If watched the video above you would know a little something about google new tool BUZZ.

Google Buzz seems it was ment to take out the social networking world , such as Twitter / Facebook,  but i think its going to need some major work.  There is nothing special about google buzz that you cant do with Twitter and/or Facebook.

We are just going to have to see where this one goes google.

http://www.google.com/buzz

HBO imagine is a unique new storytelling device that offers four different perspectives on the same scene, simultaneously. There is a kind of gaming element to the cube, making no two experiences the same.

I found this very interesting.  You Can watch one scene and never know what going on in the next. REVOLUTIONARY!

Check it out for your self.

http://hboimagine.com

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period–after which the call will end–as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts. The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.

One important element of the service is that users can keep their phone numbers private, yet be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. To be sure, since the calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online, or may choose to ignore the call if they don’t want to talk.

There are currently several applications that allow users to create voice-to-text Twitter posts–known as tweets–but it does not appear that anyone has yet made it possible to initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users.

Coming on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Facebook users will now be able to communicate with each other via voice–using a third-party application from Vivox–it’s clear that there is a strong interest, among service providers, at least, in taking leading social networks beyond strictly text communications. Whether large numbers of users choose to get on board is unknown at this point, of course. And given that neither the Facebook nor the Twitter voice services are being provided by the social networks themselves means that some users will choose not to get involved for fear of privacy, stability or other concerns.

Still, if these third-party services end up being successful, it would be natural to expect that Facebook and Twitter may decide they need to step up and directly embed such technologies into their offerings. And there is a precedent for such a move. After Vivox began offering Second Life users a third-party voice solution, the virtual world’s publisher, Linden Lab, decided it needed to take advantage of the technology. Today, thanks to a formal partnership, Vivox’s voice service is formally integrated into Second Life.

And while it may be some time before such a thing happens with either Facebook or Twitter, or any other major social network, one would have to think that it’s only a matter of time.

Via our friends over @ CNET

Social-storage service Dropio on Thursday announced a partnership with Yahoo Mail to deliver a default application for the e-mail program’s users. Dubbed Attach Large Files, Dropio’s application will allow Yahoo Mail users to send attachments up to 100 MB in size.

When Yahoo Mail users log on to their accounts, they will now see Dropio’s Attach Large Files listing included in the Applications drop-down box, which also features apps from Evite, Flickr, and PayPal, among others. When they click on Dropio’s application, they can immediately start sending large files through their e-mail accounts.

The Dropio application isn’t available through Yahoo Mail’s e-mail composition form. Only when the user clicks on the “Attach Large Files” option will they be brought to a page allowing them to select files from their computer. Once they choose all those files, they can then upload them and compose an e-mail message. The message contains a note at the bottom saying the attachment technology is “powered by Dropio.”

The recipients will then view the e-mail’s contents on a unique Dropio page. There, they can leave a comment or download the files to their computer.

Incorporating the Dropio technology marks an improvement for Yahoo. Currently, users of Google’s Yahoo Mail rival, Gmail, can attach up to 25MB to their messages. By effectively quadrupling that figure through Dropio’s app, Yahoo Mail has another compelling feature to communicate to users.

Dropio was quick to point out that the app it created for Yahoo was based on its open application-programming interface. It hopes that the Yahoo Mail feature will be used as a proof of concept for other developers to find unique ways to use its API.

Dropio’s Attach Large Files application is available now for free in the Yahoo Mail Applications listing.

VIA [CNET]

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.

At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.

And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.

Update:: Facebook has just issued the following press release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released

Via [Tech Crunch]

As Of Sunday August 10th the URL shorting service tr.im will no longer make URLs  short.

Posted on site (Tr.im):

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Press Release:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 30, 2009 — Funambol, the leading provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email, today introduced the world’s first open source mobile cloud sync solution for mVoIP. The solution lets mVoIP users sync contacts from a variety of sources, including mobile phones, email systems, personal computers and social networks. Its contact syncing enables users to call more people and increases mVoIP utilization. The solution’s basis on open source allows it to be fully customized, in contrast to proprietary solutions.

mVoIP enables users to conduct Skype-like voice calls on cell phones using wifi and other non-cellular networks. A recent Visiongain report says that mVoIP will be a game changer and offers significant business opportunities for mobile operators and others in the wireless industry.

A challenge with mVoIP is that users start with an empty address book which curtails their usage because they lack the contact info for people they want to call, such as their email address, phone number or mVoIP user ID. Most mVoIP services are unable to sync contact info from cell phones or other places. Funambol enables mVoIP to sync contacts from many sources via the Internet cloud, automatically populating the user’s mVoIP address book. When contact data is updated anywhere, the changes propagate to the user’s address book, allowing them to continue reaching people when their contact info changes. Funambol’s solution for mVoIP is an extension of its mobile cloud sync software that makes it easy to keep data and content on cell phones in sync with other sources.

The Funambol mVoIP cloud sync solution is based on open source which provides several benefits. As mVoIP is an emerging technology, it is important that providers be able to rapidly adjust their service for trends and market conditions. Open source’s code availability offers full control, which differs from proprietary vendor APIs that permit limited customization. Open source also provides the broadest device compatibility and a global developer community that helps adapt the software for the latest wireless handsets. The Funambol solution also includes an AJAX portal that keeps contact info in sync across many sources via the cloud. This makes it convenient for users to use a web browser to add, change or remove address book info, rather than doing this on a mobile phone.

“Several of our customers are mVoIP providers that sync user address books with email systems and social networks”, said Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO. “They selected Funambol because open source lets them fully customize the solution to support their needs and target devices”.

The Funambol open source mobile cloud sync solution for mVoIP is immediately available.

Press Release :

Yahoo! Inc. announced Search Pad beta, a Yahoo! Search feature that lets people capture, organize, save and share information they find while researching online. Search Pad provides a new search experience that is especially valuable for people conducting extensive research in categories such as academic, health, jobs, travel, or shopping.

Today, people conducting online research often use cumbersome methods for capturing the information they find in search results, pasting snippets into separate documents, taking handwritten paper notes, bookmarks, and/or sending themselves emails with links. Search Pad simplifies this task by automatically recognizing when people are conducting research, and allowing them to easily capture information and websites found in their search results. Once activated, Search Pad automatically saves recent items, including links in one integrated notepad that stays with them as they search. People can edit their notes and then print, save, email, or share their Search Pad documents with family, friends, colleagues or anyone else, eliminating the need for others to do the same research.

“At Yahoo! Search we are committed to understanding people’s intent and building the right tools to help them complete their most important tasks online,” said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products, Yahoo! Search. “With Search Pad, Yahoo! is providing an elegant solution that understands when valuable research is being conducted and offers a way to effortlessly gather information in one place. Yahoo! Search Pad helps people make decisions, save their work, and share the best with friends and colleagues.”

Available only on Yahoo! Search, Search Pad has a host of features that make search and research as meaningful and manageable as possible:

1) Automatic Research Detection: Understands research intent to initiate note-taking;

2) Simple Collecting: Tightly integrated into the search experience; once research begins, it automatically collects visited websites and thumbnails;

3) Organize: Easily manages research into a coherent document for quick reference with capabilities that include free form note entry, drag & drop, auto-attribution of the URL for pasted notes, and save/delete of notes and documents;

4) Share: Provides simple and useful ways to share work with friends and colleagues via print, email, publish, and a number of social networks.

The new Yahoo! Search Pad feature will be rolling out to people today by searching at Yahoo.com in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

Flickr has just released their long awaited feature for posting photos to Twitter. It’s been in beta over the past few weeks, but now it’s live for everyone.

It’s not exactly like other photo tweeting services like TwitPic (Twitpic), which lets you sign-in using your Twitter account. To use Flickr2Twitter, you first need to sign-in to Flickr, and then authorize the service to post to your Twitter account, which can be done from your settings page.

Then, you’ll be able to use the “Blog This” button that accompanies each photo to post it to Twitter, along with a customized tweet. Like an increasing number of other services, Flickr2Twitter uses its own URL shortener: flic.kr.

You’ll also be able to use Flickr2Twitter from your mobile, with a new custom email address that’s generated once you authorize Twitter posting. The new address is the same as your old one, but appends a “2twitter” to the alias. Just send a photo from your phone to this address and your photo will be posted both to Flickr (Flickr) and Twitter (Twitter).

Essentially, this is TwitPic for existing Flickr users. TwitPic offers a lower barrier to entry for people who use Twitter but not Flickr, but for Flickr users, the experience of cross-posting photos to Twitter is now a breeze. And since there are millions of Flickr users, get ready for lots of flic.kr photos in your Twitter stream.

Thanks To Mashable for this one!

Ok, so I’m all over the internets. I am a News hound, Blog follower, Shopaholic, Social Media Junkie, and I often have a billion (ok, 10 ) tabs open in my browser at any one time. I wished, “If there was only one place I could have all my favorite internet hot spots all in one place….” And of course, there is such a wonderful place. It’s called Netvibes.com.

I completely dig this site because not only does it come with a staggering array of modules to choose from to customize your personal page, but you can add just about any content or RSS feed that you want to also. It’s so super easy.

And just last week, Netvibes rolled out some major changes. Now you can have Multiple Personalized Pages. This lets users better organize their collected widgets and also give more control over accounts and decide what gets posted publicly. You can also have mulitple accounts and personalize everything.

Here’s the Deets about the features:

Multiple Personalized Pages (MPP) introduce new page publishing and management tools, leveraging Netvibes startpage technology into a rapid publishing platform for users, marketers and enterprises. MPP can be used to create infinite:
- Business Dashboards: Monitor industry, client and competitor news, alongside calendars, CRM and workplace tools.
- Topic Pages: Track favorite hobbies, sports teams, entertainment news, etc.
- People Pages: Follow friends, family and social activity feeds.
- Public Pages: Publish a small business website, online portfolio, aggregated social profile dashboards, etc. Like iWeb, but better, easier.
- Branded Microsites (for marketers): Rapidly publish user-personalizable brand, product and media portals with Netvibes Premium Universe.
- Enterprise Portals (for large companies): Deploy employee dashboards, intranets and user-personalizable websites on a global scale with Netvibes Enterprise
- Startpages: Oh yeah, you can still make startpages, too, but the point is that MPP let’s you do way more.

So what does this all mean? Lots!
With Multiple Personalized Pages, users have unlimited room to make as many personalized pages as they like, it’s way super fast to remix and add all your widget content, it’s really easy to manage multiple accounts from one dashboard, and you can organize each page as you wish. All your different interests will have it’s own home in netvibes. You can also publish as many separate pages as you want, and you can personalize everything just to your tastes: no ads, logos, forced search bars, etc. There is no limit to what you can do and present on Netvibes. From personal hobbies to enterprise solutions, Netvibes will let you aggreate all your favorite sites and you have the power to customize everything just how you like it. Give it a spin, and there’s lots more screenshots after the jump. Sign up, get your page started at www.netvibes.com, you can find my public page here: target="_blank">http://www.netvibes.com/lizmoney