Author: Frederic Lardinois

Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app – which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 – doesn’t really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram’s new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous.

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Wolfram Alpha for E-Books

The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray‘s best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. The e-book application integrates Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It’s easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha’s vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010.

As Wolfram Alpha’s managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team’s “number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction.

Wolfram Alpha iPad App

Wolfram Alpha’s newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves.

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Tellmewhere is a location-based iPhone and Android app that offers its users personalized recommendations for restaurants, bars, grocery stores and other local retailers. The service, which also offers a full set of location-based social networking features, is already very popular in Europe where it has about 500,000 users. With the release of its latest iPhone version, the company is now also trying to expand into the U.S. market. Tellmewhere offers a very solid set of standard location-based social networking tools, but it’s the service’s ability to give you personalized local recommendations that makes it stand out from the competition.

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Personalized Recommendations: Making Check-Ins Useful

As Tellmewhere’s CEO and co-founder Gilles Barbier told us when we met up during SXSW in Austin, TX last month, the company wants to offer a location-based service and social network that is more useful than most location-based social networks. Instead of just checking in, collecting badges and stalking your friends, Tellmewhere wants to make these check-ins more useful.

Tellmewhere’s algorithms strive to tell you what the nearby restaurants, shops and spas are that your friends and other people like you would recommend. As you (and your friends and neighbors) use the mobile app, Tellmewhere learns about your preferences and compares them with those of people like you. Whenever you look at the venues around you, Tellmewhere will highlight the local restaurants and merchants around you that it thinks you will be most interested in.

Because it isn’t focused on check-ins as much as services like Gowalla and Foursquare, you can also review venues that you are not currently visiting. It’s worth noting that the app doesn’t just learn from your friends. When you are traveling, for example, the service’s algorithm will look at recommendations from locals that are similar to you.

More Features

If you choose to do so, you can also broadcast your location on Facebook and Twitter, but to ensure your privacy, this option can be tweaked for every check-in or review. It’s also worth noting that you can use the service’s web site to browse recommendations and reviews.

Tellmewhere uses Google Local as the back-end for its location database and Google Maps as its mapping provider. The team plans to monetize the app with a “special offers” model where local merchants can offer coupons to loyal customers.

Within the U.S., the service obviously still needs a few more users to become really useful. Given that these are still the early days for location-based services, though, there is no reason to believe that Tellmewhere couldn’t replicate the success it has had in Europe here in the U.S.

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Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its “computational knowledge engine” altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site, but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 and will issue a refund to every customer who bought the app at the full price.

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A New Policy for Wolfram Alpha

According to Wolfram Alpha’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team’s “number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram’s earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking.

Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App

While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won’t return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund.

To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone’s or iPod touch’s UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple.

You can find our full review of the iPhone app here.

New Mobile Site

The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn’t offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app).

More To Come

According to today’s announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn’t offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha’s architect, “the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity.”

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Without a doubt, location-based services and social networks are one of the hottest topics on the Internet right now. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and many others are vying for users, but strong privacy concerns are still holding back the mainstream adoption of these kinds of services. Rally Up for the iPhone is a new location-based social network that puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and also features some innovative new concepts.

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Focus on Privacy

While Rally Up (iTunes link) allows you to friend anybody who is a member of the service, it features some nifty privacy settings, which are represented by a slider on every friend’s profile. You can choose between four different privacy settings. These range from not sharing information with this person to just seeing this friend’s update but not sharing information with them, to giving the contact the full firehose of settings with and without push notifications. The idea here is that you only give your real friends full access to all of your updates, while still giving you the option to follow anybody else on the service – though these users can obviously also choose to not share any information with you. Your own home’s location is always private and never shared on the service.

Just like Gowalla and Foursquare, Rally Up features badges, but the emphasis of the service is more on connecting you to your real friends. Because of this, the Rally Up team also decided not to allow users to syndicate their location feed on Twitter. You can, however, choose to share your location with your Facebook friends. The assumption here, we assume, is that your Facebook friends are more likely to be your “real” friends and that Facebook will keep this data private.

Instead of connecting to Twitter, Rally Up emphasizes private microblogging on the service itself. Rally Up allows you to send short text messages to your friends, but you can also attach photos to any location.

I’m On My Way

Besides focusing on privacy, Rally Up also included some interesting innovations in its service that aren’t available in most of the current crop of popular location-based services yet.

While most services only allow you to check in once you have arrived at a location, Rally Up also allows you to send out a notification when you are on your way to a venue. You can also set up temporary locations, which is quite useful when you go to a party at somebody’s house, for example.

The app, which, by the way, is very well designed, doesn’t focus so much on venues as on connecting people. This is a nice departure from quite a few of the location-based social networks we have recently seen.

Overall, Rally Up represents a very nifty take on the location-based social networking model and we especially like the company’s focus on privacy.

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Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, just published its first quarterly State of the Internet report. With over 350 million users worldwide, Mozilla collects a lot of interesting data and the organization decided to start sharing more of this data in these quarterly reports. Firefox’s worldwide market share is now hovering near 30%, with Europe (39%) and South America (31%) leading the pack and North America coming in last (26%), even though it has the highest total number of Firefox users.

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According to Mozilla, Firefox usage in Russia, for example, grew about 20% in the last quarter. In Indonesia, Firefox’s market share is now over 60%. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft’s new browser choice screen for Windows 7 in Europe will influence these numbers over the next few months.

Tabs

Mozilla also shared some data from its recent Test Pilot study about how its users interact with tabs. The typical Firefox users has between 2 and 3 tabs open at any time during the day. The maximum number of open tabs that were recorded during the study was 600.

Some Fun Stats about Firefox Usage:

Mozilla also took a look at the lighter side of the data in its databases.

• Based on when the company receives daily Firefox update pings from its users, Mozilla calculated that people in New York tend to turn on their computers later in the day than Firefox users in California, while users in Hawaii, Maine and Wyoming tend to get an early start.



• Firefox users in South America are the most likely to use themes or Personas to personalize their browsers.



• Firefox users in Asia adopt add-ons faster than anybody else, but users in Antarctica download more adds per head than anybody else. Firefox’s market share in Antarctica is about 80%.

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Mplayit, a Facebook-based mobile app store, just released some interesting new data about people’s willingness to pay for mobile apps. According to Mplayit’s report, about one-third of users across all the major mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) are interested in paid apps. iPhone users are the most willing to pay for some of their apps (57%), followed by BlackBerry users (33%). Android users are the least likely to be interested in paid apps (16%).

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While only a third of BlackBerry users are willing to pay for apps, it’s worth noting that, with a median price of $5.99, they are willing to pay the most for their apps. iPhone users only want to pay around $1.99 and the average Android user is willing to pay up to $2.72. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these are just average prices and people’s willingness to pay definitely depends on the quality of the applications.

As we noted earlier this month, the average price for iPhone apps continues to fall, but the average price for the most popular iPhone apps is around $2.43 in the U.S. – which – judging from Mplayit’s data – indicates that most users would like to pay less than $2 for their apps, but are more than willing to pay extra for the best and most popular apps.

Bonus: Percentage of Games in the Top App Stores

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Twitter just launched an updated, more dynamic homepage. The old, static homepage that didn’t really explain how Twitter really works and just showed a list of trending topic and a search form. The new homepage, on the other hand, features a scrolling list of trending topics, a constantly updating view of tweets from popular Twitter users, a random sampling of suggested users and a new explanation of what Twitter is.

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We have to say, though, that Twitter’s new explanation of itself sounds a bit odd:

“Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing. You choose and customize every aspect of the service. Lots of people like it. We’d love it if you joined us.”

Interestingly, Twitter de-emphasizes the social networking features of the service here and stresses that Twitter is a source of “instant information.” The old homepage simply said: “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” According to Twitter’s own announcement, the company wants to stress that Twitter is “not just for status updates anymore”

The new homepage also now feature a link to Twitter’s FAQ for business users.

A Better Homepage for Novice Users?

Given that Twitter has always had a hard time converting new users to regular users, this new homepage is clearly an attempt to better explain the service’s features and functionality to new users. We will have to wait and see if this new homepage will do a better job at converting visitors to regular users.

The new explanation of Twitter on the homepage could surely use some tweaking, but the new focus on interesting tweets and users will immediately give newcomers a good idea of how they can use Twitter themselves.

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Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13″ MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. The question, though, is if programs like this aren’t a bit premature, given that nobody has actually used the device yet and that we don’t really know how well the iPad will work for textbooks and other school-related activities.

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Can the iPad Succeed Where the Kindle Failed?

So far, Amazon’s Kindle and other e-book readers haven’t made a major dent in the textbook market and the early experiments with e-textbooks on the Kindle have been met with little success. At the same time, though, textbook publishers (who are always looking for ways to cut down on the used book market) will surely embrace the iPad, either by publishing books through their own apps and bookstores, or by releasing books through Apple’s, Amazon’s or B&N’s e-book stores.

Interactive Textbooks

Given the amount of interactivity that’s possible with books on the iPad, we can only hope that publishers will make good use of the device’s capabilities. While just publishing a static book on the iPad might be good enough for some subjects, Penguin’s recent demonstration of interactive books clearly shows the potential of interactive books on the iPad. At the same time, though, publishing textbooks is already an expensive business, so it remains to be seen how many interactive textbooks we will actually see.

(via: TUAW)

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Google, together with Microsoft, AT&T, AOL, Intel, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of other organizations launched a new effort to modernize the Electronic Communications Act (ECPA) today. ECPA, which was enacted in 1986, sets standards for low enforcement access to electronic communications and other data. According to this coalition of technology companies, which calls itself Digital Due Process, ECPA has been outpaced by technological advances like cloud computing and is now a “patchwork of confusing standards that have been interpreted inconsistently by the courts, creating uncertainty for both service providers and law enforcement agencies.”

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ECPA: Outdated and Convoluted

In an announcement earlier today, Google specifically noted that while the ECPA was originally designed to protect citizens from unwarranted government intrusion (while still giving law enforcement the necessary tools to ensure public safety), ECPA is now completely outdated. Indeed, as Google notes, ECPA became law before most people even knew what email was and long before the “cloud” became a buzzword.

Today the law gives more protection to data you store locally than to data stored in the cloud – an issue the Digital Due Process coalition is trying to rectify. The coalition also wants to ensure that government agencies get a search warrant before they can track the location of your cell phone. Digital Due Process also wants to protect citizens (and its member organizations) against unnecessary bulk data requests from government agencies.

As CNET’s Declan McCullagh noted yesterday, ECPA is notorious for being extremely convoluted. Digital Due Process also noted that the ECPA standard are not clear (especially with regards to access to location information), that it’s not clear how the Fourth Amendment applies to new services and information and that some fo the standards are simply illogical.

Digital Due Process wants the U.S. Congress to completely rewrite the law, but to focus on a handful of issues: access to email and other private communications stored in the cloud, access to location information, and the use of subpoenas to obtain transactional data.

Here are the four ways Digital Due Process wants to modernize the ECPA:

• Better protect your data stored online: The government must first get a search warrant before obtaining any private communications or documents stored online;
• Better protect your location privacy: The government must first get a search warrant before it can track the location of your cell phone or other mobile communications device;
• Better protect against monitoring of when and with whom you communicate: The government must demonstrate to a court that the data it seeks is relevant and material to a criminal investigation before monitoring when and with whom you communicate using email, instant messaging, text messaging, the telephone, etc.; and
• Better protect against bulk data requests: The government must demonstrate to a court that the information it seeks is needed for a criminal investigation before it can obtain data about an entire class of users.

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Google just announced a small but useful update to the chat feature in iGoogle and Orkut, Google’s social network. You can now use the chat feature to send photos, documents and other files directly to your contacts. More importantly, though, Google also announced that it plans to finally bring this file transfer functionality to Gmail’s built-in chat feature. Right now, if you want to transfer a file to your Google contacts, you either have to email them the file or use the Google Talk desktop app or a compatible instant messaging client.

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To use this feature, simply go to your chat widget in iGoogle or Orkut, start a chat and click on “Send a file…” in the “Actions” menu. The recipient will be able to either accept the incoming file or politely decline the transfer.

Chat in Gmail already features video and voice chat, but the file transfer feature is currently still missing. It always seemed rather strange to us that some of Google’s instant messaging services like the Google Talk desktop client already had this capability. Now, there isn’t even feature parity among the web-based version of Google Talk anymore. Hopefully Google will soon fulfill its promise and bring this feature to Gmail as well.

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While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek didn’t say much about his company’s timeline for launching in the U.S. during his SXSW keynote interview, it definitely looks like the popular streaming music services is putting all the pieces for a U.S. launch together. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier today, Spotify’s senior vice president Paul Brown noted that the company is “buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too.” According to Bloomberg, Spotify its planning to launch in Q3 2010.

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Judging from the fact that Spotify is starting to set up an infrastructure for its U.S. launch, it looks like the company has cleared most of the hurdles for a U.S. launch or at least feels very confident that the last roadblocks for the U.S. launch can be cleared out of the way easily.

Spotify, which currently has about 7 million users in Europe, allows anybody to stream the company’s music library for free (with ads) to their desktops. During his SXSW keynote interview, Daniel Ek noted that the U.S. launch would coincide with the release of an updated version of the Spotify desktop client. We assume to hear more about this in the coming weeks. According to most industry pundits, a launch date somewhere between Q3 2010 and early 2011 seems reasonable.

Too Little, Too Late?

As our own Mike Melanson noted after Ek’s SXSW keynote, Spotify faces strong competition in the United States. Companies like MOG, Napster and others are starting to gain traction in the U.S. while Spotify is still trying to put all its deals with the record labels in place. According to Spotify’s Paul Brown, the company’s negotiations in the U.S. “are going fine because we’re in a long-term partnership with the labels and publishers.”

Spotify currently has about 325,000 paying subscribers in Europe. Subscribers get access to an ad-free version of Spotify, as well as access to the company’s iPhone, Android and mobile apps.

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After Google Buzz launched to a lot of hype and controversy in early February, it looked like it could become a big hit for Google – especially after the company fixed some of the early privacy flaws that plagued Buzz in its early days. These days, however, a lot of us on the RWW team have noticed that the number of interactions on Buzz seems to have declined rapidly. While a lot of people are still sharing their blog posts, Flickr and Twitter items on Buzz, the number of comments and likes on most posts is pretty low.

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Did Buzz Ever Reach the Mainstream?

Google Buzz never caught on with mainstream users, even though Google pushed Buzz into every Gmail user’s accounts. There are obviously still some major usability issues around Buzz and most Gmail users who see Buzz for the first time aren’t likely to even understand the basic ideas behind Buzz.

The concept of Buzz – while immediately clear to anybody who ever used FriendFeed – is relatively novel. Google also never did a good job at explaining Buzz to new users and unless the company starts to make Buzz easier to use and explains its features to new users, Buzz will remain a niche product. Right now, even figuring out how to import content from third-party sites is way to hard.

Are You Still Using Google Buzz?

Popurl’s Thomas Marban took a closer look at the content on Buzz today and found that “the most commonly published links [on public Buzz streams] only included the usual suspects such as Facebook, Foursquare and other social media spam.”

Marban’s experience mirrors our own and that of quite a few of the people we have talked to. What’s your experience with Buzz? Are you still using it? Or did you forget about it after the early rush of excitement? Did you turn Buzz off after all the privacy issues became known? Are any of your non-geek friends ever use it? Let us know in the comments.

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YouTube comment threads aren’t exactly known for offering highly intellectual discussions. Today, however, YouTube is introducing a new experiment that is meant to highlight the best comments on any video. This experiment will offer a “highlights view” of comments that shows the top rated comments and comments from the uploader at the top of every comment thread.

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To opt-in to this experiment, just click here.

More Updates

This experiment also introduces a new way to view ratings. Just a few weeks ago, YouTube abandoned its star ratings in favor of a like/dislike system. In this new experiment, YouTube will now show exactly how many people likes and disliked a given video. Until now, any video you likes was also saved as a “favorite.” Starting today, likes aren’t automatically saved as favorites anymore.

To round up today’s updates, YouTube will also start to surface “Most Liked” videos in various places on the site. According to today’s announcement, the YouTube team hopes that “‘most liked’ becomes a reliable signal that helps you find quality videos to watch.”

Fixing YouTube Comments: Is it Possible?

As we noted earlier this year, the new watch pages feature a far more minimalist design than YouTube’s current layout. With today’s updates, however, YouTube isn’t trying to tweak the site’s design as much as the comment culture on the service. It’ll be interesting to see if these tweaks will help to bring up the level of discussion on the site, or if giving this much prominence to the uploader’s comments will actually reduce the overall number of comments people will post on YouTube.

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WordPress’ iPhone app (iTunes link) just got a nice update and now allows you to geotag your mobile blog posts. WordPress launched official support for geotagging posts through the web interface on WordPress.com blogs last November, though bloggers with self-hosted WordPress installations have long been able to geotag their posts with the help of numerous plugins.

While the iPhone app supports both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs, users with self-hosted blogs won’t see any advantage in geotagging their blogs until WordPress releases its own geotagging plugin in a few weeks.

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Geotags are Only Exposed in Your Blog’s Feed (For Now)

For now, it doesn’t look like there is any way to actually highlight a post’s location directly in a post or on the blog, though WordPress.com’s feeds are compatible with the GeoRSS format and the location attached to a post will appear in compatible services like Friendfeed. It would be nice if WordPress automatically added a link to your location on a map at the bottom of the post or gave you the option to display the location associated with this post in a sidebar widget.

Chances are, WordPress will do more with this in this information in the future. It would be nice, for example, if WordPress could highlight “nearby” posts or allowed users to browser post on a map.

How To Enable Geotagging in WordPress

By default, WordPress won’t show your location, even on geotagged posts. To enable geotagging on WordPress.com, you first have to enable it in the WordPress.com settings for your blog. Look for the “Enable Geotagging” setting in the “Your Profile” tab.

To geotag your post from the iPhone app, simply click on the compass icon next to your new post’s headline.

Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.

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In 2005, the U.S. still ranked as the most networked country in the world according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report. This report, which provides an extensive analysis of the economies and network infrastructures of 133 countries, has now demoted the U.S. to fifth place, and ranks Sweden, Singapore, Denmark and Switzerland as the most networked countries in the world. With regards to broadband adoption, the U.S. only ranks 22nd in the world.

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U.S. Has Some Catching Up to Do

As the report notes, the U.S. still boasts an environment that is highly conducive for information and communication technologies. The U.S. still ranks first when it comes to IT usage in business, and fourth for IT usage in government. On an individual level, however, the U.S. lags behind many other countries, mainly due to the low mobile subscription penetration rate – where the U.S. only ranks 72nd in the world – and the relatively low number of broadband subscribers (22nd). The report’s authors base this assessment on information from 2008, however, and according to some data we saw earlier this year, broadband penetration in the U.S. was actually down in 2009.

China and India

China, which ranked at the bottom of the report’s annual rankings in 2002 (64th out of 74 countries) has now moved up to 37th place (out of 133 countries). India, too, continues to climb up the the World Economic Forum’s rankings and has now moved up to 43rd place.

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Bing now knows a lot more about cars and will also give a select group of users the option to compare the performance of different sports teams. Microsoft just announced these updates at the Search Engine Strategies event in New York. The new comparison answers for sports will be rolled out to only about 5% of Bing’s users at first. In addition, Microsoft will also begin to roll out some minor design changes to a small group of users today that will better highlight Bing’s assets like weather and travel search.

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Starting today, mobile users will also see improvements to Bing’s autosuggest feature, which will now include answers for things like stock quotes right in the autosuggest box.

Domain Task Pages for Cars

Whenever a user searches for cars and car-related topics (“2010 Toyota Camry specs,” for example), Bing will now bring up a page will all of the car’s specs instead of directing you to another site with this info. This page will also include links to additional images and videos about the car, as well as the ability to restrict the search query by different trims and links to the specs of cars in the same class.

In Microsoft parlance, these pages are called “domain task pages” and chances are that – if successful – the company plans to roll out more of these for additional topics in the near future. The task pages are part of Bing’s efforts to provide users with specialized answers for popular queries in verticals like weather. According to a recent job posting, other topics for these pages that Microsoft plans to launch in the future could include “movies, music, games and other high-volume domains.” Given that Bing bills itself as a “decision engine,” it only makes sense for Microsoft to try to capture as many popular searches as possible and present its users with relevant answers right on Bing.com instead of sending them on to other sites.

Sports Comparison and UI Changes

A small number of Bing users will now also be able to compare the performance of sports teams by simply typing the name of two teams in the search form. As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s Director of Bing, also told us during a briefing earlier this month, about 0.7% of all queries on Bing are comparison searches and the company hopes to capture more of these in the future and present the right answer in Bing instead of sending users to multiple sites.

The same number of users (about 5%) will now also see a new user interface for the boxes at the top of the page that Bing will often display for popular topics. For searches related to cities and towns, for example, these “Bing boxes” will now include info about local weather, a relevant link to Bing Maps, as well as airfare info from your current location (based on your IP address). For popular artists, these boxes will now also include information about upcoming concerts and other relevant information. Sadly, this concert info is based on chronology and doesn’t take a user’s current location into account.

Overall, these are interesting updates – not necessarily because Bing now knows a lot more about cars and sports, but because they show the direction the Bing team is going in. As a “decision engine,” the Bing team’s intend is to give users more information directly on the site instead of just presenting them with a couple of links. While these links can be relevant (and Bing still shows them most of the time, too), the Bing team wants to reduce the number of queries that result in links and increase the number of times the software can present users with direct answers Microsoft has sourced from its own databases or from sources across the Internet.

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How would you feel if your employer constantly tracked your activity on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter in real time? If it’s up to Teneros, your employer will soon use the company’s new Social Sentry service to follow your every move on social media sites in real time. As Teneros points out, more than 70% of white collar workers have Facebook accounts – which they regularly access during work hours – and a number of corporations like Domino’s Pizza and British Airways have recently suffered major damage to their carefully constructed brand images because of their employees’ actions on social networks.

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Track Your Employees Across the Web

Social Sentry gives employers the ability to track their employees’ online activity, provides granular real-time tracking and allows employers to “monitor employee public communication happening from any location, within the corporate network or public Internet.” The services gives employers the ability to monitor select users or the entire employee base.

The idea behind this, of course, is to make sure that employees don’t leak sensitive information on social networks or engage in any behavior that could damage a company’s reputation. From a corporation’s point of view, this makes complete sense. After all, these companies have to ensure that their secrets are protected, compliance regulations are followed and risky behavior by their employees is exposed quickly. On the other hand, most employees would probably have strong feelings about a system that constantly tracks their every move on the Internet (even if they use an alias, by the way).

If The Data is Already Public, Is Aggregating it an Invasion of Privacy?

Of course, Social Sentry only tracks information that is already public, but as Danah Boyd noted in her SXSW keynote earlier this month, even the aggregation of seemingly public data can quickly feel like an invasion of privacy. Until now, tracking data from all your employees would have been an arduous and costly task, but with a program like Social Sentry, it’s automated, easy and relatively cheap.

How Would You Feel if Your Employer Used Social Sentry?

How would you feel if your employer started using Social Sentry and kept track of all of your comments on Twitter and YouTube? Would you be okay with that? Is it just the same as a drug test and a background check, or would you quit your job if your employer started using this tool?

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Google Bookmarks is one of Google’s lesser known services. The new star marker in Google Search – which syncs with Google Bookmarks – gave this tool some added exposure, but most users are probably still unaware of this service. Thanks to some new features Google just introduced today, Google Bookmarks may soon become more of a household name, however. Starting today, you can organize your bookmarks into lists (instead of just labeling them) and – more importantly – share these lists publicly and collaborate on creating and editing lists with others.

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Getting Started With Google Bookmarks

If you are not an active Google Bookmarks user already, you can start using the service by starring a few items in your search results on Google Search and Google Maps. These links will then appear on your Google Bookmarks page (note: to see the lists feature, you have to follow this link – the standard Google Bookmarks URL does not feature lists yet).

Features

One nifty new feature is the ability to add items to your lists without having to leave the Bookmarks Lists interface. By clicking on “Add Stuff,” you can easily append links, images, videos and local search results to your lists, as well as any Google Docs document. Other features include the ability to rearrange lists through a simple drag and drop interface, the ability to comment on any item in a list and to preview videos, maps and Wikipedia entries directly in the Google Bookmarks interface.

What’s Missing? Integration

As is so often that case with Google’s products, the lists in Google Bookmarks are a great feature, but while they are nicely integrated with some tools (Google Docs, YouTube, Google Maps), some obvious integrations are still missing. Why, for example, doesn’t Google Chrome’s bookmark syncing feature work with Google Bookmarks? Using the stars in Google’s search engine works well enough, but that same star feature on Google Chrome is linked to Google Docs and not to Google Bookmarks.

Tip of the hat to Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System for being the first to notice this update.

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Not too long ago, spam on Twitter was quickly becoming a serious issue that made searching for any popular topic on the service’s own search engine almost pointless. Spammers would regularly hijack popular terms by polluting the search results with nonsensical tweets that included the popular keyword and a link to a spam site.

Since Twitter started implementing better spam controls last year, however, the number of spam messages on the service has gone down dramatically. According to the latest data, the percentage of spam tweets per day is now down to under 1%.

Sponsor

According Twitter’s chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, the company’s Trust and Safety team is “constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we’re happy to report that it’s working.” Between May and October 2009, the percentage of daily of spam messages on Twitter regularly exceeded 9% and spiked to over 10 on a few days. As Twitter’s primary monetization strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company’s best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible.

Report a Spammer

If you want to help Twitter in its fight against spam, remember that you report a spammer directly to Twitter‘s anti-spam team from every user’s profile page. Just look for the “report for spam” link in the right sidebar or in the drop-down actions menu.

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