News (103)

Facebook patents social feeds

Facebook has been awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology, more specifically "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network". Read more »

Facebook still pitching itself to open-source crowd

Facebook's rep at the Future of Web Apps event in Miami this week was David Recordon, the company's open-standards guru. That's a crowd that the social network still has yet to win over. Read more »

Adobe joins Linux-phone group to spread Flash

In an effort to spread its Flash technology as widely as possible, Adobe Systems has joined the LiMo Foundation, a group devoted to putting Linux on mobile phones. Read more »

Google beefing up new 'Social Web team'

Is Google plotting to encroach upon Facebook's comfy territory? Read more »

HTML 5 drops open-source video codec

HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, the Google employee who maintains the burgeoning web-coding standard has announced. Read more »

Oracle unwraps Fusion Middleware 11g

Oracle has unveiled the next generation of its middleware suite, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Read more »

Google: The browser is the computer

Google spent Wednesday morning trying to get developers excited about the next generation of Web technologies by showing off how future web applications will mimic desktop apps. Read more »

Opera: Web standards could eclipse Flash

The next revision of the HTML web language will make Adobe's Flash technology largely redundant, according to the chief executive of browser company Opera. Read more »

OpenID comes to Facebook, at last

For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralised, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it. Read more »

Google adds new filters, visualised results

Google introduced three new enhancements to its search engine on Tuesday, giving searchers new ways to filter results and adding new types of data to the search results themselves. Read more »

Features (28)

10 reasons why open source makes sense on smartphones

Open source brings a host of benefits to the mobile market, starting with cost savings but the advantages go much further — from better security to more customisation options to more prolific application development. Read more »

Taking on Twitter with open source software

One service that seemed to come out of nowhere and get instant buy-in from influential digerati around the Web was Identica, an open source microblogging alternative from Montreal resident Evan Prodromou, who in 2003 had co-founded Wikitravel. Read more »

Five ways Microsoft could change after Gates

Bill Gates has left the building and the question on many people's lips is: will Microsoft change as a result? What influence will Steve Ballmer have and how will the company's strategy alter without Gates? Read more »

Add meaning to Web pages with microformats

A technology that has gathered steam the past couple years is microformats. Microformats allow you to add context to existing information contained within a Web page. Read more »

A Quickstart to Erlang

If any language could be said to be ideally placed to deal with the challenges of the next 10 years it's Erlang. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of parallel and multi-core architectures, and natively supporting distributed systems coding, Erlang is a valuable addition to your programming skill set. Read more »

Driving towards in-car software

Developing applications to run inside cars is a fascinating and potentially lucrative market for developers. But what systems are actually running under the hood, and what hurdles do you have to overcome to build for them? Read more »

Do you want source with that database?

Is Microsoft slowly becoming a more open source company? Read more »

The beginning of the end for Microsoft?

Franklin Fisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, once said Microsoft's customers believed there were no serious commercial contenders to the Windows operating system. Read more »

Open source vs open standards

Customers and government bodies should focus on products with open standards and realise the pitfalls of open source, argues Scott Petty, Dimension Data Australia COO. Read more »

Can't J2EE and .NET just be friends?

The two Web services standards are now settling into their respective roles and the reasons for choosing one over the other are becoming clearer. But can they play nicely together? Read more »

Blog (13)

Playing with semantics

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- The Semantic Web, Microsoft's upcoming app store and a security flaw in Google Docs are amongst some topics that made news this week. Find out more in this week's Roundup. Read more »

Do browsers need a Universal Edit Button?

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- As websites allow more user generated content do browsers need a way to better inform users that pages are editable? Read more »

Social Skills

Lana Kovacevic [blogs:webanatomy] -- With Facebook usage on the decline, is OpenSocial the next big thing? Read more »

Firefox 3's better performance and memory improvements

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- As beta 5 is due to come out next week, I take a look at some of the new features and improvements in Firefox 3. Read more »

Yahoo open search: Good for users, but great for Yahoo

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Yahoo is making a big deal of its new open search initiative. This program, not yet live, will allow site publishers to influence the way the Yahoo search engine displays results for their sites. Read more »

OpenID Foundation scores top-shelf board members

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron. Read more »

DataPortability has big names on board, but a long road ahead

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- There's been plenty of talk about data portability over the past few weeks, what with Facebook taking issue with a Plaxo script that imported user data from one social network to the other. But the news has mostly dealt with tiffing and squabbling -- until now. Read more »

Google: Don't give up on OpenSocial

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- When Google unveiled its OpenSocial developer initiative at the end of October, observers hailed it as the future of the social Web. But is the search king already too late to the party? Read more »

Microsoft's two faces of SharePoint

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- One way or another, proprietary and open-source companies need an answer to SharePoint. Content is the center of the enterprise ecosystem, when all is said and done. SharePoint is Microsoft's answer for controlling the next decade of IT. Read more »

Just how much memory is Firefox using?

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- According to our logs 40% of you use Firefox: can you tell how much memory it's using? Here's a few tricks you should know if you're trying to cut it down to size. Read more »

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  • Staff Microsoft shows off IE9 preview

    This week, highlights from Microsoft's MIX10 conference and more in the Roundup. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett IE9's H.264 vote killed Ogg

    In a split decision by the judges, the winner of the W3C/WHATWG video codec consensus is H.264, taking home the future of video playback on the internet while loser Ogg goes home with nothing but thoughts of what might have been. Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Staff Google launches Apps Marketplace

    Google launches and app store, while Mozilla plans to re-write its open-source license. More of this week's news in the Roundup. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

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