkify @usernames and add hovercard functionality. It’s no harder to implement than any other Javascript widget. For full details, check out the tutorial at SocialTimes.

How Much Do Artists Earn Online?

The music industry is in a constant state of change due to the Internet and social media. Customers have become accustomed to immediate access to music and many music consumers don’t even know what’s it’s like to have a physical music collection. But the question is, how is this new marketplace affecting artists? This image by David McCandless gives us a rough estimation.

Cuil Launches Cpedia and Lashes Out at Users

Cuil was supposed to be the “Google killer.” A search engine above all other search engines. It was supposed to cure cancer and solve wo

rld hunger. Ok..maybe not that last part, but the hype around Cuil was at such a ridiculous level that when we all found out how uncool Cuil really was, there was a huge backlash against it. That was 2008.

Almost two years later, the makers of Cuil have launched Cpedia. This is some kind of Wikipedia competitor where the data is automatically pulled together from mentions about some topic or person. It’s actually a cool idea, but some of the results are either extremely useless or extremely hilarious. This resulted in some not-so-nice press about Cpedia.

That would be the end of it, except that Cuil CEO Tom Costello went in on all the Cpedia “haters” (his word, not mine) in a blog post…and you thought the tech world didn’t have any drama.

Xobni (that’s Inbox backwards) is the plugin for Outlook that provides super search abilities and social networking integration. Outlook 2010 is still in beta and it’s weeks before it will actually be ready for prime time, but Xobni has already released a version for you to play with. You can download Xobni 1.9.2, which is compatible with Outlook 2010. Of course, you’ll need Outlook 2010 beta also, download it here.

If you already use Xobni, simply upgrading to the Outlook 2010 beta should automagically download and install the new Xobni for you.

In addition to helping you search and find emails and contacts, Xobni also helps you find important bits located in your inbox. These include things like attachments, meetings, and links. This new version of Xobni is pretty much focused on being Office 2010 compatible, so there are only a few feature additions:

• Outlook 2010 Compatibility: All features available in previous versions now working and optimized for Outlook 2010. 32bit and 64bit versions supported. New Quick-Access in the Ribbon.
• Search when Xobni collapsed.
• Show/Hide Xobni instantly.
• Xobni Options always available: If multiple Outlook windows are open, Xobni can move from one to the other.
• Users who are not “administrators” on their computers can now install Xobni. This is especially important in corporate environments.
• Twitter profile images now show in business card area.
• AutoSuggestions can be deleted from the compose screen.

Keep in mind that Xobni does have a premium level of service called Xobni Plus and some of the most interesting features are not available in the free version. These include stuff like advanced search, accessing your xobni contacts from the compose window, finding links you’ve exchanged with contacts, and locating calendar appointments. For more information on Xobni plus, check out the comparison on their website.

Xobni might seem anxious in releasing this new 2010 beta-compatible version, but it could be they’re feeling some pressure from competitors. Gist, a service that makes it simple to keep track of potential business collaborators, offers some very similar functionality to Xobni but with more social integration. Gist also has an Outlook plugin that seems to duplicate for free much of what Xobni is charging for. Or maybe Xobni is just trying to stay on top of their game.

MySpace has recently made an update to their events system that may have musicians scrambling to update their profiles. The new events page is a complete overhaul of the simple and pretty much useless events system of old. It also adds a bunch of features which make it much more useful to artists, profitable for MySpace, and helpful to users and fans.

Many have lamented the alleged demise of MySpace as the top social network, which is odd because you would be hard pressed to find someone who was a MySpace fan in the first place. Although Facebook has since taken the crown of #1 social networking site, MySpace has not simple accepted defeat and laid down to die quietly. Despite their setbacks, they have made some pretty smart decisions and done a good job of playing to their strengths.

Primary among these are it’s use for musicians and artists. Facebook might be the top social network, with Twitter running close behind, but it’s a major pain to try and promote your music on either. MySpace has already been doing this for years. MySpace has also rolled things out slowly, bit by bit. This keep people paying attention and avoids them doing some major redesign that everyone soon forgets.

With the new events page, people can easily promote their upcoming events in a visually pleasing interface (especially when compared to what was available before). You can see the Who, What, When, and Where about the event as well as a detailed description. You can RSVP, share the event on your other social networks, and see who else is going. There is also an integrated map that shows the event’s location.

When a user RSVP’s, they have the option to promote the event to their friends. You can buy tickets directly through MySpace for the event, which earns them a little revenue. Advertisers looking to promote their own events can purchase add space in the social calendar.

MySpace might be down, but is definitely not out. They are playing to their strength in media events and slowly rolling out features so people know they are still alive. They have even integrated directly with Facebook using Facebook Connect. They plan to roll out additional features around mobile access, concert notifications, movies, and DVD releases in the near future.

When is the last time you logged into MySpace?

more at TechCrunch and hypebot

With Earth Day approaching, going green is at the forefront for many businesses and individuals. Some people don’t know where to start. It seems as if you may need to completely change the way you do business to even make a significant change. This is not the case, though. Every little change that you can make will be a benefit to the environment in the grand scheme of things. You don’t have to make some huge long-term investment in solar panels or wind power to make a difference. This post will go over four ways that you can go green now without putting your business out of business.

Go Paperless

This is a pretty obvious one and also a pretty easy one to implement. Most of the time, we are printing things out just because it’s what we’ve been trained to do. You can just as easily read something on your screen as you can read it on a piece of paper. This is especially true of the types of content we come across in doing business. Emails, invoices, newsletters, marketing messages, NDAs, proposals, and even contracts can all be done electronically. Microsoft Office is one option that will make sharing and collaborating on documents simple.

Work From Home

According to Energy Star, working from home or running a home business can reduce energy costs by about 30 percent. Of course, this depends on the specifics of how you run your business and exactly what type of investment you’re able to put into going green. Bottom line is that you won’t be adding to commute pollution.

Involve Your Clients and Customers

Part of going green as a business is helping communicate and spread the same types of ideals to your customers, clients, and employees. Work with your clients to see if getting rid of paper is acceptable for them while working with you. Instead of always meeting face-to-face, see if some or all of your meetings could be done by phone or maybe via Skype. Outlook with Social Connector can help in keeping in touch.

Turn Stuff Off

Something so simple can make a lot of difference. Many people and companies as a whole don’t even bother to shut down their computers and other office equipment at the end of the day. This wastes loads of energy. Back in the day, many businesses and a few individuals ran their own servers at home. While some still do, it’s just not a necessity anymore. The cloud makes all of your data available 24/7 to you and your clients without the need for your personal computer to be on. When you shut it down for the day or turn in for the night, give your electronics a rest as well.

What have you done to make your business greener?

Bing has started rolling out a new feature called Social Search. This allows you to see real-time results from Twitter right alongside your Bing search results. If that sounds familiar, it should. Google has been doing it for a little while now. This feature has been rolled out to a subset of Bing users, so you may not have access to it just yet. The goal here seems to be to give you real-time trending results alongside the sites you might expect to find. You’re basically getting the best of both worlds in one shot.

Microsoft has actually had a deal with Twitter for a while now and initially offered Twitter results via an entirely separate beta site. Now, these results will be integrated into your actual search results.

Bing pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event. From people on the ground tweeting about what’s happening around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be significantly faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on breaking events. Further, the Twitterati also picks up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.

The feature should be available to most Bing users “very soon” according to Microsoft. In addition to helping fill out your standard searches, Bing will also keep an eye on trending topics and fold in tweets on those topics from Twitter within your search results. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet.

It’s not really surprising that Google and now Bing have decided to make social media a part of their search strategy. f course you want your old standbys when search for things, but times are changing and many people aren’t satisfied with simply knowing about things that have happened. They want to know what’s happening now at this moment or even what might possibly be happening in the very near future. To give the people the information they hunger for, integrating social media sites is the next logical step.

MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system for portable devices. It’s the product of a partnership between Nokia and Intel which brings together Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin environment. This operating system could power your smart phone and your netbook as well as other devices you might not consider like a vehicle or an embedded system.

Since it popped up back in February, MeeGo has gained some steam and has recently picked up quite a few partnerships with both hardware and software companies. MeeGo competes directly with Android and, by default, against the iPhone OS. It remains to be seen if the Open Source OS will be able to gain traction, but this latest news seems to indicate that it does have a chance.

As far as netbooks go, Intel has some specs available for the MeeGo-powered devices. Firefox has been taken out of the picture and replaced with Google Chrome (or, more likely the open source Chromium based on the same code).

For mobile devices, Fennec will be the web browser of choice. This browser is from Mozilla and does actually support Flash. VOIP and Instant Messaging are included. Also, social networking is integrated and GPS should be supported for the location-based app lovers out there. The potential interfaces for mobile are below and quite compelling.

The MeeGo product release schedule shows version 1.0 coming out some time next month. 1.1 should be released during the 4th quarter of this year, and v1.2 should be available during the 1st quarter of next year. Developers can download MeeGo and start developing applications for it now. Some of the basic features of the environment include:

• Performance optimizations and features which enable rich computational and graphically oriented applications and connected services development
• No-compromise Internet standards support delivering the best web experiences
• Easy to use, flexible and powerful UI/app development environment based on Qt
• Open source project organization managed by the Linux Foundation
• State of the Art Linux stack optimized for the size and capabilities of small footprint platforms and mobile devices, but delivering broad Linux software application compatibility

It remains to be seed how and if MeeGo will have any major effect on the mobile device market as it relates to Android and the iPhone , but a little competition can only make sure end users get the best product possible.

more info at CarryPad

MyLikes, founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSesne tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money totaling about $630k from 11 other ex-Googlers to fund the company. Those are the only people they took money from. People who also used to work for Google.

If you recall, MyLikes is a service that helps you make money by telling your friends about stuff you like. At it’s core, it is simply a service that lets you Like anything you want across the Internet (something like Glue). What sets it apart is that some of these items are sponsored. So, when you share your love (er…like?) for something across your social networks and your friends click the link, you get paid.

MyLikes is also a viable service for simple word-of-mouth advertising, which pretty much ensures there will be a steady stream of campaigns for you to choose from. If you’re an upcoming artist or small company, for example, you could spend a relatively small amount of money advertising directly to potential users than you might spend on other advertising methods.

CEO Reddy says she wanted to take money from people she knew and trusts, and those happened to be all Ex-Googlers. Individual investors included FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, angel investor Georges Harik, Digg VP Keval Desai, David Hirsch of Metamorphic Ventures, LinkedIn product VP Dipchand Nishar, Aydin Senkut, and Greg Lee. Robert Scoble and Louis Gray will be joining as advisors.

MyLikes is different from others in the pay-to-tweet space in that the focus is on popular users rather than on the advertisers. Simply sharing an ad in your Twitter stream is not enough to get paid. People have to actually click the link. This means that you must have a good reputation with your network and a good overall reach into the Twitter community. This also means that spammers and bots won’t be able to penetrate the market as they have done with other services.

MyLikes will still have to compete with Twitter’s new ad platform and existing pay-per-tweet services, but I think MyLikes has a leg up on the competition. Especially since you can also post your sponsored likes on your blog and other social media avenues.

As of today, Opera Mini has been approved for distribution through Apple’s App store. This browser is already in use by over 50 million users worldwide, providing lightning fast mobile browsing by compressing data by about 90 percent before it ever sends the content to your device. This means you waste less bandwidth and your pages should pop up on your little screen much faster.

Not only will the Opera Mini browser speed up your mobile browsing in general, but it also helps you save money on your data bill. The change in browsing speed will be especially noticeable if you’re forced to use a slower data network like the 2G Edge.

Even though Opera won out in the end, the process of getting accepted wasn’t as simple as you might think. Apple is pretty strict about what it allows into the App store. Especially apps that potentially replace Apple’s own offerings. In this case, they could have denied Opera Mini based on the fact that Safari is also a mobile web browser (even though they had previously accepted other browsers).

Besides creating an outstanding product that would actually be a huge benefit to iPhone customers, Opera put up a website that provided a live countdown until Mini was either accepted or rejected. We covered this back in March. 20 days, 8 hours, and 31 minutes later, Opera Mini was finally made available in the App store.

Did Opera’s strategy make a difference, or did Apple simply recognize that Opera Mini would be a useful App for their customers? We probably won’t ever find out for sure, but I’d like to think so. While it is at Apple discretion what they allow into the App store, some of their policies have been very upsetting to developers and customers alike and this move by Opera was either going to end in Opera Mini being accepted or possibly in some type of litigation.

Even now, Apple has started informing existing iPad developers that they cannot use the word “Pad” in their applications. Not “iPad” or anything specific like that, just the generic word “Pad.” If you want the new Opera Mini browser, feel free to download it (for free) via iTunes.

With all the Buzz surrounding Buzz, many of us have forgot about all the other services out there vying for the privilege of serving as our lifestream or aggregator. You have the old stand-by, FriendFeed which is still alive and kicking despite being purchased by Facebook. Cliqset is improving all the time. There are still others, including a little known service called Nsyght.

Easy Registration

Nsyght has been around for about 2yrs, but has recently received a round of funding and has since grown from a simple social search site to a full fledged social aggregator. Signing up is simple because you don’t actually have to sign up, simply register using your existing Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Clickpass, or OpenID account.

Adding Accounts

Once inside, head on over to Settings > Services to attach your Nsyght account to all your different social media networks. Currently, these include: StumbleUpon, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Digg, OpenID, Clickpass, Google, and Yahoo. In addition to pulling in your content, most of these can also be used to login later. Nsyght uses OAuth so you don’t have to tell it your passwords.

General Usage

From here, most things work as expected. You’re looking at a river of all the content from your social networks. You can post items via Nsyght and have them also post to your other sites. A set of filters in the sidebar lets you focus on one specific services, simply click the ones you want to see. This is helpful if one particular service happens to be burying the rest.

What Makes it Different

While Nsyght has most of the features you would expect to find from any other social media aggregator service, it’s approach is very interesting. By definition, an aggregator is supposed to pull things together and help you keep your self organized. Rather than visiting multiple different websites to try and keep track of your friends’ activities, you can monitor everything from one place.

What actually happened with most of these services is that they came with their own social graph and their own comments for each item you import. Instead of being able to manage all your social networks and services from one place, you just end up with yet another social network to keep track of.

Part of why we built nsyght was to help users really take advantage of data portability. Instead of building a service that would encourage you to leave your network behind, we wanted to build something that could give you cool tools and services that helped you get more out of your existing social network, while allowing you to keep all your various profiles up to date. At the end of the day, we all (theoretically) have lives and jobs to do, so doing more with less seems pretty appealing.

When you comment on an item in Nsyght, your comment shows up in Nsyght as well as on the site the item came from. If you Like an item, you get a similar result. All in all, definitely worth a look and I’m sure they would appreciate your feedback.

Google is announcing some pretty major updates to it’s Google Docs service. They have done some under-the-hood updates to improve the overall speed of the document editor and spreadsheet editor. In addition, Docs is starting to look more like Wave as far as collaborative editing and discussion around documents. These updates come as a result of Google realizing they needed to make major changes to the foundation of Docs in order to provide more advanced features.

Multiple participants can now edit a document and see changes made by others in real-time, character by character. Each individual’s changes are color coded. In addition to watching actual changes being made, you can chat in the sidebar with potential participants and leave notes on the document, separate from the actual document content. It’s almost like putting a sticky note on it. Google has improved reliability and accuracy of the import/export functionality, added real margins and tab stops, and improved image layout within documents. You can drag and drop images freely within the document.

Spreadsheet editing is a lot smoother due to the updates on the back end. Your spreadsheets will load much faster, are more responsive, and scroll more seamlessly. They have added a formula bar which allows you to input formulas as well as edit cells. You can now drag and drop columns and save time with auto-complete within columns. Just like with the document editor, you can see changes being made by other people in real-time and color coded.

Google has added an entirely separate drawing editor. This will save you from having to open big and bulky third party drawing/diagram software. You will be able to access your drawings alongside the rest of your documents. You can also copy drawings to the web clipboard and past them into your spreadsheets, presentations, and documents.

This new version of docs is not compatible with Google Gears, which Google was planning to do away with anyway. After these updates roll out, offline mode will no longer be supported. On the positive side, they are working on a replacement for this functionality that takes advantage of similar features in HTML5.

These new features are coming to you within the next few days, but you can get them immediately by clicking New Version at the top of any spreadsheet or look for New Version of Google Documents under ‘Document Settings.’

In a live event today, Microsoft revealed the project referred to as the Microsoft Pink until now. It’s called the Kin and it represents the next generation of devices stemming from Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger. The Kin is a device which focuses on people deep in the social media world. Those of us who live on Facebook and Twitter and who have groups of friends that extend beyond just those we interact with in person.

There are actually 2 devices in play here. The Kin One and the Kin Two. Both devices are sliders with a camera, LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. The Kin One is a small squarish device and the Kin Two is more of a standard sized slider phone with a higher quality camera (8 megapixels) and screen.

The phone has no support for third-party applications, but is well integrated into all the most popular social networking sites. The point is to keep you in tune with what’s going on with your friends online, separating your friends into 3 groups:

• Friends you interact with on a regular basis and in person. The people you hang out with.
• Friends that you probably haven’t seen in years, but still stay in touch with online. Like those people on Facebook you graduated high school with.
• Friends that you met online that you have probably never actually met, but you still share interests with.

The primary home screen of the device is where you stay in The Loop. The Loop refers to both the stream of information available on the Kin as well as the conversations and media that are constantly flowing through your network of friends.

In addition to keeping you in The Loop, the Kin helps you easily share things. A green dot is ever present on your screen and dropping items on this dot allows you to share them across your network. You compose your share by dragging things to the dot from The Loop, the web browser, your search results, and so on. Once you send the item to your friends, the Kin figures out what to send to whom. For instance, your Facebook friends may get a Facebook message with all the details and your standard phone contacts will get an MMS with the relevant attachments.

The Kin One comes with 4GB of internal storage, while the Kin Two offers 8GB. The great part of it is that this internal storage is almost made irrelevant based on the fact that all of your data is stored in the cloud. This is pretty much identical to how the Sidekick (created by Danger) has always worked. In addition to having all of your phone data available outside of the phone (yeah! no lock-in!) you can access your data via any web browser. There is even a timeline available so that you can scroll back in time and reminisce.

I can’t lie, this device looks very interesting. The Sidekick was probably my favorite phone ever and the only reason I got rid of it was it’s lack of 3rd party apps. Even though the Kin series offers Over The Air updates, the lack of apps might turn many off. On the other hand, it might be exactly what their target demographic is looking for. If you want to be the first one to comment on your friends’ updates, this is the device for you.

The device is exclusive to Verizon and you should be able to snag one in May.

first photo via Engadgenet