Posts tagged Improves
New Chrome Beta Improves 2D & 3D Graphics for Older Systems
Feb 10th
The next version of Chrome will help older computers catch up with rapidly accelerating Web-based graphics. The upcoming Chrome release will improve the performance of hardware-accelerated 2D animations using Canvas, which include many Web-based games and other graphically-intensive sites.
It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can’t handle. It won’t look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.
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Many of Google’s recent browser-based updates have pushed the envelope on hardware performance. For example, in October, Google released 3D views in Google Maps that use WebGL, so lower-end GPUs can’t display them. Even some relatively new laptops can’t handle WebGL. The new SwiftShader capabilities in Chrome will bring some these 3D graphics to less capable systems.
Other recent Chrome releases contained advanced audio APIs and the ability to run native code inside the browser. Others focused on speeding up page loads by pre-caching pages. Chrome engineers are even building new image formats to push the Web forward. These uncompromising updates were moving pretty quickly for a while, so the next version of Chrome will let older computers catch up.
If you feel like testing Google’s browser capabilities as soon as they come out of the shop, jump in the Chrome beta channel.
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Hudson Horizons Improves SEO Ranking for December 2011 – PR.com (press release)
Dec 10th
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Hudson Horizons Improves SEO Ranking for December 2011
PR.com (press release) Top SEOs is an independent authority on search vendors that ranks the best in the country for the following categories: SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Wed Design and Web Development. Companies must pass a rigorous evaluation process to be considered … |
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Facebook Improves News Feed Postings for Third-Party Apps
Nov 8th
In a post on the Facebook developers’ forums, Manager of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consult Matt Trainer wrote that they had “made some changes to our Page posts ranking system, which added more signals to determine Page post quality.” Yet he also wrote the following: “We will continue to add in more Page post quality signals over time to ensure that people are always receiving engaging and relevant content in their News Feed.” Does this mean that the News Feed no longer penalizes third-party apps?
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We reached out to a Facebook spokesperson to learn more about this update. She responded, saying “…we recently made a fix that added more signals to detect good quality posting behavior. This should improve the situation with the distribution of posts coming from third-party apps in the News Feed.”
Previously, using a third-party API to update a Facebook fan page decreased the likelihood of engagement by about 80%. Facebook penalized third-party API’s Edgerank and collapsed third-party API updates.
How is the Facebook News Feed treating your third-party app now? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Google Improves Author Info in SERPs for Signed-in Users, Simplifies Markup
Nov 4th
Google has been diligently working on testing and rolling out new authorship features over the past several weeks. The newest additions give content creators the ability to claim authorship through a simple email verification process an…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
As Facial Recognition Improves, New Privacy Controversies Await
Oct 7th
If you think recently-unveiled products like the Facebook Timeline and Amazon’s cloud-powered Silk Web browser have raised privacy issues, an innovation that lies just around the corner could blow them both out of the water.
Facial recognition technology has been around for decades, but until recently it’s been slow, inefficient and largely limited to proprietary implementations, such as databases used by law enforcement. That could all be about to change, and the results are bound to send shivers down the spines of digital privacy advocates.
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PittPatt, software developed at Carnegie Mellon University (and now owned by Google), is just one example of software that can quickly identify individuals in a photograph, matching their likeness with other images of them found online and then scouring the Web for other information about the person.
“With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute,” writes Jared Keller in The Atlantic. “Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait.”
As incredible as some of the potential uses this technology has may be, the futuristic possibilities are largely overshadowed by the privacy implications raised by the widespread availability of point-and-shoot facial recognition. For every auto-tagged friend and identified criminal, there is inevitably a pervert and a ruthless despot bent on punishing protestors.
Google is well aware of the risks. Even before acquiring PittPatt, it had developed its own powerful facial recognition internally, but has declined to bake it into any publicly-released applications like Google Goggles because of these privacy concerns. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said that the privacy implications raised by facial recognition are “very concerning” and that the company would not likely lead any effort to popularize it in consumer mobile apps. Even so, third party developers haven’t been deterred from working the controversial technology into Android apps.
Apple and Facebook Join the Facial Recognition Game (Carefully)
On Facebook, some users were disturbed when they first saw the social network’s own implementation of facial recognition. Upon uploading an image of friends, Facebook will automatically identify people in the photograph and ask users if they’d like to tag them accordingly. The feature, which was made available globally this summer, allows users to opt out via their privacy settings.
Apple made clear that it intends to let the iPhone recognizes faces one way or another when it acquired a company called Polar Rose in 2010. While it has declined to integrate the technology into iOS directly, Apple has made facial recognition features available to developers in new APIs for iOS 5. On example of how this might be used is RecognizeMe, an app for jailbroken iPhones that unlocks the device by scanning and recognizing the owner’s face.
Just because titans like Google and Apple have declined to roll mobile facial recognition out in a way that would allow the technology to be easily abused, that doesn’t mean somebody else won’t. As long as the tech exists and continues to improve, it may only be a matter of time before it’s available on a smartphone near you.
What do you think about mobile facial recognition? Creepy or cutting edge? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Google Analytics Adds Real Time Reports, Improves Custom Site Search
Oct 3rd
A couple new and noteworthy Google Analytics features were announced last week. First, Google has added real-time reports to monitor visitors actively looking at your site. Also, for sites with their own custom search engine, Google Anal…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Retailer Tackles Duplication & Improves SEO – Actionable Insights
Sep 21st
 Drop Ship (press release) (blog) |
Retailer Tackles Duplication & Improves SEO
Actionable Insights The website's SEO fundamentals were as strong as ever. But traffic was falling slightly short of expectations. Something was irritating the search engines. Enter the canonical solution. Product level duplication was running rampant. … Ecommerce Dropship Tips: SEO Items You Shouldn't Forget Part I |
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Google Improves Webmaster Penalty Notifications For Both Manual & Automated Penalties
Sep 15th
Google announced they have stepped up their webmaster communication for notifying webmasters of both manual and automated penalties. In the past, Google let you submit reconsideration requests and then added that they received those requests. Now, Google may reply if your site was affected by a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Amazon Improves S3 Management Console
Sep 2nd
Just in time for the holiday weekend (in the U.S., at least) Amazon has made a few select improvements to its S3 management console. While not Earth-shattering, the features will make using S3 from tablets and behind corporate firewalls a bit easier. Uploading files in bulk just got easier too.
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Here’s the skinny, today Amazon announced that it had gotten rid of the Adobe Flash requirement to use S3. Now you should be able to manage S3 from your iPad without headaches. That includes access when you’re behind a restrictive corporate firewall – as long as you have access to port 80 and 443 (SSL).
That would be nice on its own, but Amazon has a few more tweaks that are of interest. If you have Java, you can use the Advanced Uploader to send entire folders at once – and files larger than 5GB. If you have a lot of data, you might still consider mailing your drive to Amazon instead.
Finally, the latest update also gives you the ability to search for folders or objects by just typing a few letters of the object/folder name.
Again, these are all small enhancements, but they add up to a more pleasant experience when using S3. What else would you like to see Amazon improve with S3?
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Google Docs Improves Collaboration with Comment-Only Permissions
Sep 13th
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In March, commenting in Google Docs got a major upgrade, turning it from a basic, chronological comment thread into a rich conversation system with in-line comments, @ replies, notifications and the ability to mark comments as ‘resolved.’
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This seems like a small change, but it’s part of a larger effort by the Google Docs team to improve the collaborative uses of the browser-based document editor. A mishap following one such tweak brought down the service for a short time last week, but the response from Google Docs was swift, clear and apologetic. Docs has also turned on Google’s clean new interface design, which was introduced when Google Plus launched and came to Gmail as an option shortly thereafter. Improvements to the Google Docs experience are coming in fast.
Lest we forget, Google Docs is free to use. Even expensive office tools like, well, Office, don’t make Web-based collaboration this easy.
How do you use Google Docs in your workflows? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.
Discuss
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