Author: Rahsheen on Black Web 2.0

PicClick is a search engine that only includes a few sites, but that’s all it needs to make your shopping life easier. It is the first visual shopping interface for eBay and others. It’s a really unique and pretty awesome way to find things you want to get. Whether it be a handmade bag from Etsy.com or a new way to make curry from AllRecipes.com. You can even use it to find someone special using PlentyOfFish.

PicClick currently supports eBay, Amazon, Etsy, PlentyOfFish, AllRecipes.com, and Google. Yelp is still in the works. These appear as tabs across the top of the page. Once you’ve decided what you might be looking for, you can enter your search terms or simply start narrowing things down by clicking through the categories. The images you see as results will update accordingly.

As part of your search, you can specify a minimum or maximum price where applicable. A slider on the right lets you choose how big you want the thumbnails to be. Once you narrowed things down a bit, you can use this to see things clearer. Visual search fits really well with shopping. Usually, we find ourselves hunting around the page for the photo showing what the item looks like. With PicClick, you can get right to the point. When looking for things in real life, we are usually attracted to what catches our eye, so online shopping should work the same way.

“With PicClick you can see hundreds of products on one page, you can maximize full-screen for even more, infinite scroll, and zoom slider on the top right. It just allows you to find things 100x faster.”

Not sure about the 100x figure, but it will definitely speed things up a bit. PicClick also lends itself very well to touchscreen devices like the iPad and most of the mobile phones coming out these days. Why go through the standard method of searching and scrolling through a small number of items at a time when you can quickly browse hundreds of items at the same time?

PicClick plans to release a new section every month starting with Yelp. It looks like PicClick has found a very interesting niche that will possibly blow up. What do you think?

via RWW

Sounds like AOL will be doing their part to help the economy this year. They are focused on being able to churn out massive amounts of content all in-house and will be hiring hundreds of new content creators. David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division, studied the numbers and came to the conclusion that this is the most profitable route for the company to take. Yahoo just recently reached a similar conclusion, which was part of the reason they acquired Associated Content.

“Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period. The content driving our traffic is home-grown, and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.” – David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division

AOL is already home to 500 full-time editorial employees and content creators. Eun says that this number could double in the coming year depending on the marketplace and that AOL will be “the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year.” The goal of this operation is to attract advertisers. The content operation involves over 100 brands, which will be reorganized into 17 separate content networks.

They’ve done their homework and have not only represented all types of content that attracts users, but also content that advertisers want to spend money on. These huge networks will range in topics from finance and sports to music and communities like AOL Latino and Black Voices.

500 more full-time employees is apparently not enough to turn the company from a dial-up ISP into a media giant. AOL is also looking to expand their network of 40,000 freelance contributors. As part of this, they are working on a system that will judge the value of a piece based on traffic, visit length, and the ad revenue associated with it.

It seems that both Yahoo and AOL have chosen the same path. AOL already has a base of writers to work with while Yahoo had to get most of theirs through acquisition. It remains to be seen if simply flooding the web with content and throwing ads on top of it will be a profitable strategy for either one, but the strategy of monetizing other people’s content has worked just fine for most major players on the web to this point.

Caffeine is a complete redesign of Google’s search index. While they reign as the #1 search engine, they have never been known to stop innovating. The web has changed and we have come to expect things to happen immediately. When we search, we want the most relevant and freshest results. When we publish things on the web, we want them to show up right now. Google has taken steps to make their search more realtime by integrating with the social web, but they have decided to go much further than that.

The results you see when you search Google come from their search index, which is a representation of the web as they see it stored in a database somewhere. Every so often, Google’s web crawlers go out and try to figure out what has changed. The web is now a rich ecosystem of data, going way beyond simple text and images, so this strategy doesn’t quite fit. It’s also slow to update. If you’ve ever published something and then waited and waited for it to show up in Google, you know how annoying that can be.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Caffeine is a fresh take on an old idea and should go a long way in keeping Google at the top of their search game. It’s also an investment in the future, providing a strong, scalable, and faster base for future developments in search. It seems that this is just the beginning. This back-end change should bring users some nice benefits on the front-end, making search more useful and relevant in the months ahead.

FaceTime is Apple’s new standard for video calling. It comes along with the release of iOS4 and the iPhone 4. At the moment, it only works from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 and only over WiFi. FaceTime was demoed at the WWDC yesterday by Steve Jobs himself. Even though 570 WiFi base stations in use by various bloggers threatened to bring the demo to it’s knees, Jobs made a video call to Jony Ive to demo the product.

11:34AM – Jony: “I did, too — I used to love the optimistic view of the future. And it’s real now, isn’t it?”
“It’s real now. Especially when people turn off their WiFi.”

11:34AM – “Hey Jony how you doing?”
“I’m doing okay — except for these guys who aren’t turning their WiFi off. You know, this is amazing… I grew up with the Jetsons and Star Trek communicators. I grew up dreaming about this stuff…”

– “In 2007 when we launched the iPhone, I got to make the first public call on the iPhone…” Jony’s face shows up on the screen. “Hey Jony! This never freezes up, so you haven’t turned off all the WiFi — let’s get it off please!”

At the moment, the whole thing seems pretty limited. You have to first have an iPhone 4, then you have to be near a WiFi hotspot. The person you’re calling also needs an iPhone 4 near a WiFi hotspot. On the plus side, there is no configuration necessary. It simply works right out of the box. The software automatically switches cameras for you (front or rear) and the video and audio quality are said to be good.

Jobs says they are working with cellular carriers to “get things ready.” They are also planning to turn FaceTime into an open industry standard. This will bring this video calling technology to other handsets and carriers, which should make it much more useful. The possibilities and use cases are many and the demo video showed most of the ones you would expect: people talking to babies, since people love babies, even for get them the babyzoom’s budget baby girl wear from stores online. Maybe this could be the push needed to take video calling to the mainstream.

photo and video via Engadget

While the HTC Evo 4G is a formidable Android phone, it didn’t really have any competition when it was first released. It set the bar pretty high for what a smartphone should be capable of. Now that the iPhone 4 has been announced, the first thing we want to know is how they match up. How do the two best phones from Android and Apple compare? The Evo 4G and the iPhone 4 are pretty evenly matched except for a few key areas. These are the camera capabilities, battery life, and the displays.

The Cameras

The iPhone 4 bumped the camera from 3 megapixels up to 5 megapixels over previous versions. It also includes a backside illuminated sensor and Jobs points out that the size of the sensors was not decreased in order to boost the megapixels. This is all in an effort to increase the number of photons that are captured by the camera, thus increasing photo quality.

The HTC Evo 4G has an 8 megapixel camera. This should mean it takes better photos, but all this talk about the sensors from Apple casts a shadow of doubt. Is it really all about the megapixels, or does Apple know something we don’t?

Both phones have secondary cameras and are capable of recording HD video. The difference here is in the software capabilities of the phones. You can get iMovie for the iPhone 4, which lets you edit your HD movie right on the phone and then publish it wherever you need it. Both phones offer some form of video calling, but the iPhone is limited to WiFi-only in this department.

Battery Life

The HTC Evo is known to have serious battery life issues. According to Matt Burns at Mobile Crunch, this is the deal breaker. Even with features like 4G WiMax turned off, the battery life is apparently still miserable. Even the HTC CEO agrees that this is an issue.

The iPhone 4 made more room in it’s design for a bigger battery. The A4 processor it uses is also very good at power consumption. This makes for a device with some pretty competitive battery life stats (7hours 3g talk time). We won’t know until more people get the device in their hands, but I suspect the iPhone 4 won’t have a problem outlasting the Evo 4G.

The Display

The HTC Evo 4G, with a display size of 4.3 inches, definitely has a bigger display than the iPhone (3.5 inches). It’s not all about size, though. The iPhone display has a resolution of 960×640 while the Evo comes in at 800×480. Higher resolution means better viewing quality and Apple has also added Retina Display technology, which puts 78% of the pixels you would find on an iPad right in the palm of your hand. Which display comes out looking the best is probably a matter of opinion given the 1-inch size difference.

Given the engineering and technology involved in these devices, it’s difficult to simply compare them on paper. Once we see them being compared in the wild, I’m sure their individual quirks will become clear. For now, it looks like the iPhone 4 may have a slight lead. Of course, we also have to keep in mind the existing issues with the AT&T network. Worst case scenario, you either end up with a device that can’t hold a charge or a device that can’t keep a data connection.

photo via Engadget

At WWDC 2010, Apple brings us iOS4. No, it’s not a completely new Operating System, but they’ve decided to drop the Phone part and make things simpler. According to jobs, this is their “most ambitious release to date.” It sports over 1500 developer APIs and over 100 new user features. The most obvious of these new features being multi-tasking. This has been a huge issue for many potential iPhone users and detractors and Jobs sticks with the same talking points as to why they’ve taken so long to implement it, saying “Some people were saying you weren’t first with multitasking — the same was true with cut/copy/paste. But we took some time to figure out how to do it right.”

During the iPhone 4 presentation, Jobs was unable to pull up a web page. Apparently, there were 570 WiFi base stations in the room and they were messing up the demos. Before he began the iOS4 presentation, he actually said “All you bloggers need to turn off your base stations, put your notebooks down.” Many blogs actually did stop live blogging, but GDGT was hearing none of that.

11:06AM – And yes, we’re still here. Sorry Steve.

11:06AM – People are jeering… “come on guys.” Oooookay. “Are we done? So, number six: iPhone OS4. The most advanced mobile OS in the world.” Big applause.

11:06AM – “I’ve got time…” laughter. “This is a testament to how far we’ve come, isn’t it?”

11:05AM – “If you want to see the demos, there’s no way to do it. Set ‘em on the floor.” This is really awkward.

11:05AM – Wait, Steve is seriously asking everyone to stop liveblogging? They’re serious!

In any case, the show must go on. One of the primary uses for multitasking that I’ve heard was for streaming music while doing other things. This is the first thing we see during the keynote, Pandora streaming music while Jobs checks his mail. That alone is probably worth some applause. A few other iOS4 features to note:

• Folders – easily keep things organized and categorized
• Retina display integration
• Mail – unified inbox & threading
• Enhanced Camera & Photos apps
• Deeper enterprise support – this includes features like better data protection, wireless app distribution, and multiple Exchange accounts

Another interesting point is the addition of Bing as a search option. It’s an HTML5 presentation of Bing done by Microsoft. As Google and Apple move directly into competition, some speculated that we might see Google removed from the iPhone. It looks like simply adding another option was as close as Apple was willing to go. Google still remains the default, though.

Apple will sell the 100 millionth iOS device this month. That includes iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. A pretty awesome number to think about and Jobs ends by saying, “There is definitely a market for your applications.”

With the iPhone 4 camera, Apple realizes that one of the most important factors in the quality of your photos is your lighting. Rather than simply focusing on boosting the megapixels of the camera, they took steps to maximize the number of photons it can capture.

The iPhone 4 has taken the camera from 3 to 5 megapixels and has a backside illuminated sensor. Jobs notes that most manufacturers increase the megapixels at the expense of the pixel sensors, making them smaller to accommodate, but Apple has kept these sensors the same size as a way to capture more photons and give you better quality photos.

• 5 megapixel camera
• Backside illuminated sensor
• 1.75um size pixels
• 5x digital zoom
• Tap to focus
• LED Flash

The new camera also records video in HD (crowd went wild at that one). It can do full 720p at 30fps. “It’s REAL HD!,” says Jobs. Tap to focus is supported, along with built-in video editing, one-click sharing, and the LED flash will stay on while recording videos. To put this all into perspective, you can record HD quality video, edit it right there on your phone, and send it via e-mail, MMS, to MobileMe, YouTube, and others.

As if this wasn’t enough, they are taking things a step further by giving you iMovie for the iPhone. This will let you add beautiful transitions, titles, music, and intros from the palm of your hand. You can optionally include geolocation information for video clips. Record directly to the timeline, or choose from existing clips on your phone.

There is really nothing out there like this at all. High-definition video editing on your mobile device. This is something that video bloggers have probably been dreaming about. It could definitely change the video landscape. We are used to seeing choppy, low-quality videos with bad audio and no polish when it comes to real-time events. If it’s possible to carry iMovie around in your pocket, we may see the quality and presentation of videos on sites like YouTube shoot way up.

An HD Camera and iMovie could leave some video bloggers/journalists in the dust.

Apple has once again changed the cell phone game with it’s latest iPhone release at WWDC. It boasts 100 new features over it’s predecessors, including a sleek new design that many are already somewhat familiar with. Steve joked about the iPhone being leaked and many have thought that leak would make the entire WWDC event pretty boring, but seeing the iPhone in action is a different story.

• It’s 9.3mm thick. 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS.
• Front-facing camera
• MicroSIM slot
• Camera + LED flash
• Headset
• An extra mic for noise cancellation

Jobs talked about how extraordinary the build quality and structure of the phone is, especially for a device that many didn’t think could get much smaller. The phone’s antennas are integrated right into the phone, running along the perimeter. “It’s never been done before and it’s really cool engineering,” says Jobs. The structure of the antennae explains the odd lines around the edge of the phone.

The device is built with stainless steel for strength and has glass on the front and the back. Some had speculated that the surface on the back would be an additional touch-sensitive surface. One of the most obvious and stunning new features is the Retina Display. The Retina Display packs 78% of the pixels you would find on an iPad right in the palm of your hand. Jobs compared the iPhone 4 with the 3GS side-by-side on a projector and the difference is quite obvious. They had to bring in special projectors that could handle the detail. While the new display will make everything, including all your apps, look better, Jobs encourages developers to include higher quality artwork in the future.

“We think this is going to set the standard for displays for years to come. It may be the most important single component of the hardware, and we’ve got something here now that’s like the best window on the planet.” -Steve Jobs

The iPhone 4 is powered by the A4 processor. By using a microSIM among other things, they made more room for a bigger battery. This boosts your battery life quite a bit:

• 3G Talk – 7 hours
• 3G Browsing – 6 hours
• WIFI Browsing – 10 hours
• Video – 10 hours
• Music – 40 hours

Stay tuned as we bring you more news on the iPhone 4 and Worldwide Developer Conference 2010.

(photo via GDGT live coverage)

Klout, the gold standard as far as measuring influence on Twitter, will begin branching out from Twitter by launching the Facebird experiment later today. Facebird will be available the Klout Labs segment of the site. Klout has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2008. The site is much more polished and they’ve added better visual cues and badges to make it easier to understand what your Klout score means. Facebird will add another dimension to the service by letting you find influential Twitter users to connect to based on your Facebook interests.

Facebird works by using Facebook Connect to access your Likes. Using the information about all the stuff you’ve expressed an interest in, Klout pulls up relevant influential Twitter users for you to browse through. It’s not just that simple, though. Klout defines 16 separate classes of users that describe their style of influence based on how they use Twitter. This goes a step further in helping you find the right people to follow. For example, you may not be looking for an expert on your favorite band or someone who talks about your favorite show, but you want to follow someone who just shares a lot of content related to something you like. In essence, you can find people who share your interests and also use Twitter the way you would like them to.

This is definitely a step in a new direction for Klout that could make the service much more useful across the board. Klout could put themselves in a position to build your social graph for you across all of your social media services based on all the things your actually interested in. This could make our lives much simpler and help cut out a lot of the noise we’re used to seeing. Most new services that you join offer the ability to connect with your friends from other services, but this isn’t always the best strategy. Your interests will mostly stay the same across the board, but that doesn’t mean you always want to connect with the same people.

Producteev is a task management solution born from the frustrations the team had with other available products and services. Many users trying to get their productivity game on point have run into the same issues. Some interfaces are entirely too complicated. You are limited in how you can access or add tasks. The application doesn’t connect with any of your existing tools. The list of grievances goes on and Producteev aims to address most of them out of the gate.

We wanted a fully-featured, social networking aware task management application with a user interface that made sense, something we didn’t have to devote a couple of hours to learning to use. We wanted to be able to get a clear overview of the status of any project, anytime and from any place. We needed to be able to collaborate effortlessly. We wanted to be able to update project information in many different ways : via email, online, mobile, IM… and we needed to be able to share information in real time with all our team members, no matter how computer-savvy they are … or aren’t.

We couldn’t find that perfect application, so we decided to build it.

You can add tasks on the Productive site, via Instant Messaging, or by email. Given the goals for Producteev to be ubiquitous solution for talk management, it’s interesting that they have not included any ability to add tasks via SMS as that would be the least common denominator. Android, iPhone, and Mac desktop applications are in the works, but some users may still be left out in the cold.

To set up the proper connections, you need to go to Workspace Settings on the bottom left and navigate to the Communication Preferences tab. Don’t bother with the Settings link on the top right near your name as that only leads you to your account settings.

To add tasks via IM, be sure to connect your instant messenger service of choice and then follow the directions that show up for adding Producteev as a contact. For GTalk, you have to add ‘improducteev@gmail.com,’ for example.

Adding tasks via email is as simple as composing or forwarding an email to task@producteev.com. No matter which method you choose, you can also tag tasks by adding a hashtag to include a date or direct the task to a specific workspace.

While Producteev doesn’t yet meet it’s goal of being a complete solution for task management that is available everywhere you are, it does pack a bunch of project and team management features that make it worth a look.

• Shared Workspaces – Workspaces allow you to separate tasks into groups or lists. You can use them to manage multiple projects and share them with family, clients, or colleagues. Useful for just about any use case.
• Automatic Prioritization – Producteev watches how you work and figures out what you need to do next based on your activity. Just check your Hot! filter.
• Google Integration – Sync your tasks up with your Google Calendar. Add a gadget to Gmail or iGoogle.
• Producteev Academy – Kick your team into high gear by adding an element of competition and fun. The Academy adds a social gaming aspect to your task management so that team members can earn badges and compete to be the most productive.

Producteev is still a young application with a lot of potential. In such a crowded space as the productivity game, their ultimate goal is what will help them stand out. What do you think of Producteev?

via ReadWriteWeb

Smokescreen Brings Flash to the iPhone/iPad…Kinda

Smokescreen is a new open-source project that makes it possible to do Flash without the Flash plug-in. It works by converting the Flash SWF file into Javascript/HTML5 on-the-fly. This means that you can view Flash content on devices that otherwise don’t support it, like the iPhone and iPad. Because all the work is being done by the browser, the process is very resource intensive and can be a bit choppy on some content. This is still a new project, though. I think we can expect to see improvements. Especially given the current climate around Flash support and HTML5. Check out the demo for yourself. (via Engadget)

Google Ditches Windows to Improve Security

Google has decided that Windows will no longer be allowed. For most of it’s 10,000 employees, Mac and Linux are now the only options. For those who really love the Windows OS, they will need permission from a CIO or other executive to use it. This comes after the China hacking attacks back in January of this year. Some have said that this move is bogus and won’t actually protect the company from attacks like the one in January, but sources say that the China hack simply stirred up an existing movement for Google to run it’s business using it’s own products. We must also remember that Google Chrome OS will be coming later this year and competes directly with Windows.

Jobs Spills the Beans at D8

Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at D8 and revealed some pretty interesting tidbits. The overall idea that he repeatedly returned to was that Apple is just trying to make a good product. This was part of his answer to a good number of questions, including whether Apple would remove Google from the iPhone/iPad (No), whether Jobs felt that Apple was in a platform war (Nope), and even in relation to the exclusion of Flash. He said Flash simply doesn’t make a good product and that’s why it was left out. He also mentioned that he never had beef with Adobe, but they kept talking and he couldn’t let it slide.

We didn’t set out to have a war over Flash. We made a technical decision. And it wasn’t until the iPad that Adobe raised a stink. They came after us….That’s why I wrote “Thoughts on Flash.”…We were getting tired of being trashed by Adobe in the press.

WWDC Begins Next Week

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference begins next week. With everything that been going on in the tech sphere recently, it will definitely be interesting to see what Apple will announce. TNW offers up 5 Solid Bets for what we should expect. Arstechnica will be live blogging the event. All Things D suggests that we may see nothing much at all since the new iPhone was already leaked. Stay tuned here as we will be sharing highlights from the event.

Twitter Forces Password Updates

For some odd reason, Twitter has pushed out a bunch of password update emails. This was surprising to me since I rarely ever go to the site itself to login. I stick to one client and don’t give out my login/pw to third party services (they should be using OAuth anyway). This indicates to me that something more sinister than simple phishing could be going on, but it could also just be Twitter being extremely over protective. In any case, be careful out there.

“Password resets are a standard operating procedure if we see anything even close to fishy related to an account in an effort to keep people safe”.

Microsoft Tag is an interesting way to add a new dimension to your current business. By creating a tag, you can connect your audience in the real world to a virtual experience via their mobile phone. Creating tags is free and scanning tags is possible from just about any phone with a camera.

We’ve previously discussed what place mobile barcode technology has in the future. It’s obvious that it’s useful, but we haven’t seen many popular services or brands take advantage of it. Microsoft may change that by putting a familiar name and some free tools behind tagging technology.

With Tag, you can connect your brick-and-mortar business with the infinite possibilities of the digital world. Rather than hoping potential customers remember your website or relying on the telephone game that word-of-mouth sometimes becomes, you can provide a direct conduit to your product or service. Tags turn inanimate objects into interactive experiences that let your products sell themselves.

Creating Your Tag

Your first step is to actually create a tag. This is simply the bit of information that you want to give people access to once they scan the tag.

• Tag Title – This is the name of the tag
• Tag Type – You can choose URL, Free Text, vCard, or Dialer
• Tag Notes – A few details about your tag (I don’t believe these are shared with the user)
• Start Date – When your tag should go live
• End Date – When you tag expires

Depending on which tag type you choose, you will be able to add additional data to your tag. For instance, the vCard type lets you upload a vCard to distribute and the Dialer type lets you specify a phone number that the user will be connected to.

The most popular option here might be the URL because it can possibly provide the richest digital experience, but having option to specify Text or connect the user to a phone number expand opportunities without relying on a data plan.

Once you’ve created your tag, the next step is to actually render it. This simply means printing it out for display at your location. All tags should follow the implementation guidelines before rendering so that you can maximize your efforts.

Scanning Tags and Usage Scenarios

The end user simply needs to grab a tag reader and start scanning. Then, the magic happens. Microsoft provides a set of tools that lets you track daily scans, so you have a way to track your results. Here are a few scenarios where Tags might be useful:

An automobile company might want to place a Tag on a billboard as a way to advertise their latest models to potential customers. Passengers and pedestrians could scan the tag as they pass by.

A film production company might put Tags pointing to a movie trailer on a poster at a movie theater, guiding the customer to more extensive information and interviews with the movie stars.

A video game company makes special custom Tags to be used at its trade show booth, allowing gamers to scan the Tag for custom in-game gear or clothing.

A sports drink company might choose to display a series of Tags for a product on the jumbotron in a stadium during a game, providing the fans with a collection of “secret phrases” throughout the game that enable free products or discount coupons.

What do you think about Microsoft Tag? What scenarios would you use it in.

Zynga has inked a five-year deal with Facebook in attempts to patch up their strained relationship. The details of the deal are not available yet, but the negotiations to get there show two companies definitely at odds with each other. While both companies have benefited from their close relationship up to this point, it seems that the Zynga gaming platform has grown beyond simply being a part of the Facebook experience.

Games are an easy way to make any site sticky and keep users coming back. Services like Foursquare, 12seconds, robux generator and Glue have shown how integrating some level of gaming, achievements, and competition, can help your user base grow. Facebook games are a huge part of the site’s attraction as many users are mostly there to play Cafe World, Sorority Life, and Farmville.

Sources say that Facebook was pushing for a long-term deal with Zynga, but the terms were in Facebook’s favor. One major sticking point was Facebook forcing Zynga and other apps to use Facebook Credits as their only virtual currency. Not only that, but Facebook takes 30% cut off the top for Facebook Credits transactions. This is bordering on robbery for Zynga, who already showed they can make huge sums of money in virtual goods on their own when they raised over $1 million for Haiti.

Even after both parties threatened to part ways, they eventually came to an agreement. The question is whether they have patched things up, or are following the old saying of keeping friends close and enemies closer. At this point, it doesn’t seem that Zynga really needs Facebook’s cooperation to be successful. It actually seems that Facebook might be more dependent on Zynga’s games than Zynga is on Facebook’s social network. In either case, both parties still gain some benefit by being connected. Facebook gets the benefit of return visitors and a slight influence over Zynga’s direction while Zynga remains entrenched in the hottest social networking site out.

Zynga has already been making moves to exist outside of the Facebook ecosystem. They definitely plan to have their cake and eat it too. They have Farmville.com up and running with plans to launch a social game network called Zynga Live. They have also recently entered into a partnership with Yahoo, which could connect their social gaming platform with 600 million Yahoo users. It’s clear that Zynga’s games won’t be buried somewhere on the site, but will be tightly integrated into most of Yahoo’s current services and probably end up on it’s front page.

The once modest gaming platform is doing big things these days and one thing here is clear: Zynga is playing no games.

Soundation is an application that lets you create music on the web. There is no software to download or hardware to install. All you need a browser with Flash support and you can start making music immediately. The Soundation online sequencer provides 11 real-time effects, 3 synthesizers, and a drum machine. There is an introductory library of over 400 sounds, samples, and loops to create your projects with. If this isn’t enough to satisfy your creativity, Soundation provides an integrated Sound Shop where you can buy more sounds.

Adding Sounds

Getting started with Soundation is simple. You don’t even need an account. Simply fire up The Studio and you’re good to go. The interface is similar to other audio programs you may have come across, with a list of audio channels on the left, menu at the top, and transport controls at the bottom. To add audio to your project, browse through the library to find what you need and drag it to an audio channel. Samples are organized by tempo and genre.

The waveform for the selected loop is now displayed on the track. You can extend the loop by dragging the top-right corner to fill out your track. This doesn’t stretch the loop, but duplicates it to fill the space. This makes sure your project stays on beat. If you want to actually stretch the loop and change it’s tempo, drag from the bottom-right corner.

You can drag clips around between channels and within the same channel. There is a snap-to-grid feature that helps make sure everything lines up. Delete a clip by selecting at and pressing Del or Backspace on your keyboard. There is also an Undo feature accessible from the Edit menu or by pressing Ctrl-Z.

Adding Effects

Each audio channel can have multiple effects added to it. This makes it easy to add compression to your drums for more punch or reverb to a melody to give it some depth. Just click the FX button (next to Solo and Mute), click the ‘+’ symbol, and choose the effect your wish to add. This will pop up another window which lets you optionally tweak the effect to your liking. Click the FX button again to hide the list of existing effects, tweak your existing effects, or add more effects.

Adding Channels and Instruments

Add additional audio channels by clicking the ‘+’ symbol at the bottom left of the studio. The button just to the right here adds an instrument channel. This allows you to add a few instruments, including a drum machine, to your project. While you can add instruments to your project and play them using the virtual keyboard, it doesn’t seem that you can record yet. Keep in mind that you can only play the drums by clicking on the first set of keys on the virtual keyboard, the corresponding keys on your keyboard don’t work. Other instruments work fine in this respect.

Saving Your Work

Once you’ve got a hot beat going, you have a few ways to keep it. The down-arrow symbol on the bottom right of the studio will let you mixdown and download your project as a WAV file. More interesting is the ability to publish your project to the web. This gives you a link that you can share so that others can hear what you have done. Publishing to the web also provides you with an embed code to share on other websites. The last option is to save the project on your local hard drive in Soundation’s native format. This is best if you plan to change things later.

Soundation is obviously a work in progress, but you can still use it in it’s current form to create some advanced music. It’s easy to use even for amateurs. As long as you understand the basics of music and know how to drag and drop, you will be fine. You could use Soundation to easily create original music for all types of projects. Once you get tired of the 400 available sounds, go ahead and buy more.

Here is a sample project I threw together real quick. What do you think about Soundation?

As far as fonts go, the web is a pretty boring place. Choices are limited by many factors and most web designers rely on a few standard rules when picking typefaces. Google aims to change all that with it’s Fonts API and Font Directory. The Google Font Directory allows you to browse a directory of attractive fonts for use on your site and the Google Fonts API makes it simple to include those fonts on your page.

One of the primary problems with using nice fonts on a web page is that those fonts are probably not free for your use. A font is just like a photo or piece of music in that you need permission to use and/or distribute it. With the Google Fonts directory, you now have access to fonts which are free to use and also pleasing to the eye.

The other side of this is that designers often have to guess at what fonts a specific visitor has available. Unlike photos and other embedded media, fonts are usually stored locally on a visitor’s computer. Rather than making assumptions about what a visitor has available, the Google Fonts API makes the fonts from the Fonts directory available to your page with a few simple lines of code. This means that you can reliably predict what your site will look like for most users.

If you are interested in seeing these fancy new fonts, you don’t actually have to do anything. If you’re a web designer looking to implement these fonts in your projects, the process is quite simple.

• Request the relevant stylesheet from Google for the font you would like to include:

  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

• Reference the included font as you would any other with in your CSS like this:

  CSS selector { font-family: 'Font Name', serif;
  }

  or like this:

  <div style="font-family: 'Font Name', serif;">Your text</div>

Font Name is the name of the font you’ve chosen from the Google Font Directory. CSS Selector would be the name of a particular HTML element, a class, or unique id you’re trying to style. The Google Font API will have a downside as some “web designers” get carried away and use as many fonts as possible on the same page. On the bright side, this should make the web a slightly better place by making it easier to include clean and professional fonts on any site. This is only a basic example. For full details and other options available in including fonts, check the quick start guide.