2008 July 15 | money news blog

15 07 2008

Twitter buys Summize, launches Twitter Search

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

As expected, Twitter has purchased Summize, a search engine designed for the micro-blogging service. The pairing seems pretty obvious. While Twitter may have started as a means of individual expression, the service has quickly grown into a repository of news and opinions.

Want to know what people think of the latest blockbuster motion picture? Just enter the title into Summize and you’ll get a whole slew of results. Want to see what people are saying about a politician? Summize can help. The search engine can also help you find other Twitter users who share your interests, making it simple to expand your own social network.

Twitter has launched a new site that looks and works pretty much exactly like Summize, at search.twitter.com. The only difference is that the new site states Twitter and not Summize. If you visit Summize.com, you’ll automatically be taken to the new site.

Terms of the deal haven’t been made public, but Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter paid $15 million for Summize. It might have made more sense for the company to develop its own search engine in-house. But since somebody’s already done the work, and since Twitter is sitting on a pile of venture capital, an acquisition was probably the easiest way to go.

15 07 2008

Preview the new Facebook profile page

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Facebook will soon be rolling out a new site design that, among other things, will change the way your profile looks. But you can check it out this day by logging into your account and then visiting www.new.facebook.com.

One of the most prominent new features will be an emphasis on the mini-feed. In fact, it might be safer to start calling it a news feed, since it’s not so mini-anymore. When you first view a profile, what you’ll see is a list of current activity on that account.

You can also click on tabs for Info, Photos, or Boxes. Info brings up your contact information, group membership, and other info. Boxes shows all the Facebook apps that are currently littering your main profile page. And we’re going to let you figure out for yourself what shows up in the Photos tab.

[via Mashable]

Update: Facebook seems to have disabled the www.new.facebook.com page sometime in the last few hours. But trust us, it looks something like the image above!

Read

15 07 2008

Blackstone taking stake in German wind energy farm

Posted by: in Raising Money

Filed under: The Blackstone Group, Raising money, Private equity industry, Investments

The Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX) has entered into its second large-scale substitute energy project. The private equity giant has announced that it will form a partnership with Windland Energieerzeugungs GmbH to finish the development and construction of Meerwind.

This is being billed as one of the North Sea’s largest wind farm projects. The wind farm will comprise 80 wind turbines with a combined generation capacity of 400MW. The project will be located some 80 kilometers (approximately 49 miles) off of the northern coast of Germany in the North Sea and is expected to cost in excess of €1 billion (almost US$1.6 Billion) to build.

The area management plan for the future wind farms in the North and East Sea was introduced by the German government in July, 2008 and supports local government objectives in fighting global warming by reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by the year 2020.

The wind farm will generate approximately 1.6 billion KWh annually and will provide enough energy to supply electricity to some 500,000 households.

This will be Blackstone’s second significant investment in renewable energy after the financial closing of the $870 million Bujagali hydroelectric power station project in December 2007 by Blackstone’s 80% owned portfolio company called Sithe Global.

15 07 2008

Posty: Adobe AIR client for Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, Tumblr

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Social Software, web 2.0

There’s no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty’s main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also choose the individual tab for each service to see current updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they’re available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we’d with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there’s no way to make it smaller. Larger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]

15 07 2008

iPhone App Review: iPhone port of AIM is close, but not quite there

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Social Software, AOL, iPhone

One of the most striking things about the first crop of iPhone apps is the divide between those that work with the phone’s user interface, and those that either don’t take advantage of the phone or ignore the design specs altogether. The AOL Instant Messenger app for iPhone scores points in some UI areas, but could be more intuitive and feel more like an iPhone app in others.

We’ve got no complaints about the look of AIM, but there are some places where it doesn’t feel right. For example, we were really hoping for a horizontal mode in this app, to take advantage of the wider keyboard. Groups are supported, but you can only view them one at a time, which makes them much less useful than on desktop versions of AIM. While a mobile AIM app like this is a dream we’ve had since high school, we favor the more intuitive Meebo mobile web app. It supports mutliple chat clients, too … can we get an app store version of that?

Oh, and here’s a tip, because we’ve seen a lot of people confused by this: to change your screenname, you’ve to go to your iPhone Settings. It’s not in the AIM app itself.

15 07 2008

See your del.icio.us bookmarks in a new way

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Social Software

Favthumbs takes a visual approach to your del.icio.us bookmarks. Instead of the usual text based links found on the Del.icio.us web site, Favthumbs displays image thumbnails of your bookmarks giving them a Web 2.0 look and feel.

No setup is required to use Favthumbs, simply enter in your del.icio.us user name and Favthumbs will generate thumbnails of all your bookmarks in either a grid or carousel (think cover flow) layout. You can further narrow down your bookmarks by clicking on your tags to the right of the screen.

We found that it took a bit longer to display our bookmarks on Favthumbs than using del.icio.us directly. This delay may be the result of Favthumbs fetching the images. But if thumbnails are your thing then you might want to give Favthumbs a try.

15 07 2008

iPhone App Review: Twitterrific is even better than the desktop version

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Social Software, iPhone

Sometimes Download Squad has to concur to disagree about a new app, and this is one of those times. Although some on the team have knocked the iPhone version of Twitterrific, I actually care about it better than its big brother on the desktop. What can the iPhone version do that the desktop version can’t? Well, for one, it can pop Twitter open within the app - sometimes you want to scope someone’s page (to see what a friend was replying to, for example). I haven’t seen another iPhone app that uses the same trick to browse web pages without quitting and switching to Safari.

Just like the browser trick, the rest of the UI is elegant. Tweets look great and are easy to read - the premium version lets you switch to a lighter theme that also looks good, if that’s up your alley. @reply links are clickable, and short profiles are viewable without opening a webpage at all. I’ll grant that there seem to be some issues with icon caching - when a tweet goes off-screen, the icon has to be reloaded when you scroll back to it — but I’m not sure if that’s an iPhone issue or a Twitterrific one. Throw in the ability to update your location with the iPhone’s built in location services, and this is an app that uses the platform to its fullest.

Continue reading iPhone App Review: Twitterrific exercises your EDGE connection and your patience

15 07 2008

iPhone App Review: Twitterrific exercises your EDGE connection and your patience

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Developer, Social Software, iPhone

Slick UI seems to be the norm for most ‘big name’ iPhone applications on the AppStore. Twitterrific easily gets the top spot in terms of having attractive UI and navigation. However, UI and usability are not synonymous. When I use my phone, I want to accomplish what I want to do quickly and easily. Unfortunately Twitterrific falls short in a few area which makes it one of the most frustrating apps to use on the iPhone.

Until recently, the only way for developers to test an iPhone application was to use the simulator. While it does a great job in allowing developers to see and interact with the app as they develop it, it doesn’t show how the app performs in real-life situation.

There are two major differences between the simulator and the real iPhone that are at play here. One is the computer speed and the other world wide web connection speed. Even the slowest MacBook Air runs faster than the iPhone and thus any performance issue would be masked. Likewise with internet connection, there’s no straightforward way to simulate the speed and latency of a EDGE connection and therefore any deficiency of the code in the app would not be exposed until the developers try it out on the real iPhone with spotty EDGE connection.

Twitterrific suffers from both of these problems. The scrolling performance of the message list is so jerky and slow that initially I thought there was something wrong with my iPhone. As I waited patiently for the list to scroll up and down, I also noticed that Twitterrific loads and re-loads each single user picture, even if it has previously been loaded. I stared at my iPhone in dis-belief because I could not understand how any sane developers would be as inefficient as that. My hunch that the reloading issue is tied to connection speed was confirmed last night when I got home and connected to the net via wi-fi. Both scrolling and picture reloading sped up because of the much faster connection I’ve at home.

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15 07 2008

Podcasting site Odeo relaunches, now with more video

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Video, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

After spending a few months in private beta, Odeo has launched a new version of its podcast aggregation service. OK, actually it looks like the new version of the site launched a few weeks ago, but we just noticed it, thanks to a short writeup over at TechCrunch. The updated site features a sleek new design and video. Lots and lots of video.

Odeo now has videos from about half a million different partners, including major content partners like Blip.tv and Revision3. There’s also an improved Flash player for watching videos or listening to audio on the site. At its heart, Odeo is still a podcast aggregation site, which means that there are download links for most audio and videos. Because while you can spend all day watching videos online, sometimes you want to download them and take them with you on your portable media player.

Users can also create profile pages, create playlists, rate podcasts, and share content using email links or embed code. The developers are also working on an improved version of Odeo Studio, a utility that lets users record or upload podcasts using a web browser.