Voice Search for Chrome Searches and Fills Input Boxes with Your Voice

Chrome only: Got a microphone? Got a knack for talking faster than you type? Even if you don't, you might enjoy trying out Voice Search, an experimental Chrome add-on that uses your voice as text input, just like on Android.

The extension's maker notes up-front that voice input is fairly experimental at this point, and that it may require adding a switch of --enable-voice-input to your Chrome shortcut (a process detailed in our power user's guide to Google Chrome). But when it works, it feels like magic.

Yahoo to cut 4 percent of workforce

Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday that it will cut 4 percent of its workforce, as the struggling Web portal seeks to adjust its operations and revive its revenue growth.

Yahoo will lay off about 600 employees, mostly in the company's product group, said spokesperson Kim Rubey. The company began notifying employees on Tuesday, he added.

Yahoo issued a statement on Tuesday that the company would continue to hire globally to support key priorities.

"Today's personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo for revenue growth and margin expansion," said the statement, which also noted that the company was offering severance packages and outplacement services to the affected employees.

Yahoo had 14,100 employees at the end of September, according to information on the company's website.

vai Reuters

LimeWire abandons hope, prepares to close music store

A new report Thursday suggests that legendary piracy pioneer LimeWire may soon call it quits. LimeWire was hardly the first network of its kind, but along with services like Kazaa, LimeWire played a major role in bringing file-sharing to the masses. This past October, LimeWire was forced to shutter its file-sharing service following a court order. Now, the company’s recent attempts to jump from seedy to sanctioned appear to be for naught. According to an alleged email to vendors obtained by All Things Digital, LimeWire will soon cease its attempts to run a legitimate online music store. 

Facebook Now Worth $50 Billion In Secondary Trading

It was just a few weeks ago that Accel Partners sold off around half a billion dollars of Facebook shares at a company valuation of $35 billion. If you thought that was insane, and a lot of commenters did, then don’t read the rest of this post. You’ll only get more jealous.

Around $40 million changed hands last week in a Facebook share auction held by SecondMarket. The end price per share was $20.76, and about 1.9 million shares were bought and sold. And based on there being around 2.5 billion shares outstanding after a 5-1 stock split earlier this year, that values Facebook at around $50 billion. As far as we know, this is an all time high.

Google Earth 6 adds 3D trees and integrated Street View

It's not hard to love Google Earth: it's free, it gives great views of one of our top five favorite planets ever, and it's free. Now Google is adding in some new functionality to push the realism to the limit in Google Earth 6. Most importantly, Street View is getting seamless integration into your virtual travels, with the little yellow Pegman set right next to the navigation controls for placing any which where. Google has also "planted" millions of 3D trees to make the 3D building view a bit more realistic, and has a new easy-access method for pulling up historical imagery. It all sounds very exciting in theory, but the best part? Google Earth 6 is free, and you can download it right now to find out for yourself.

Farmville No Longer Number One On Facebook

Zynga's immensely popular FarmVille game has been replaced by Phrases as the top application on Facebook.

The application, which has been developed by Takeoff Monkey, allows users to create and generate status messages, quizzes, post sayings and images. Phrases has managed to garner a user base of 54.3 million monthly users. Players can also share quizzes with their Facebook friends as well.

Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal

It’s a very old trick, and arguably a mighty effective one. Ask people to set your website as their homepage, and it will become their entry point to the Web, the very first thing they’ll see when they open their browser. Venturebeat noticed that Facebook started prompting visitors to set the site as their homepage before the weekend, by means of a bar at the top that actually shows some pictures and names of your Facebook friends.

Facebook founder's first website sold at auction

The FaceMash.com Web address that landed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in trouble as a Harvard University student has sold at auction for slightly more than $30,000.

FaceMash.com drew 10 bids, with the top contender offering $30,201, according to a posting online Thursday at domain name auction service Flippa.

Zuckerberg was a Harvard student in 2003 when he made a FaceMash.com website at which people could compare pictures of coeds at the college and rate which was "hotter."

The website was an instant sensation but was quickly shut down by Harvard administrators unhappy with the stunt. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and started Facebook in 2004.

Google Offered to Buy Twitter for FOUR BILLION DOLLARS

Muhahaha! Four, BILLION, dollars. Yes, mister Powers, if you believe a lovely story from Yahoo Financial News you’ll know that earlier this year Google thought through the notion of buying the entirety of Twitter for somewhere around $2.5 billion US dollars. Their offer didn’t end up being officially announced, but apparently it did go down. But that’s not the end, according to YFN again, Twitter felt insulted! And Google offered more.

Google Turns Dozens Of Its Consumer Products Into Enterprise Apps

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be rolling out Apps interactivity with iGoogle, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and other products in the Google family. Today the search giant is making over 60 of its homegrown products available for a deep integration for all types of Google Apps accounts.

Services like Google Voice, Reader, Analytics and AdWords will now be available on Google Apps accounts. The apps can be accessed through a new interface in administrative control panel for new customers. Existing customers can transition to the new interface at their own pace but Google says it will automatically shift all App customers over to the new control panel early next year.

Wanna Watch TV? Don’t Cut The Cord, Get Cable

Google TV is a mess. Apple TV is a joke. Using a Roku is about as exciting as cleaning my gutters. I like the Boxee Box, but my wife doesn’t understand why; she doesn’t get it and that says something. Downloading torrents or NZBs is time consuming and only a small portion of the population actually has the know-how and hardware to do it. Sorry. Cord cutting is a lost cause.

Twitter Has A (Secret) Reputation Score For Every User

Whoah. Onstage at Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter founder Evan Williams revealed, when asked by interviewer John Battelle “How do you pick ‘Who to Follow’?,” that Twitter has a private reputation score for every user.

According to Williams, Twitter’s “science and math people” have systems which gauge who you follow and who the people you follow follow and try to find ‘Who to Follow’ relevance in that overlap. He didn’t make it clear how individual user reputation score was measured.

“We might make it public,” he said regarding the score, “But it has to evolve more.”

You can watch the rest of the talks here.

via TechCrunch

October search engine numbers: Google, Bing up; Yahoo, Ask, AOL down

Analytics company ComScore has released its October search engine market share numbers and… instead of making you fire up your search-site of choice and finding the information yourself, we thought we would just put it right there for you. October’s search numbers are as follows: Google 66.3%, up from 66.1% in September; Bing 11.5%, up from 11.2% in September; Yahoo 16.5%, down from 16.7% the month prior; Ask.com 3.6% down 0.1% from the previous month; and AOL 2.1%, down from 2.3%. We are curious to see how/if the recent release of Windows Phone will help Bing’s search numbers. We’ll find out next month.

via BGR

Editing your Google Docs on the go

With Google Docs, we’re always trying to make you more productive—and part of that means making it possible for you to get things done from anywhere, at anytime. That’s why we’re excited that the new documents editor now supports editing on your mobile browser. We’re rolling this out over the next few days.

That means that...

• You can work on that important memo...while on the bus or train to work.
• If you’re behind on a group proposal, but really want to make it to the ball game tonight, your whole team can work on it from the bleacher seats.
• You can take minute-by-minute notes at a concert so you’ll always remember the setlist. And your friends can jealously follow in real-time at home.
• ...and the list goes on!

What Google knows about you and how to tweak it

"Everyone who has a Google account should visit their Dashboard once a year," Google product manager Jonathan McPhie told me in a meeting room at Google's Chicago office. "It's like Google's way of showing you our hand—let you see what info we have on you—and allow you to change it."

As the holidays draw near and people turn to the Internet to do their gift research and shopping, Google is on a renewed push to make users aware of the plethora of privacy settings available to them. But even when they're not trying to hide their jewelry purchases from their spouses, much of the general population is blissfully unaware of what can be done to keep their personal information in check. "We want it to be something that your grandma can understand," McPhie said.

Google Docs Adds Autocorrect and Shortcut-Based Text Substitutiion

Good news for people who can't help making the same typos over and over, or those who find text substitution apps like our own Texter a real time-saver: Google Docs now features automatic, customizable text correction and substitution.

When Docs' word processor flags a word as incorrect with the red squiggly underline, you can right-click on the word, choose the Autocorrect sub-menu, and choose which word it should always correct to. Better yet, though, click the Tools menu and choose Preferences. In there, you can add abbreviations or words that should be automatically expanded into longer text. Docs automatically handles some common ASCII substitutions (like (c) for ©), but it's the custom stuff that can make Docs a much more efficient editor.

via Lifehacker

Dscover.me: You Browse, You Share. Question Is, Why?

Dscover.me is launching today as a way to share and recommend what you are reading or watching on the Web. Using a Chrome or RockMelt add-on, you can share pretty much any link – sorry, “Discovery” – with friends and followers.

Using Facebook Connect, you can sign in to Dscover.me and start sharing websites with friends via a so-called “Discoveries Stream.” A Whitelist feature allows you to check which sites you’d like to share and which sites you’d like to keep private. With these settings, Dscover.me will automatically add Whitelisted sites that you’ve visited to your stream.

Introducing Boutiques: a new way to shop for fashion online

The way we shop for fashion is different from how we buy cameras—especially online. With fashion, reviews and specs are less important; fashion shopping is about discovering something that fits your taste and feels right. The web works well for buying cameras and other hard goods but for soft goods, such as clothing and accessories, it’s not the same as shopping in a store.

What’s more, the market for soft goods online is growing tremendously. A year and half ago, our team (which at the time was part of Like.com) started to wonder if we could create a better experience for people to shop online. Our team consists of PhDs in computer science with an emphasis on machine learning and computer vision, along with fashion designers and stylists—we jokingly called ourselves the computer nerds and fashion nerds (and a few of us were both). So, we set out to create a new way to browse, discover and shop for soft goods online.

Google No Longer Claims Facebook Will “Trap” Users. Or Do They?

There’s a new twist to the Facebook-Google contact data export brouhaha. It looks like the warning Google issued last week to Facebook users who tried to export their Gmail contact to the network has been removed. If you try to import your contacts from Gmail now on Facebook, Google’s warning to you that your contacts information will be effectively trapped inside Facebook without the ability to re-export the data, no longer appears. But the warning still exists on the web. Weird, huh?

Yahoo CEO Hints At New Products

Yahoo, which has been besieged by takeover rumours and poor financial performance, is looking to the future with a series of new product launches.

During the Web 2.0 summit, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said that even though the company has hit hard times recently, it is now ready to bounce back in the market.

According to Mercury News, Bartz admitted that the company "has had a couple rough years".

"I don't think you're really tested as a person or as a company unless you've had some tough times. Companies get tough and pick themselves up when they face some tough challenges,” she added.