• Facebook Announces In-Browser Video Calling Powered By Skype

    // Gradly // blog, Facebook, News, Rants & Raves, Social Networks, Software No Responses

    After teasing an “awesome” announcement at the company for Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the chance to announce the launch of in-browser video calling powered by Skype.

    See The Friends You Message Most
    The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it’s easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

    Create a Group Chat Instantly
    We’re also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can’t figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat and just like your other chats, the history of your conversation is available in messages.

    Bring Your Conversations to Life
    Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services.

    So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.

    Hopefully Facebook plans to bring these new video calling features to its rumored iPad application. You can get video calling enabled by hitting the link below.

    Video calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, you can get it now.

  • JailbreakMe 3.0 For iPad 2 Jailbreak Might Be Released Today

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Cydia, Featured, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, Jailbreak, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors No Responses

    It turns out we will have un-ended stories regarding the upcoming iPad 2 Jailbreak. An email image spotted showing a conversation between Comex and MultiMediaWill, the one who previously leaked the iPad 2 jailbreak files.

    MultiMediaWill email to Comex:

    I don’t know if you got my tweets but I am truly sorry for the leak and If I knew it would turn out like this I wouldn’t have leaked it. I was so happy when I got the PDF and it actually worked that I felt I need to show everyone. Dumb decision, I know, but I removed all my videos and deleted the website. Anyways, the beta is really buggy like you said and really annoying sometimes. I hope you are able to release the JB to everyone soon. Thanks.

    Comex reply to MultiMediaWill :

    No, I didn’t see your tweets (I think they were deleted?) But if no more issues come up, it should be ready by tomorrow.

    Although we are taking this with a pinch of salt, Comex might, in fact, be releasing the new iPad 2 jailbreak to the public within two days.

    Update:

    Jailbreakme.com is now showing the Apple sticky note “We’ll be back soon”, suggesting the leak we received was true. Expect a release of the iPad 2 jailbreak today. (July 5th)

  • Google Realtime Search Goes Offline As The Deal With Twitter Expires

    // Gradly // blog, google, News, Rants & Raves, Social Networks, Tech., Twitter No Responses

    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 has this explanation:

    Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.

    While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

    As for other features such as social search, they will continue to exist, though without Twitter data from the special feed.

    Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.

    Google Realtime Search had carried content from a variety of services beyond Twitter, including Facebook fan page updates, Quora and Gowalla content, Check out the full source list:

    • Twitter tweets
    • Google News links
    • Google Blog Search links
    • Newly created web pages
    • Freshly updated web pages
    • FriendFeed updates
    • Jaiku updates
    • Identi.ca updates
    • TwitArmy updates
    • Google Buzz posts
    • MySpace updates
    • Facebook fan page updates
    • Quora
    • Gowolla
    • Plixi
    • Me2day
    • Twitgoo

    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 has this to reply:

    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.

    Twitter has largely outsourced the service of Twitter search longer than a few days to Google, a deliberate decision so that Twitter could focus on other search features, such as its new Top Tweets feature

    You can certainly understand why Google+ has become even more important to the service now. While Google has gotten by largely without social signals from Facebook, having its own data from Google+ gives it insulation if it now has to get by without Twitter signals, as well.

    [via searchengineland]

  • Michael Bay Uses Recycled Action Sequence in Transformers 3 From ‘The Island’

    // Gradly // blog, Movies, News, Rants & Raves, Scandal, Tech., Youtube 2 Responses

    Say what you will about Michael Bay, but he is a filmmaker who knows how to maximize the bang for the buck. He is often criticized for using too much product placement, which gives him millions of dollars more to play with than he would have otherwise had access to. so you can’t really blame the guy for re-using footage from one in another, more particularly the guys has used some footage from 2005 “The Island” and reuse it in Transformers 3 Dark of the moon.

    Filmmakers often use stock footage to save money from traveling to capture an exterior of a city, house or location. Its a very common occurrence which you likely never notice. Bay has used stock footage in most of films, sometimes borrowing shots from his earlier movies . Watch the clip below which shows that Bay recycled shots from an action sequence from The Island in Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

    And by the way, it’s not the first time Bay has done this. In Transformers, a shot of an aircraft carrier that was borrowed from Pearl Harbor.

    [via /Film]