AdSense Referrals Now a Lot Less Lucrative

Everyone is used to Google being generous, for lack of a better word, in the way they treat their users and customers. Therefore it’s a rare occasion for them to discontinue a service, but this is what has happened today for users outside of North America, Latin America and Japan - the AdSense referral program is simply not available to them any more.

Furthermore, users who are still eligible to participate in the program will found their bonuses greatly reduced. Here’s the official word from Inside AdSense:

“About a year ago, as an experiment, we changed the pricing structure for AdSense referrals so that when a user you referred to the program earned $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you would also earn $5. When that publisher earned $100 within 180 days and removed all payment holds, you’d receive $250. We have decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original pricing structure. As a result, we’ll soon no longer be offering the $5 bonus or $2000 bonus, and the payout for referring a user who generates $100 with AdSense in the first 180 days will return to $100.”

The reason for all this is obviously poor performance of the AdSense referral program; the folks at Google “hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience,” but I’m sure that, for example, Darren Rowse, Australian blogger and head of popular make-money-online blog Problogger, won’t be too happy about the change.

gOS 2.0 Now Available For Download

Those of you who don’t like Windows and aren’t too fond of Macs either, but aren’t really all that crazy about the complexity of Linux, might be in for a treat: a new version of gOS is available for download.

gOS is the unofficial Google OS; a Linux-based, simple operating system that works with Google applications out of the box. It was popularized by being sold in Wal-Mart with a low-end PC for just 199 dollars, and although it’s definitely not the Google Operating System that many have been waiting for since some journalist decided that it was a good idea, it’s a nice, user-friendly Linux version that even your grandma might like.

The new version, gOS Rocket 2.0.0, brings several important tweaks and improvements; namely support for Google Gears, virtual desktops, online storage drive (via online storage service Box.net), Adobe Flash 9 for Linux, and an updated Wi-Fi manager. It’s not really clear if this is a beta version or not (the actual file has “beta” in the name, but the torrent doesn’t), but since everything is always in beta lately, who cares anyway.

Twittpoll Brings Interactivity to Twitter

Twittpoll is the latest to take advantage of the mobilizing and speedy capabilities of Twitter, this time for polls (hence, the name). From Twittpoll’s updates you can vote for one option or another by clicking on the tiny URLs that appear in the updates. If you follow Twittpoll through your actual Twitter account, then this is even easier to do, as the poll is right there in your updates. Otherwise you can check out all the Twittpoll updates on its website, and vote from there as well.

The polls last for only 24 hours, and you’ll also be updated on the results. Unless you’re really into polling, especially in a slightly unorthodox manner, Twittpoll won’t be much more than a fun and somewhat quirky thing you can do in order to interact more with Twitter tools, if you happen to catch the Twittpoll update.

As users have no input (other than emailing in suggestions to the company) for polls that are offered on Twittpoll, this is a pretty passive interaction that you’ll have with the service. Ever since the entrant of Woot onto Twitter.

GMail Adds Group Mailing List Functions

Robby Stein one of Google’s Product Marketing Managers, announced the ability to create personal mailing lists with the GMail contact manager.

The new features are compatible with IE7 and Firefox2, and are extremely simple to do (I had a few groups set and actually used in under five minutes). From the instructions at the GMail blog:

To create contact groups, click “Contacts” from the left-hand navigation list and then click the groups icon:

After naming your group, browse for contacts you want to add to it. You can find them by clicking “All Contacts” or by searching by name or email address. Once you locate the contact you’d like to add to your group, click on the contact name, and select the “Groups” drop down menu in the right-most pane. You can add any contact to a group this way — or make impromptu new groups. (You can also add people to groups by clicking a group name and then typing email addresses or names in the search box at the bottom of the middle pane).

The great thing about creating contact groups is that they “auto-complete”: you can type the group name as you normally would type email addresses or contact names, and by selecting the group from the drop down menu, the group’s contacts are automatically inserted. Your email recipients will not see your group name when they receive the email, but instead will see all the individual contact names and email addresses listed as normal.

While this feature is great for creating efficient ways to email small groups, we encourage you to use Google Groups to manage large ones.

AOL Adds Stupidest Idea Ever To AIM

In the latest Beta of AIM, you can make a direct connection with another user and see what the other is typing in real-time. Considering the messed up state some people type, whether it be drunk or angry, this is just not a good idea. Thankfully it does require both parties to agree to the connection, and that’s something we don’t see happening very often. You have to wonder why anyone would even think there was a benefit to seeing the other party type in real-time, and not only think there was a benefit, but take the time to development!

For whatever reason you might want it, go download the beta.

Streaming Music from Torrent Files

Online BitTorrent client BitLet has released a new service that lets users stream MP3 and Ogg encoded music directly from torrent files. The new music feature, called westeam, works by prioritizing bits at the beginning of each track -- and then subsequent to the one you just listened to, but also gives preference to rare bits to achieve optimal speeds. WeStream is a Java applet that works in any browser that support Java.

Westream's interface is simple, with controls for volume and playback. Like any BitTorrent client, it also seeds the file for as long as you keep the browser window open (click on the download speed link to see the speed at which you're uploading). "It would have been easy to design the streaming client to be extremely selfish, and make it care only for its needs," wrote westream's creators in a blog post. "Ideally, we tried to avoid it: westream should behave as most torrent clients, with a slightly different piece choosing strategy."

Westream is a useful BitTorrent innovation that lets users essentially "try before they buy." Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool.

Google Enabled Televisions Coming Soon

Japanese manufacturer Matsushita (Panasonic) has signed a deal with Google that will see the company launch flat panel television sets that allow users to access YouTube and other Google services such as Picasa Web Albums.

The deal is said to be non-exclusive with the first units set to be launched in the United States in Spring.

The deal isn’t the first internet enabled television to be manufactured, but it is the first time Google has signed a deal in this space. Internet in the lounge room has long been a hyped technology that despite various platforms (including Windows MCE) has failed to capture the publics imagination, particularly given the need for a computer or internet specific device to connect. TV with internet access built in, if it’s delivered without any major premium over existing television sets has the potential of finally delivering mass market convergence. Having YouTube access built into sets as a default would also be a positive for Google as it continues to work towards strengthen YouTube’s long term dominance in light of increased competition.

Yahoo Releases Browser Based MP3 Player

This is clearly just a first step in whatever Yahoo’s grand plans are around the future of their music service, but today they released some code to embed a very simple Javascript based MP3 player on any website.

The player finds MP3s on a given web page, creates a playlist and a very simple overlay to play the songs. A small play icon is placed next to every MP3 link, and the player itself hovers over the bottom left of the page. It can be expanded to show a playlist of all files on the page (Yahoo is using the XSPF format).

To see it in action, check out this blog.

Social.im: The Instant Messaging Service For Facebook Junkies

If you don’t mind installing one more instant messaging client on your computer, and you happen to be a heavy Facebook user, check out social.im. This isn’t yet another instant messaging application that resides on Facebook; rather, it’s a normal IM client that grabs all of your Facebook friends via the Facebook API and brings them into Social.im.

The client also shows other basic information about facebook - new wall posts, messages, pokes, friend requests and photos tagged with your name.

It’s only available for Windows machines now, with a Mac version promised soon.

Typeroom Simplifies Web Page Editing Online

Los Gatos, CA based Typeroom is developing a web based content management system that enables on the fly editing of existing sites.

The idea is simple. Typeroom users specify the URL of the page they wish to edit. Typeroom then creates a copy of that page on their servers for editing. The editing itself is WYSIWIG based and covers areas such a text editing and image placement. Once a user is finished making their edits they can download the edited page directly to their computer, or (presuming its there site) update it via ftp directly from Typeroom itself.

There are a number of companies operating in this space, but most are focused on creating websites from scratch, and sometimes don’t support existing websites, at least not from typing in the URL of the page and allow users to edit the page then and there.

Typeroom provides a web based alternative to desktop design packages that even those not design literate could use.

Google Processing 20,000 Terabytes A Day, And Growing

A recent white paper by some Google engineers puts some numbers around the massive amount of computation that Google does every day to index the Web, process search results, and serve up ads, among other things. As oflast September, Google was processing 20,000 terabytes of data (20 petabytes) a day. This large-scale computing capability is a big part of Google’s competitive advantage over Yahoo, Microsoft, and everyone else.

Xobni: The Super Plugin For Outlook

Anyone who depends on email to work, knows how surprisingly bad Outlook is when you get beyond about ten contacts; conversations easily become jumbled, and keeping contacts up to date can be a pain. Xobni’s Outlook plug-in solves these problems with a sidebar that automatically tracks contacts and organizes emails into fully searchable threaded conversations linked back to those people.

Xobni’s sidebar has improved Outlook for me by offering faster search, and automatic organization of my email and contacts. Their search function alone has saved me time by just being faster and more comprehensive than Outlook’s native search. Emails can be searched as independent threads or viewed in the context of a contact’s profile (pictured right). The profile shows basic contact info (automatically updated) and a full history of threaded conversations, files, and people they’re connected to (the email “social graph”).

Anti YourTube Coalition

In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN, and Comcast’s Fancast in gaining access to Viacom’s video library.

Viacom obviously wants to strengthen the hand of other video Websites against Youtube by spreading its videos everywhere except on YouTube. Viacom has a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement and yanked its videos from the site last year. As Comedy Central’s own Jon Stewart said last night regarding his parent company’s lawsuit against YouTube, “A billion dollars? What are they four-year olds?”