iTech Report Australia

Twitter moves to new-look HQ

Twitter is preparing to open its new offices on Monday, after saying goodbye to their old premises just streets away in Downtown San Francisco.

On Friday, employees said their last farewells to the old Twitter HQ, as designers work overtime all weekend making the final touches to the new site, located on Folsom St, San Francsico. "Leaving Twoffice 3.0, which @sara, @al, @dougw, @jess, and a hundred or so workers are whipping into shape for Monday" Twitter CEO Evan Williams tweeted yesterday. "As much as I loved this [old] office a year ago, the current population has me really excited to move" he also said. The new office is said to be themed around Twitter's 'clouds' which are found across the site, with reports they are being painted around the walls along with some Web 2.0 icons and ideas. The new premises were previously occupied by another social-networking site, Bebo, and is approximately 31,000 square feet. AOL Communications Vice President Sarah Gavin told SFGate that Bebo plans to move from the sixth floor to a lower floor "to take up a more appropriate size space in the same building." It's not yet clear why the company needs such a large area for its current size of just over 30 employees, however if reports claiming that Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone has announced that the service will soon launch a 'paid-for version' for businesses that would give organisations access to new marketing and other tools are to be believed, then the site could be about to expand exponentially.

Geocities closes tomorrow, leaving many, many websites without a home

By now you've probably heard the news that Yahoo's free hosting service,Geocities, is closing down tomorrow. What's the big fuss, you might be wondering? Well Geocities has been around for a long time (since late 1994 in fact), and many, many websites have been hosted on the service over time. When the doors shut for the final time tomorrow, what will happen to them all?

Alright, many Geocities users have probably moved on by now (hence why Yahoo has decided to close the service), but many small sites are still hosted there. Do any Google or Bing search and you're sure to stumble across at least one Geocities site. Soon, instead of getting the information you were looking for, you're most likely going to be redirected to another landing page informing you about the closure of the service. Great. Just what you were looking for.

It's a sad, sad day for the Web. Yes there are now other services out there offering the same capabilities if not better ones, and the old Web 1.0 Geocities site layouts have become a bit of the past, but I for one still found much of the information hosted by Yahoo to be informative and helpful albeit at times a little outdated.

And get ready for the complaints as users searching on Google find out that many of the links they click will no longer go to the site they were looking for. There's a heck of a lot of indexed pages from the Geocities that have been found by Google's crawlers - all of which will become redundant and useless starting tomorrow.

Farewell Geocities. May your spirit (wait-does a web service have a spirit?) live on for generations to come.

Google adds Yelp-like feature Places to Maps

Well this is interesting. Today Google posted information on its blog about a new feature for Google Maps called places which combines aggregated data about a location, for example the United States of America, in one page similar to that offered by Yelp.

 "A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world" Lior Ron, a Senior Product Manager on the Place Page team said.

You can access these pages by clicking "More Info" in the sidebar when you search for a location, or by visiting the page direct using a friendly URL (which you can usually work out as they are in the format of google.com/places/country/state/suburb). 

At this stage it appears you can't actually edit the pages, and they simply contain information pulled from places such as YouTube, Panoramio and Wikipedia.

These "places" for businesses are very similar to Yelp for because they contain almost every ounce of information you're likely to need such as the website, location, reviews etc. along with some data which seems to be being pulled from the likes of Citysearch and Zagat. 

Look out Yelp, Google are after you!

Welcome to Techmosis - my little tech oasis!

Thanks for visiting Techmosis, a place where I plan to blog about tech news, and little discoveries I make browsing the web. 

So a little about me - you may have seen some of my articles on Digital Journal, Newsvine, Streem (now no longer active) or All Voices. I have a Twitter account (yes I tweet, but hey who doesn't these days?) and Facebook and the last time I checked my Google Reader account had over 60 feeds that I'm subscribed to.

You can contact me at brenton.currie at gmail.com (replace the at with @ and remove spaces) or DM me on Twitter if you think you have something I should know about (i.e. if you want something reviewed).

Anyway that's enough for now. Hopefully you'll check back soon for my first (real) post.

Brenton.