Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

One thing that I’ve always enjoyed with Google’s test site, SearchMash, was the powerful sidebar that it included. It gives users quick access to videos, images, Wikipedia, blogs, and more. Determined to find a way to get similar features on the Google search page I decided to turn to Greasemonkey.

The script that I came across is called Google Extra, and it does everything that I wanted it to. It utilizes the extra space on the right side of the search results to display:

• Images – Six small thumbnails are shown, and hovering over a thumbnail will show you a larger version.
• Videos – Grabs four videos from YouTube, and if you hover over one of the thumbnails it will flip between three thumbnails from that video.
• Wikipedia – You’ll see a condensed excerpt from Wikipedia.
• Dictionary – A nice list of definitions for the word you’re searching for.

 
(Click to Enlarge)

The thing that really makes this script nice, however, is the ability to reorder the four different sections so that they are organized with your most useful ones first. If you don’t use one of the sections very often, such as the videos, just minimize it. Your settings are remembered for every search you perform.

Heads up: Don’t be concerned if you perform a search and don’t see the four different sections pictured above. It’s designed to only display a section if it actually has matching results, so most of the time the Wikipedia and Dictionary results probably won’t show up.

You probably have some speed concerns, which is understandable given that several different sites have to be queried in order to display the extra data. After all, you don’t want to compromise Google’s split-second search results. Don’t worry, the script is well designed so that it will load after your search results. Basically you won’t notice any speed decrease in how long it takes to show the search results, but the overall page will obviously take an extra second or two to load.

Google Extra Script
Note: This script uses Greasemonkey-specific features, and for that reason it won’t work in Opera.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

It’s been a little over a week since news broke that Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Their offer translated out to about $31 dollars per share which many people had said was too low for a company that was trading at that price not long ago. Sure enough, Yahoo felt that the offer undervalued them and formally rejected Microsoft. In a document filed with the SEC, they said that Yahoo’s Board of Directors “carefully reviewed Microsoft’s proposal and has unanimously concluded that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders.”

So will Microsoft come back with a more lucrative offer? If they do what analysts expect them to, they’ll be coming back with an offer of around $35 to $40 per share. Another route they could take would be to do some heavy lobbying directly with the shareholders. If they really wanted to, they could take their original offer directly to the shareholders. The Associated Press said that “if it goes down that route, Microsoft might have to antagonize Yahoo by trying to oust the 10-member board that rejected the original offer.”

It sounds like this is just the start of what could be an extremely long and drawn out process.  Microsoft isn’t going to give up, and if they do finally manage to come to an agreement with Yahoo’s Board of Directors and/or shareholders, they’ll still have to deal with the Department of Justice.  Remember, the DOJ has already said that they are “interested” in looking into this deal for possible antitrust issues. It looks to me like Microsoft is going to have a lot of work ahead of them if they want all that Yahoo has to offer for keeps.

For now, Yahoo says no to becoming “Microhoo.”

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Apple has good reason to celebrate today after iTunes reached its five billion songs sold milestone. Five billion songs is a lot if you think about it. To put it into perspective, here are a few examples involving the number five billion…

• Five billion seconds translates out to about 158.5 years
• Five billion minutes translates out to about 9,505 years
• Five billion feet translates out to about 946,969 miles
• Five billion pints translates out to about 625,000,000 gallons
• As of June 2008, the world’s population is estimated to be just under 6.7 billion, which means the number of songs downloaded from iTunes isn’t THAT far off from the World’s population

What’s interesting to note is that in early 2008, over 4 billion songs had been sold when they were celebrating their 5th birthday. If they’ve already reached over five billion, they’ve experienced quite a bit of growth over the last several months.

Aside from celebrating the five billion songs milestone, Apple is also celebrating the fact that they rent and sell over 50,000 movies each day. Clearly they sell more songs than they do movies, but that’ an area where there is plenty of room to grow. We have yet to try out iTunes for renting or buying movies, but those who do seem to be satisfied.

Congrats to Apple and iTunes. 7 years ago when iTunes first launched, who would have thought that it would have become so popular? Five Billion is definitely a big milestone and helps explain why it is that they are the largest music retailer in the United States.

Apple Press Release

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

At the Web 2.0 Summit going on right now, Flickr’s co-founder Stewart Butterfield will be demonstrating two changes that will debut over the next several weeks to the popular photo sharing service.  These new features will focus on geography and allowing people to discover places around the world using photos. With the millions upon millions of photos that have been geotagged, Butterfield is hoping that the new user interface will allow for discovery of photos instead of flipping through pages upon pages of photos. The first change will be updates to the Geotagging feature, and the second will be a completely new feature called “Places Pages.”

It was a year ago in late August of 2006 that Flickr first introduced geotagging using Yahoo Maps to their service. Now that more than 29 million photos have been publically geotagged, they’ve decided to make some changes to the results page for these photos to enhance the experience. Instead of displaying little circles like what currently happens, with numbers indicating how many photos have been tagged at a particular location, the map will display actual descriptive tags. There will also be changes to the navigation process.

“Places Pages” is an entirely new feature to Flickr and according to TechCrunch, they are “dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places.” Every photo that is ever uploaded is taken at a “place” which means there’s a lot we can learn from locations all over the World.  On these pages, not only will you be able to view photos, you’ll also be able to see the weather, local time, and even any relevant Flickr groups pertaining to the page as seen below in the example of the “San Francisco Places Page.” TechCrunch says that overtime, this new feature will get even better by allowing users to make adjustments to the page. For example, if you were viewing photos of New York City, you could adjust the season so that you could see pictures of New York City only in the Fall, or only in the Summer, depending on what season it was.

Both the updates to geotagging and the new way that Flickr is putting a focus on geography through the Places Pages sounds interesting. I could see people using a combination of these two features to help them decide where they want to take a vacation, or teachers using it to teach their students about places all over the World. There are so many posibilities when you incorporate geography and photography, and I can’t wait to get a hands-on experience with it once in launches in the next few weeks.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Some of you may have experienced this before: you go to watch a video on YouTube only to get a message saying “This video is not available in your country.” Unfortunately there are some videos that people in certain countries aren’t able to watch because the person/company that added the video put geographical restrictions on it. With a very simple change in the URL, you’ll now be able to watch those videos without any problems.

This tip comes from the Google Operating System Blog who explains that all you have to do is replace the original URL which would look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID

And of course you know that the video ID would be the 11-character set of numbers and letters that are in a video URL, right? Essentially what you’re doing with this trick is entering in the URL of a video as though it was being embedded. When you enter in the modified URL and press enter, you’ll see a player maximized to your browser. Apparently YouTube hasn’t figured out a way to verify your country if you watch a video using the embedded video player.

If you’re wanting to try this out for yourself and you live outside of the United States, this Madonna video will be a good example. The normal URL for this video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU and so to get it to work outside of the United States, you’d need to enter the following URL:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU

If you know of any other videos that are banned in countries outside of the United States, give this trick a try.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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