AllThingsD » fastest

Viral Video: 2010 As Told Through Google Products

Liz Gannes — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:10:29 +0000

For 2010, Google dressed up its annual Zeitgeist list of fastest-rising search terms with nifty HTML5 data visualizations and a music video that sums up the year while simultaneously demonstrating uses of all sorts of Google products, including new ones like Google Instant search, voice dialing in Gmail and YouTube Leanback:

Google says its single fastest-rising search term of the year was “Chatroulette,” which peaked way back in March. However, it appears from the explainer page that Google may have included searches for the generic term “chat” in the category.

Also on the fastest-rising list (as compared with 2009′s) were the iPad; pop stars Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry; the social sites Twitter and Facebook; the ringtone site Myxer; and the game sites Friv (extremely popular in Albania and Colombia) and GameZer (big in the Middle East). Less popular this year were swine flu, New Moon and Myspace Layouts.

YouTube on the iPad and Dumping IE6

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:25:48 +0000

My wife likes to watch YouTube videos. I was thinking of getting her a new Apple iPad tablet, but apparently the iPad lacks an easy way to do this. Why, oh, why did Apple (AAPL) fail to make it easy to access YouTube on the iPad?

A: Even though the Web browser on the iPad can’t play Adobe Flash video files like the ones YouTube typically serves up, Apple did include a special YouTube app on the iPad, similar to the one on the iPhone, that can play loads of YouTube content. In fact, this YouTube app was shown at the iPad launch. The company says the one for the iPad has been rewritten to take advantage of the larger screen, as have all of Apple’s built-in apps. Apple also says when you orient the tablet horizontally, YouTube videos automatically play in full screen mode. However, Web videos using Flash that must be accessed through a Web browser don’t appear to work on the iPad, just as they don’t work on the iPhone.

I have had Internet Explorer 6 as the browser on my home PC for years. Having heard about the security problem with IE6, I wonder if you would suggest that I keep IE6, download IE8 or download another browser.

A: I definitely recommend that you dump IE6, which is outdated and insecure compared to newer browsers. Its latest successor, Internet Explorer 8, has many nice features and much improved security. But, in my tests, IE8 proved slower than its main competitors. So I’d suggest switching to either Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari for Windows or Google Chrome. The latter two are the fastest Windows browsers I’ve tested, but Firefox boasts many more add-ins and extensions that add extra features.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online, free of charge, at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Microsoft Announces Windows F(E)U Edition

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:20:59 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Safari 4 More Popular Among Window Users Than Mac Users

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:35:23 +0000

Apple claims that Safari 4 is “the world’s fastest” Web browser. That may or may not be true, but certainly its speedy market share gains are impressive. Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of the new browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by Windows users.

More than six million downloads by Microsoft (MSFT) Windows users? That means that Safari 4, at least at the outset, is more popular on Windows than on the Mac.

Now, the former’s installed base is significantly larger, I know. But still…. Clearly, Apple’s (AAPL) 2007 decision to suggest Safari to Windows users via the iTunes software update has done great things to boost usage on that platform. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when Safari for Windows was first announced:

How are we going to distribute [Safari for Windows]? We don’t really talk to these customers, do we? There are over 500,000 downloads of Firefox a day. What are we going to do? Well, it turns out, there are over 1 million downloads of iTunes a day. As a matter of fact, there have been over a half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows Machines. Over half a billion. And so we know how to reach these customers and we are going to do exactly that.

And successfully, too.