TechBlog

Mashable: If you live for data, slave over spreadsheets and constantly find yourself sifting through endless rows and columns of facts and figures, Google’s got a lovely new product just for you — and it’s free and open-source, too. Google Refine is a project born of Freebase Gridworks, a data-cleaning tool Google acquired when it bought Metaweb during the summer. Google has since renamed Gridworks and relaunched it as Refine. ...

BetaNews: Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular micro blogging service announced Thursday. Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned. ...

Mashable: Facebook’s running out of servers to handle its 500+ million users, so it has decided to build a new data center in North Carolina that will cost a whopping $450 million to complete. The announcement was made by North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, who said that the facility will take 18 months to complete and will employ 35 to 45 workers to operate (not including the 250 jobs that will be created during its construction). It is being built in Rutherford County, which is to the west of Charlotte. ...

Mashable: If you didn’t think the Nexus S was real, perhaps these pictures of the purported device will convince you otherwise. Kudos to Engadget, which was the first publication to get pictures of the mythical successor to the Nexus One. As we reported earlier today, the device is built by Samsung and has a lot of similarities to the Galaxy S Android phone. According to multiple reports, the Nexus S runs Gingerbread (Android 2.3), sports a 4-inch AMOLED screen, sports a curved back, hosts a front-facing camera and will be available on T-Mobile. It’s expected to be announced at the same time as Google’s official Gingerbread announcement. ...

Apple has issued the latest update to its Mac OS X operating system, bringing Snow Leopard users up to Mac OS X 10.6.5. Enhancements include improved Microsoft Exchange reliability, and a variety of performance and stability improvements. But what’s probably most interesting to you is that the update also includes important security fixes. Well over 100 different vulnerabilities are reportedly patched by Mac OS X 10.6.5 – if you want to see the gory details (or at least, those details which Apple is prepared to make public) view their knowledgebase article. ...

In 2009, naked photographs of American baseball star Grady Sizemore circulated on the internet after being stolen from the email account of his then girlfriend, Playboy Playmate Brittany Binger. A total of 15 photos were circulated – some showing Sizemore posing in his bathroom mirror wearing a suit, but others that showed him nude or only partially clothed. In one of the pictures, still easily available on the web, the Cleveland Indians’ star is using a coffee mug to protect his err.. modesty. ...

This is amazing news indeed. Its has been feature talk with many of clients and colleagues all long for many years. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well. ...

CNet: The latest security fiasco on Facebook’s application platform may involve business pages rather than personal accounts: Sendible, a company that makes software for businesses to manage accounts and presences on various social-media services, looked like it was hit by a virus or hacker on Tuesday afternoon: TechCrunch pointed out that Sendible-managed brand pages on Facebook appeared to be posting malicious links. Now Sendible’s claiming it wasn’t their fault. “Just to clarify, Sendible was not hacked,” the company posted to its Twitter account. “One of our users has discovered a major flaw in Facebook’s security.” Sendible’s Twitter account then quoted the user in question, who said, “i wanted to post only on a few Facebook walls as a fan – and for some reason, posted as the page Owner. weird,” and Sendible added “This appears to be a bug in Facebook’s API as the posts should have been displayed as the user profile and not the page owner.” ...

Oh look, Microsoft is late to the party again? They are finally launching full-session SSL encryption to Hotmail a mere 2 years after Google did the same thing for Gmail. It looks like the release of FireSheep really has had an impact on web-application vendors due to the amount of mainstream media coverage it got and the sheer number of downloads. At least they are doing something and I hope more vendors follow and give users an option to force full-session HTTPS connections for all web properties. ...

Google has given all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%, a loyal reader tells us. The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011. In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance. ...