Facebook just officially announced Facebook Chat and new features for controlling Friends Lists. The Press event was held at 10:00am PST. TechCrunch is the first to post notes from the event. Look for a more detailed summary of the event and announced features soon.
Update: TechCrunch has updated their story with a screenshot of FB Chat.
Something that’s been in the rumor been for quite some time may actually be coming true very soon. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of flickr, has told users back in May 2007 that video would be coming “soon” and this was reconfirmed in August 2007, but now months later nothing substantial has been shown.
Currently no details exist on this upcoming functionality, but knowing flickr it will probably be clean & simple to use.
Also flickr just celebrated their 4th birthday. Happy Birthday to them. I started following flickr in 2004 and their service is what really turned me onto this whole “web 2.0″ scene. I even got the chance to speak to Stewart Butterfield via email, which basically consisted of me sending him an email saying “omg I love your site, I want to be just like you” and him replying with a thank you and some sort of smiley face and thats how the legend goes (because I lost the email…doh).
Twitter’s blog put out a neat little graph showing the usage of the term “SxSW” in twitter posts. I would like to see the actual usage count of the term, but this graph is cool either way.
Lots of people included the string of letters “SXSW” in their Twitter updates during the five days of SXSW Interactive this year—and last year as well. We thought it would be fun to visualize and annotate some of the surges so Jason put together this graph.
Something we were watching very closely this year during the conference was service reliability. The thin brown line across the top of this graph represents the 99.97% uptime Twitter measured during the week.
YouTube announced on their blog today that they have started the process of re-encoding their catalog of videos into higher quality. News to me was also the updated size allowed for uploaded videos. YouTube now allows uploaded videos to be up to 1Gb in size. Thats 10x the previous limit. You can see that Google is serious about YouTube and making it the video platform of the internets. I guess thats why they spent 1.6 billion dollars to buy it. UPDATE: Apparently YouTube announced the larger upload limit in November of last year, sorry, I must have been in a cave then.
Excerpt from YouTube’s blog
“You may have noticed that we’re now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We’re making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you’ll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality.”
You may also wonder how video quality is chosen. Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this “Super Duper YouTube HD,” because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the noise, FriendFeed is the hot startup of the minute. The service launched to the public February 25 and announced $5 million in funding at the same time.
The concept of FriendFeed is simple enough. You add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services, and Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing. The interface is clean, not surprising given the company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.
I asked for some feedback on FriendFeed via Twitter and Michael responded saying that Friendfeed was this year’s Twitter, complete with SXSW inflection point. Others, such as Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are talking about the service like it was the most amazing thing they’ve seen in years.
I signed up to FriendFeed yesterday to see what the fuss is about. Having used it for a day I don’t get why FriendFeed is that much better than the range of other services that do exactly the same thing. Plaxo Pulse immediately comes to mind, and there’s Spokeo, Second Brain, Social Thing and Iminta as well. Certainly FriendFeed wins (by a small margin) on usability and scope, but it’s still yet another service in a sea of similar startups.
I myself don’t use FriendFeed, but since the service was launched by ex-googlers, the hype was all over it from the beginning. Social network aggregation services are popping up all over lately. Its one of the hott new things to build.
YouTube has updated their embedded player. The new player no longer has the YouTube logo overlay in the bottom right corner. Now the logo is integrated into the control bar at the bottom.
Apple has announced the dates for WWDC 2008 (June 9 - 13, 2008)! Our best guess is that the iPhone OS will take center stage this year event. Its presumable that the first round of iPhone applications will be coming out during… a possible Stevenote?
We want to feature your iPhone apps a before the big event! Are you a tech startup or developer with a hot new iPhone application in the works that you want to preview on to the world on Heartlandish? Let us know! matt [a-t] heartlandish.com
Something that’s been in the rumor been for quite some time may actually be coming true very soon. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of flickr, has told users back in May 2007 that video would be coming “soon” and this was reconfirmed in August 2007, but now months later nothing substantial has been shown.
Apple has announced the dates for