Real Time Coverage Of Apple Announcements

Hop on over to CrunchGear to see the real time coverage of the special Apple press event today that started at 10 am PST. Lots of new iPod news, and a make-your-own ringtone tool in iTunes. And they always save the best stuff for last.

I Want This In Photoshop Immediately

http://www.techcrunch.com/page/4/



This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here.

eBuddy Adds MySpace Instant Messaging

European web chat startup eBuddy, which is in a fight-to-the-death struggle with Silicon Valley based Meebo, just added support for MySpace instant messaging tor their product.

eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide - July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.

Rumor is that Trillian, a downloadable piece of software that also accesses all major IM networks except Skype, will be adding MySpace support soon, too.

Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless

We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa.

This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story - Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion.

Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.

For smaller sites it is understandable that Alexa may not have good data. But Google and YouTube are among the largest sites on the Internet. To get it this wrong is embarrassing.