All hail the new queen of Twitter! Lady Gaga has toppled Britney Spears to be number one on Twitter with the most followers, with more than 5,769,000 followers and counting. Check out the top 100 Twitter users based on followers from Twitaholic.com.
It looks like someone managed to bypass Twitter’s 140 characters message limit using what appears to be a bug in Twitter’s new t.co shortening service. Check it out before Twitter take it down.
Twitter has launched the so called promoted tweets on its trending topics. The first sponsor is DisneyPixar promoting Toy Story 3 (Seriously, a guaranteed blockbuster does not need to be promoted this hard). When you view the list of trending topics on Twitter, you will see “Toy Story 3″ with a “Promoted” label beside. Click on this trending topic will bring you to the search page for all tweets with “Toy Story 3″, with the first tweet being the promoted tweet by DisneyPixar.
YouTube by default will use its Flash video player even if you are using Safari or Chrome which supports HTML5 video. YouTube HTML5 video playback is in beta and is not enabled by default.
In order to use YouTube HTML5 video player, you need to visit YouTube site http://www.youtube.com/html5 to opt-in to enable this feature.
Twitter has been experiencing multiple and massive failures for the past week, there is even an explanation of the problems from their engineering team.
If you still encounter the failed whale, you might as well switch to a better failed whale for some entertainment while you wait for the service to be restored. Over at Subcide, they developed an animated failed whale which is awesome consider it is made using just plan CSS codes.
The highlight of new Safari 5 features must be the Reader. Safari Reader removes annoying elements such as ads on the page and present you with an easy to read article. It is generating buzz at the moment as there are two opposing camps on the idea of removing ads. Most users will welcome the build-in ability to strip off distractions while reading, while bloggers and online publishers are worried the ads-blocking will bring them reduced earning.
There are even conspiracy theory that Reader is part of Apple’s plan to reduce the profitability of articles on the web, so that developers/publishers will shift their focus to iOS devices and iAds. This is hardly believable judging by the minor market share of Safari.
Safari Reader is based on the work on Readability by Arc90. Rich Ziade has published an article on their vision for Readability and why they build Readability. It is an interesting read.
Will other browsers follow suite by implementing something similar to Reader natively? We can only wait and see.
We believe Google Search must be losing market share to Bing for the search portal to behave this way. First Google search result page is revamped with a left column similar to Bing. And now a background image on the search portal? And one that is poorly done that could make the page looks real ugly depending on the selected image. Luckily you can turn off the background and restore back the white background.
Google websites has always been geeky looking, its their trademark. Google search portal with background image is like someone who has poor fashion taste wearing the wrong clothes and pretending to be a fashion model.
This is a useful trick to find out info and statistics of shortened URLs by bit.ly: just add a “+” at the end of any bit.ly URL on your browser. For example to find out details on bit.ly URL “http://bit.ly/dcV9Bm”, visit the site “http://bit.ly/dcV9Bm+” which will bring you to the bit.ly info and statistics page for the URL. The page shows you who owns the URL, original URL, number and traffic of clicks in graph, and even tweets mentioning the URL.
This will also work for shorten URLs using bit.ly as backend service such as http://huff.to (Huffington Post), http://tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) and http://nyti.ms (New York Times).
In its campaign to ask users to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is calling Internet Explorer 6 an 9-year-old milk.
Internet Explorer 6 has not been popular among web developers due to its many non-compliances to the open web. Google is one of the major vendors that ceased support for IE6 for its Google Docs site in January. And this week, Google Reader axes support for IE6.
If you still have some Windows XP machines lurking around, its time to check the IE version and do the necessary upgrade.
Google today released stable version of its Mac & Linux version of Chrome, making them on par with its Windows release. The release also comes with new feature: syncing of browser setting and preferences on top of bookmarks; extension in incognito mode; html5 support such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web socket, file drag-and-drop. The bookmark manager is also having a facelift.
Today, I’m happy to announce that Google Chrome for Mac is being promoted out of beta to our stable channel. We believe that it provides not only the stability, performance and polish that every Mac user expects, but also a seamless native Mac application experience that Mac users will feel instantly at home with.
Flash is not included by default in this release but Google “we’re excited to enable this feature with the full release of Flash Player (version 10.1) soon”.
