Facebook Planning Email Service Launch

Facebook is hosting a special media event on Monday, November 15, where the company is expected to introduce its own email service code named Project Titan. The service apparently includes a full-on Web-based email client and will give Facebook subscribers their own @faceboom.com email address,according to TechCrunch.

Facebook email may be on the way

Facebook isn’t saying yet what it plans to announce at its press event, but the invitations do hint strongly towards an email or message-related service. If the social networking company does in fact roll out a new email service, it could include features such as the ability to prioritize messages based who you interact with most on Facebook.

Assuming a new email service is on the way, that could account for a recent dispute between Facebook and Google over accessing contacts from Google Gmail user accounts. Google blocked Facebook users from moving their Gmail contacts to the social networking service, but a workaround has already surfaced that lets Facebook users get at their Gmail contacts.

Facebook isn’t dropping any more hints about its Monday event, so for now word that a new email service will be launched should be considered speculation.

Google Chrome Beta Can 'Prerender' Web Pages

One of the most recent builds of the Google Chrome browser offers support for an intriguing new feature: "prerendering" of Web pages, offering even faster Web browsing by guessing which pages you'll visit next.

In the 9.0.576.0 build and subsequent versions of Chrome for Windows and Linux, the new build "add[s] support for page prerendering", according to the changelog. The feature had previously been part of the open-source Chromium technology. The new Chrome build is part of the Chrome beta channel, and users who use the standard "stable" Chrome builds must download the beta version.

The concept of prerendering should be something like a "crystal ball," where Chrome predicts which site a user will visit next, preloads it, and then delivers the content almost instantly. In the "about:flags" section, prerendering is described as "speculatively prerenders complete webpages in the background for a faster browsing experience". It is turned off by default.

A Google spokesman characterized prerendering as "an experiment". "While we are always working to improve the speed of Google Chrome, this particular feature is still an experimental idea that is in the very early phases of development," he said in email. "Over the coming months we plan to work on prototyping the feature in Chromium builds behind a flag to test out various approaches and see if this is a feasible way to improve browser speed."

In a sense, Google already launched a similar feature on Tuesday, the same day as the prerendering feature went live. Then, Google launched Google Instant Previews, which preloads a portion of the page when a special "magnifying glass" icon is clicked.

"We match your query with an index of the entire Web, identify the relevant parts of each Web page, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second," Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post describing Google Instant Previews. "Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting."

Whether or not the feature actually works at this point is uncertain. ConceivablyTech, which tested the feature, found that, when turned on, the feature seemed to improve the load times of Web pages, but not consistently, with most improvements confined to smaller, less efficiently coded sites. It's also not clear which Web sites or links Chrome will choose to pre-load, although hovering over an HTML link would seem to be a good indicator that a user intends to click on it.

In informal PCMag.com tests, I found that some Web sites, such as Engadget, seemed to load more quickly than others. ReadWriteWeb for example, seemingly loaded slightly slower when using the new Chrome build. ConceivablyTech also noted a small spike in traffic when hovering over a link; I did a few times, but not consistently.

Loading a Web page often depends on pulling information from several different servers to load ads and other modules, however, and it's unclear how deep Google goes in loading this data. It's also unclear whether, even enabled, the new technology is even turned on.

Google representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The beta Chrome browser also includes performance enhancements like "Snap Start," which enables an experimental TLS extension which removes a round trip from HTTPS handshakes, supposedly increasing performance. Verbatim Instant also makes the address bar load URLs as you type suggestions into it.

Other experimental features include the ability to toggle between top and side tabs and to also disable outdated plugins that may have known security vulnerabilities.

Samsung Galaxy Models

A Pocketable Train Wreck:

This is it. The Galaxy Tab is the first Android tablet meant for humans. But is it actually fit for humans? No.

Samsung Galaxy Tab (Sprint)
Price: $399 w/ contract, ($599 w/out)
Display: 7 inches @ 1024x600
Processor: 1GHz ARM Cortex A8
Memory and Storage: 512MB RAM, 2GB built-in + 16GB microSD
Cameras: 3.2MP (rear); 1.2MP (front)
Monthly Data Plans: 2GB for $30; 5GB for $60

Put simply, the Galaxy Tab is the first post-iPad tablet that matters, because it's the first tablet that's trying to be legitimate competition. It aims to break a lot of ground. Powered by iOS's biggest rival, the Tab essentially kicks off the next generation of tablets. And, at the size of a paperback, it's one of the first to seriously test how well a seven-inch tablet really works. There's a lot riding on this thing.

Here's the thing about tablets: Size is everything. Size is the whole point. It's what makes browsing, reading, creating and sharing better on a tablet than on a phone, even if they're both running the same software.

If you take iPhone apps and simply scale them up for the iPad, most of them don't feel right. If you take Android apps and scale them up for the Tab, the majority of them—Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds—work perfectly. (Except for when they don't, like The Weather Channel.) That's because the Galaxy Tab is small enough that apps simply blown up a little bit still fundamentally work. Which means, conversely, that there's almost no added benefit to using the Tab over a phone. It's not big enough. Web browsing doesn't have greater fidelity. I don't get more out of Twitter. A magazine app would be cramped.

Videos do look better than they do on a phone, but a bigger tablet would be even better.

There is no way to not feel like a total dorkface while typing on this thing. In portrait, it's like tapping on a massive, nerdy phone. In landscape, it's just dumb. You still have to thumb type, only you're stretching out further, and text entry swallows up the entire screen. Swype might be dandy on a phone, but on a seven-inch screen it doesn't work so well—you have to travel a lot further to sketch out words. In other words, you get the worst of a phone's input problems—amplified.

In the places where Samsung tries to make the Tab feel more like a tablet than a big phone, it's not afraid to borrow liberally from what Apple's done on the iPad. The music app (a huge improvement over the standard Android player) bears an uncanny resemblance to the iPad's iPod app, while the faux-realness of the Calendar, Contacts and Memo apps feel like Chinatown knockoffs of Cupertino software.

The Tab feels like a grab bag of neglect, good intentions and poor execution. Example: Samsung's built-in task manager, with one-touch kill switches to free up gobs of RAM, is plenty effective at dealing with apps running in the background. But why does it have to be there in the first place. Should you really be actively managing background apps?

Typically, the point of a compromise is to bring together the best of both sides. The Tab is like a compromise's evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all of the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits. With more apps geared to its tweener size, it could be a lot better, but it's not clear they're coming anytime soon, if ever. The Tab is an awkward first attempt at this kind of tablet—wait for somebody else to do it better.

None of these "4G" networks is really 4G

 The Dirty Secret of Today's 4G: It's not 4G

Right now, every major carrier in the US is touting a "4G" network that's either available or being rolled out. Sprint is pushing WiMax. AT&T and Verizon are pushing LTE (Long-Term Evolution). T-Mobile is pushing HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access Evolved). They're all faster than the "3G" speeds than we're used to, with WiMax and HSPA+ delivering consistent, real-world speeds of anywhere from 3Mbps-12Mbps today. But a rep for the ITU told me flatly, "The fact is that there are no IMT-Advanced—or 4G—systems available or deployed at this stage." Calling their newer, faster networks "4G" is "completely marketing" by the carriers, says Gartner analyst Phil Hartman.

The ITU has actually just decided which technologies are officially designated as IMT-Advanced—"true 4G technologies" in its eyes—after looking at six candidates. The winners:LTE-Advanced (LTE Release 10)and WirelessMAN-Advanced (aka 802.16m aka WiMax Release 2). In other words, the next versions of today's LTE and WiMax. Despite sharing the names, and being developed by the same groups as their predecessors, the for-serious 4G networks will be "pretty different" at a technical level, says Hartman.

If you think top speeds of 300Mbps for LTE and 72Mbps for WiMax are impressive, true 4G makes them look downright pokey. Today's 4G is "not anywhere near what the 4G experience will be in 10-15 years," says Hartman. You're talking about speeds of "up to a gigabit a second" in a wireless LAN, and 100Mbps for fully mobile applications. In other words, true 4G is a massive leap, not a dainty skip forward. There's also little things, like full capability for voice in LTE-Advanced, which there's no standard for in the current LTE spec.

The goal of true 4G is to create a superfast, incredibly interoperable, basically ubiquitous global networks. What we've got now and in the very near future is pretty good, and definitely better than what we've had. But they're no 4G.

The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses

This is one of the most surprising and awesome tales ever told in the history of medicine. These twins are Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Their brains and sensory systems are networked together, but they have separate personalities. Their story defies belief.

So much, in fact, that Tatiana and Krista Hogan shouldn't be alive at all. Their chances of surviving the pregnancy, birth and first months of life were almost zero. Surprisingly, they turned four on October 25, and they are still healthy and happy, as you can see in the photo above.

They play Nintendo Wii games against each other, they fight for toys and they share food and physiological functions. But they also share their senses. For example, one can pick an object out of her field of view, while the twin looks at the object.

Most importantly, however, they can share each other thoughts, like their grandmother—Louise McKay—describes:

They share thoughts, too. Nobody will be saying anything, and Tati will just pipe up and say, ‘Stop that!' And she'll smack her sister.

Scientists are nothing short of absolutely amazed. Here you have two kids, completely different from each other, with their own distinct personality, but with connected brains and sensory systems. Dr. Douglas Cochrane—neurosurgeon at Vancouver's Children's Hospital—has tested their networking abilities:

Their brains are recording signals from the other twin's visual field. One might be seeing what the other one is seeing.

Nobody can possibly imagine how this may work and feel for them. And since they haven't developed their full verbal skills yet, scientists can't ask them about it. I don't know if they will have a lot of answers for them, however. If they ask me how I see or smell things, there is no way that I could accurately describe it. These actions just happen. Like you and me, they have no other point of reference. Their life is the only one they know. For them, sharing thoughts and senses is the only way things could be.

But whatever the implications for science and philosophy are, their mother is just happy and grateful for every day with them. She also believe they're here for a reason but, "we just don't know the reason yet."

I don't know what that reason could be, but the mere fact that they are alive, happy, loving and being loved, is enough for me. [Macleans]

RockMelt - Your Browser. Re-imagined. Connect for an invitation.

RockMelt Browser Comes Out from Behind Its Rock

• 

We first heard about RockMelt, a browser startup backed by the Netscape developer Marc Andreessen, just over a year ago. It's been in stealth mode since then, but finally on Monday a beta version became available to the public. It's based on the fast, highly HTML5-compliant Chromium foundation that comes from Chrome Browser.

PCMag.com met with RockMelt's founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes last week for an early look at the new browser software. Entering a competitor into a full field that includes Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, not to mention an even more direct socially enhanced-browser competitor, Flock, may seem questionable, but Visheria and Howes made a fairly compelling case for it. Their point was that the current all-purpose browsers don't reflect most people's actual usage patterns.

Reinventing the Browser
"At RockMelt we are reinventing the browser for the way people use the Web today," said Howes. "We think this has changed dramatically from the way people used it just a few short years ago. But all the browsers available today, although they've gotten a lot faster, are still just about navigating web pages. We built features into the browser to address people's three top browsing behaviors: interacting with friends, consume news and information, and searching."

RockMelt builds in support for social networks and news/information sites in the form of left and right margin toolbars that alert users any time there's new content to consume. At this beta launch, support for Facebook and Twitter is built in, and you'll even have to log in using your Facebook credentials to start using the browser. This also means anywhere you run RockMelt, your settings and alert statuses will be synced via the cloud.

The left rail shows icons for your contacts, indicating whether they're online and available for chat, which you can engage right from the sidebar that pops out. And this chat is richer than that inside Facebook, allowing collaborative Web photo and video viewing. You can choose which of your top Friends you want to have icons appear for in the rail, and search for any of the rest. Each user icon also shows if the Friend has new posts or messages for you to read.

On the right side of the browser is a column of site icons. Again, Facebook and Twitter are prominent here, offering full viewing and posting of any updated content. But you can also add any news or information site, and clicking on its icon will pop out a list of the most recent articles, using the site's RSS feed. Any panel that pops out can be torn out to live on the desktop as a separate window.

A New Kind of Search
One of RockMelt's most helpful innovations is what it does for search. The browser adds a separate search box to Chrome's Omnibox, but when you enter a query, just the results appear in a panel. You can click on any of these to view the full site in the main window. Since all the sites are preloaded as soon as you enter the search query, the experience is much more responsive than a standard search process. The idea sort of takes Bing's right-side text previews to the next level.

Another very common browsing behavior that RockMelt facilitates is sharing Web pages. Nearly every Web page, including this one, has some kind of "Share" interface. RockMelt bypasses this with its own Share button right in the browser. This spares you from logging into each sharing site separately, since you'll already be logged in. Having one button in the browser also means you won't have to hunt for the sharing feature on the site, since there's no consistency among sites as to where this will appear.

"There's a reason we designed the edges; this is a new UI construct," Vishria told us. "They're thin, but there's a lot of power there, but it doesn't get in your way when you're working. If you look at the product overall, it's a browser that's much more personal than anything else. It's my friends, my sites, my services. The cloud service enables the push notifications, and allows me to log in from any Mac or PC RockMelt instance and get exactly my experience."

What About Privacy?
I asked the RockMelt founders about a topic that often gets internet users hot: Privacy. A browser that you log into and that stores your Facebook content on its servers might be cause for a raised eyebrow, considering all the flack Facebook itself has gotten. Here's the answer I got: "We're not running ad networks, so we're not trying to target users in any way. We're not storing personal information about users and what they do. We anonymize info about what users are doing for the sole purpose of making RockMelt better. We never record info about users, what they're doing online, searches they're doing, anything like that." Sounds reassuring enough.

Though you could do a lot of what RockMelt does with extensions, the percentage of the overall Web-browsing public that actually uses bookmark buttons, let alone looks for and installs extensions, is minuscule. Having these tools pre-built into a browser could end up in more utility for average users. And the preloaded search result pages could save users a lot of time navigating back and forth between result links and the search page.

Finally I asked how RockMelt would make money: "There is a proven business model for browsers today, around the one feature that is built directly into browsers, search. We think in the future that there will be opportunities to build additional services into the browser as well. You can imagine gaming or commerce, for example. But for now, we're focused on building our user base–we're on a race to a million users–and the most effective way to get there is by building the best product possible."

The RockMelt beta can be downloaded in versions for Mac and PC starting today from rockmelt.com.