The Web publishing DocStoc now provides customized document viewer , users can now e easily embed, branded document viewers. The new feature is open to all DocStoc users and offers the ability to customize the logo, buttons, links, and color of the viewer.

The viewer itself is fairly sleek and resembles DocStoc’s normal document viewers. Users can directly download documents from the viewer and DocStoc will automatically convert any convert historical embeds with Docstoc.

Also included in the viewer is the ability to monetize on the publisher side. So publishers can choose to put streams of ads in the viewers, which is operated by DocStoc. DocStoc and the publisher will then share in any advertising revenue.

Competitor Scribd launched branded viewers in October, but the feature appears to be only available to select publishers. The startup just a new marketplace for professional documents and with 3 million registered users, DocStoc is now profitable.

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Yahoo! now provides  a new service which enables you to import all of your Facebook contacts details.  Subsquently, this is a new development regardless of the applications that were granted access to users emails, as Facebook recently allowed.

It seems however, that facebook does not directly support this service but it may be part of a wider strategy to allow its users more flexibility.  Nevertheless, this could however be a start of things to come, who knows very soon perhaps other sites like Twitter and Google Buzz may also this service.

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Twitter’s Streaming API is used by around 50,000 appplications, within set limits.  However, now it is understood that a few new startups search applications have been allowed to have full unlimited access to its data, which includes data of 50 million Tweets a day.

Previously only search engines such as Google or Bing, were allowed to have the unrestricted access to twitter’s data.  The Search engines type of applications need it more than other applications in order to index and serve up results in realtime. Following today’s news, the new unrestriced access has been provided to startups such as:  Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye.

Subsquently Twitter does receive income from the big players i.e. Google and Bing.  In regards to search engine startups only it regards them as requiring a helping hand and thus allows them to use its data for free.

Photo credit: Flickr/ZeroOne

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MySpace now has a new feature for user’s activity and content similar to facebook’s stream, which is labelled as “Stream.” This new feature allows the capacity to allow much more content to become visible to users, it is now possible with detail to note what friends are listening on music, video etc.

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Following Facebook’s decision to acquire Ocatzen, the company from which Facebook’s contact importer technology is used, this technology helps seduce new users to see which of their friends are also on the site.

Why the Acquisition

Facebook needed a team which could monitor changes to third-party email providers thus enabling viral growth. Octazen, allows this capabability and also helps ensure that Facebook’s contact importer is a part of its organic user growth.

Although Facebook was not obliged to acquire the Octazen, one of the main benefits was to facilitate its developers to commit to Octazen’s technology.

Continuity

Octazen may have technological knowledge proprietary on Facebook’s contact importer on the way it process invitations.  Subsequently, it follows that Facebook wishes to protect that aspect, Furthermore Facebook developers are now bound to an agreement in which their technology could not be used for any other organizations.  In this case it is now understandable the statement on the Octazen Solutions website:

The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction. After carefully evaluating this offer, our team believes this is a wonderful opportunity of which we must take advantage.

As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations.

Financial

Facebook was paying fees to the Octazen.  In this regard, Facebook may have felt as they were committed to paying  fees for at least the next 3 to 5 years, that it made simple financial sense on the present value of the future outgoing cash flows in order to maintain the contact importer functionality would best be served with a simple acquisition.

Sum up

Facebook however stated internally that the acquistion was a simple “talent acquisition”, not much else is known about the business reasoning which led to the acquisition.  However, all the above reasons seems plausible enough, and the the fact that it was a small acquisition is probably one reason Facebook didn’t make any type of formal announcement.

Others however, like Techcrunch have their own explanations conspiracy theory.

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reMail. is a powerful iPhone application which provides instant full text-search for Email.  Subsequently, It follows that Google despite having only recently acquired startup Aardvark, including  acquisitions.  Google has now decided to acquire reMail, despite this startup was only launched in August, however it is a better alternative to the native iPhone mail client, it works by storing your entire Email account on your phone.  The technique works by using advanced compression techniques which gives you full text search in real-time and has proved to be quite good with excellent results when compared with the normal email search.

The startup reMail was incubated at Y Combinator, founded by Gabor Gselle of which following this acquisition will now join Google at Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team.  The application will be discontinued from the App Store, so google branded solutions may be in the pipeline using such technology.

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Twiangulate allows users to find out which friends or followers they have in common.  It also allows to show an overlap between a user social graph and any other twitter user.

Following this analysis a user is then able to make a decision whether he or she is following the people which interests them or whether to join a group of interest.  This free tool provides gives detailed analysis where overlaps may occur between twitter users.

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If someone criticizes a TED event, it is now obvious that they will not be invited again to attend or present (this follows a series of nonsense articles).  However the organizer feels he is entitled to criticise his guests as he pleases, however this implies a contradiction of the TED principles.  An example follows below of the criticism from the organizer:

“I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers,” he said on Twitter, “but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful…”

Perhaps TED speakers ought to present  Slavery sucks, as one speaker did.

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It seems now that Facebook will have an email client, code named “Titan”.  This follows as Paul Bucheit,  (developer of Gmail), is currently an employee of Facebook which seems to suggest that facebook has its own plans to implement and offer its users a new feature to its users.  Some specific suggestions follow below for a particular facebook email client to offer:

Automatic Filtering

It’s important for Facebook to understand how often users are interacting with each other.  By developing efficient  communication tools,  it may improve it’s capability to analyse user site data.  It then follows that it can optimize user experience.  Furthermore Facebook is then able to determine which notifications are more relevant to each specific user while attempting to give less relevance to possible spam.  This predicted email client will certainly help achieve this goal of automatic filtering information which is not related to each individual user as it downgrades its importance or relevance.

Application Attachments

Currently it is not possible to add applications to any email clients as an attachment.

A great suggestion is to allow attachments on facebook email including application additions, as a result Facebook will surely have a powerful email client to offer its users.

List Filtering

Another nice feature would be a friend list filter built into the email client.  By being able to select all emails based on your settings, listings and membership of your groups or pages.  If this suggestion is accepted then this functionality would encourage users to user their email client efficiently as well as being a popular capability among Facebook users.

User Info

Another great suggestion is by a user mousing over a user’s email address and instantly being displayed most relevant information about the user.

Large Contacts

As Facebook currently only allows  5,000 “friends”.  This follows that the networking and relationships are limited in size,  a nice feature would be to have a large contact list and being able to manage their contacts with flexibility like other sites such as in linkedin.

Sum up

It is  hoped that Facebook launches its own email client in the near future with this suggestions in mind.

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Facebook and Microsoft have partnered to create a standalone Facebook client powered by the new Silverlight 4 Beta technology.  Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 Beta enables Facebook users to browse and interact with a completely different interface.

After enabling the Silverlight client and all the permissions dialogs, the result is a GUI (graphic user interface) in a black finish.  Silverlight powers big fonts among other features.  After setup is completed, browsing is easy and a nice new feature is the new interface on the photo album on the right side.  Another relevant element is the events tab which is a better alternative to the way that the Facebook Events calendar can be viewed.

Definitely check out the Silverlight Client and try browsing Facebook in a different way.

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