Many users now have their Gchat back after Thursday morning's service failure, but are now facing a new blackout around lunchtime: Twitter won't load! Twitter's status website says: "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue." Even the workaround of logging in through the mobile site isn't working. Let's hope these things don't come in threes (Pinterest? Tumblr?) or people will have to actually do work today.
In our "What Was It" series, we've been talking with notable people about what first piqued their interest in technology.
People like Steve Wozniak and Alexis Ohanian have shared what pushed them into this field. Last night, at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil de Grasse Tyson told us what got him hooked on space exploration.
These recent discussions have been illuminating, and we'd like to hear more on the subject from our readers. So what did it for you? A trip to a planetarium? A high school science teacher? Tetris?
Microsoft announced its plans to buy the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service Skype in early 2011 and the acquisition closed last October. Since then, though, Microsoft mostly left Skype alone and continued to run it as a stand-alone product. With the release of the next version of Office, Microsoft is now integrating Skype closely into its office productivity suite. Skype will, for example, now power the “presence” feature in Outlook and – just like Yammer, Microsoft’s most recent acquisition – will become a default part of every version of Office.
Teens are immersed in video, whether it’s using video chat applications, shooting and sharing video, or streaming video live for others to view. That said, with more video use comes more security risk. Let’s explore just how much teens chat, share, and stream, and look at a few simple steps you can take to protect yourself.
Having a website is great because you can tell the world what you think or what you offer, but the hardest part is to interact with your readers. Sure, you can use the commenting system but is this enough? I don’t think that the finest user interaction is by waiting for the admin to approve your comment and then waiting for someone to reply, so the best method to offer them a live chat where they can talk instantly. But is it possible to implement such thing on a website? Sure it is, with ArrowChat.
Good news, WinPho lovers: you can now use Skype on your handset. The software's currently in beta testing, but the official release is due April.
Just like other smartphone releases of Skype, it allows you to make voice and video calls over 3G, 4G and WiFi. Microsoft has singled out some handsets that will offer the best experience—including the Nokia Lumia 710, Lumia 800, HTC TITAN, HTC Radar , Samsung Focus S, and Samsung Focus Flash—but you should be able to install the app on any Windows Phone 7 device.
