Nicholas Kolakowski

Yahoo continues to open itself to developers with the April 29 release of YQL Execute, which gives them full control of how data is fetched into Yahoo Query Language and then presented back to the user. Originally launched in October 2008, Yahoo Query Language is a Web service API that makes both Yahoo- and Web-based […]

Facebook follows in the footsteps of Twitter, Google and other prominent Web 2.0 sites by introducing an application for tracking swine flu, the much-publicized pathogen that has killed dozens of people in Mexico and potentially infected hundreds more worldwide. Facebook is utilizing its Lexicon tool, which traces the occurrence of certain words and phrases on […]

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 on April 27. The latest beta release of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, contains a number of new features, such as availability in 70 languages, privacy tools including a Private Browsing Mode, improvements to the Gecko layout engine, such as speculative parsing […]

Google is responding to claims that its Google Health solution, which allows users to collect their medical information in an online account and then port it to their health care provider, has the potential to display inaccurate information. The controversy that erupted earlier in April 2009 stemmed from the experience of kidney cancer survivor Dave […]

How Google, CDC, Twitter, Wikipedia Are Tracking Swine Flu No Title Google Flu Trends uses aggregated search queries (think people typing in the words “swine flu”) to map the spread of a pathogen across the United States, based on the assumption that a close correlation exists between people searching for flu-related topics and people actually […]

Google Android 1.5 SDK Release 1 is now available. The new SDK, released to developers on April 27 and available for download here, is based on the “Cupcake” branch of the Android Open Source project, and includes APIs for new and improved features such as home screen widgets, home screen framework, media framework, input method […]

Google has been tracking the spread of the new swine flu pandemic. Google’s Flu Trends site, a product of Google.org, has been updating itself with the latest wire reports and provides a search window where people can type in their ZIP code and locate the nearest flu-shot distributor. Flu Trends also describes how it tracks […]

1 Billion iPhone Apps: eWEEK’s 10 Favorite iPhone Downloads Name: OmniFocusCost: $19.99One of the biggest-selling productivity-oriented Apps during the App Store’s initial rollout (as opposed to, say, Super Monkey Ball, which does not qualify as “productive” of anything aside from improving your thumb speed), OmniFocus allows its users to keep track of tasks by project, […]

Facebook April 27 confirmed that it was releasing Facebook Open Stream API, allowing designers to create new applications and widgets that utilize the continuous information “stream” that represents the heart of the social networking site’s recent and somewhat controversial upgrade. “With the Facebook Open Stream API, users will be able to use applications to read […]

Yahoo has pulled the plug on GeoCities, which it acquired in 1999 for $3.6 billion in the hopes that millions of users would use the service to create their own Web pages. The shutdown will come later in 2009, although Yahoo declined to specify an exact timeframe. News reports from 1999 about Yahoo’s acquisition of […]