Computerized Spirit

New Mozilla Project: Snowl

Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.

But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.

The current version of Snowl shows messages in one of two ways: in a three-paned window much like a traditional e-mail client, and in a river-of-news view. This is a separate project from Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, although it does overlap somewhat. The point of Snowl is specifically to “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”

You can download Snowl here but use it on your own risk because there are some bugs.

Twitter Asquires Summize - Launches Twitter Search

Twitter has announced that it has acquired Summize, and launched its own search engine at search.twitter.com. The new search tool has the exact same look, feel, and functionality of Summize, but with Twitter branding.

Twitter has also hired 5 of the 6 Summize employees. Founder and CEO Jay Verdy will move on to a new project.

The five Summize employees joining Twitter are all engineers, adding to the twelve engineers that currently work at Twitter. Summize CTO Greg Pass will become Twitter’s top tech guy as Director of Engineering and Ops.

Summize was not the first mover in the Twitter search space and was preceded by projects like Tweetscan. But eventually they did it best and offered the most commercially viable product, and hence, to the victor go the spoils.

iPhone 3G, Finally!

After hours and days of waiting infront the stores, the first owners of new iPhone version, now happy sleep with their new toy.

We can predict that Apple until the end of this year should sell 10 millions of iPhone 3G with the sold 6 millions of iPhone’s old version.

How much people are crazy for this iPhone we can see from the example in Las Vegas when one iPhone enthusiast payed 1.200$ on other man to wait into the waiting line so he can buy the phone without waiting.

iPhone App Store Has Been Launched

Apple’s iPhone App Store has been launched. To access it, you must download iTunes 7.7 here. Once iTunes has been installed or upgraded, you can access the App Store here.

You can get applications on iTunes now, but you’ll need the iPhone 2.0 software to actually use them on the iPhone, which isn’t yet available.

There are 27 pages of applications currently available. We’ve updating our directory with the more interesting applications now. At first glance, there are very few non-English applications. Another interesting trend - a lot of books are listed as applications, most for $0.99.

Twitter maybe is going to buy Summize

Summize is the leading Twitter search engine on the web, it enables both twitter users and non-users to search through conversations and tweets, a feature twitter itself lacks.

Both companies are already said to work together closely which of course is a given as they both rely on one another. The purchase would probably a good decision as Summize already is a both working and well established service and developing a completely new, own search engine would take its time.

10 Spam emails daily is a problem ? What about 44,000 spam emails daily ?

Colin Wells, Orange customer who works as Workshop Foreman for Stagecoach buses receives over 44,000 unsolicited emails every day, which amounts to 16 million “v1ag3a c1al1s” style emails per year.

The data comes from UK anti-spam software company ClearMyMail which announced UK’s top 5 most spammed email accounts under its protection. These unlucky customers receive somewhere between 3,900 and 44,000 spam emails daily. Wells, for example had spent nearly 2 hours every day deleting spam. Apparently, no one has told him that when a porn/warez/torrent site asks you for your e-mail, you do not give your real email account, you use Mailinator or a similar service instead.

Mozilla sets Guinness World Record with Firefox 3!

The launch of the open source Firefox 3 web browser has set the new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. Mozilla’s mirrors served 8,002,530 complete, individual downloads during the download day event following the official release of Firefox 3 last month.

The download day grassroots marketing campaign was orchestrated by Mozilla’s global marketing team. When the idea was first announced to the public in May, Mozilla encouraged enthusiasts to pledge in advance. Over 1.7 million users from all over the world visited the SpreadFirefox web site to affirm their support prior to the day of the launch, and many Firefox enthusiasts planned special parties and download fests for the day of the release.

Within 24 hours after the initial release, Mozilla’s counter showed over 8 million downloads. The server logs and download information then had to be subjected to an independent audit so that duplicates and incomplete downloads could be removed from the final count. The documentation was then submitted to Guinness and has now received final approval.

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives,” said Guinness records manager Gareth Deaves in a statement. “Mobilizing over 8 million internet users within 24 hours is an extremely impressive accomplishment and we would like to congratulate the Mozilla community for their hard work and dedication.”

The download day event reflects Mozilla’s approach of using inclusive grassroots marketing campaigns that give users a way to contribute and be part of the Firefox community. The success of the event demonstrates the commitment of the Firefox user base and represents one of the greatest open source success stories in recent history. Mozilla credits its users as the architects of this victory.

“The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was instrumental in achieving this record,” said Mozilla marketing vice president Paul Kim in a statement. “Our community members came together and not only spread the word, but also took the initiative to help mobilize millions of people to demonstrate their belief that Firefox gives people the best possible online experience.”

Last.fm, Radiohead Gives Fans Two Years of Free Album Playback

After Radiohead’s much-publicized pay-what-you-wish release of the album, which purportedly garnered the ensemble both an outstanding distribution count and quite commendable sum of revenue, from digital downloaders and fans intent to capture the physical package, some of which were released as limited-edition, the group is intent to allow Last.fm’s audience to consume tracks via the Web without cost. Of course, as with much of Last.fm’s music catalog, individual tracks as well as the entire album may be purchased either as a disc from Amazon.com or as a DRM-free download(s) from Amazon MP3.

Twitter announched their funding

Twitter has officially announced their third round of funding - new investors Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions come on board. Spark partner Bijan Sabet has joined the Twitter board of directors.

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone also talks about their aspirations to become a communications utility, and not to worry about the business model too much until their infrastructure is stable.

Mozilla confirms Firefox 3.0 flaw, says risk minimal

Mozilla security chief Window Snyder has confirmed the existence of a serious code execution vulnerability in the brand-new Firefox 3.0 browser.

Snyder’s confirmation follows a public warning by TippingPoint’s ZDI (Zero Day Initiative) that the flaw could lead to PC takeover hijacks if a user simply surfs to a rigged Web site with Firefox.

On the Mozilla security blog, Snyder said the bug impacts Firefox versions 2.x and 3.0:

This issue is currently under investigation.  To protect our users, the details of the issue will remain closed until a patch is made available.  There is no public exploit, the details are private, and so the current risk to users is minimal.

At Mozilla we appreciate any report of security issues because that is how we make the browser stronger and more secure.  The best way to keep Firefox users safe is to report the issues directly to Mozilla as TippingPoint has chosen to, and to wait to release details until a fix is available.