By Paul Thomson :: 5:48 PM
AllThingsD is reporting that Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 5, will integrate contacts from social networks other than Twitter.
When Apple announced enhancements to iOS earlier this week, the company talked up and demonstrated the seamless way that the operating system will support Twitter. However, it appears that support for Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and MySpace are also available in the new OS.
According to Liz Gannes‘ post, “the iOS 5 address book has a field not just for Twitter, but also offers space to add friends’ handles on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Myspace. Alongside a person’s email address and phone number, an iOS user can also add links to their accounts around the Web. Then Apple auto-populates the URL for each of the services. Clicking on the account name opens up Safari to that person’s profile page.”
Right now, the new iOS is only available to the developer community. It will not be generally available to the public until Fall, 2011.
By Gilbert Falso :: 11:45 AM
Google has changed the logo at the top of its search page today to celebrate the 96th birthday of legendary inventor and guitarist Les Paul. The image is no ordinary Google Doodle, however – this one is interactive. Drag your mouse across the strings and you can make (and record!) a tune of your own.
According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Paul “refined the technology of sound recording, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking.”
In a blog post, Google said, “In keeping with [Paul’s] spirit of tinkering, those of you in the U.S. can click the black ‘compose’ button to record your own 30-second track. Just strum the strings or trigger notes with the letters or numbers on your keyboards. Clicking the button again will display a link to share the songs you’ve made.”
Paul played weekly well into his 90s, and continued to tinker in his basement workshop at his home in New Jersey until his death in August, 2009.
The doodle was created by Google employees Kristopher Hom, Joey Hurst and Ryan Germick. It employs JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas, CSS, Flash, and the Google Font API.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:32 PM
Twitter announced yesterday that it will be providing an automatic link shortening service on the web-based client at Twitter.com.
“Sharing links on Twitter.com is now simple and instant. Plus, since we show a shortened version of the original link, people will know which site the link points to,” read the announcement posted on Twitter’s blog.
An additional feature of Twitter’s shortening service is the ability for the micro-blogging platform to recognize links that have been reported as malicious, and redirect the user to a page warning them about the potentially dangerous link destination.
The service works as follows:Â after a user enters the first 13 characters of an URL, or pastes a URL, Â a pop-up will alert them that Twitter is going to shorten that link automatically. Links will use the short t.co URL, but will partially display the original URL, so that users will have some idea where the link is taking them.
Plans are to roll the service out slowly, to a limited number of users. Eventually, all Twitter users will have access to it. The company emphasized that people who use other link shortening service, such as bit.ly, will still be able to do so. The advantage of using a shortener such as bit.ly is that it provides users with click statistics for their shared links.
By Gilbert Falso :: 4:40 PM
Last year, Facebook implemented facial recognition in its photo albums, prompting North American users to tag their friends in pictures uploaded to the site. The feature was turned on by default, and users had to manually switch it off.
Now, Facebook has rolled this feature out across all geographies, and many Facebook users are finding that their privacy settings aren’t protecting them. As your friends upload pictures, Facebook’s facial recognition technology will try to determine who the people are in the pictures. If it thinks it finds a match, your Facebook friends will be encouraged to tag it with your name.
As with photo tagging in the past, users only find out that they have been tagged in a photo after it occurs, and must remove it if they do not want themselves tagged.
You can prevent your friends from receiving your name as a possible photo tag suggestion by following these instructions:
1) Go to your privacy settings, under “Account” in the top right corner, and click “Customize Settings.”
2) Scroll down to “Things others share” and look for “Suggest photos of me to friends.”
3) Click “Edit Settings” on this selection, and then “Disable” the function.
4) Click “OK” to confirm the change.
By Gilbert Falso :: 12:39 PM
Yesterday at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), the company announced that the new version of its mobile operating system iOS would offer tight integration with Twitter.
Support for the 140-character social media platform will be integrated into iOS 5 applications and features including Photos, the Safari browser, Contacts and Maps. iOS users will now have the ability to take photos or link articles from Safari and tweet them to their followers with one click, without the need for involving a separate application.
In addition, Twitter’s integration into the operating system will allow users to take advantage of a one-time sign in for all Twitter functions, eliminating the need to authenticate with several different applications.
In a blog post concerning the integration, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says, “Building Twitter into iOS 5 truly creates the easiest way to share everything that’s happening in your world. Take a picture, tap ‘Tweet’. Tweeting has never been simpler.”
Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software said at yesterday’s conference that, “People send more than a billion tweets per week, and we hear from a lot of our customers on iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch that they love Twitter. So we want to make it even easier for all of our customers to use Twitter.”
Twitter profile pictures and handles will also be part of a user’s contact list, along with names, email addresses and telephone numbers.