In a live event this afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a set of “awesome” new features centered on chat. He broke the announcement down into three areas: group chat, the chat interface, and video chat. Facebook has had groups available for a year, and in that time, 50 percent of its users have become […]
According to Ben Parr at Mashable, Google intends to rebrand several of their popular products, including the Picasa photo manager software and their Blogger product. Picasa will become “Google Photos”, while Blogger gets renamed “Google Blogs”. The word is other products will be renamed as well, but Google intends to leave YouTube alone. (They already […]
If there’s one job that’s been tweaked time and again by new technologies, it’s the President of the United States. Now, the Obama Administration takes the townhall model of interacting with the public to Twitter with the first ever Twitter @Townhall. While the actual White House uses lots of archaic tech, past administrations have embraced […]
Google+ profiles offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to privacy, but there are three pieces of information on them that are open to the public. Your name, gender, and profile picture are visible not just to your Circles and Google+ users, but the entire internet. That information shows up through Google’s own search […]
Amidst all the well-deserved hullabaloo over last week’s big Google+ release (Who isn’t salivating?), Google began making some tweaks to their mobile web user interface (UI). It seems that Google didn’t make any announcement about the upgrade, instead leaving users to find the changes on their own. Well, the heck with that. Here at Techcitement, […]
The definition of the word techcitement really came to life for me this weekend while attending Anime Expo in Los Angeles. One of the booths, Nico Nico, hosted a live web broadcast. That in itself wasn’t so interesting. What was different was as the show went on, messages sent in from viewers around the world would […]
The last year has seen concerns over privacy on Facebook rise to new heights. Every new feature seems to be designed to automatically share more user information, on an opt-out basis, and the controls that let users opt out of services they never wanted to be a part of are buried under layer after layer […]
Today marks the first day Amazon.com would have been required to start charging California customers a 7.25% base sales tax on their purchases, after Governor Jerry Brown signed a new piece of legislation to that effect two days ago. The catch? The justification for requiring this state sales tax hinged on the fact that Amazon […]
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably seen at least a mention of bitcoin. The latest was negative press about hackers compromising a major Bitcoin trading web site and plunging the value of the virtual coinage from around $17.50 per coin to around one cent. But what’s the fascination with bitcoin and is […]
Google doesn’t have the best history when it comes to their attempts at social networking. There was Orkut, a social network that never took off, which actually predates Facebook, and was designed as a competitor to Friendster. Then, there was the disastrous launch of Buzz. I was never quite sure which was more fatal to this […]
