Websites and web services, from streaming and messaging to the tools and trends I follow online.
YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have finally launched in Singapore. Note the price gap: in-app purchases via the iOS App Store cost more, since Apple takes a 30% commission Google passes on.
To create an official WeChat account, head to apply.wechat.com and complete the online form. You'll need a proposal document, official company certificate, company profile, and the contact person's business card. The process is free, and WeChat has authorised no agency.
Google Reader has officially gone offline, following its shutdown announcement on 14th March 2013. Farewell, Google Reader, may you rest in peace. I'll be moving on to Feedly, which seems the most natural successor for managing all my RSS feeds.
Google has released its annual Zeitgeist, a look at 2012 through the world's collective searches, offering a window into the year's biggest events and trends in Singapore. Top trending searches included Olympics 2012, Gangnam Style, SOPA, Legoland Malaysia, Zerg Rush.
I was invited to the launch of starcount at Pangaea, Marina Bay Sands, and they clearly have strong backing. Singapore's IDA, IDMPO, STB, EDB, and Marina Bay Sands itself are all supporting the venture, billed as the world's first.
Finally! Street View has landed on Google Maps in Singapore, something I've waited years for. Google's cars captured 360-degree street-level imagery along all public roads earlier this year, letting users view and explore the city right down at street level.
LTA and Google have collaborated to help travellers reach destinations faster, making Singapore the first country with comprehensive, nationwide land travel-planning tools on Google Maps, spanning walking, public transit and traffic. A genuinely useful upgrade for getting around the island.
This news is a day late, sorry! Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally joined forces to take on Google, after last year's takeover fiasco. Their 29th July 2009 agreement aims to improve web search and compete harder.
Ozh and I have released YOURLS, Your Own URL Shortener. I run it on lc.sg and Ozh on ozh.in. YOURLS is a small set of PHP scripts that let you host your own TinyURL-style shortening service, private or public.
WordPress 2.8 has been released! As Matt announced, version 2.8 'Baker' is now available to download. It's a nice fit-and-finish release, with improvements to themes and plenty of under-the-hood polish that make it well worth upgrading to.
Frustrated with the sluggish, forever-lagging Windows Live Hotmail? I certainly am. Here's a tutorial on forwarding your incoming Hotmail emails to Gmail: in your Hotmail inbox, go to Options, then More Options, and set up Mobile Alerts to enable forwarding.
The first .com domain ever registered was symbolics.com. Back then registering a domain cost far more than today's US$10 a year, so most names on the list belonged to multinational corporations. Surprisingly, Microsoft.com isn't among the earliest registrations.
I really don't think this is a good idea. Lawyers and analysts say ICANN's vote to allow any word as a top-level domain will cause URL chaos. Whenever ICANN needs money, they'll launch new TLDs companies must buy.
What's up with the internet today? So much major news at once: Microsoft has released the long-awaited Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to Windows Update, Apple has released Safari 3.1, and Intel has announced its six-core Dunnington processor.
UADDit has posted an article with photos of Web 2.0 company workplaces, featuring Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Craigslist, Mozilla, Joost, Flickr, Last.fm, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Netvibes and Reddit. I'd love to have the chairs and monitors that Facebook uses!
DotAsia has put .asia domain names up for sale, with premium names ranging from US$4,000 to US$21,000 per their auctions page. The so-called landrush for the latest suffix has begun, and DotAsia expects huge demand for the new namespace.
HTML 5 is the first major update to HTML in ten years, since HTML 4 in December 1997, and I'm looking forward to it. It adds APIs for drawing 2D graphics, embedding and controlling multimedia, and managing client-side storage.
Copied from Neowin: don't you love how Facebook has an app for everything? Don't you love wading through friends' profiles just to find their Wall? And don't you love how Facebook looks more and more like MySpace by the day?
Finally, it's released! Today begins a new chapter in phpBB's history. After five years, over 200,000 lines of new and altered code, and many a long night, the phpBB Group is proud to announce the release of phpBB3, codenamed Olympus.
Yesterday marked phpBB's seventh birthday, and the team finally announced the release date for the long-awaited phpBB3: 14th December 2007. Honestly it feels a little late for me, as I've already moved from phpBB2 to SMF 1.1 in the meantime.
Mozilla Firefox is a fast, full-featured web browser that makes browsing more efficient than ever. Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated Google search and simplified privacy controls to help you cover your tracks.
Microsoft has enabled @live.xx signups, so grab yours now, whether a local domain like @live.co.uk or @live.com itself. Confirmed available aliases so far span many countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria and Belgium, with more domains expected to follow.