Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead, Google Mobile News
Last November, we redesigned Google News for mobile access on smartphones including Android, iPhone and Palm Pre. Today, we’re globally rolling out new usability and visual enhancements that we hope will make browsing news on your smartphone easier.
We expanded the story space to make tapping on articles easier and more accurate. Tapping anywhere on an article headline or snippet opens it up, and clicking on a section heading opens up that topic section on your screen.
In addition, the default view of stories is now collapsed which reduces scrolling time. You can ‘expand’ a story by tapping on ‘More sources’, which brings you to related stories from other sources. The screenshots below show the collapsed and expanded view of a story.
Collapsed:
Expanded:
So, pick up your smartphone, point your browser to http://news.google.com, and catch up on news on the go.
Right now, you can download the bulk of Geocities in a single, giant 652GB file over BitTorrent.
The seminal free web hosting site has been off the tubes since last year, when its owner, Yahoo, shut it down.
Most of us probably didn’t care about Geocities disappearing. Its content was outdated. The design of most pages made MySpace look like something created by Edward Tufte. And the HTML tables — oh, the tables!
However, enough people did care about the demise of Geocities to form a group that calls itself The Archive Team, which began grabbing as much of Geocities as it could before Yahoo killed it. On Sunday, that archive of Geocities was made available in torrent form — a 652GB torrent.
If you don’t want to download 0.65 terabytes of the web equivalent of space junk, you can merely browse one of the several mirrors the Archive Team has set up at reocities.com, geociti.es, geocities.ws and oocities.org. At once of those sites, you can get your fill of jazz midi files, learn about the totally amazing all-female grunge band L7, and pay a visit to Spanky’s mushroom-infested link compendium without downloading the entire payload.
It’s easy to joke about Geocities. After all, Geocities looks very primitive from this web X.x vantage point. But the archive team has a point, both about our “digital heritage” and the short-lived nature of popular websites.
What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words and digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call “regular people” joining the World Wide Web. A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.
But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So the Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved.
If you’d like a little bit of internet history (OK, a massive bit of internet history) head on over to The Pirate Bay. And please, remember to seed.
Large web services from the likes of Google, Yahoo and others love to tout their OpenID support. But when these companies say “support,” sometimes what they mean is that you can use them as an OpenID provider — and store all of your precious personal information on their servers.
What’s much less common from the big companies are sites that let you sign in with OpenID. Today the popular photo sharing site Flickr has taken a small step in that direction.
The site has stopped short of true OpenID support, though that appears to be the end goal. For now its offering a way to sign in with your Google OpenID. Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is using Google’s authentication APIs to power the sign-in experience. Sadly, the new feature is only available for those signing up for Flickr. If you’ve already got a Flickr account, you have to authenticate using your original login.
Given that most of you probably already have Flickr accounts, today’s news isn’t all that exciting. But hopefully, it means the wheels are turning at Flickr and one day you’ll be able to sign in with any OpenID account.
OAuth is a great way to sidestep the dilemma of having to hand over passwords to third-party sites and apps to access user data. This is the primary reason the authentication method is fast becoming a de riguer part of today’s social APIs.
But while OAuth solves one problem, it creates another — it greatly raises the complexity of simple apps.
We’ve looked at the issue in the past, particularly with regard to Twitter’s transition to OAuth, which broke countless small scripts. The good news is that OAuth 2.0 is less complex than its predecessor and removes much of the headache for small developers. Unfortunately, OAuth 2.0 isn’t widely adopted yet, and it’s not quite ready for prime time.
But there is a solution for Twitter. SuperTweet was created by developer David Beckemeyer. The service sits between your script and Twitter, where it does the heavy lifting of OAuth for you. Even better, you don’t have to hand over your Twitter password to SuperTweet — instead, you create a password on the site, approve SuperTweet to access your Twitter account and then connect your script to SuperTweet.
The service isn’t meant for full-blown apps, nor does it support commercial uses. But for individuals and non-profits without the development resources to make the switch to OAuth 2.0, it can bring those simple Twitter scripts back to life.
Of course using SuperTweet means adding another potential failure point between your script and Twitter, but if you can live with that, using SuperTweet is easier than wading into OAuth’s waters.
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