Everything APPLE!

Twitter messages from prominent writers like All Things D's Kara Swisher are now in Bing search results.

(Credit: Bing)

Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.

Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities (leading to the odd pairing of search guru Danny Sullivan and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest in the same sentence) when users search on their names and “twitter,” the company announced Wednesday afternoon. It’s not indexing all of Twitter, instead picking “a few thousand people to start” and using Twitter’s public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.

Amid all the nauseating Twitter adoration of late lies a real trend within the search community: the desire to display search results that contain items from real-time communication services. Right now, this is done haphazardly by the Big Three, although smaller companies are trying to offer this service for those who just can’t wait.

Both Google and Yahoo, for example, will return the main Twitter page and a single tweet as the top two search results for “Ryan Seacrest Twitter.” They don’t call out multiple tweets within a single defined box, as Bing will now do with the new feature.

Bing’s Twitter feature is rolling out slowly over the day on Wednesday.

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(Credit: Google)

Last December we showed you how Google refined its search results for iPhone and Android. The change loaded pages faster and fit the results to the screen width for searches generated from Google.com (plus for the specialized Google widget on Android and the search box on Safari.)

On Wednesday, Google began supporting these optimized results for feature phones–essentially handsets that are not smartphones or PDAs–in 38 languages and in more than 60 countries. The project to revamp search results builds on a March 2009 initiative that included iPhone and Android phones in about 20 countries. After that, it expanded to feature phones in the U.S. and Japan.

The optimized result is a listings page very similar to what you would see on your desktop, that is populated with image, blog, video, news, and product entries that are relevant to your search, often as the first result. An image showing the local weather forecast is one common example; a thumbnail of a Google map or movie showtimes are two others.

The language support includes English (U.S. and U.K.), Spanish, Japanese, Polish, French, Dutch, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Thai, German, Russian, Tagalog, Swedish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Finnish, Indonesian, Croatian, Catalan, Danish, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Greek, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Hindi.

You can read the Google Mobile blog for more details.

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Yahoo has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google’s browser.

Extensions still must be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology clearly is immature. But Google is steadily addressing the concern that its browser lacks one of Firefox’s notable features–called add-ons in the Mozilla browser.

“Delicious extension (alpha version) for Google Chrome is now available,” said Amit Papnai of the Delicious team in a mailing list posting Tuesday. “This is a light version of the extension and allows you to sign in and post bookmarks to your Delicious account.”

The Delicious extension for Chrome shows the logo in the address bar. Clicking it pops up a dialog box as a new miniature Web page.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Extensions can be powerful tools to customize a browser’s interface or add significant features. In an effort to ease programming difficulties, Chrome’s extensions technology uses the same interface techniques as Web pages, a method Mozilla as adopted for its Jetpack Firefox extensions project at Mozilla Labs.

Delicious lets people store, tag, describe, and share bookmarks, and the add-on simplifies use of the service directly through the browser.

In addition, Nick Baum released a Chrome-based Twitter extension called Chritter on Tuesday.

I found both the Delicious and Chritter extensions easy to download and install, though Chritter isn’t terribly useful at this stage because it only flashes recent tweets in a status bar. Update 2:57 p.m. PDT: Google has added a rough but workable interface for managing Chrome extensions, including uninstalling them, by typing “chrome://extensions/” into the address bar.

Extensions compatibility can be tough to maintain, as the release of Firefox 3.5 Tuesday illustrated.

“We’re working on pushing out a new Gears version that supports Firefox 3.5,” Google programmer Aaron Boodman said Monday on a mailing list for Gears, a Firefox add-on that among other things can enable offline access to the Gmail Web application. “We typically wait until the official ‘gold’ release of Firefox is pushed, because otherwise, we keep having to do new builds every time a new release candidate is pushed.”

One of Firefox’s most popular add-ons is AdBlock Plus, which suppresses online advertisements. With Google’s business dependent on advertising, skeptics have said they don’t expect Chrome ever to support that technology.

However, in a December design document about Chrome extensions, Boodman highlighted AdBlock Plus as an example of an extensions use that Google would like to support. And discussion of ad blocking in Chrome has surfaced on the Chrome extensions mailing list.

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I really like Opera (Windows | Mac) widgets. They all offer something unique. But I especially like the browser’s science and math widgets.

If you’re someone who just can’t get enough of planets, you love building mathematical graphs, or you enjoy science, these widgets are for you.

Science widgets

Astronomy Picture of the Day Each day, when you load Astronomy Picture of the Day, it displays a picture it gets from NASA. When you click on that image, it gives you an in-depth description of what’s being depicted and why it’s important. I found it to be extremely informative. Practically anyone who likes astronomy should be pleased with Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Astronomy Picture of the Day gives you some beautiful images.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Chinese Abacus If you want to get some addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division work done, look no further than than the Chinese Abacus widget. Much like the real thing, you can move the blocks up and down to keep count. The abacus will show a tally at the bottom to help you.

Before you start using it, beware that the Chinese Abacus widget requires some knowledge of the abacus to get it to work. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find that it makes performing basic math functions quite simple.

The Chinese Abacus widget is a really cool app.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Functions 3D Functions 3D isn’t for the novice mathematician. The widget lets you create a 3D structure based on a mathematical equation that you devise.

Once you set the X, Y, and Z boundaries, you’ll create an equation to develop the figure you want to depict. You can create simple archways or complex statues by changing the equation to fit your needs. Functions 3D is one of the more powerful Opera widgets I’ve ever used. It’s also one of the most difficult to understand.

Functions 3D helps you create 3D models with your equations.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Math Workpad Math Workpad is a neat utility that not only lets you evaluate mathematical expressions, it also provides you with a vector graph to see the result of an equation.

Once you load Math Workpad, you can start defining different functions or letters. You can then use those functions and letters to create a mathematical equation that the widget will solve for you. I found that all of the equations I created were solved quickly and accurately. It’s perfect for students in math classes or the geek who wants to create some vector 3D graphs with their mathematical prowess.

Create and solve your own equations with Math Workpad.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

PlanetWerks 2 PlanetWerks 2 is a great way to learn a little something about the solar system. When you download the widget, it displays the sun and all the planets orbiting it. You can zoom in on different planets and adjust your tilt to see better. If you want to learn about individual planets in the solar system, you need only to click on one of the celestial bodies, and the widget will provide information, including the object’s size relative to Earth, how long its orbit is, and more.

PlanetWerks 2 teaches you about the solar system.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Scientific Calculator The Scientific Calculator widget is a must-have for any science or math whiz. The app provides a slew of functions to satisfy your mathematical needs. It even has seven programmable memory buttons. I used it to perform some basic operations and was impressed. It completed equations in just a few seconds. It was like having a real calculator with me.

Scientific Calculator is like the real thing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Unit Converter Unit Converter is a handy widget to have when you want to quickly switch between different units. True to the science theme, the app includes unit conversions for velocity, volume, pressure, and the basics, like area and temperature. It’s a simple widget that you won’t always use, but you’ll be happy you have it, when you want to convert some scientific measurements.

Unit Converter gives you all the conversions you need.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top 3

1. Chinese Abacus: The Chinese Abacus widget is designed well, and it’s ideal for quickly solving mathematical equations.

2. Scientific Calculator: It’s like having the real thing in front of you.

3. PlanetWerks 2: Who doesn’t want to learn about the solar system?

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Bing picked up half a percentage point of market share in June.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Bing took a baby step up the search engine ladder in its first month on the Internet.

Microsoft’s share of the search market increased from 7.81 percent prior to the launch of Bing to 8.23 percent for the month of June, according to data from Statcounter picked up by Reuters. Bing got a noticeable bounce during the first few weeks of June, but settled back after the novelty wore off.

Google’s share dropped ever so slightly, from a dominant 78.72 percent of the search market in May to a perilously shaky 78.48 percent of the market in June, a drop attributed by more than a few news outlets to Bing’s success but one unlikely to cause too much concern in Mountain View. Statcounter was a lone voice suggesting that Bing surpassed Yahoo during its first week of existence, but now reports that Yahoo actually gained share during June in maintaining its second-place position, up from 10.99 percent in May to 11.04 percent in June.

The changes may look small, but all Microsoft ever wanted out of the Bing relaunch was a few percentage points’ worth of extra market share, according to executives. One month does not a comeback make, however, and tweaks to both Google and Yahoo’s core search products are expected over the rest of the year.

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Gdgt, a new site co-founded by Peter Rojas (founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget) and Ryan Block (former editor in chief of Engadget) is opening up today.

It is–surprise–yet another gadget site, but it’s quite good, and more useful to real people than the gadget porn sites these two editors came from. It’s a community-driven site, wiki-like in features and general atmosphere, so it’s the site’s users that will make it succeed or fail.

Meanwhile, the new version of Retrevo (previous coverage), another tech product site, launched on Monday of this week. It’s a more sober site, useful but not as exciting as Gdgt. It’s more of a buyer’s and owner’s resource.

Gdgt: By geeks and of geeks

“It’s the gadget site we always wanted,” Rojas and Block say about their new site. Conceptually, it’s quite simple, and potentially powerful. Users on the site pick the products they have, want, or once had, and write up quick reviews of them if they like. It’s social, it’s fast, and if the product you want to write about isn’t in the database, it’s pretty easy to add it.

If you’re looking for solid advice on a product–how to fix it, if you should buy it–the community could provide value. You’ll be able to see what users are saying about products and dive into discussions about particular features. If you like researching what the people who are really passionate about their gear say, this will be helpful.

But the people who get the most out of Gdgt will be product geeks and fanboys who like chatting about toys. The service has a very high social component. You can follow people, friend them, get alerts when your friends write reviews or respond to yours, and so on. There are also free-floating discussions about product companies, and “feature” stories (blog posts) by the editors that will serve as jumping-off points for community chatter.

It sounds like an straightforward concept, but Gdgt wins points for execution. It’s fun to use. It’s fast (at least the unloaded beta I tried was) and most of the pieces are where you expect them to be. Those that aren’t (like the site’s preference for using product model numbers instead of more popular brand names) will likely be fixed based on user feedback.

I admit I do have issues with sites that encourage people to define themselves by what they own, and Gdgt definitely does that. There’s a tacit game of one-upsmanship in the “I have” list. But if you do have the gadget bug and see no issue with feeding it, I think Gdgt will end up being a great place to hang out.

Gdgt is as much about products as it is about their fans and owners.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Retrevo: Get in, get info, get out

In contrast, the new, recently launched version of Retrevo is designed to “make the shopping journey simple and enjoyable,” an anodyne pitch if ever there was, but attractive, no doubt, to people freaked out by the idea of buying a digicam or a flatscreen.

Retrevo has an AI core that gathers up product review and pricing data from numerous sources (including CNET), to present overall recommendations on products. What’s new is its Farecast-like feature of telling you if the product you’re looking at is at its peak of popularity, or heading toward or away from it, plus indicators telling whether users like it, and if it’s a good value or not at the moment. If you trust the Retrevo machine, it provides good info to reduce buying anxiety.

A new automated “product catalog” also gathers up information on entire categories of products and puts into a catalog-like format that’s supposed to be comfortable to users. I found the information on the catalog pages poorly organized, however.

The site will now also telegraph the essentials it knows about products to you via Twitter if you send it a query, which is potentially useful if you’re in a store and curious about a product you’re looking at on a shelf, and if you don’t care if all your Twitter followers see when you query the Retrevobot. Another handy feature (which I don’t think is new) is an electronic “shelf” for keeping product manuals. Retrevo has a nice library to stock it from.

This should make it easier for you to part with your money.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

If you’re a gearhead, try Gdgt for fun and community, but don’t skip Retrevo when you’re looking to make a purchase.

And to keep me employed, be sure to check out CNET reviews as well. Thank you.

Disclosure: In past jobs at Red Herring and Ziff-Davis, I have worked with people now at both Gdgt and Retrevo.

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Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook.

The social network’s privacy controls had gotten so sprawling that they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings, according to a conference call the company held on Wednesday.

“These can add up and pile up and not be as clean as one would like,” Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said on the call. From what it sounds like, they’d gotten so complicated that many members just ignored them altogether–something that Facebook certainly doesn’t want as it encourages its 200-million-plus members to post and share even more content.

As a result, Facebook’s new controls will be more streamlined so as to offer easier and simpler controls about how much everything from entire profiles to individual pieces of content are shared. Users will be introduced to this through “transition tools” that allow them to toggle how open everything on their profile will be–totally public, friends-only, restricted to company or school networks, etc.

One of the biggest changes along with the new controls is that Facebook is getting rid of “regional networks,” the opt-in way that members could designate themselves as residents of certain geographic areas. Only half of members even joined these networks, according to Facebook. It’s a change that’s been anticipated for some time, and privacy controls regarding regional networks have already been phased out.

“Networks were kind of the bedrock of privacy,” product manager Leah Perlman said on the call. “When we expanded past college and work (networks), we created the concept of regional networks in order to have our privacy model expand.” Members could share content selectively with members of their regional network, but representatives said that it was never quite clear as to exactly who else was in that regional network, and the delineation of networks was messy–some were defined by city, other by broader region or state, and others encompassed entire countries.

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly is also considering a run for attorney general of California.

(Credit: Kelly2010.com)

There were, for example, separate networks for each of New York City’s five boroughs, but most residents just chose to join the broader “New York, NY” one instead. Facebook says that this shouldn’t affect locally targeted advertisements: the company will be porting regional network data to its “Current City” field, and has already been using other data like IP address information to hone local ad targeting.

Facebook is keeping school- and company-based networks intact.

This comes in the wake of an announcement that Facebook would be tweaking its “publisher,” the toolbar that lets members update their status messages or post content like individual photos and videos. The “publisher” will now have a privacy toggle for individual pieces of content, letting a user choose whether to make them available to friends only, custom friend groups, or–for the first time–to the Web at large. Making content available publicly will bring Facebook better in line with the thirst for real-time, searchable mass information that Twitter has captured so effectively thus far.

So how will this be handled? Facebook members will be guided through one of the aforementioned “transition tools,” which representatives said will take one of two forms: either an ultra-specific set of granular, custom controls or a more no-brainer set of radio buttons. The new controls will first be tested with 40,000 users in the U.S. before rolling out to a bigger, international group of beta testers and then worldwide.

Last updated at 12:20 p.m. PDT.

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Starting Wednesday, Gmail users will find their labels farther up the left-hand side of their screen.

(Credit: Google)

Google is rolling out another tweak to its Gmail user interface that makes its labels behave a little bit more like folders.

Gmail has never used folders, at least in the traditional sense of the familiar classification system used by other e-mail clients. Instead, it encourages users to “label” messages with notes like “Work” or “Travel” instead of putting them away in folders, which has the primary benefit of allowing a single message to be given multiple labels and therefore appear in multiple categories, rather than having to decide whether the itinerary for a business trip should go in “Work” or “Travel.”

But earlier this year, Google acknowledged that traditional e-mail users were treating the labels like folders anyway, and it began allowing them to hit a “move to” button to label a message and store it away. A further tweak being rolled out Wednesday moves a Gmail user’s list of labels from the lower left-hand corner of the navigation screen to the upper left-hand corner, right underneath the usual labels such as “Inbox” and “Sent Mail,” where they will look just like a traditional list of folders.

The concept of labeling isn’t going away, said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager. “We wanted to add some functionality that would make labels more useful for people used to folders,” he said in explaining some of the changes.

The primary addition is the ability to drag and drop messages using the mouse “into” labels. If you were pretending that the labels were folders before Wednesday’s tweak, you had to use the “Move to” button at the top of the screen to label, and then archive a message to get it out of your in-box. You can also drag a label onto a message, rather than using the “Label” button at the top.

And now that the list of labels has been moved up, pushing the chat list down, Google has minimized the number of labels that appear in the default list as to not push the chat bar down too far. For those who have dozens of labels in use, clicking on the “more” button will bring up the additional labels without going to a different Web page, and the number of labels shown in the default view can be set by the user.

The changes forced Google to kill its first Gmail Labs project: right-side labels, although dozens remain. Google is moving everyone on Gmail to the new design as of today.

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Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.

A developer building an application using Twitter’s API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter’s own, as well as his use of the word “tweet” in the application’s name.

The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: “Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own.”

Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word “tweet,” that could mean a problem for TweetDeck, TweetMeme, PoliTweets, and some of the other extremely popular businesses built atop Twitter.

A few things to keep in mind here. One, the developer was also creating a service that looked a lot like Twitter, the TechCrunch post explains, which means that the use of the word “tweet” may really have been less important than the e-mail made it out to be. Second, it’s a personal e-mail coming from a Twitter employee–not a company representative or executive–which means that it may not be perfectly aligned with the company’s official stance on things.

(Case in point: A Twitter investor hinted to The New York Times that the company would be making money with virtual coupons. One of Twitter’s co-founders said in a comment on a blog that the investor was “brainstorming on his own.”)

But the tech industry does have a history of getting into one skirmish after another over names similar to their trademarks. Several years ago, Apple started sending cease-and-desist letters to some third-party equipment companies and fan blogs that were using the word “pod” in their names. Google, too, has taken issue with the word “googling” being used as a generic verb.

And as TechCrunch points out, Twitter has filed for a trademark on the word “tweet.” On the other hand, being possessive of this term (which, it goes without saying, has been a dictionary word for centuries) might not be the smartest strategy, if Twitter indeed wants to be a Digital Age communication standard “like electricity,” as one executive said last month. So we’ll see how this one unfolds.

UPDATE at 11:49 a.m. PT: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has, as the company’s executives often do when there’s a rumor flurry about something Twitter’s doing, put up a blog post to clarify. The answer, not surprisingly, is that these things are handled on a case-by-case basis.

And “tweet” is not a target, he said.

“We have no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter,” Stone assured readers. “In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet.”

It’s more complicated when developers choose to use the word “Twitter,” though it had been a dictionary word long before the microblogging company adopted the term.

“Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well,” Stone wrote. “After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with ‘Twitter’ we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line.”

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