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.

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?

HOW TO: Integrate Google+ Into Your WordPress Site

 by Kelli Shaver

This month’s hot topic has been, without a doubt, Google+. Whether the new social service from the world’s largest search company will be a “Facebook killer” remains to be seen, but one thing’s for certain: This is one social network you don’t want to ignore.

When it comes to getting found, Google+ is fast becoming a great asset for bloggers and content producers thanks to its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools. In this post, we’ll show you a few ways to start spreading a little of that Google+ love on your WordPress-powered website.

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Display Your Google+ Profile Information

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Software developer John Henson from PlusDevs has developed a handy, easy to use WordPress widget that displays your Google+ profile on your blog. The setup is quick and simple: Install the plug-in and drag the widget into your sidebar. Just fill out the form and you’re done.

You can also incorporate the widget into your template with only a few lines of PHP code, giving you the flexibility to place it anywhere within your layout.

You can learn more about the widget in the official blog postor jump straight to the code on GitHub.

Unofficial Google+ user tracking site SocialStatistics.com also offers an embeddable Google+ widget. Simply add your profile to their database and grab the widget code from your page on their site.

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Add the +1 Button

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If you’re not already using the Google +1 button, consider taking a moment to add it to your site. This is a great way to let users save, promote and find their favorite content. The +1 button only takes a few minutes to integrate with your site and works with any Google profile. While this isn’t a Google+ specific feature, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it integrated with the service. Either way, it’s another great way of adding an additional avenue for promotion and sharing.

You can learn more about the +1 button from Google.

To add it to your WordPress site, you can either use the official +1 button code generator from Google or take a look at the myriad +1 button WordPress plug-ins available.

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Use a Google+ Inspired Theme

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Do you love the look of Google+’s clean, intuitive layout and unobtrusive interface? For the die-hard fan (or, hey, maybe you run a blog that’s centered around the service), there are already a few Google+ inspired WordPress themes for your perusal.

WP Plus

WP Plus is a fixed-width, 3 column Google+ inspred WordPress theme supporting custom content menus, styled sticky-posts and valid XHTML/CSS code. Clean, fast-loading and SEO optimized, WP Plus gives your blog the Google+ look and feel in just minutes.

PlusOne

Similar to WP Plus, PlusOne is another 3-column, fixed-width Google+ styled theme that supports custom WordPress menus. It’s a clean and well-designed theme, but it does take some liberties with how it translates Google+ to WordPress (so it doesn’t look quite as accurate to Google’s own design).

Reflex+

Reflex+ shares all of the features mentioned in the above two theme but it also brings in jQuery and incorporates AJAX for some tasks, such as the “read more” post navigation, helping it appear more fluid and seamless.

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Want More?

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Google+ is still a relatively new service locked behind an invite-only registration system. No doubt as time progresses and the service grows, there will be more options for publishers. Right now there are a couple of options if you’re a developer interested in having a go at creating your own Google+ plug-in.

If you’d like to gain access to the official Google+ API, you’ll need to sign up with Google to register interest in a Google+ developer account. Unfortunately, the API is not yet public. It’s unclear whether this will change as the service matures, but inquiring about developer access is certainly worth looking into if you want serious Google+ integration and sharing between your site and the service.

For a more portable (and presumably trimmed-down) solution, software developer Jason Striegel has put together a collection of PHP utilities for a locally-hosted Google+ API service. In its current state, the API will allow you to retrieve post and profile data and post to Google+. You can check out his code on GitHub. This is a great option to include within your own distributed code, such as WordPress plug-ins and widgets.

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

Google Offers New YouTube Interface For You To Try [PICS]

by Charlie White

After rolling out Google+ and sneak previewing a revamped Gmail interface, now Google has redesignedYouTube with new features that are more than skin deep.

Announced Thursday on the YouTube Blog, the new Youtube interface is an experiment that Google is calling “Cosmic Panda,” and unlike Google+, this one’s open to everyone.

Gone is that white background underneath the video player, replaced by a less-distracting dark gray backdrop. At the bottom of that frame are four new icons that let you conveniently change the video frame size. There are new page designs and improved editing tools to customize channels. Best of all, when you’re using Google Chrome, you can keep one video playing while you’re looking for others, switching between channels or playlists.

Another improvement is the ability to choose whether you see comments or not, with buttons allowing you to dismiss comments and fill the page below the video player with suggested videos that are each in larger frames. In addition, Cosmic Panda makes it easier to edit a channel template, giving users a choice of layouts for creators, bloggers, networks and a general-use template Google calls “everything.”

Unfortunately, Google’s YouTube player has retained the old transport controls from the previous YouTube interface, and there’s no icon to click to incrementally skip forward or backward. You can still do that with the slider control underneath the video, but as you can see in our gallery of screenshots below, on this new version, the zone where you can click to skip forward or backward is even smaller than that area on the old version.

Even with those quibbles, I think the new YouTube interface is a significant improvement over the current one. What do you think? Go ahead, try it yourself at Google’s Cosmic Panda page. And don’t worry — if you don’t like it, you can easily change back to the old YouTube interface.

View As Slideshow »

Suggested Videos Interface

Notice the bigger thumbnails.

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YouTube interface

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Browsing a channel

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Comments visible, but with a click...

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Suggested videos only, no comments

Click "suggested videos" and the comments disappear, which might be a relief given the savage nature of many YouTube comments.

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Old slider

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New slider, slightly thinner

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