Mike melanson

Latest Posts From

Craigslist, 3taps & The Court Battle For The Soul Of Public Data

Craigslist, 3taps & The Court Battle For The Soul Of Public Data

Who owns the kind of information collected by Craigslist? The classifieds site has staked its claim in a series of lawsuits against apartment listings mapper PadMapper and Craigslist data scraper 3taps. On Monday, 3taps will file a bold counterclaim, aiming for a victory that would bring a new era of pubilc information.

How Mobile is Changing the Way We Work

How Mobile is Changing the Way We Work

Once upon a time, things didn’t happen now, they happened later. Editing a document meant volleying back and forth over email or fax, meetings were something everyone had to be in the same place for and group communication on-the-go meant saying “hold on, let me call you right back” over and over. Then came the real-time Web.

If there’s…

EFF Calls On Apple to Defend Developers Against Patent Trolls

EFF Calls On Apple to Defend Developers Against Patent Trolls

Earlier this month, patent-holding company Lodsys started going after small-time iOS developers, sending them “notice” letters which claim the developers are infringing on one of Lodsys’ patents for in-app purchasing technology. In these notices, Lodsys demands that developers license the patent from them for 0.575% of the U.S. revenue…

Google Maps Mobile Matches Pace With the Web

Google Maps Mobile Matches Pace With the Web

I don’t know about you, but when it comes down to figuring out the “where” of my life on my smartphone, Google Maps is pretty much it. On the Android, the Maps experience is great and complete, but on iOS, the maps app can be a bit lacking. Thankfully, Google offers an equalizer in its mobile website – which comes complete with biking…

Google eBooks Get Search, Translation & Definitions

Google eBooks Get Search, Translation & Definitions

Pick up a book like James Joyce’s Ulysses and you’ll likely want a library at your side to help define, translate and help give the context needed to understand the plethora of heady content inside. Before the days of the Internet, reading some of the more scholarly literary texts involved just that – having a dictionary or other reference…

Google Wants to Kill the URL: Chrome 13 Lets Users Hide the Address Bar

Google Wants to Kill the URL: Chrome 13 Lets Users Hide the Address Bar

Since Google’s official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google’s world, an OS is a browser and a program – one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download…

No Porn on iOS? “Uncensored” iPlayboy Hits the iPad

No Porn on iOS? “Uncensored” iPlayboy Hits the iPad

Apple has been clear on one thing for a while now – nothing resembling porn of any kind shall grace the screens of its iOS devices if it has anything to do with it. Of course, that’s not a world that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner wants to live in and last January the robe-wearing, pipe-toting extravagant promised an uncensored version of Playboy…

Google Takes Social Search Global, +1 Coming Soon

Google Takes Social Search Global, +1 Coming Soon

The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search – the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S.

Today, the company announced that it is…

Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search

Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search

When you look at the numbers, there’s no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future.

We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big…

Twitter’s Humble Origins: Jack Dorsey, His Pager and a Hack

Twitter’s Humble Origins: Jack Dorsey, His Pager and a Hack

If you were a child of the 1990s (and even the early 2000s), then you might remember pagers, those silly little vibrating devices you would clip to your supa-fly JNCO jeans that either flagged you as a teenage victim of overprotective parents, drug dealer, bike messenger or working stiff.

Such is the birthplace of Twitter, way back in 2001…

Twittamentary: A Documentary By, For & About Twitter

Twittamentary: A Documentary By, For & About Twitter

There’s just something about the Internet that makes people go meta. Want to write a blog post? Why not write a blog post about writing blog posts? Or how about check-in on Foursquare to that Foursquare meetup? Take an Instagram of Instagram? Better yet, why not make a documentary film about Twitter using the site and its users in nearly every…

How to Unlock All Levels on Chrome Angry Birds

How to Unlock All Levels on Chrome Angry Birds

Until just the other day, I had resolutely withstood the Angry Birds phenomena. I hadn’t downloaded it and I hadn’t even tried it out. I also hadn’t yet learned that burning desire to know what tortuous assembly of blocks, planks and pigs awaited me on the next level until I began playing the other day when Google announced the game was coming to…

Report: No NFC for the iPhone 5

Report: No NFC for the iPhone 5

Look around at predictions for what to expect with Apple’s iPhone 5, expected to hit the market next fall, and you’ll see one common point – the inclusion of a near field communication (NFC) chip. The chip enables quick, proximity-based interaction and is the cornerstone of many expected mobile payment systems, but relies heavily on critical…

Google Addresses One of Android Market’s Biggest Problems: App Discovery

Google Addresses One of Android Market’s Biggest Problems: App Discovery

One of the bigger problem areas for Android users has always been the Android Market. As a matter of fact, Google didn’t even provide a Web-based interface until just three months ago, meaning users could only browse apps directly from their phones.

While the website was certainly a welcome addition it still had plenty of room for improvement…

Blogger Goes Down While Rolling Out Its Redesign

Blogger Goes Down While Rolling Out Its Redesign

Today was to be the day for Google to finally roll-out the expected redesign of Blogger, but it seems things haven’t gone as planned.

Late last night, the Blogger Twitter account announced that “scheduled maintenance” was underway and later said that it was “sorting out a few issues,” but now, hours later, the service still…

Twitter Brings #NewTwitter to the Mobile Web

Twitter Brings #NewTwitter to the Mobile Web

When Twitter warned developers last March against building Twitter clients, it used one word repeatedly in its announcement: “consistent”.

“We need to ensure that tweets, and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter where they are,” wrote Twitter platform…