So on Monday, Twitter took a step toward the mainstream as CEO Evan Williams announced the @Anywhere platform, which will pull Twitter feeds into media web sites. He announced the new system at the start of an on-stage dialogue with Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab. After that announcement, most of the audience seemed to find the conversation boring as attendees streamed out during their talk.
Williams showed a quick demonstration of @Anywhere with web sites showing "hovercards." Mousing over these brings up some Twitter posts and a way to link to a user's Twitter account. Other possibilities are linking to an author's Twitter feed by clicking on a byline.
@Anywhere is launching with 13 big-name partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSnbc.com, eBay, Amazon.com and Microsoft's Bing search engine. The idea is to find ways to discover good content on Twitter that users will want to subscribe to.
"Discovery is one of the hardest challenges," Williams said. "It's putting these in context where you're already aware of them ... Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch."
A company blog post pointed out that Twitter has fewer constraints than social networks like Facebook. "When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach -- we didn't require a relationship model like that of a social network," it said.
"You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became...
The new phones, part of the company's Quick Messaging Devices lineup, will be among the first at AT&T to receive the new suite of consumer data services as the company tries to add value to its lower end by making its data services as valuable, or more so, than the phones themselves.
"Quick Messaging Devices are among our most popular and fastest-growing phones," said David Christopher, chief marketing officer of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. These phones, he added, will now offer "cutting-edge services that enhance" the overall user experience.
The first new phone to offer these services is the Samsung Strive, which is $19.99 with a two-year contract, and it will be followed by the Samsung Sunburst, Pantech Link, and Pantech Pursuit. The services include an online address book, next-generation messaging, and sharing of photos and videos.
The online address book enables users to automatically sync contacts between a handset and a PC. Contacts from other web-based address books, like e-mail accounts, can be imported and, since the address book lives in the cloud, the information is always backed up.
With next-generation messaging, users have the ability to send a text message to a group. They also get a threaded-conversations format, a consolidated inbox, and multimedia display, such as putting photos into messages.
Using mobile share, customers can use their handset to share videos and photos between their home computer, social-networking sites, friends and personal online storage. The online address book and advanced messaging are free, while mobile share requires a monthly or per-use fee.
A key value of the cloud-based services is that the user's personal content isn't lost, even if the phone is. For...
Along with the advance orders, Apple released some details on what's expected to be a key app for the new device -- e-books. Promoting the iBooks feature of the iPad, Apple's web site explains, "iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page. Even with all these extras, reading is so natural on iPad, the technology seems to disappear."
The site also promotes iBooks as a totally new reading experience. "Turn iPad to portrait to view a single page. Or view two pages at once by rotating to landscape. Change the text size. Even change the font. Touch and hold any word to look it up in the built-in dictionary or Wikipedia, or to search for it throughout the book and on the web," the site says.
And in a positive sign for open-source books, Apple announced the iPad will support the EPUB format for digital books -- even those that are not offered through Apple's e-commerce sites.
"The iBooks app uses the EPUB format -- the most popular open book format in the world," Apple's site says. "That makes it easy for publishers to create iBook versions of your favorite reads. And you can add free EPUB titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad."
EPUB features advanced presentation for digital books, including in-line raster and vector images, embedded metadata, digital-rights management support, and Cascading Style Sheets styling.
That support could go a long way to making the...
"Designed specifically for the iPad, our new B&N eReader will give our customers access to more than one million e-books, magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble e-bookstore, as well as the existing content in their Barnes & Noble [online] digital library," Barnes&Noble.com administrator Paul Hochman wrote on a company blog.
The app will allow customers who have already downloaded content to Barnes & Noble's nook e-reader to access the same material on the iPad, Hochman said.
While the iPad is a direct attack on the nook, which debuted over the holiday season, as well as Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader, the B&N eReader shows that Barnes & Noble is doing everything it can to adjust to the digital age as paper books sit longer on the shelves.
"Barnes & Noble is first and foremost a content retailer, not a gadget maker," said consumer-devices researcher Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. "It is far more important for [the company] to ensure that when -- or if, as the case may be -- reading moves from the physical realm to digital that Barnes & Noble maintains its place in the distribution chain."
Greengart also predicted an iPad app for the Kindle, which is already available for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. The app, he noted, would have to be optimized for the iPad's higher screen resolution.
A ChangeWave survey last week found that 40 percent of the firm's research-network members who plan to buy an e-reader...
At least that is the latest rumor making the rounds, as reported by the AppleInsider blog. The site attributes the report to "people with a proven track record" in predicting Apple's next moves.
AppleInsider's sources offered no details, however, on how the company will deliver multitasking without compromising battery life, efficient memory usage, and security.
Users will see a multitasking manager that "leverages interface technology" already bundled with the Mac OS X, according to AppleInsider. The site added that the operating system is still early in development and has a "way to go" before its ready for release.
The lack of full multitasking on the iPhone is not strictly a technology problem. The current iPhone 3.x software is a multitasking operating system, but Apple artificially restricts third-party applications from running in the background.
This is an intentional choice Apple made in version 2.x of the software as part of the security model. By cutting off apps when the user hits the hardware button or answers an incoming call, third-party apps cannot run in the background, which effectively eliminates much of the risk of viruses and spyware.
The downside is that users are irritated by the phone's behavior. For instance, users playing music via the Pandora music-streaming app, or listening to audio feeds of baseball games via the MLB.com app -- just the type of content that works best in the background -- cannot switch to games or productivity apps while listening to audio streams.
Other apps that users want to be able to run in the background are instant messaging programs (other...
