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2:35 – Dropbox Breach
- Fewer than 100 accounts accessed
- But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs.
5:09 – Tony Blairs Personal Details Hacked…and Leaked
- A member of hacker group TeaMp0isoN (Team Poison) leaked personal information of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, plus the phone numbers and addresses of dozens of members of the government who allegedly supported the war on Iraq, on Friday night.
- TriCk posted the list on Friday night, which included the National Insurance number of Tony Blair, the phone number of 10 Downing Street, plus the alleged phone numbers and addresses of some of Blair’s contacts, including Lord and Lady Irvine and Denis MacShane, Baroness Thornton, the MP for Rotherham. MacShane’s name was misspelled “McShane,” however.
- The information was obtained in Dec. 2010, TriCk posted. “We still have access to the Webmail server, phone numbers may have changed but all the information is 100% legit.”
- Strange – hardly any mainstream media coverage – Telegraph only
8:47 – Bye Bye Lulzsec
- Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. Check out the video as well (embedded below).
LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers.
- As the post, says the group of six hackers has been “disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could.”
10:30 – Google +1
- Google’s +1 button, the search giant’s challenger to the Facebook Like button, is making its worldwide debut.
- “Today, +1’s will start appearing on Google search pages globally,” Google Product Manager Nick Radicevic announced on Google’sAdSense blog.
- “We’ll be starting off with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.”
- In addition to an international rollout on search result pages, Google is expanding its rollout of the +1 button on websites across the world. The company announced partnerships with several publications, including The Telegraph, The Independent, Last.fm, SnapDeal, and El Pais.
13:09 – Google+ Project
- sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:
- Circles
- It’s through Circles that users select and organize contacts into groups for optimal sharing. I know, I know — not more group management. But the truth is that Google has made the process as pleasant as possible. You simply select people from a list of recommended contacts (populated from your Gmail and/or Google Contacts) and drag them into Circles you designate. The UI for all of this is simple and intuitive — it’s so good, that you might even say it’s kind of fun. It beats the pants off of the method for creating a group within Facebook.
- Sparks
- With Sparks, you enter an interest you have and Google goes out and finds elements on the web that they think you’ll care about. These can be links to blog posts, videos, books — anything that Google searches for. If you find something you like, you can click on an item to add it to your interest list (where it will stay for you to quickly refer to anytime you want). Or you can see what others are liking and talking about globally in the “Featured interests” area.
- Mobile
- “Our goal here is to connect people. And everyone has a camera in their pocket,” Gundotra says as he shows me “Instant Upload”. This feature of Google+ relies on the use of an Android devices to take photos or shoot video. From a new app, you’ll do either of these things and the content will automatically be uploaded to Google+ in the background and stored in a private album (which you can share with one click later). We didn’t want “just” a mobile experience, however, so with Google+ we focused on things (like GPS, cameras, and messaging) to make your pocket computer even more personal.
- Hangouts
- Hangout attempts to solve the social problem of video chat by making it easy for you to let others know that you’re interested in chatting. And if you’re already chatting with a Circle, everyone else in that Circle will get an alert to come hang out. This works for up to 10 people. And seeing it in action is a bit magical. Gundotra starts a Hangout with some co-workers and as they join, conversations start between multiple people. But the Google+ system is smart enough to focus on who is controlling the conversation in any given minute. This makes the conversation easy to watch. It was almost as if an editor is working behind the scenes, cutting between people.
- Even cooler is that you can share a piece of content, like a YouTube clip, and everyone in the Hangout can watch it together while talking about it. It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s really pretty great.
- Huddle
- It’s essentially a group messaging app that works across Android, iPhone, and SMS to allow you to communicate with the people in certain Circles.
- key to the project is the attempt to unify everything. This is done via the toolbar (which features a drop-down showing you all of your relevant Google+ activity), but also on the mobile apps (again, Android and iPhone), and, of course, on the web. The Google+ site is the main stream on which you’ll find everything. From here, you can easily switch between all of your Circles, share content with any of them, start a Hangout, look up Sparks, etc.
- All of the information flowing through the system does so in real time. As something is shared with you, it appears at the top of your stream. It’s a bit like FriendFeed…and Facebook
- Google is beginning to roll it out today, but it will only be a very limited field trial. You can submit your email address here to be entered into the system and notified as roll-outs continue, but Google says that they have no set time table for a full rollout. Again, this is phase one of what Google hopes to do with Google+, so they’re taking it slow.
- Learning from Buzz and Wave – slow roll out to make sure it works….spread word, tweak, create demand
- Design also looks very un Google – fun, clean and something different
- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/all/1
- That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Herzfeld. The former Macintosh wizard now works at Google — though he loves the company, he had previously felt constrained because its design standards didn’t allow for individual creativity. But with [Google+], he had a go-ahead to flex his creative muscles. “It wasn’t a given that anyone would like what I was doing, but they did,” he says.
- Photos up to 2048*2048 won’t count towards your free 1gB of Picasa storage – neither do 15 min videos – http://lifehacker.com/5817483/picasa-now-offering-virtually-unlimited-storage-brings-google%252B-tagging
- Not all photographers happy
- http://photofocus.com/2011/07/06/google-plus-read-the-fine-print-before-you-sign-up/
- Concern over Terms of Service and what it allows Google to do
34:14 – Google Swiffy
- Google Labs just launched Swiffy, a new web-based tool that allows developers to easily convert Adobe Flash animation SWF files into HTML5. This will allow developers to make Flash ads and basic ActionScript interactions accessible to users on devices that don’t support Flash, like the iPhone and iPad.
- Swiffy is very similar to a tool that Adobe released earlier this year called Wallaby. The main difference is that Swiffy is web-based, whereas Wallaby is a client that runs on a Mac or PC. Additionally, Wallaby’s code is designed to be edited and reused, whereas Swiffy’s code is optimized and compressed in such a way that makes editing difficult.
- The Swiffy demo page shows off the power of the tool. In addition to converting basic banner ad animations, click-event interactions can also be converted to HTML5. To be clear, this won’t convert videos, complex animations or games, but the tool meets its desired goal quite adequately.
35:31 – Google Redesign
- The new Google experience that we’ve begun working toward is founded on three key design principles: focus, elasticity and effortlessness.
Focus: Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.
- And a big black bar at the top of the screen
39:06 – Google Web Fonts
- Now have 180 free open source fonts that you can use on your website
40:25 – Google Update Calendar and Maps
- A couple of new features but the first of many updates to focus on design
- Will we start to see a more unified look and feel alongside the Google+ rollout?
43:20 – Picasa and Blogger brands to be replaced
- Picasa to become Google Photos
- Blogger to become Google Blogger
43:41 – Google Realtime Search disappears
- Googles realtime search has gone offline – reason?
- Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results has expired, taking with it much of the content that was in the service with it.
- Google also stressed that went Google Realtime Search relaunches — something it says will happen but with no set time frame — it will include content from a variety of sources and not just be solely devoted to Google+ material.
- There were multiple sources for Google realtime but mostly twitter
- Still, as said, Twitter was the by far the most dominant content within the service. It’s unclear why the agreement was allowed to expire. Twitter sent me this:
Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.
- For its part, Google said:
Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.
- I’d say we have a bit of a standoff.
46:46 – Facebooks Awesome Announcement
- They’ve hit 750 million users
- Group Messaging
- Rolling out today, group message everyone in a group
- 1 to 1 Video chat
- Your chatting to friend, click on video icon and start a video conversation
- Done via skype
- New design!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- If browser is wide enough your buddy list will be displayed in a sidebar
51:22 – Spotify coming to US
- Confirmed it’s coming
- Sign up to be one of the first
- They just aren’t sure when
52:08 – Huff Po launches UK edition
- Huffington Post launches UK edition
- Will it be as successful as US version?
- Lots of kickback over the free journalism that takes place
- Guardian don’t like it either
- Editorially, HuffPo feels like a very traditional kind of threat and certainly doesn’t feel like the future. Its formula relies on a fluency of established online skills (though admittedly ones traditional news organisations are still mystifyingly slow to deploy) such as comprehensive aggregation of news around a key story, live blogging and the obligatory social media bells and whistles. HuffPo’s UK launch is one very much for the news junkies. HuffPo’s cluttered design looks more dated than ever – moreDrudge than Flipboard. None of that seems groundbreaking, so what is the HuffPo’s killer proposition?
54:51 – Intereactive UK Broadband Map
- The first interactive map of broadband across the UK has been launched today.
Ofcom, the independent regulator for the UK communications industries, has created the map with data sourced from communications providers to visualise broadband infrastructure across the UK.
- The map allows users to zoom and shows information on the average sync speed (Mbit/s), percentage getting less than 2Mbit/, superfast broadband availability and broadband take up for that specific authority. The colour coded map also ranks areas for the best and worst (slowest) broadband, with one (green) the highest and five (red) the lowest.

Picks
Ian
Aupeo
- Europe’s Pandora?
- Web, iPhone and Android
- Great mix of stations and a good way to discover new music
- Free and paid options – free is ad supported and they can be loud!
- Sign up and if you hand over personal data you get premium access – 7 days

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Shownotes
2:06 – Twitter – Don’t compete with our apps
- Twitter has taken some time today in their developer forum to talk a bit about the state of the ecosystem and give some guidance.
- Platform lead Ryan Sarver notes that Twitter views a “consistent user experience” as very important to them. And it’s something they’re going to hold third-party developers to a very high standard to maintain. But they don’t want them to mimic Twitter’s own experience with their native apps in order to do this. They’ve updated the API Terms of Service to reflect all of this.
- “Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no,” Sarver writes very matter-of-factly.
“If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure a high bar is maintained,”
- So if your a developer what are Twitter happy with you developing:
- Publisher tools. Companies such as SocialFlow help publishers optimize how they use Twitter, leading to increased user engagement and the production of the right tweet at the right time.
- Curation, Realtime data signals, Social CRM, entreprise clients, and brand insights, Value-added content and vertical experiences.
- This hasn’t gone down well – Craig Hockenberry points out what Iconfactory’s Twitterrific brought to the Twitter platform – http://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/ – First use of tweet, first use of bird icon, first native mac client, first char count, first to support replies and conversations (with help from Twitter engineering), first native iPhone client
- Twitter killed my app – http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/03/twitter-killed-my-app/
- Some twitter stats to show you size (where’s identica?)
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/new-twitter-stats-140m-tweets-sent-per-day-460k-accounts-created-per-day/
- It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day from the first Tweet to get to the billionth Tweet. In a given week, users send a billion Tweets. Users are now sending 140 million Tweets, on average, per day, up from 50 million Tweets sent per day, a year ago. The all-time high in terms of Tweets sent per day was 177 million sent on March 11, 2011.
- In terms of Tweets per second, the all time high was 6,939 Tweets per second after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day. This compares to the previous record of 456 Tweets per second when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.
- Twitter says that 572,000 accounts were created on March 12, 2011, with 460,000 new accounts per day over the last month on average. Mobile users are up 182 percent over the past year. And Twitter currently has 400 employees, up from 8 in January 2008.
10:25 – ISPs to Provide Better Traffic Management Info
- BSkyB, BT, O2, TalkTalk, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone have all agreed to provide better information on traffic management, which should help customers understand why connection speeds vary.
- While such information is already available in many cases, in order for consumers to have a better handle on the data, the indicators must be understandable, accessible, comparable and verifiable. The info will therefore be published in a ‘Key Fact Indicator’ table that summarises the practices in a standardised format. These will be available on the ISPs’ websites by the end of June.
- The tables can be accessed directly by the consumer, but also used by price comparison websites and the like to inform potential customers of the best options available to them.
- Antony Walker, head of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, which facilitated the move, reckons it “will not only help to ensure consumers are better informed about the services they buy and use, but will also provide a clearer picture for policy makers of the way in which traffic management is actually used in the UK market”.
14:00 – Facebook Comment Box Plugin
- Facebook updates it’s comments box plugin – comment via Facebook account or Yahoo
- Forces people to use real name – deter spamming?
- Improved moderation tools
- Can send comments to wall, get notifications when others comment – fine on low traffic sites – comment on Techcrunch though and boom – spam tastic
- No Google or Twitter sign in available but it was rumoured
- Facebook marches on
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comments
- Techcrunch – less quantity, better quality
- Less anonymity = less trolls
20:06 – Google – Hide sites directly in search
- Similar to Chrome plugin launched a few weeks ago
- Click on block site to remove site from your search results
- Saved to your Google account so follows you around
20:52 – Google Maps Navigation now routes around traffic
- Google Maps Navigation has added traffic re-routing to it’s Android app
- Will take account of current and historic traffic levels when calculating best route
- Free!
- Traffic data is crowd sourced from other users to try and work out best available route
24:00 – Adobe Launches Wallaby
- Wallaby, a system it is launching today to convert basic Flash files — such as animations and banner ads — into code that will work on iOS.
- an AIR program that allows you to drag and drop a Flash file into it, at which point the system analyzes the file and outputs a sequence of HTML-friendly files that produce the same effect. By using HTML, CSS and SVG, the company says most simple Flash files can be recreated in ways that will work on Apple mobile products.
- I spoke to Adobe’s Tom Barclay about the launch, who said that the project had a specific purpose — to make Apple’s Flash ban less painful for developers — but pointed out that it was still very much experimental.
“There’s still room for improvement, but I think we’ve addressed a very specific use case for banner ads on iOS,” he told me.
- While it can port over simple animations and transitions, there’s a lot of information that it can’t handle: notably ActionScript instructions (which are used to program inside Flash) don’t convert, although Barclay suggested that they may come into the picture further down the line. Similarly, some of Flash’s higher-end features — such as filters and blend modes — aren’t being ported through Wallaby yet. And it doesn’t convert audio and video because HTML5 has its own dedicated tags for those.
26:29 – Conde Nast UK invests in iPad publishing
- Wired UK will release monthly app editions for iPad starting with its May issue, with British GQ making its tablet debut on the App Store with its July issue. Meanwhile, Vogue UK is to receive more “special edition” iPad issues throughout the year.
- For now, the publisher is focusing on iPad and iPhone only, although its thoughts are turning to other devices such as the raft of Android tablets about to go on sale, and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook.
- For now, the pricing model will remain one-off purchases, too. Apple’s recently introduced subscription billing system is also on Condé Nast’s agenda, but only if the terms are right, according to Read. “We’re in discussions with Apple in the US about how we might reach a subs arrangement that suits both sides.”
- The publisher will also launch 21 iPhone apps across seven of its magazine brands this year, including GQ, Glamour, Vogue and Wired.
29:52 – Apple Updates
- iOS 4.3
- iTunes 10.2.1
- Safari 5.0.4
- XCode 4 – Released – free for developers who pay $99 yearly or $4.99 on app store for non developers
- Benchmarks for iPad2 are very impressive – http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked
- Online backlog – 4-5 weeks now for delivery, physical stores sold out
- One More Thing
- Jon Bon Jovi
- Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it..
- God, it was a magical, magical time…I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.
38:54 – App Updates
- Flipboard – faster, instagram support
- Instapaper – faster, more social in that you can find liked reads from your twitter connections, can share to more places including Pinboard, can now search sync’d content – one of my fav apps just got better
41:14 – IE9 now released to mainstream
- Ars calling it the “most modern browser there is”
- Doesn’t work on anything before Vista.
- I’ve not had a chance to use yet. Speed graphs look good. Standards support looks much improved. Certainly a good thing. And with IE trying hard to now kill off IE6 – fingers crossed, those will move straight up to the latest version and save lots of development headaches!
44:09 – Kinect is record breaker
- Kinect officially fastest selling consumer electronic device ever… Guinness certified.
- “Fastest selling consumer electronics device in 60 days…”
45:38 – Zune Player is no more
- End of hardware. Software and service still live.

Picks
Chris
Droid@Screen
- Recently used to do my blog post on Android OS. It’s a desktop java app that can output your Android screen in a window! Fantastic! OK, you have to jump through a few hoops. You need to have the Android SDK and also the debug USB driver, but once that’s all up and running, you just load the .jar file and off you go.
- Used in conjunction with Camtasia/Jing you can then record the window.
- FPS is an issue – 30fps is fastest it offers and that’s not to say that you get 30 updates of the screen every second! It’s jerky at best but as a way of showing how Android works, I couldn’t find a better option out there at the moment.
- It’s also delightfully geeky!
Ian
Zite
- Magazine app for the iPad
- Displays content based on twitter followers, google reader and what you read as you use the app
- Like the front end, slower than Flipboard but not a dealbreaker