Has Yahoo Buzz beat Digg to the mainstream?

The search engine has provided some statistics of activity on its site from its first two weeks, and it shows that the company may have the upper hand on bringing social news to the mainstream.

Read more via Betanews

YouTube now in higer definition

YouTube recently posted on their blog a new feature that they are implementing on the videos. The ability to watch the video in higher definition:

You may have noticed that we're now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We're making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you'll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality. This feature applies to all eligible videos uploaded from the YouTube community, and is not restricted to partner content, so everyone can enjoy this upgrade.

How do you watch higher quality videos? On your Account page you're now able to choose "always show me higher quality when available" or "never show me higher quality." We suggest you select "always show me..." only if you have a fast internet connection, otherwise you might find that videos don't play as quickly or smoothly as you're used to. Higher quality videos also have a link right below the video player which will allow you to select between the normal or higher quality settings.

The quality is significantly better but what disappoints me is that the embedded videos are not in higher quality (you need to go to YouTube.com and watch the video there for higher quality)

Watch a video in higer quality here

via The YouTube blog

Quickies: Vista SP1 next week, Google announces Google ad manager

Vista SP1 in one week
Google ad manager

New YouTube API opens embedded players to customization

A new set of functionality enhancements being released today to Web developers could enable them to build customized video libraries around their exclusive sites, with YouTube doing less to steal their users away.

Read more via betanews

Get the Firefox 3 beta 4

You can now download the new beta of the Firefox 3 which is FF3B4 (Beta 4). New features and changes:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, javascript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our javascript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

Download link: here

Say goodbye to spelling mistakes in text boxes (Firefox)

We all know that Firefox has a built in spell checking tool and it's very useful (for me at least). But this spell checking tool is a available only in text areas and not in little text boxes. To make them also be available there you just need to follow those simple steps:

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar.
2. Search for layout.spellcheckDefault
3. Change the value from 1 to 2 (right click > modify)

Now go to a webpage and test your new tool!

via http://www.nirmaltv.com/

BitTorrent comes to the iPhone

The iPhone Hacker core has developed a new application that will allow users to download torrents directly to the device over EDGE.

Read more via BetaNews

Facebook now in german

It isn’t apparent if Facebook’s translation into Spanish has resulted in significant growth since it was rolled out only weeks ago. So far Columbia has over 1 million members but other Spanish speaking countries don’t have as large of a Facebook presence. Only time will tell but for now, all your German friends can now surf Facebook comfortably in their native language.

via http://www.allfacebook.com/

YouTube's beta homepage

YouTube is currently testing a beta of their new homepage...

How it looks?
It has Latest from Your Subscriptions, Friend Activity, Featured Videos, Inbox, About Your Videos and About You. It looks clean and I really like all the stats that show on the homepage.

Give it a try: Login into your account and go here