Feb 11, 2008 | Categorized Under: Web | | Comments
The day MySpace Application Platform was released to developers, Facebook announced that it would start pruning FaceBook apps - the bad ones.
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Facebook apps that get good user responses from Newsfeed messages ( such as clickthroughs and app installs) will be allowed to send more notifications and apps that get fewer user responses to their notices will have the number of notices they can send cut down. ﾠ
Feb 09, 2008 | Categorized Under: Web | | Comments
Internet blackout is now getting some explanation. If you don’t know what I am talking about, here is the story: severe Internet and phone service outages hit Egypt and India Wednesday after two submarine cable communication lines were severed. Many people thought it was sabotage. But it turns outs, a ship’s anchor was abandoned and it cut down one of the undersea Internet cables causing disruptions across the Middle East and parts of Asia.
The company who owned this Internet cables is FLAG Telecom. Their repair crew discovered the anchor near where the fiber-optic cable was severed Feb. 1 in the Persian Gulf, 35 miles north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman.
Before it was discovered, there speculations that the U.S. government was behind the cable cuts to create an information blackout for un announced reason. Others thought the Internet sabotage is from Islamic terrorists.
Feb 07, 2008 | Categorized Under: Web | | Comments
Facebook has released its site in Spanish and German language version. The French language will be the next to follow. Nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort and translated the site from English to Spanish in less than four weeks.
Current users who want to view Facebook in Spanish can change their language preference from their account settings. Beginning on Monday, Feb. 11, any person who goes Facebook website from a Spanish-speaking country will see the site in Spanish. Facebook currently has more than 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.
According to the Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, over 60 percent of Facebook users are now outside of the U.S., and many live in countries where English is not the primary language. He says that their goal has always been to allow people to use Facebook in their native language so we built an application to enable users to participate in translating the site into their local languages and dialects.
Jan 01, 2008 | Categorized Under: Web | | Comments
Hard to believe but Netscape Navigator has been online browsing websites for more than 13 years. Netscape was the world’s first and foremost commercial Web browser. Netscape will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 by its creator America On Line AOL.
AOL won’t be doing any further development and offering technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape’s usage kept falling ever since Microsoft Corp.’s started to jump into into the browser business, and made it even worse when the popular open-source browser called Firefox popped up.
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.
In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.
People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead.
A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.
The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows.
Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.
Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape’s stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2 billion market value even though it had only $20 million in sales.
But Netscape’s success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.
Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10 billion deal completed in early 1999.
Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing.