Facebook going Lite to take on Twitter

Seems a lighter version of Facebook is on the cards. The world’s no. 1 the social-networking site has sent out invitations to select users to beta test the site, termed Facebook Lite.

According to TechCrunch, it has been inundated with social networkers who have been asked to try out Facebook Lite saying that, surprise, it is more Twitter-like.

The message sent out to beta testers reads, “You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite! We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.”

Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.

Facebook recently announced that it is buying FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, that allows people to share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.

The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 mn in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed so far, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

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Google invites feedback on super-secret search upgrades

Google is upgrading its search infrastructure and it’s being really shady about it.

In a post on its Webmaster Central blog, however, Google engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts insist that ordinary users won’t even see the difference.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” the post reads, making it all sound vaguely like some kind of elf workshop. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” The user interface is unchanged.

Developers are encouraged to try out the new technology on a “sandbox” page and then offer feedback by including the word “caffeine” in Google’s feedback text field, secret-password-style.

The company acknowledged that “some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet.” But the industry buzz is obviously a huge part of it: There’s a legitimate new contender in the search engine market, Microsoft’s Bing, which is fueled by heavy marketing dollars and has begun to inch its way up in market share since its debut earlier this summer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gives the impression that he isn’t particularly worried about Bing. But it’s hard to not look at a shadowy blog post about under-the-radar upgrades to Google’s search index and not take it as a Googly way of saying, “game on.”

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Google Earth Admits Goof-up on Arunachal Pradesh

Google has admitted that it committed a mistake by wrongly depicting certain parts of north-east India’s Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese territory, and promised to correct the maps soon.

According to a statement by a Google spokesperson, “Earlier this week, as part of routine update to Google Earth, we published new data for the Arunachal Pradesh region that changed the depiction of certain place names in the product. The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data.”

There was speculation in media circles that Chinese hackers had attacked Google Earth which led to the wrong depiction of Indian territory as Chinese in the maps on google Earth. “We would like to clarify that this issue did not impact our depiction of international borders,” the Google spokesperson said.

Google Earth is a service offered by Google that lets users to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings.

Google Earth had earlier been in the center of another controversy when Indian security agencies had complained that Google Earth exposed Indian defense and other sensitive installations.

Source: CXOtoday.com

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Kerala gets stronger in fighting cyber crime

Stepping up its combat against cyberpunks, Kerala police has decided to set up cyber cells in all districts, state DGP Jacob Punnoose said today.

The state government has already provided Internet connectivity in all police stations. So the move comes as a logical next step for the government. “Cyber cells alone are not sufficient, we should have cyber crime fighting tools and interaction facilities with other states. Everyday new forms of cyber crimes are being discovered,” Punnoose told reporters.

Speaking after inaugurating the national seminar organised by the City Police to mark the Cyber Safety Day, he also said police personnel should change their attitude and be technologically competent to fight the cyber crimes.

He further said that cyber training facility for police personnel would be started in the near future.

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Flickr Updates Its Search Feature

Flickr is one of the largest and most used photo sites, but its search function hasn’t always been the most intuitive. This week the company announced a noteworthy redesign that makes searching for photos easier.

Forstarters, the new “View” control (located at the top of the page, just below the search box) will display results in a thumbnail gallery view across different sizes and formats (small, medium, detail, slideshow). As Flickr’s blog states,”both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail.” Clicking on it will generate a full-sized image of the photo, which means you no longer have to navigate away from the page to get up close and personal with your favorite photos.

Flickr has also added a new sidebar with links to groups, photographers, tag clusters, and more. All in all, a much-welcome set of tweaks.

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Wikipedia Sees a Drop in Contributions

Wikipedia has become one of the biggest sites in the world and many users rely on it almost everyday either for school and even research, but also other less educational purposes. It’s hard to imagine how the web looked like before Wikipedia, but a new study revealed some troubling statistics showing that the site had mostly stagnated in recent years, with contributions dropping about a third since 2006 when their numbers peaked.

“It’s easy to say that Wikipedia will always be here,” Ed Chi, a computer scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, told New Scientist. “This research shows that is not a given.” Eight years after it launched, the web resource houses some three million user-contributed articles. But the growth in the number of new articles reached its peak three years ago, when 60,000 new pieces were submitted per month, and the trend has since turned negative, with about 40,000 new articles being added today.

The number of edits to current entries flattened out in 2007, when they reached their maximum, and have since stayed at about 5.5 million per month. The number of active editors also peaked that year and has since stayed at about 750,000 per month.

The research also provided a possible explanation for the waning interest, as regular contributors have become more important both in the number of contributions, but also in exercising their powers. The data showed that “occasional” contributors, those with just one edit per month, had their changes reverted or deleted 25 percent of the time, and the number has risen for the more frequent contributors as well, with those making less than ten changes per month having their edits reverted 15 percent of the time.

However, while the data may be accurate, the interpretation may not be the only one, with others attributing the high number of deleted or reverted edits to the increasing level of spam on the site. The decreasing number of new articles may also be a natural effect of the size of Wikipedia, as new content is becoming increasingly scarce, while also increasing the importance of edits versus new entries.

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