YouTorrent alternatives

So you might probably know that YouTorrent changed their website template and went legal. Before YouTorrent made this (bad) move you were able to search the most known torrent trackers for torrent files. Now you can't!

So here is what I made to help you, a simple list in which I will tell you some YouTorrent alternatives:

1. Torrentz
2. NowTorrents
3. PizzaTorrent

Hope you like them!

YouTorrent more like Google search

So I noticed some (little?) changes to the YouTorrent template. The homepage still looks the same but when you search for something, it looks much better!

So let's search for "Google". You can order the results by downloads, seed, peers and much more and also you have some related searches in the side bar

Cool!

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/

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

Spammers bypass Google's Gmail signup security

An Internet research firm discovered spam bots are now able to register on Google's Gmail for spamming purposes. This latest attempt by spammers has been the most sophisticated recorded attempt to get around CAPTCHA, using both humans and bots.

Read more via Betanews

Pakistan removes YouTube ban after fixing bad routing

February 26 - 6:15 PM ET

Access to YouTube has been restored in Pakistan after the country ordered local Internet providers to unblock the site.

Read more via Betanews

Yahoo Buzz launched

And I don't like it. Why? Because the homepage is full of politics and because it doesn't have that digg style that attracts you.

Want to read more about Yahoo Buzz? Here

Social networks over the world

Image from Le Monde.fr
Click on image to enlarge

In a few words here are the best over the continents:
North America: MySpace
South America: Orkut
Europe: Bebo
Africa: Facebook
Asia: Friendster

via Le Monde

Blogged.com...

Blogged.com is a nice way to discover new blogs in a very easy way. When you arrive on their website you will already see some categories with examples. Simply press them to take a look at the blog.

What do I like at this blog directory is that it has a very easy navigation!

Take a look and why not submit your blog? Here

hi5 is performing maintenance

It seems that hi5 isn't accessible for now. When you go to www.hi5.com you will see this:

We're performing maintenance right now, in order to make the site better than ever.

Please be patient - we'll be back real soon!

500 million Firefox downloads

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

via The mozilla blog

Adsense for Videos almost ready!

Google posted today on their blog about the launch of their new Adsense feature, this is about Ads inside your Youtube videos:

In a very short time, watching videos online has become a common pastime, and the imagination of artists and other content owners continues to fuel this trend. Meanwhile, across the industry, advertisers and video publishers continue to look for the best solution that balances the needs of video fans with the need for video sites to generate the revenue that enables them to continue to be creative as they grow.

It all started when Google bought Youtube for $1.6 billion... and now, 9 months after Adsense for video was in private beta... it's finally here (almost as I said before)!

The ads format? Video and text. Both of them come in a banner.

Learn more:

What should Digg do next?

techcrunch wroted here a very interesting blog post. It's about Mixx, something like Digg, which will add a new feature called "related items". What does this little thing?

It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them

This will make a big change to the Digg system, why? How will stories get to the front page will change.

How should I make this? On the homepage display the stories with the most diggs and below them (on a little line over there) I would add the similar stories (also known as duplicates) ordered by time of submission.

via techcrunch

Quickies: Yahoo! Filters Pirate Bay From Search Results

As of this weekend, Yahoo started to filter some of Pirate Bay’s pages. For some mysterious reason, several pages from the tracker disappeared from Yahoo’s index. Unintentionally or not, a search for “The Pirate Bay” doesn’t show a link to the homepage of the popular BitTorrent tracker.

Read more