• Google Launches Photovine Social Sharing iOS App

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, google, iPhone, Photography 2 Responses

    Google has just released a free but invite-only and now open for everyone Photovine for iOS app on the App Store. People can request an invite on the site, which is needed to take advantage of an iOS app. Google loves to introduce invite-only products and services, think the latest Google+.

    Update: Download the App from the App Store to sign up and start vining immediately

    Photovine is Google’s attempt at social photo sharing that takes on other platforms such as Flickr, Facebook photos, Picasa and other services. Its not weird for Google to feature an iPhone 4 instead of Nexus S as the iPhone 4 is the most prominent and the most popular camera on Flickr?! Watch the teaser in the bottom.

    Release notes from iTunes:

    Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine. Photovine is invite-only at the moment, so you’ll be asked to enter your email address after installing the app. If you haven’t already been invited to Photovine by a friend, you can visit our website at photovine.com to request an invitation.

  • Google Announces ‘Cosmic Panda’, New YouTube Design Experience

    // Gradly // blog, Design, google, How To, News, Youtube No Responses

    Google’s designers have been busy yet generous with subsequent visual updates to Google Search, Gmail, Google+ and other Google products and services. YouTube is no exception and has got its new redesign as well, codenamed Cosmic Panda, and you can try it right away.

    As announced by Google official blog the new design comes to fulfill what exactly the viewers are looking for:

    With nearly 8 years of video uploaded and 3 billion views logged every day on YouTube, it’s clear you like to watch and share YouTube videos. While you’re watching your favorite or new videos, we at the ‘Tube are obsessing night and day over how those videos are presented. Our team is constantly experimenting, tweaking and playing with new ways to make your experience exactly what you’re looking for.

    Once you’re in the experiment, much of YouTube will look different, including videos, playlists and channels.

    Try it out yourself by visiting this link

  • 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]

  • Apple’s iOS Is More Secure Than Google’s Android!

    // Gradly // Android, Apple, blog, Featured, Gadgets, google, iPhone, News, Rants & Raves, Tech. 1 Response

    An interesting report run by security experts at Symantec indicates that Apple iOS devices are much “less prone” to most security risks than Google’s Android platform.

    For its closed app distribution nature, the iOS is more secure and its increased resistance to resource abuse, data loss, and data integrity attacks among the factors.

    In a head-to-head comparison, Symantec found that iOS was just more secure in many areas, and was found, contrary to their findings regarding Android, to have full protection against malware attacks. Apple’s platform was also found to have greater security feature implementation in the categories of access control, application provenance, and encryption.

    The report also applauds Apple for their thorough and excellent job in designing the non-interface aspects of iOS. Check out the full report in all of its detail over at Symantec.

    [via mactrast]