Twitter added new features to Tweetdeck today that makes it easier to arrange and consume various feeds.
Column headers now have “grab handles” in the top-left corner so they can quickly and easily be rearranged. If you are looking at fewer than four feeds, the selected column will now snap its left edge to the sidebar; if four or more columns are visible, the selected column will still be in the center of the screen, like before.
Finally, when you click a column icon twice, it will scroll to the top and reveal any Tweets you may have missed, a similar function to Twitter for Mac.
Tweetdeck, which Twitter acquired for $40 million in 2011, is a web, mobile, and desktop client for sorting and reading many customized Twitter feeds in a short amount of time. Twitter seems to be working hard to keep their core “power users” loyal to digesting most of their media through the service; the company redesigned Tweetdeck two weeks ago and added some “often requested features.”
Today’s updates are available now for web and Chrome, and the company says updates for Mac and Windows will “follow soon.”
In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was “Quick view,” an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google’s mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and have quietly disappeared from Google’s mobile search results pages.
We asked Google about this change, but the company did not provide us with an on-the-record statement. It’s common for Google to quietly run various experiments on its search results pages and then remove them later. Once the company officially announces a feature, however, it tends to keep it around for a while.
When Google launched Quick view, it said that it was working on bringing more sites on board and even offered a sign-up page for webmasters who were interested in making their sites available through this feature. The sign-up page is still available.
It’s surprising to see Google, which loves anything that can help speed up the web, remove this feature from mobile search. Maybe users didn’t actually use Quick view or didn’t fully understand it, but its odd to see it go. It was actually a very useful feature and worked exactly as advertised.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that this version of Quick view was different from the one Google also once featured for quickly opening up PDF files, Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Maybe anything called “quick view” doesn’t have a long life expectancy at Google.
It looks like Twitter #Music has gotten a couple of improvements on the web — specifically to its individual artist profiles.
Previously, the artist page just pointed to the other artists that they were following. So the profile page for Fun., for example, pointed to the other musicians followed by Fun. on Twitter. (Clearly I’m writing this post to include as much #random punctuation. as possible.) Now it also includes a list of Fun.’s most tweeted tracks and links to artists who are similar.
These aren’t huge changes, but they do make the profile page more useful, both for discovering music by a given artist (if you click on a “most tweeted” track in a profile, an iTunes preview of the song will start playing) and for finding other artists you might like. I’m guessing that the various charts of trending music are still going to be the site’s main discovery mechanism, but now, at least, when you go from a chart to an artist page, it’s a little more interesting.
It looks like the changes are only live on the website currently, not on the mobile app. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the new features are live on the web for everyone, but she declined to say if and when they would be added to the app. (This suggests that we may want to keep an eye on the website for new Twitter #Music features before they hit mobile.)
By the way, Twitter #Music was in the news earlier this week because it’s going to have its own station within Apple’s just-announced iTunes Radio service.
Google just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.
The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud Platform. But now with general availability, the team is pushing out new features weekly and connecting different parts of the organization in a way it had not done before.
Today was similar with a number of new updates to Google App Engine:
Search API: About a year since the Search API release, Google has moved it to the preview stage — general availability. The Search API allows a developer to integrate Google-like searches over structured data such as plain text, HTML, atom, numbers, dates, and geographic locations. As we reported last week, Google will begin charging for operations and storage. Pricing details can be found here. Prices may change up to general availability.
Source Push-to-Deploy: App Engine now supports deployment of Python and PHP applications via the Git tool. The promise is that developers can deploy apps with the same ease as pushing to a git repository.
Google Cloud Storage Client Library: Google is improving access to Google Cloud Storage from App Engine through the preview release of the Cloud Storage Client Library. In its blog post, Google says the client library contains much of the functionality available in the Files API but has stronger integrity guarantees and a better overall developer experience. There is some overlap so the Files API will be decommissioned in a future release. The Cloud Storage Client Library will be upgraded.
Task Queues: A popular request, developers can now quickly add tasks to any Task Queue without blocking, allowing a developer’s applications to process requests more efficiently.
Datastore: Google says there are two significant Google Cloud Datastore changes in this release. The team has changed the Datastore default auto ID policy to use scattered IDs. Also, the NDB library now supports ‘DISTINCT’ queries.
A fill list of features and bug fixes for 1.8.1 can be found in Google’s release notes.
The rumors are true. Facebook is rolling out hashtags and now, a Facebook hashtag truly does exist as the social media giant officially announced the new feature after months of speculation.
Back in March, we reported on rumors already swirling that Facebook was considering adding Facebook hashtags, a feature often associated with social media rival Twitter, as a way to tie together social conversations on a particular topic.
In a post on the official Facebook Newsroom blog, Facebook Product Manager Greg Lindley wrote:
Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.
Reactions to the news on the social site where hashtags are already king, Twitter, were mixed as news broke:
Lindley said users on the social media site can now:
- Search for specific hashtags from the Facebook search bar in order to surface conversations on trending topics.
- Click on hashtags originating on other services, for example Instagram.
- Write posts from the new Facebook hashtag feed and search results.
Lindley also hinted Facebook hashtags were only the first in a series of new features planned on Facebook in the next few weeks and months. Those new features will include “trending hashtags” and other insights to help users keep track of trending conversations on the social media networking giant.
More details on using the new Facebook hashtag feature are located on the Facebook Help Page.
Image: Facebook
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