The latest from TechCrunch
- Translate Google Docs And Share Them Around The World
- Facebook Bows to Canadian Privacy Concerns, Will Change The Way All Apps Access Social Data
- Nokia N900 and Maemo 5 Get Official, Launching In October
- TwitterSense. It's Coming.
| Translate Google Docs And Share Them Around The World | Top |
| Google docs is a useful application for sharing documents, but previously didn’t allow for sharing across different languages. Today, Google is launching a feature in Google Docs that will automatically translate documents into 42 different languages. In the tools menu of Google Docs, you can now click “Translate document” and choose the language to translate too. This functionality uses Google Translate’s technology. You can replace the original document with the translation or save the new translated version as a different document. Google says that formatting and layout of translated documents remains the same regardless of what what language it’s in. It looks like along with new features, Google Docs may be getting a new interface soon, perhaps in the fight to one-up Microsoft Office’s new web-based productivity suite. Google also peeled off the beta label for Docs in July. It seems that this is just another example of Google’s tying its apps together. Other examples of this trend are bringing Google Gadgets into Gmail, Docs and Calendar, Picasa pictures in Google Maps and more. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Facebook Bows to Canadian Privacy Concerns, Will Change The Way All Apps Access Social Data | Top |
| Bowing to privacy concerns by Canada , Facebook is going to change the way all apps work on Facebook, particularly how they access user data. Facebook will be further fine-tuning its privacy controls. The biggest change will be how third party applications access a user’s personal data and that of his or her network of friends. Currently, when you install a Facebook app, you get a pop-up box which asks you to allow the third-party app to access personal information. Once you give permission, the app can work. Now, the apps will have to ask repeatedly for permission as they request new types of information, and users will have to “specifically approve any access to their friends' information.” What this amounts to is basically more privacy notifications explaining exactly what type of data is being shared and giving users more control over what they want to share. Facebook explains on its developer blog : When users authorize an application, they will have the opportunity to opt out of giving certain pieces of information. There may be some fields that, at minimum, are necessary for the application to function. We will make it clear that the user must authorize the required fields in order to use the application. We also anticipate that users will need to opt-in to giving applications access to their friends’ data. On a conference call today, Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin noted, “We certainly think that good privacy is good business.” But there is also a tension between privacy controls and the smooth functioning of social apps which require access to the semi-private social data on Facebook in order to work properly. Asked if these new polices would make it more likely for apps to break, Morin tried to downplay that possibility: “This change will not likely cause many applications to break per se, but cause users to more clearly understand what information they are sharing with the application.” Of course, if users decide to shut down access to key parts of their social data, many apps won’t work. But that, of course, is up to each user. On the call, Facebook was also keen to point out how much privacy controls users already have when it comes to third party apps. Currently, users can block any app or authorize access to data at a very granular level. Although they didn’t say this in the call, I’d expect many of these controls to become more explicit. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Nokia N900 and Maemo 5 Get Official, Launching In October | Top |
| Waaaay back in May , we put up just shy of 750 words jam-packed with details on Nokia's unannounced N900 Internet Tablet. This morning, Nokia finally pulled back the curtains on the device - and man, we absolutely nailed it. Though we would have expected Nokia to announce this at next week's Nokia World event, they've gone and verified all of the details we'd mentioned previously. 3.5" 800x480 touchscreen? Check. 32GB internal storage? Check. 5 megapixel camera, T-Mobile USA friendly 1700mhz bands, and running Maemo 5? Three checks, please. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| TwitterSense. It's Coming. | Top |
| At this very moment, at this very villa in the Israeli city of Hertzeliya Pituach, the final preparations are being made for what can be best described as ‘TwitterSense’—a way to automatically filter your Twitter stream so that the most relevant Tweets come out on top. The location in question is the home of my6sense , which currently offers a powerful way to filter news feeds. It is applying its filtering technology to Twitter and by the looks of it you’ll soon be able to follow as many Twitter users as you want and still never miss out on the most important tweets. It took insistent prodding on my part to get my6sense to spill some of the beans and give me a sneak peak. The good news is that TwitterSense (my term, not theirs) is real and it works. The bad news is that it’ll take a couple of more months to be deployed. And yes, it could greatly improve the way we consume Twitter streams. The advent of a TwitterSense offering could not be timelier as the onslaught of noise on Twitter has increased dramatically and its manageability has become a real pain point. Even Robert “The Stream Prince” Scoble has had to take dramatic measures , namely, slashing the number of users he follows on Twitter and befriends on Facebook. I, on the other hand, keep the number of people I follow on Twitter in the neighborhood of 150. This number works well for me, but I keep wondering whether I’m missing out on users who could provide insights relevant to my personal and professional interests. That is exactly where TwitterSense would come into play. First, a quick recap on my6sense: The company has been building out what it calls ‘digital intuition,’ a content ranking technology that to date has been applied to RSS feeds to separate the signal from the noise. My6sense's technology translates user actions such as Web navigation within and across various streams of content, and actions taken with various pieces of information in different contexts, into semantically-sensible implicit user feedback. The real beauty is that it requires zero intervention other than using the app itself. Here’s how I described my experience with the alpha release : The "A-ha moment" took a couple of days of interacting with the product, but it came. Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main "TOP MESSAGES" pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so. A couple of weeks ago my6sense announced its new native iPhone app ( iTunes link ), which along with a few new features, presented a major user experience improvement over the original iPhone web app version. So far there is nothing seemingly compelling beyond our previous in-depth look into the company’s technology. But looks can be deceiving. Underneath the surface lies what could transform the way my6sense users consume Twitter. TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them. If you tend to click on links from specific friends on Twitter, those will get a boost in the rankings. But my6sense also looks at the underlying pages behind the links and figures out what topics those pages are about using its semantic engine. If those topics match your interests, as determined by your past reading and clicking behavior on the app, then those links rise to the top as well. So the obvious question to ask is, why then if it rests upon my6sense’s existing technology isn’t it deployed already? First, there are challenges in ranking the content behind the link. A typical web page includes not only the post/article itself, but additional data and content as well. my6sense wants to make sure it ranks the intended content and this isn’t always trivial. Second, there are scalability challenges. On average, a Twitter stream encompasses a greater mass of content than an average RSS feed. This means that my6sense has to go out and parse every piece of content behind every link in a user’s steam so it can analyze it based on the user’s ranking model. This requires extra processing power in order to avoid significant delays in ranking. My6sense did close a round of funding recently, but it can’t just throw money at the problem and solve it via brute force (i.e. just buy more machines). I asked Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and president, whether they’ll be offering TwitterSense integration for Twitter clients. His answer was that they do have such plans but it’s far too early to talk about them now. My6sense plans to make TwitterSense publicly available in a couple of months or so. In the meantime, if you want to experience what it will behave like I suggest downloading my6sense’s native iPhone app to see how it works on RSS feeds. You won’t have to spend very long waiting to see the ranking magic since some backend improvements were made that get users to achieve the ‘A-ha moment’ I mentioned above much quicker, even within one or two brief sessions. There’s also a new digital intuition meter that provides users with feedback regarding the status of their preference model and indicates how strong their digital intuition is at that point in time. We’ll be keeping a close tab on the upcoming release of this so called TwitterSense and reexamine it when it’s made publicly available in a couple of months. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment