Clint Boulton

Facebook July 1 ushered in new rules designed to make user privacy more fine grained and less confusing, but analysts and bloggers see the move as an effort to generate more advertising revenue and fend off feisty Twitter. The leading social network is collapsing several privacy pages and roughly 40 settings onto one page and […]

Microsoft July 1 added the ability for users to search Twitter tweets with its Bing search engine, the company’s latest attack on Google’s search stronghold. The feature is real-time search, or the ability to locate data generated at a specific moment in time online. Microblog service Twitter has given rise to this phenomenon, with millions […]

For Google Apps users who have been waiting for the software-as-a-service suite to resemble some of today’s social networks for businesses, Google is surfacing Gmail contacts more readily within companies. When corporate employees search for a contact in Gmail, they’ll see relevant contacts from their company’s global address lists. Previously, the only Gmail contacts that […]

Google’s Gmail team has altered its labels feature in a major way, moving them to the left of the in-box, and adding drag and drop and other navigation capabilities. These changes are rolling out today, July 1. Gmail labels essentially do what folders do, but let users add more than one to a conversation. Once […]

Programmers continue to leverage Google’s Friend Connect social application in new ways. Now, Websites that use Friend Connect can better communicate with their visitors using ClackPoint, a new gadget from startup Vipadia. The ClackPoint gadget enables Website owners to offer text chat, conference calling and document sharing through a gadget for Friend Connect. With the […]

Buoyed by strong word of mouth and intensive marketing, Microsoft’s Bing search engine gained 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, Web data researcher StatCounter said July 1. That’s up from 7.86 percent in May and 7.21 percent in April, when Microsoft’s search engine was known as Live Search, said StatCounter researchers, who base […]

Zoho on July 1 released a new version of its Zoho Projects project management software, adding a Twitter-like user status tool, a project visualization tool and the ability to create a project in Microsoft Project and import it to Zoho Projects. Zoho Projects 2.0, intended to compete with Microsoft Project, Intuit QuickBase and suites from […]

Cisco Systems is putting the finishing touches on integrating its Jabber instant messaging assets into its WebEx Connect suite and will likely add a Twitter-like status update tool to that suite, a company official told eWEEK June 30. Cisco WebEx Connect is a SAAS (software as a service) collaboration platform. The software, which Cisco hosts […]

The Wall Street Journal has generated the latest report (paywall) about Dell creating a mobile computing device. The news would seem to substantiate Michael Dell’s allusion in March that Dell was “exploring” mobile Internet devices, or MIDs. The key action item in the latest report is that the device is rumored to run on the […]

Jimmy Wales has spent a lot of time defending his brainchild Wikipedia, the world’s leading Website where citizen Web users can anonymously contribute entries on anything from the history of the hot dog to celebrity biographies. Wikipedia founder Wales’ crusade continued this week in the wake of a June 28 The New York Times report […]

Real-Time Search Startups That Deliver What Google, Twitter, Facebook Cant by Clint Boulton TweetMeme As the name implies, TweetMeme funnels all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. The search tool categorizes these links into categories and subcategories, “to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.” Users leverage […]

Microsoft Windows Desktop Search and Windows Live Hotmail users can rejoice. The search tool and Webmail client are no longer broken when used with the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook plug-in, which Google released June 9 to help Microsoft Outlook users access their Google Apps e-mail, contacts and calendars through Outlook. Google intended the […]