WebProNews - Insider Reports

Google Chrome Gets Slapped Around in Germany

It doesn’t get any more “official” than this here. Yesterday, Saturday at around 20:07, Germany’s oldest and perhaps biggest prime time news Tagesschau announced the following under the headline “Warning against internet browser"*:

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The Private Domain Registration & Google Dilemma

The Search Engine Roundtable scoop has drawn our attention towards the fix situation that is faced by the majority of online marketers regarding the registration process of their domain names.

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You're Not Safe Using Facebook Apps

In the name of finding any possible way that hackers can get at your data, a group of researchers has penetrated Facebook via a could-be-malicious application proving that Facebook Apps are unsafe. The app seems harmless enough. It's a National Geographic "photo of the day" app that gives users (obviously) a different photo each day.

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Bebo Alters Users' Profile Names

Bebo was once referred to as "the best social network" based on a variety of factors, one of which being its protection of members' privacy. It is that protection, however, that has a lot of its users peeved. They are apparently changing users' profile names at will whether they like it or not.

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Thinking Makes You Fat

You’d think with all the technological wonders being announced daily that somebody would come up with a Nutty Professor-like weight loss potion eventually. Likely “they” are working on it and are personally invested in it because “they” have likely gotten fat, too, thanks to the computer age.

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Digital Web: What's New Headlines:

dConstruct 2008: Cognitive Bias and Social Design

There have been a couple of great presentations either side of lunch here at dConstruct. Joshua Porter — social web expert and occasional Digital Web contributor — revealed the hidden mental tics (or “cognitive biases”) that designers should be aware of when thinking about how best to attract engage with their users; and Daniel Burka (Pownce, Digg) shared his recommendations on how to approach the key pain points when designing for social interaction.

Keep an eye out for the dConstruct podcasts of these talks; in the meantime, Daniel’s slides are on SlideShare — when I find Josh’s I’ll post the link here too.

Digital Web goes to dConstruct

The UK arm of Digital Web (editor Frances Berriman and me) are at Brighton’s annual dConstruct conference today to hear some of the web’s leading thinkers talk about Designing The Social Web. Steven Johnson is up first, drawing parallels between modern information design and cholera epidemics (London’s “social network of dead people”, as he puts it).

Also in evidence is Clearleft’s Silverback gorilla, dispensing promotional bananas (yes, really) to the assembled geeks. If you’re at the conference, please come and say hi!

Link Roundup: IE8, Google Chrome, 4-Day Weeks, and authentication

New products, plugins, and announcements have been coming thick and fast in the last couple of weeks, but here are some of the interesting posts we’ve been reading:

• Peter-Paul Koch summarises the changes in the new beta of IE8, and notes that its “backwards-compatibility mode” doesn’t actually emulate older browsers correctly;
• Jon Hicks deflates the Google Chrome hype by pointing out that all of their UI enhancements have actually been done before;
• Chris at Particletree discusses their 4-1/2 day work week arrangement at Wufoo, which includes a 2pm lie-in on a Friday — sounds good to me!
• and David “Fat Businessman” Thompson muses on OAuth authentication and password anti-patterns — are you careful enough with your passwords?

Mozilla Ubiquity

As you may have seen mentioned elsewhere, Mozilla Labs recently released an alpha version of Ubiquity, their new natural language command tool for Firefox. They have big plans for it, but even now the limited functionality to invoke certain commands is extremely impressive. When you find yourself trying to call it up in unrelated applications you realise just how useful it is destined to become in the future.

New Issue: Web Design by Designers

Digital Web is happy to welcome Ringling College of Art + Design’s Kimberly Elam who encourages us to look to critique of design firm websites to inspire our web best-practices in Web Design by Designers. It is a good article with excellent examples analyzing the designs by the best-of-the-best. Anyone looking to add thoughtful critique to their designing (who isn’t?) will benefit from Kimberly’s suggestions.