Twitter Adds an Activity Stream

by Jennifer Van Grove

Twitter is introducing two new activity-centric features Wednesday in a partial redesign of its web application.

The changes, designed to help users more easily discover what’s happening on Twitter in relation to them, are reflected in two new tabs on Twitter.com: “@[username]” and “Activity.”

The @username tab replaces the mentions tab and is more of a personal notifications dashboard. The tab will now include tweets directed at users via @replies (as usual), highlight favorited tweets and retweeted tweets, and include new follower notifications.

The Activity tab’s purpose is similar to activity notifications that appear in Facebook’s News Feed. The tab showcases the same actions — retweets, favorites and follows — as the @username tab, but as they pertain to the individuals a user follows.

“It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place,” the company says of the Activity tab in its official Twitter Blog. “It’s easier than ever to explore Twitter, connect with people, and discover what’s happening around the world.”

Both the new tabs are radical in function and design, especially when compared to the far less colorful mentions and retweets tabs.

The new tabs have already appeared for some users and will continue to be gradually rolled out to all Twitter users.

Facebook App Suggests Concerts Based on Bands You & Your Friends Like

by Brenna Ehrlich

Trying to figure out what shows are going on this weekend, but too lazy to click through all of your favorite bands’ Fan Pages? ConcertCrowd aims to alleviate the onset of carpel tunnel by offering you suggestions based on your and your friends’ favorite bands.

ConcertCrowd is a Facebook app that launched Tuesday to make it easier to figure out what concerts to hit up. Simply install the app, and you’ll be presented with a dashboard that depicts all the upcoming shows in your area. You can click on “Your Artists” to see when bands that you’ve “Liked” on Facebook are playing, or “Recommended Artists” to see when your friends’ faves are slated to go on. You can also check out recently posted shows, as well as all shows in your geographic area.

The app also allows you to add concerts to your calendar, post events to your wall, email them to a friend and buy tickets. Click on a band’s name to access its Facebook Page.

Granted, there are a ton of apps out there that make it easy to find shows (I personally like Songkick‘s mobile app, which scans your iTunes to serve up suggestions), but Facebook surfers will definitely find ConcertCrowd useful when planning their weekends.

Google+ Hangouts Adding YouTube Live Video Viewing

 by Charlie White

The Hangouts group video chat platform on Google+ now lets video-chatting groups of up to ten people watch live streaming videos together on YouTube.

The ability to watch recorded YouTube videos together has been possible in Hangouts from the start, but now, YouTube Live product manager Brandon Badger told GigaOM that Google‘s been quietly rolling out live video stream viewing while chatting in Hangouts.

While it’s not exactly simple to enable a live video feed alongside a Hangout chat now, Google plans to add tools that will make it a lot easier to find those live video feeds on YouTube while using Hangouts. According toGigaOM, it’s already possible to incorporate live feeds into hangouts using the following five-step manual method:

• Start a Hangouts session in Google+ and invite your contacts to join you.
• In a separate browser tab, head over toYouTube.com/Live and select a live stream of your choice
• Copy the YouTube video I.D. of the selected live stream. Not sure how to find it? Just click on the share link below the video. You’ll get to see a link like http://youtu.be/XXXXXXXX – the cryptic code after the slash is the video I.D.
• Switch back to hangouts, open the video tab and search for the I.D.
• Click play, and you’re all set.

It doesn’t stop there. As you can see above, this is not a convenient way to incorporate live video into a Hangout, so YouTube plans to create tools that will tightly integrate the feature into its Google+ interface, as well as integrate Hangouts into YouTube Live.

For example, Google+ users will be able to watch a live stream on YouTube and see which of their friends are watching that stream in a Hangout. Then, they’ll be able to join their pals to watch that live video, letting them, say, virtually gather together to watch a live football game, with the ability to interact with each other face-to-face at the same time.

We’re going to select our friends carefully to watch live streaming video with this feature — imagine nine of your most talkative friends distracting you so much that you can’t pay attention to the broadcast. Beyond that, we have a feeling this capability will go way beyond watching football games together. What are some other uses for this new group watching of live streaming videos?

New Google Service Improves Web Page Load Speed

Google has just released a new tool that will help webmasters speed up their page load time.

Google’s new Page Speed Service takes many of the optimizations outlined in the company’s Page Speed Online API and applies it to sites automatically.

It’s a turnkey online service that automatically takes care of the optimizations by rewriting pages and delivering them to users using Google’s servers.

The tool works by having users point the CNAME for their URL at Google’s own servers. From there, Google can do the optimizations and rewrite pages as needed.

On the Google Code blog, Google says that it has seen speed improvements from 25% to 60% on some sites. Google has a gallery and a comparison test that users can try themselves.

Right now, the tool is only available to a limited set of webmasters, but you can request access by filling outthis form. Google says that pricing will be competitive.

It’s rare that Google rolls out plans for a pay service, but this is a case where we think it makes sense. Would you be interested in using Google’s services to automatically optimize your website page load?

Gmail Now Lets You Make Multiple Calls at the Same Time

 by Charlie White

Remember those old multi-line phones with all the buttons across the bottom? That gave you access to more than one line at a time, a feature now available in Google‘s Gmail.

According to the official Gmail Blog, this new multi-call capability will let you put callers on hold with Gmail’s phone service, picking up another call at the same time. Too bad there’s no music on hold to entertain that first caller.

Also imitating conventional phone systems is call waiting, where you receive a notification of an incoming call, and then it’s up to you whether you’re going to answer it or not. The only limitation with this new capability is that you’re only allowed two outgoing calls to physical phones at the same time.

Best of all, U.S. and Canada calls using the Gmail phone and video system will be free through 2011, and all these new multi-line features work with Gmail’s phone, voice and video calls.

Create Albums From Instagram, Twitter & Facebook Photos With Pictarine

 by Jennifer Van Grove

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pictarine

Quick Pitch: Pictarine is a website that lets you enjoy and share all your photos in one place.

Genius Idea: Mix and match photos from different services to create shareable albums.

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Today’s digital photo sharer snaps and posts shots to myriad social sites and photo applications. Those photos often end up haphazardly scattered across web and mobile sites and devices.

Paris-based startup Pictarine gives modern photo sharers a way to clean up the photo chaos and bring together all of their shots littered across web and mobile for viewing, sharing or one-click download.

CEO and co-founder Guillaume Martin says Pictarine was envisioned after a weekend getaway with his partner. “Both of us took photos, but we couldn’t share them in an easy way,” he says. “So, the first idea was to share Flickr photos with other friends, like Facebook friends.”

An early version of Pictarine first offered users a simple way to collect and share all their photos fromFacebook, Flickr, Picasa and the desktop. Today, Pictarine now includes Instagram and Twitter — TwitPic, Yfrog, Lockerz and Twitter Photos included — integration. These new features where released Tuesday to further round out its online photo repository.

After first-time users authenticate each of their photo site accounts, Pictarine collects their photos, and auto-sorts them into albums by service, while also maintaining third-party site album structure. The service even grants users viewing access to their Facebook friends’ photos, Instagram friends’ photos and Flickr friends’ photos, making Pictarine a window to nearly all of the photos the users’ friends are posting to the web.

Pictarine’s most fetching feature is its highly malleable virtual photo album. With Zests, as they’re called, you can construct albums from your Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and desktop photos, as well as mix in photos from friends’ albums. You can then choose to share Zests with Facebook friends, Google contact groups and email contacts either publicly or privately.

Founded two years ago, Pictarine has been quietly available to the public since May of this year and has more than 3,000 users. The bootstrapped startup hopes to raise funding to support development of mobile applications.

Google Shuttering Google Labs

 by Brenna Ehrlich

Google announced Wednesday that it plans to shutter its Labs department in an effort to focus more on its products.

For years, Google Labs has been, to quote the company, “a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them.” That playground has birthed the likes of the Google Reader and Google Goggles — to name a very few.

Google announced the loss of Labs via its blog, stating: “While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.”

Many Labs experiments will end, Google says, and other products will be folded into different areas. Android apps in the Lab phase, however, will still be largely available in the Android Market.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information.

Image courtesy of Google

Is Google+ Becoming More Female?

by Christina Warren

If you believe the “unofficial statistician” for Google+, the new social network isn’t nearly as male-dominated as previously reported.

Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com and the man who released a report estimating that Google+ was about to reach 10 million users, says that the male-to-female ratio on Google+ is not as disparate as some reports, including those published by Mashable, have seemed. Instead, Allen’s latest figures show that 33% of Google+ users, as of July 14, 2011 are female.

To be clear, this still means that Google+ is still a male-dominated network (at least for now), but the breakdown isn’t as extreme as the 90% male, 10% female stat from SocialStatistics or the 75% male, 25% female stats from FindPeopleonPlus.

Allen’s methodology in estimating Google+ statistics varies from some other Google+ data sources.

This is how Mashable’s Stan Schroeder described the methodology earlier this week,

He sampled a number of surnames from the U.S. Census Bureau data and compared it to surnames of Google+ users. By comparing surname popularity in the U.S. with the number of users on Google+ with each surname, he can guesstimate the percentage of the U.S. population that signed up for Google+. Finally, he calculated a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate an estimate for the number of Google+ users worldwide.

We’re not sure how census data can be applied to gender, especially on a social network, but we’ve reached out to Allen for additional information on how his data was composited.

Still, Allen’s figures show that from July 4, 2011 through July 14, 2011, the male/female gap closed considerably. On July 4, 2011, Allen estimated that 23% of users were female. By July 14, 2011, that percentage was up to 33.6%.

In its own videos and marketing for the service, Google put a lot of emphasis on women, which to us, implies that women are a prime target for Google+.

In our own unscientific estimates, we’ve seen more women joining Google+ over the last few days than when the service first launched.

That leads us to our question — do you see more women joining Google+ in your own circles? What do you think it will take for the gender ratio to start to balance out? Let us know in the comments.