Facebook and Skype

Baidu and Bing

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Bing Lasso

Skype & Office 365

Nuads on Kinect 

Mozaic

Love for Mozilla

Facebook all day long!

PhotoDNA & Facebook

Xbox dashboard update

Free Xbox for students!

Windows Phone and Verizon

Fashion update

Microsoft buys Skype!

Bill Gates makes a fashion statement

Phishing on Facebook

Don't text and drive!

Facebook & Office

Visual search for WP7 apps- COOOL!

Fastest growing apps...really?

Kinect ART

Lync is here

Back in 2007, XKCD created a fantastic map of some of those online dwelling places, including names that still shine bright, such as the Gulf of YouTube, Wikipedia Island, and Deviant Art plus other fading stars like Friendster, Second Life and AOL. 

Charting such perilous, changing seas requires constant vigilance, and as reported by TechCrunch, the XKCD cartographers have been busy updating their maps, releasing an all new view of the globe as it appears here in 2010. Dominated by the lands of Facebook, Twitter and yes, Farmville(!) the world is a very different place three years on, and is even more dangerous.

For the first time the Charred Wasteland of Abandoned Social Networks, the plains of People You Can’t Unfriend and the Great Firewall (near China) have been carefully mapped in full colour to ensure you know where you’re headed.

The only question, which lands will shrink, and which mountains will rise in the next three years?

Check out the map, (and order a poster) over at XKCD.

Check out the Phones!

Socializing Bing

New Windows Phone 7 ads- yay or nay?

Geek 2 Chic!

Boat for Kinect???

So are my printer and I best buddies? Well, we’re more acquaintances. It does its job, gives me know trouble, but you’ll agree with me, after losing it so many times in frustration, it’s tough to love your printer. You may drone on to friends and colleagues about your new phone, tablet or notebook, but you’re not likely to give them an impromptu demo of your printer any time soon.

That may well change with HP’s latest range of printers, and the HP PhotoSmart eStation in particular caught my eye.

Take a decent, All in One printer (with 802.11n Wi-Fi, scanner and fax) and whack a 7” detachable touchscreen tablet on the front, which serves as control panel and web browser, including news, weather, email , ebook reader and more. That in itself is cool convergence, but then add a dash of HP’s new ePrint feature, which lets you print Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, Images and web pages whilst on the road by email, and we’re starting to get into “bore your friends” territory. Add a library of web apps from social networks like Facebook and other providers and now we’re talking about a printer you can friend.

With all of these features, I’m not sure whether this printer is still a “printer”, or whether a new “More Than All In One” category needs to be invented – but I’m ready to forget the crimes of the past, and get to know this printer a little better.

Sign up with your state and license plate (US only for now) and you’ll be able to message other drivers via voice-activated commands on your phone (a mobile web app is currently available), or a photo snapshot of the license plate (taken whilst your both stationary, obviously). Voice messages, emails and texts can be swapped between users, and in the future the plan is for roadside discounts to be on offer to eligible drivers based on your location. With links to Twitter, Facebook and even Match.com, Bump clearly believe their service will put an end to angry driving and spread peace and love amongst American drivers. That is, as long as they’re all registered with Bump.

If this all sounds a little far fetched, Mashable report that the startup has recently received $1 million in a first round of funding and are seeking up to $8 million in round two. Your concerns on privacy, one handed license-plate photography and texting whilst driving are noted. But scarier still, Road Rage just went multi-channel.

The program also has a Twitter and Facebook-like social element involving the ability to follow other users, write on their walls, engage in conversations, and provide feedback or rate each others’ research.

The prototype will become available for download in December.

There’s a new puzzle available every day via the website. You can get started here by signing in with Facebook and inviting your Facebook friends to join.

(Thanks Steve Clayton for pointing this out!)

According to a post on the Docs blog, you can now tag your documents with keywords, which will allow you to better find your files in a large list. Also new is an improved search feature which lets you drill-down into your friends’ public document lists or see related files. While in these lists, you can sort by date, title, and file type. And finally, from anywhere on Docs.com, you can now search for files by people, places or tags.

These features for better organization and discovery will come in handy as September rolls around and kids, teens and college students head back to school. Since nearly everyone uses Facebook these days to communicate, having a central place to store, collaborate and share your files will be handy to students discussing homework assignments – especially those working on group projects, we’d imagine.

But keep in mind that  students aren’t the only ones who can benefit from Docs.com. On the app’s Facebook page, underneath the “upload a doc” section, there’s a separate section called “use Docs + Facebook.” It’s here that you’ll find some really interesting tools.

The first, “Create a Resume,” automatically accesses your Facebook profile for your work and education history and contact information, and instantly creates a formatted and editable resume you can share with your friends.

The “Chart Your Friends” application accesses your friends’ Facebook profile info to instantly create a chart of your friends’ details, including things like ages, gender mix, location, etc.

And the third app, “Make a Photo Slideshow,” instantly creates a PowerPoint from your Facebook photos. Like all Docs.com docs, you can view or edit the file online or download it to your computer.

All the docs created on Docs.com also offer a shortened URL perfect for tweeting, posting in a status update or sending via text message. If you’ve never used Docs.com yet, you can do so by adding the app here.

According to news from Chris Jones, the beta has proved quite popular so far, with 3 million unique users in Messenger alone, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages, just to give you a taste of some of the beta-related stats.

So what’s new this go-round? A lot, actually. Here’s the list of service improvements:

• A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
• More efficient video chat - Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
• Better facial recognition - Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
• Larger movie uploads - Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480x640 vs. the previous 320x480).
• Higher bit-rate movies - Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
• Better spell-checking - Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
• Better integration with Office - Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
• Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
• Faster web filtering - Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

There are also new features being introduced as well, like “quick previews” and an improved tree view in Photo Gallery, Flickr video publishing and “Snapshot” in Movie Maker, Bing Maps integration in Photo Gallery & Movie Maker, 640x480 video upload resolution to SkyDrive, Jump List integration in WLW plus some other improvements to formatting features and spellcheck, better alerts and reporting in Family Safety, support for Russian and German languages in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, and even more minor upgrades too numerous to list here.

But perhaps the feature I’m most excited about is Facebook chat via Live Messenger. I may hang out in “invisible mode” a lot on IM, but it’s nice to know that when I want to chat over my preferred communication service – that’s Facebook, actually, sorry GChat, AOL, & Messenger – I can. And I can do it without having to go to Facebook.com itself, which, quite frankly, can be a huge time suck I don’t always need.

To try out the new beta yourself, just head over to its homepage here and hit the “download now” button. 

Thanks to the (optional) “full view” feature, Messenger users can check on social networking updates, photos, and status messages from Windows Live friends, Facebook friends and MySpace friends or reads news from MSN.com. If you click “connect more services,” you can also pick dozens of others to your dashboard, including popular social sites like flickr, Twitter, Pandora, Digg, Hulu, YouTube, Photobucket, Last.fm and many more.

Now, the new version of Messenger kicks up the social networking integration to the next level by allowing you to not only see and respond to social networking activity via the dashboard, but to directly chat with Facebook friends in real-time. Even if you don’t use Messenger IM itself, the app can now function as an always-on “people app” that alerts you when your friends come online in Facebook, explains Chris Jones on the Windows Live Team blog.

To get the new Messenger, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button. 

Here's what is going on this week...

Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools 
Facebook Hits 500 Million
Windows Phone 7s for 'Softies
Kinect Bundle

...Laura is coming back next week!

Here, blue dots on the map show the location of these stories which can also be identified by theme (like “love,” “family,” reunions,” etc.)

It’s not too late to submit your story for inclusion, either. Facebook is still asking for submissions – details can be found via the Facebook blog here.

To view the map, head over to this page on Facebook: stories.facebook.com

You can pick from any Facebook photo already on your profile or you can upload a new photo. Then you choose your team and decorate the photo with the items of your choosing. The finished photo can be posted to your Wall or saved to your Facebook Photos.

You can also get access to your team’s news and news for other countries (on Bing, of course). For example, here’s Team USA’s page. You can replace the text in the search box to see your country’s page in the same format. 

Gunther Lenz

ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft | blog http://blogs.msdn.com/glenz| team-blog http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde | ISV Concierge http://www.isvconcierge.com/

To try this application, you have to first sign in via Facebook Connect then “allow” the app access to your Facebook profile info. It then retrieves all of your friends who list a “Current City” in their profile. 

For a bit of added fun, you can also write on your Facebook friends’ wall directly from the Bing Maps application itself.

Described as the “first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose,” the new search engine will retrieve both fan page updates and links plus links from individual Facebook users whose updates are set to “Everyone.”

However, unlike other standalone Facebook search engines, user names and photos from Facebook users will not be displayed, and neither will the text included the status update. In fact, the only thing that will be retrieved is the link itself, in aggregate. It’s a nice way to retrieve the data from Facebook, without violating user privacy. 

The Bing homepage is also being tweaked now too to show the “trending topics” based on both the Twitter and Facebook data. When you click on a topic, you’re shown info about why it’s trending, results from social search and then query refiners.

These changes will roll out starting today, June 9th.