Happy Independence Day, Pakistan

14 AUGUST MUBARIK
AE HAMARAY ALLAH HAMARE WATN-E-PAKISTAN
KO QAEMO-DAEM RAKH OR ISS KI OR ISLAM KI HIFAZAT FARMA
AMEEN.

Ay mere ALLAH !!!
Iss se pehle k ye dunia mujhe ruswa kr de.
Tu mere jism, meri rooh ko acha kr de
Meray halaat ye main ne hi banaye hain magar..
Jaisay Tu chahta hai ab mujhe wesa kr de.
Mere har faislay mein TERI RAZA shamil ho.
Jo TERA HUKM ho wo mera irada kr de.
Mujh ko wo ilm sikha jis se ujaalay phelain.,
Mujh ko wo ism parha jo mujhe zinda kr de..
Zaya hone se bacha le mere MABOOD mujhe
Ye na ho waqt mujhe khel tamasha kr de…
AMEEN

Facebook prepares ‘Facebook Lite’

Facebook is preparing a service called “Facebook Lite” – but it is not, as some have inferred, a clone of Twitter, the service that Facebook tried to buy last year.

Instead, it’s precisely what it says: a stripped-down version of Facebook, intended for deployment in countries around the world where bandwidth is limited, and where always-on broadband connections are a rarity rather than the rule – unlike the UK and US.

It is also aimed at mobile phones, where data downloads are slower than broadband – but which are pervasive in Asia, its fastest-growing region for users.

The service is presently being tested in India, with plans to deploy it in Russia and China, the company has told TechCrunch.

Hundreds of people in India are understood to have received invitations to try the service out in the past couple of days – but the link failed because it was not ready to run. Non-invited users who try to access the stripped-down site – at http://lite.facebook.com – are simply redirected to the main Facebook site.

Read More: Facebook prepares ‘Facebook Lite’
Via: Guardian

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

Read More: Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

Link-Shortener Tr.im Shuts Down, Blaming Twitter

By Andrew LaVallee

Nambu Network, an online media company that operates Tr.im, said it is shutting the link-shortening service down after it ran out of financing options.

Tr.im competes with Bit.ly and TinyURL in offering shortened versions of long URLs that users can use on sites like Twitter, which limits the number of characters in each update.

“Tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough,” said Eric Woodward, Nambu’s chief executive, in a blog post. “We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential.”

The company approached potential investors but found no takers, he said, and Tr.im customers aren’t willing to pay for the service.

Mr. Woodward added that Twitter’s use of Bit.ly as its default shortener made it even harder to compete. “Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further,” he said. “What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.”

Read More: Link-Shortener Tr.im Shuts Down, Blaming Twitter
Via: Wall Street Journal Blog

Twitter Goes Down

And, yes, that’s news: Once notoriously unreliable, site’s uptime improvement has been notable

This used to happen so often it made Twitter’s “fail whale” famous. However, as Twitter’s popularity has exploded and the hype surrounding it has become overbearing, the fledging company has gotten its act together in terms of keeping the site up.

Not so this morning. (Update below: It’s a denial-of-service attack.)

As I type, Twitter has been down for just over an hour. From the company’s status blog: “We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”

And, of course, when Twitter is unavailable people notice.

Writes Dan Frommer on Silicon Alley Insider: “Twitter is down! This seems to be happening more, recently, than in the last several months. What’s going on, guys? It’s going to be tough to become the next AT&T if you’re dead at 9 a.m. on a Thursday.”

The data doesn’t support Frommer’s suggestion that this is happening more often, although the contention does show how difficult it can be for a company to shake a bad reputation.

According to the Web monitoring company Pingdom, this is Twitter’s first outage of more than 5 minutes duration since June 16. Over the past six months, the site has had just under eight hours of downtime for an uptime record of 99.8%.

Pingdom noted Twitter’s improved uptime performance in a report released in February.

Read More: Twitter goes down
Via: PC World

Firefox Hits 1 Billion Downloads

The company expected the milestone to be reached sometime today. As forecast, Firefox reached its landmark download at 15:00 UTC, at which point the browser was being downloaded at a rate of 24 times per second.

Those tracking the impending achievement could do so via an official Mozilla site or over on a Twitter account specifically set up to keep tabs on how many times the open source browser has been downloaded.

However, it’s worth noting that this benchmark doesn’t signify that Firefox has a billion active users, just how many times it has been downloaded since its 2004 launch.

Firefox is now at version 3.5 and is one of the fastest browsers available, second only to Google’s Chrome, and despite 3.5’s recent release the Mozilla foundation are already looking forward on how to improve the next version.

Mozilla is set to launch One Billion Plus You on Monday, with more details and comprehensive statistics on the accomplishment.

Via: PC World

Google Wave Cresting For 100K Users This Fall

Google Wave, the search giant’s long-awaited all-in-one communication and collaboration platform, will be released to a select group of users this fall, Google said.

Google will open Google Wave up to 100,000 people on September 30, the company said in a blog post this week on the Google Wave Developer Blog. The catch: To be part of the earlier trial, users have to be part of the Google Wave testing community and report bugs and other issues with the software.

The September 30 launch will mark the first time Google Wave is available outside of the developer community. Google released Wave to about 6,000 developers on Monday.

First showcased at the Google I/O Conference in May as Google’s next big thing, Google Wave is Google’s collaboration and communication software that ties together e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, blogging and wikis into a single application. It is essentially a retooling of Google’s Gmail Web mail offering to add in more real-time communications services. Google said Wave lets users share images and videos, and converse in what Google terms a collaborative conversation stream, or “waves.”

While Google’s blog post didn’t say whether Wave wannabes can still sign up for the trial run, it appears registration is still open on the > Google Wave Web site.

Google also did not say when a more widespread public beta will be available, but in the blog post Google boasted what a few developers are doing with the Wave API. One example, dubbed Waves in WordPress, lets bloggers embed Wave conversations into a blog post. Similar functionality is expected for other blogging and social networking platforms in the future.

According to Google, the communication and collaboration software is still early in production, and there is still work to do to boost Wave’s speed and increase its stability and usability.

Courtesy: Channel Web

Why Google Is Stealing Apple’s Ideas

Short answer: because they’re good. Long answer: because Google has none of its own.

BURLINGAME, Calif. — Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. That’s because, in Apple’s case, they already have.

Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) is renowned for its secrecy. Employees are given different code names for new products so they can’t gossip about them in the company cafeteria. Vendors and parts suppliers are punished if they leak any news. Blogs that publish news about new products have been browbeaten by lawyers and even bought out.

Apple’s pattern of offering hints and cryptic disclosures about founder Steve Jobs’ health–a campaign that cumulated in the revelation last month that Jobs had received a liver transplant in Memphis, Tenn., earlier this year–is said to have prompted a Securities And Exchange Commission investigation.

If Apple is trying to keep information away from its competitors, however, it missed a spot. That spot’s name is Eric Schmidt. He’s Google’s ( GOOG – news – people ) chief executive, and he sits on Apple’s board of directors.

Google announced this week it will soon offer an operating system for PCs and netbooks, a move that pits Google squarely against Apple, whose business is built around its own OS X software. And that’s only the latest Apple business Google has aped.

Read More: Why Google Is Stealing Apple’s Ideas
Via: Forbes

Wikipedians slam study tagging them bunch of egocentric introverts

Melbourne, July 9 (ANI): Wikipedians have slammed a report that found them to be egocentric introverts, socially awkward, and closed to new ideas.

Israeli psychology researchers had observed that ‘the pro-social behaviour apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives … which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness.’

Lead researcher Yair Amichai-Hamburger, of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication, told New Scientist magazine that Wikipedia users were ‘compensating’, and that contributing to the site was ‘their way to have a voice in this world’.

Their study, published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behaviour, found that users of the free web-based multilingual encyclopedia website were introverted and disagreeable and at odds with the idea that the project was created around community and knowledge sharing, reports The Age.

Australian Wikipedia administrator Andrew partially confirmed the findings, saying that the site’s policies resulted in ‘intractably opposed contributors, many with vested interests, slugging it out to the death.’

But Daniel Bryant, one of the most senior Wikipedia administrators in Australia, pointed out that the study only examined Israeli users, and that the culture of the Australian Wikipedia community stood out from other national groups.

He said: ‘I may be biased in this assessment, but I’d go as far as to say that we are likely in the top echelon of countries for Wikipedians who have what could be described as a `normal’ social standing and a `normal’ real life. I don’t think [the study] accurately reflects Australian Wikipedians nearly as well as it does the Wikipedia community’s general population.’ (ANI)

Courtesy of: Sindh Today

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Ars Technica has received confirmation from two sources that Google is working on new software named Google Chrome OS, which will offer a cloud-based, OS experience around the browser. UPDATE: It’s official. It’s coming in the second half of 2010.

Google says the OS is open source and lightweight, allowing users super quick access to the web. They claim the OS will be virus free (the security architecture is entirely new), and run a newly-designed windowing system on top of a Linux kernel that will be compatible with x86 and ARM processors alike. Though they were quick to mention this was separate from Android, they also conceded there would be some overlap in concept and functionality between the two platforms.

While the discussion of specific apps (and how they will work) was vague, Google made reference to a developer ecosystem that will be heavily web-based, and apps would be compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (obviously). In a nutshell, it looks like Google Chrome OS is about simplicity, speed, safety, and cloud computing.

The announcement of Google Chrome OS is a big step forward for a company who slowly and subtly wedged their way into web app development. Google says that Chrome OS is intended for “power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” So what does this mean for Google, and more importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft and Apple?

I think that Google has primed themselves to take a big chunk out of the mainstream computing market. That’s not to say that you or I will be exclusively using Chrome OS, but with the internet becoming more and more accessible from ANYWHERE, our parents, grandparents and technophobic siblings probably will be converts. Most of them are already familiar with Google as a brand, and frustrated in trying to learn the intricacies of current operating systems.

Read More: Google Chrome OS
Via: Gizmodo