Apple has just published the latest upgrade to Safari,version 5.0.1, which includes a whole new feature called “Extensions Gallery,” as well as a number of other interesting fixes.
The Extensions Gallery is essentially a center for add-on features and toolbars for a variety of different web programs and services
All of them are built using HTML5, CSS or Javascript technologies. You can get a full look at the Extensions function before downloading on Apple’s site.
Source: ZDNet Community
This isn't the final SP1 code & there's not much going on in SP1 to get excited about, so if you're happy with the way your Windows 7 system is running you may as well hold off until the service pack is available via Windows Update.
Download the beta 
Source: Download Squad
Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.
You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.
It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably. On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Google has decided that they're going to update Chrome twice as often. Apparently the longer release schedule put too much pressure on developers to get new features ready on time, because if they didn't, they'd have to wait three months before the next update.
Now, they're going to release a new stable version every six weeks, meaning we get to see those features sooner.
Source: Google Blog
The battle between Adobe Flash and HTML5 will extend into YouTube video players embedded around the web, now that Google has announced a developer preview of video iFrames that use HTML5 when viewed in a browser that supports it.
Google began experimenting with HTML5 players on the YouTube site itself in January, but offering HTML5 for the embedded players all over the web is a big step.
Source: Youtube Blog
Facebook adds a writable comment space inside the pop-up that appears when visitors Like something out around the web.
Messages sent with personal comments tend to get more click. These messages will now also include a longer description of what's being liked.
Now, when a user adds a comment to the iFrame version of the Like button, a larger, more prominent story will be shared with the user’s friends.
Source: Facebook Blog
Microsoft learns from Google and gives employees Windows Phone 7 devices. Back in December 2008, Google handed out G1’s as a holiday bonus. Now Microsoft is handing them out, not as a bonus but probably as a way to get everyone excited about the company’s latest version of its mobile OS.
What’s the best way to generate some positive hype? To seed the device with all of its employees.
Source: ZDNet Community
What are you doing today? Something routine like cooking breakfast or taking the dog for a walk? Or is it something extraordinary like your child's first soccer game or your wedding day?
Whatever it is, big or small, we hope you’ll capture it on video and take part in "Life in a Day," a user-generated documentary that will tell the story of a single day on Earth, as seen through your eyes. You have until 11:59 p.m. local time to film something, so get going. For more information, visit the Life in a Day channel.
Get out those cameras and let's make film history!
By: YouTube Blog
Apple recently revealed the preview of its Xcode 4 programming environment to the public.
Xcode is the complete toolset for building Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications - and with Xcode 4, the tools have been redesigned to be faster, easier to use, and more helpful than ever before. The Xcode IDE understands your project’s every detail, identifies mistakes in both syntax and logic, and will even fix your code for you. Quite simply, Xcode 4 will help you write better code.
Xcode 4 has a brand new user interface, built upon proven technologies that Apple itself uses to build Mac OS X and iOS.
Here are some additional new features:
Source: Apple dev center
Here are my top 10 features and functions found in the current Technical Preview of Windows Phone 7:
Source: ZDNet Community
Since the YouTube Play project was announced last month, more than 6,000 videos have been submitted from 69 countries, and the YouTube Play channel has received over 2 million views. Today “23/7/2010”, they are unveiling the jury for YouTube Play.
YouTube Play jurors
- Musician and performance artist: Laurie Anderson
- Musical group: Animal Collective
- Visual artists: Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter and Takashi Murakami
- Artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Darren Aronofsky
- Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with Guggenheim Chief Curator and Deputy Director Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.
Over the course of the next few months, these jurors will watch countless hours of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and select the most creative and inspiring work to showcase at the Guggenheim museums in October.
For more information about the jurors and to learn more about how to participate, check out youtube.com/play.
Translation is key to mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of content available.
To help Wikipedia become more helpful to speakers of smaller languages, They’re working with volunteers, translators and Wikipedians across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. They began these efforts in 2008, starting with translating Wikipedia articles into Hindi, a language spoken by tens of millions of Internet users. At that time the Hindi Wikipedia had only 3.4 million words across 21,000 articles—while in contrast, the English Wikipedia had 1.3 billion words across 2.5 million articles.
They selected articles using a couple of different sets of criteria.
- They used Google search data to determine the most popular English Wikipedia articles read in India.
- Using Google Trends, Wikipedia found the articles that were consistently read over time—and not just temporarily popular.
- Finally using Translator Toolkit they translate articles that either did not exist or were placeholder articles or “stubs” in Hindi Wikipedia.
Number of non-stub Wikipedia articles by Internet users, normalized (English = 1)
Wikipedia also found that there are many Internet users who have used their tools to translate more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide. If you do speak another language we hope you’ll join Wikipedia in bringing the content to other languages and cultures with Translator Toolkit.
Following YouTube’s acquisition by Google in 2006, new YouTube signups were given the choice between two different account systems to power their YouTube experience: the original YouTube account system (built in 2005) or the Google Account system.
In May 2009, google started requiring all new YouTube usernames to be powered by Google Accounts. Now, we’re gradually asking all remaining pre-May 2009 users still using the older YouTube account system to connect a Google Account to their YouTube username. For now, it’s an optional step, but eventually it’ll be required in order to continue using your YouTube username.
Before we go any further, we should clarify three important facts:
So what’s the point of asking people to connect a Google Account to their older YouTube account? Here are the main reasons:
Create a drawing in google drawings to check out new features and shortcuts that will help you refine.
Zoom improvements
Google added several new and simple ways to zoom in and out within a drawing: a zoom tool on the toolbar; the ability to draw a rectangle around an area to zoom; zoom levels to the View menu; and keyboard shortcuts to zoom in (Ctrl Shift → or Cmd Shift → on a Mac) and zoom out (Ctrl Shift ← or Cmd Shift ← on a Mac).
Pie and arc drawing improvements
Once you’ve selected the pie or arc shape, drag from the center point, then release to set the radius, move your mouse along the circumference to set the angle, then click when you’re done. Hint - you can hold shift during step 2 to constrain your arc to 15 degree increments.
You can also select Edit > Change Shape to toggle between a pie shape and arc shape.
Duplicate while rotating and resizing
Google Team have extended the Control/Command modifier to duplicate objects while you resize and rotate objects too, which makes it easy to make both concentric and radial diagrams.
Hint: duplicating while resizing works better if you resize from large to small, since each new object gets placed on top.
New line decoration controls
Now you can change the style of the cap used at the end of your lines from the default butt cap to use square caps or round caps.
You can also change the appearance of line joins within your polylines and shapes from the default round join to use miter joins or bevel joins. These options are available via Format > Line decorations.
Let us know what you think in Comments.
Following Pakistan, Afghanistan also blocked the world’s most popular social networking and video sharing websites, facebook and youtube. Both are now completely blocked. The pages say ‘This Site is Restricted.
These websites gained popularity in Afghanistan recently. The sites are facing criticism over a page that asked fans to draw Prophet Mohammad’s caricatures. A court in Pakistan ordered the government to block facebook. Youtube and Wikipedia are also blocked.
In an effort to encourage more business owners to take advantage of its Tags advertising program, Google Places is offering a 30-day trial to users who sign up by July 23.
The Tags program was one of a handful of features rolled out in April when Google
fixed its Local Business Center and re-branded it as Google Places.
Tags offer local businesses an opportunity to enhance their Google Maps listings with a note about special offers, coupons or just a link back to their website.
A company's effectiveness on Facebook can be hampered if the account isn't set up properly.
Facebook's terms of service:
"Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook."
Two really crucial advantages of administering a Page are user analytics and easily-embeddable Like buttons and widgets.
In Facebook Insights, you can view all kinds of useful data about user activity on your page, including how many likes and comments you received each day and much more.
This data can be really useful for understanding the characteristics of your customer base, and knowing which wall posts get the best reaction. This data is not available to individual profiles.
Another thing profiles don't offer is the means to embed a Like button and other Open Graph plugins into your own site. This is a major setback for businesses hoping to grow their audience on Facebook.
On Facebook, individual profiles are limited to 5,000 friends, whereas Pages can have unlimited fans (or likes). Once your profile friend list reaches 5,000, Facebook will encourage you to set up a Page, but doesn't offer a tool to convert your profile to a Page.
Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload.
But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.
But, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.
For those users who uploaded more than one photo at a time, using the new Facebook integration feature made each and every new Flickr photo uploaded its own individual post on your Facebook Wall and friends' News Feed. After processing a big set of photos, your Facebook page would end up covered in nothing but Flickr posts. That issue has been fixed so that it now identities these multi-picture posts as batches.
Over time google improved search by deepening their understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities will help in delivering relevant information more quickly.
Google have acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. This will help in improving search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone. With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, google beginning to understand the the web to make search better.
Type [Barack Obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. Google is offering this kind of experience because they understand facts about real people and real events out in the world.
In addition to Google's ideas for search, google team also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more.
Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, They plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. It will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.
By: Google Team
Google announced a major acquisition in the Semantic Web space.
The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide variety of purposes.
Freebase is a massive open-structured database of information about almost anything, including books, movies and music.
The Yahoo! Answers team made improvements that streamline search to find the information you want on the world’s most popular question-and-answer site.
First up,there are new sorting options near the top of the search page. You can now sort search results by:
If you have a tendency to search for a particular topic more than others, you can now perform an “Advanced Search” and save your filter settings for future searches. You can add up to ten saved searches to the “My Saved Searches” list and edit or delete them as you wish.
By: Yahoo! Search Team
According to the Yahoo, Yahoo Personals will close permanently on July 21.
Yahoo:
You can continue your online dating search with no service interruption by having us move your Yahoo! Personals information to our new partner, Match.com!!
Your Options Until Yahoo! Personals Closes on July 21 2010
Google's Place have begun appearing at the top of Google search results.
Google first launched Place Pages as a part of its “Local Business Center” before combining the center with several other services and launching Google Places.
The service offers businesses a way to control their presence on the search engine and take advantage of a number of features, from analytics to business information and online coupons.
Google created a Getting Started Guide for drawings. This guide covers the basics about Google drawings and gives you all the information you need to start creating, editing, formatting, and sharing your drawings. It also includes some tips and tricks about features you may not know too much about.
So far you've only be able to drag in attachments and images into email messages in Chrome and Firefox. Now, this feature work in the newest version of Safari (Safari 5) too.
Twitter has launched the new @earlybird account, dedicated to announcing special deals and discounts to followers.This will revolve around tech, travel, entertainment and fashion. Anyone who wanted to advertise a discount would need to pay.
This actually seems like a good way to advertise things, so long as you can express your idea into 140 characters (including a link). The @earlybird account probably won’t be enough to finance Twitter alone for years to come, but it’s a decent start.
Now Google is offering a do-it-yourself mobile app tool. The tool, which is available now in Google Labs, is called App Inventor.
To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.
Google is launching the ability to write your own rich text signatures right in Gmail. 
The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you'll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images.
Gmail also now supports a unique signature for each email address associated with your account. So, if you send mail using a custom "From:" address, you can use a different signature for that address. From the Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.
