Clint Boulton

Facebook has opened its Facebook Chat application to work with outside instant messaging applications such as AOL Instant Messenger, the social network said Feb. 10. To enable this interoperability, Facebook is leveraging Jabber/XMPP, open standard for instant messaging used by other services such as Cisco’s WebEx Connect IM and Google Wave. Facebook engineer David Reiss, […]

Wowd, one of a number of real-time search startups trying to differentiate from traditional search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing, has added a real-time tag cloud and a real-time streaming feature to the second version of its platform. Wowd launched to public beta at the Web 2.0 Summit on Oct. 20, joining CrowdEye, Collecta […]

Google Feb. 11 said it will build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in some locations across the United States, hurtling Internet data at speeds of 1 gigabit per second, or more than 100 times faster than most residential broadband connections. Google will offer this service to anywhere from 50,000 people to 500,000 people. Why […]

Google Buzz was accorded a lot of attention for its potential as a disruption to Facebook and Twitter when Google officials unveiled it Feb. 9, but Google also put its stake in the ground for social location services with Buzz. The desktop version of Google Buzz lets users post updates, links, videos, photos and other […]

Microsoft recorded 11.3 percent of the searches in the United States for January, grabbing market share from market leader Google and sinking search rival Yahoo, according to comScore. Google notched 65.4 percent of U.S. searches, down from an all-time high of 65.7 percent through December 2009, the researcher found. No. 2 search provider Yahoo claimed […]

Top 10 Features Missing from the Apple iPad by Clint Boulton Multitasking People have become so spoiled by their Swiss army knife smartphones and laptops that they really, really want to flit from one application to the next, whether it’s listening to music, watching a video clip or typing an e-mail. Actually, that’s not being […]

Google Buzz Seeks Share of Social Web Crown with Facebook by Clint Boulton Google Buzz Get used to seeing this logo, complete with Google colors, in your Gmail inbox under the Inbox link in the Webmail app. Buzz Setup There is no setup! When Google turns Buzz on for a user, the user is automatically […]

As a frontal assault on the social Web castles of Facebook and Twitter, Google Buzz lets users post status updates, pictures, links, videos and other content in Gmail and share them with users or the entire Web. I wrote about it after viewing the launch event Webcast. I also logged into Gmail to find Buzz […]

Mike Blumenthal did a rather nice Q&A with Carter Maslan, Google’s vice president of product development for Google Maps, about Nearby Places You Might Like, a new feature that surfaces similar stores when you search for a business on Google Maps. I wrote about my issues with this feature Feb. 7, noting that it showed […]

Google has cut a fee charged to users who cease using its Nexus One smartphone before four months from $350 to $150, making it somewhat more palatable for users dissatisfied with the device to put it down. Not long after Google began selling the Nexus One from its own Webstore Jan. 5, bloggers who read […]

Google Feb. 9 made its most aggressive move against Facebook and Twitter yet, launching Google Buzz, which lets users post status updates and share Picasa photos, YouTube videos, links and other content right in Gmail. Rolling out over the next few days to Gmail’s 176 million users (according to ComScore in December 2009), Google Buzz […]

The Google Nexus One smartphone, based on Google’s Android operating system, is getting fans in high-profile tech places even as it battles a reputation for poor 3G service. Linus Torvalds, the man who created the Linux operating system on which Android is based, purchased a Nexus One and spoke favorably about it in a blog […]