Yahoo Gives Photo Sharing Site, Flickr A New Look And Offers One Terabyte Of Free Storage Space
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 13:41
Flickr, a photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, got a huge upgrade. With Yahoo! fighting to make itself more relevant, Flickr will now give you one terabyte of free storage for your photos.
While everyone wants to consolidate their files as much as possible, we're already seeing seeing apps that let you manage free storage space from multiple providers in a single interface. So this could be an ingenious move by Yahoo!.
In addition to the massive upgrade in storage, Yahoo! gave Flickr a new interface that is much more modern.
This makes avaiable to iOS users Google's context-aware search functionality, says Ars Technica. To use this app, sign into your Google account and access the Google Search application. Tap the microphone icon to initiate voice-dictated search queries. Talking to search the Web is less hassle than typing, especially on a mobile device that you're using no the road all the time.
"Just 13 months after being awarded the prize in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contest to create a new science school, Cornell NYC Tech got up and running. Eight students enrolled in January in what is being called the beta class, a one-year master’s program in computer science," says The New York Times today.
The school's unorthodox curriculum eschews the traditional approach to learning. Instead, real-world experience is baked in. The Times cynically covers the new approach Cornell NYC Tech is taking and buries the lead.
"If all the hopes and hype are warranted," the story opens, "a nondescript third-floor loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan offers a glimpse of the future, for New York City and for Cornell University."
By framing the story from the start with, "If all the hopes and hype are warranted," the story tells readers that he feels like the new approach of the school is hype. Who cares? Readers are best served when you report only what you know to be true. Spending any words on ungrounded skepticism waste a reader's time. As a result, some very cool facts are buried.
The U.S. Commerce Department has stationed a patent officer on the premises to help with patent applications and strategy — an arrangement that federal officials say is a first," says the story's twelfth paragraph.
Buried in the thirteenth paragraph: students every semester work with mentors from the private sector to create new products. Two students are working with a Google engineer on open-source software to predict severe weather.
Even if the school's unorthodox approach fails and Cornell NYC Tech must change course, New York is getting a big boost as "the nation's other technology center." For the city's students and businesses, this is a great new resource.
If you've complained about your boss or job on Twitter, watch out for a warning from this new app called. Or, if you suspect an employee has said something bad on social media about working at your firm, here's a way to find out.
FireMe! tracks negative phrases about bosses and jobs and rates how likely they are to get the poster fired. The app automatically sends a tweet to the employee warning him.
At the link provided, employers can input their employees Twitter names to see if they've said anything that might merit being fired.
R.I.P., Google Reader; Long Live A New Generation Of Better RSS Feed Readers And Here’s A Great Replacement
Friday, March 15, 2013 16:14
Google announced earlier this week that it was killing Reader, its RSS feed reader, triggering an avalanche of hateful posts across the Web. You have until July 1, 2013 to find a replacement.
For advisors relying on Google Reader, its death sentence is triggering great anxiety about what to replace it with. But you really don’t need to worry. Plenty of replacements are available and they will be better than Google Reader.
For the uninitiated, Google Reader aggregates news you are care about. It’s a personalized news feed. If you want to track all the news about “investment fiduciaries,” for instance, you would create an Alert in Google and every time a news item is published using the term “investment fiduciaries,” you can receive it via email, RSS feed, or in Google Reader. Google didn’t invent RSS, but Reader popularized its use by making it easy to aggregate your RSS feeds when it introduced Reader in 2006.
In a blog post announcing the death of Reader, Google says its two simple reasons explain its motivation: “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products,” Google says. “We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”
Some speculate that the real motive is to push more users toward Google Plus, which has some capabilities similar to Reader. My guess is that Google knows that that feed readers will need to continue to evolve and that small competitors will do a better job. I spent the past couple of days looking for a replacement, which taught me a few things.
First, not all feed readers are the same. I tried out one feed reader that annoyingly deleted feeds of stories if I did not read them after browsing through them, for instance. So you really have to watch out for bells and whistles. In fact, some feed readers are still desktop-based and you should rule those out right away, since any feed reader must be useable on a tablet or phone.
More importantly, I discovered that some feed readers are far better than Google Reader. A new generation of readers scans your tweets, Facebook content, and Google Reader feeds and then aggregates your news. That’s a huge improvement and could save you the trouble of having to configure or import your Google Reader feeds into other apps.
But the other thing I learned was feed readers suffer from the same problem as the rest of the Web. They most all point you to the same news sites. For instance, in aggregating news about Google Reader’s demise, all of the news aggregators pointed me to the same group of replacements for Google Reader, like Feedly or NetVibes.
It’s really difficult to find quality information, where a human being goes to six or 10 feed readers and assesses their capabilities and writes a brief but detailed analysis of each one and makes a suggestion about one or two that are best for different types of users. Point is, news aggregation does not replace reporting and analysis.
We are all being bombarded by ideas from apps that automate information gathering but lack the judgment of experts. It took me hour to read through dozens of posts about Google Reader alternatives to make a suggestion for a replacement to Google Reader.
Moreover, the app that wound up on top is not mentioned in any of the posts that are being aggregated. I had to follow a series of links that I cannot even retrace at this point to come to the conclusion that the coolest app to replace Google Reader is Prismatic.
Keep in mind that Google Reader’s demise is going to trigger a flood of innovation from replacement wannabes, and that my loyalty to Prismatic may not be long lasting. But this seems like a great alternative.
Prismatic could not be simpler. You select Facebook, Google, or Twitter as the social medium on which it will base your personalized news feeds.
Prismatic then asks you go give it permission to access your news stream on your social network.
Finally, it analyzes your likes and interests and aggregates your personal news stream. It’s brilliant.
Correction: An earliker version of this article incorrectly said you have until Julky 31, 2013 to replace Google Reader. You have until July 1.
