BlackBerry turns to 7 OS with social networking features for new 9720 smartphone

BlackBerry has launched the 9720 smartphone running the 7 OS in a bid to stay relevant in the growing low end of the smartphone market.

The launch of the new device comes as BlackBerry on Monday formed a committee to explore strategic alternatives for its future that could include joint ventures or a sale of the company.

As its new BlackBerry 10 operating system struggles to get off the ground, the company is still depending on the old version 7. During its last fiscal quarter BlackBerry shipped 6.8 million smartphones, but only 2.7 million phones running the new OS.

The launch of the BlackBerry 9720, which runs a refreshed version of the BlackBerry 7 OS, may play to the company's dwindling strength. The smartphone has a re-engineered physical QWERTY keyboard with a dedicated BBM key, a trackpad and a a 2.8-inch touchscreen with 480 x 360 pixel resolution.


The smartphone also has a 5-megapixel camera and an FM radio. Connectivity options include HSPA, 802.11n and A-GPS.

On the software side, BlackBerry has focused on social networking features. Users can write a message once and post it simultaneously to their friends on BBM, Twitter and Facebook, for example.

The updated interface also lets users swipe to unlock the phone or access the camera from the lock screen, among other enhancements.

The company didn't provide pricing, but beginning in the coming weeks, the BlackBerry 9720 smartphone will be available in select markets from retailers and carriers in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. BlackBerry didn't disclose plans for U.S. availability.

Review: Nextly brings together the best of RSS, social networks, and Web browsing

Google Reader is dead. It changed forever the way we read our news, and it's gone for good, leaving the arena open for other players to attempt the same feats. Nextly, an innovative reading app based on streams, takes regular RSS feeds, strips them of everything that's annoying about the format, and provides a new reading experience that combines RSS with regular website browsing and social-network surfing.

Nextly turns any webpage or feed into a stream you can easily browse through.
To personalize the experience further, sign into Nextly using Facebook or Twitter. This will give you access to the My Collection and Favorites features, but will also enable Nextly's social Web browsing. Let's say you connected Nextly with your Twitter account; you can now use Nextly's stream to browse your Twitter feed and lists, automatically accessing all tweeted links as full articles. In other words, your Twitter (or Facebook) feed will be miraculously transformed into an easy-to-browse stream, complete with reply, retweet, and other sharing options.

This is all great, you might be thinking, but browsing single feeds doesn't sound too exciting in a post-Google-Reader, Feedly-inspired world. This is where Favorites come in. Once signed in, you can add any stream (or website) to your favorites, which then acts as a regular RSS reader for all intents and purposes.

Bookmark any webpage to your collection, or share it using a unique link.
All your favorite websites are listed under the Favorites tab, and while you can't sort these into folders like you can in other readers, Nextly makes up for it with full articles—no "read more" links—and a built-in social browser. Although Nextly displays full webpages in its streams, these are all pre-loaded, so you never have to wait for them to load while you browse.

Nextly also includes a built bookmarking feature called My Collection, to which you can add articles, tag them, and put them aside for later reading. You can also use the My Collection feature to save important articles for quick reference, and browse it at any time just like any other Nextly stream.

With Nextly, your Twitter feed turns into an RSS feed, with full webpages for each link.
Nextly is still in beta, but you won't notice this most of the time. The only bug I encountered, and this too was rare, was Web elements that failed to load correctly, mostly special ones like an iOS 7 live demo I was trying to check out. There's also no way that I could find to add streams manually if you can't find them in the Explore tab or by using the nextly.com/websitename method. While I was able to browse the vast majority of websites I tried using one of these two methods, I could not browse the ones I failed to find. With that said, if you're tired of truncated RSS feeds and traditional RSS readers, Nextly is sure to brighten your day.

SF Plane Crash: Social Media Is Key First Responder

The Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed at SFO airport
In the aftermath of the Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday at 11:36 a.m., the drama unfolded on social media as witnesses relayed the initial reactions that were then amplified by cable news.

Passenger David Eun, a Samsung exec who was formerly president of AOL Media and Studios, posted his first tweets at 12:13 p.m., within minutes of the crash-landing and fire. According to the Associated Press, at least two people have died and 182 were taken to area hospitals.

Eun, a Harvard Law graduate who also has worked at NBC, calmly posted short but clear bulletins on the crash and the condition of the passengers. (His first cool-under-pressure tweet, which even included the airport's Twitter handle (@flySFO), was retweeted nearly 30,000 times. His Twitter followers grew from 2,000 to nearly 19,000 in hours.

STORY: Cable News Breaks in to Cover Boeing 777 Crash

Prospective Asiana passenger Sheryl Sandberg’s postings on Facebook also were widely quoted in traditional media. “Taking a minute to be thankful and explain what happened,” wrote the Facebook COO. “My family, colleagues Debbie Frost, Charlton Gholson and Kelly Hoffman and I were originally going to take the Asiana flight that just crash-landed. We switched to United so we could use miles for my family's tickets. Our flight was scheduled to come in at the same time, but we were early and landed about 20 minutes before the crash. Our friend David Eun was on the Asiana flight and he is fine.”

Meanwhile, a young woman (@EuniceBirdRah) whose father was on board asked her followers to pray for his safety. "He is on the 777," she wrote as she headed to the airport. Awhile later she sent out another tweet -- tagged for CNN -- with a photo of the burning plane that her father (who had escaped unhurt) had sent to her via text message.

She followed up a few minutes later: "About to go on CNN.. My heart is aching for the passenger, crew, family." Then finally: "God is real."

The story’s development was the latest chapter in what has become an emerging story for the traditional news media, which has found itself ever more reliant on social media bulletins and photos for its most immediate and, often, eye-witness coverage of significant breaking news events.

Saturday, the lesson implicit in that story was dramatically reinforced when traditional news outlets with no reporters immediately on the scene were forced to rely on passengers’ Twitter postings, as well as dozens of photos posted to the Internet by passengers and those waiting inside the airport terminals.

Within a relatively short time, there were videos of the evacuation and fire up on YouTube, which were picked up by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. By then, FNC's Claudia Cowan was on the ground reporting in SF, MSNBC aired a special report with Lester Holt and CNN's international anchor Richard Quest called in to discuss the incident.

Eun's cool-headed series of tweets made him the dominant initial observer of the crash-landing.

Among his Tweets:

"Fire and rescue people all over the place. They're evacuating the injured. Haven't felt this way since 9/11. Trying to help people stay calm. Deep breaths…"

"Lots of activity here. Friends, pls don't call right now. I'm fine."

Review: SocialSafe keeps your social data safe

Chances are, you have tons of information stored in your various social media accounts. Everything from photos and videos to chats with friends, contact lists, and more. If your favorite social network goes offline or becomes unavailable for any reason, all of that data could disappear. But not if you've backed it up with SocialSafe, an easy-to-use PC and Mac tool that makes safeguarding your social data downright fun.

SocialSafe makes it easy to pick and choose which accounts you'd like it to back up.
SocialSafe is free to try for 60 days, but the free version is limited to syncing four social media accounts. After the trial is up, you have to spring for a 12-month license to keep syncing your social networks. It costs $7 for four social network accounts, $17 for ten accounts, and $28 GBP for up to 20 accounts. Any data you download will always be available to you via SocialSafe, even if you do not renew your license.

Using SocialSafe is simple: You authorize it to access your social media accounts, and then set it to sync. SocialSafe supports the biggies in social media, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Vladeo, various blog services, and Facebook pages. If you have more than one Facebook account, you can add both.

A thin column on the left side of SocialSafe's interface offers access to its main features.
Once your accounts have been synced—which can take anywhere from minutes to hours, depending on how much info you have packed in there—SocialSafe stores the data right on your computer. You access all of the info using the SocialSafe interface, which is colorful, attractive, and intuitive.

SocialSafe lets you browse through your social network activity and data in a variety of ways. The calendar view lets you see how active you were on a certain date, while the journal view lets you see your activity in more of a story format. The journal is organized by date, and you can flip through its pages to see your added friends, posted photos, status updates, tweets, and more.

SocialSafe shows you how many times you were active on your various social networks on certain days.
Anyone who relies on Facebook and Instagram to capture and store photos will appreciate how SocialSafe allows you to back up and browse all of your snapshots. You can export the photos to another location on your PC for editing or other uses, too.

One of the most interesting aspects of SocialSafe is its Insights feature, which helps you gauge both the timing of your social networking activity and its reach with your friends and followers. You can see how often you post on certain days of the week, and which of your posts and online activities have proven the most popular. SocialSafe also shows you which friends you interact with the most and which photos have garnered the most feedback.

SocialSafe breaks down your social networking activity by day of the week.
I do wish SocialSafe synced your accounts automatically when you launched it, but that's a minor complaint, given that you can schedule the application to sync at a certain time each day. Overall, SocialSafe is a handy tool for backing up all of that data you store online…and one that makes it fun to browse.

Thanks, But No: Social Media Refuses To Share With Turkey

An anti-government protester wearing a gas mask uses a cellphone to read the news on social media as demonstrators gather at midnight in Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park on June 13.

Turkey's battle with the Internet took a new twist on Wednesday.

A Turkish government minister said Twitter has refused to cooperate with the government, but that Facebook had responded "positively" and was "in cooperation with the state."

Turkish Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Minister Binali Yilderim, quoted in Turkish media, did not elaborate on what this cooperation entails. But Turkish officials have complained that social media outlets aren't sharing user access information with prosecutors and law enforcement agencies.

The story took an additional turn later in the day, when Facebook issued a statement denying that it was cooperating with the government:

"Facebook has not provided user data to Turkish authorities in response to government requests relating to the protests. More generally, we reject all government data requests from Turkish authorities and push them to formal legal channels unless it appears that there is an immediate threat to life or a child, which has been the case in only a small fraction of the requests we have received."

Turkey has stepped back from earlier calls to ban social media, which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called "a menace." A few years back, Turkey did ban YouTube after videos considered insulting to modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, were posted, but the ban was largely ineffectual and was eventually lifted.

Still, the recent protests have the government searching for new restrictions. An official from Erdogan's AK Party recently said, "A false tweet is more dangerous than a bomb. Social media regulation is a must."

Turkey isn't the first country to try to rein in social media sites, which have figured in various protests and civil disobedience around the world. During the 2011 riots in Britain, lawmakers called for social networking sites to be shut down during time of unrest, and China blocked Facebook during 2009 riots.

Facebook was also blocked after Iran's elections that same year, and Egypt briefly closed it during the Arab Spring demonstrations in Cairo.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have forced Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerrys, to comply with local regulations regarding its encrypted content that had left authorities unable to monitor communications.

And as our colleague Deborah Amos reported earlier today on Morning Edition,
the Jordanian government has blocked hundreds of news websites across the kingdom amid rising dissent.
What Turkey intends to do next remains something of a mystery.

Ozgur Uckan, a new-media expert at Istanbul's Bilgi University, tells NPR that censoring social media sites presents a technical challenge, and that may be why officials are talking about criminalizing certain content, in an effort to intimidate users and encourage self-censorship.

But some microbloggers have already been targeted: Several arrests in Ankara during the protests there were of young people who had tweeted about the developing protest. In some cases, the tweets simply warned people to avoid certain parts of the city for their own safety.

 

The Tao of Facebook: 'Social Graph' Takes New Path

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

 

 

Ever noticed that certain things on a Facebook page load faster than others? This is often the case with even the simplest of websites, but with a site the size of Facebook’s globe-spanning social network, the divide is in some ways more pronounced. Facebook, you see, serves information from two very different collections of data.

 

Most data is stored inside a good old fashioned database — the open source mainstay MySQL — but the social networking giant also uses a second system to house data that’s accessed with particular frequency. This system is known as Memcached, and it’s a common thing inside the massive data centers that underpin the world’s largest websites. Memcached stores data in the memory subsystems of the servers that drive Facebook, rather than good old fashioned hard disks. Facebook engineers call it “hot data.” Basically, this means that the data you’re more likely to visit is more likely to the load at speed.

 

The rub is that juggling both MySQL and Memcached isn’t the easiest of tasks for the engineers that build and operate the Facebook machine. But in recent years, the company has built a new system that seeks to ease the use of these two data stores. It’s called TAO, short for “The Associations and Objects,” and it’s been used on the site for “several” years now.

 

“It was important to build something that would help Facebook engineers move fast,” says Facebook software engineer Mark Marchukov. “Before, engineers had to understand the details of how both the cache and the MySQL data stores operated in order to write efficient code, and that slowed down the rate of development. With TAO, we put in an API [application programming interface] that they could use without thinking about the details.”

 

But TAO is more than just a new interface for Memcached and MySQL. According to Marchokov, the company also rebuilt the software that sits behind the API. “We wanted to build something that could do better than a hybrid system consisting of just Memcached and MySQL,” he says. In short, the system is specifically designed for the types of data structures used by Facebook — data structures that define what Facebook calls “the social graph,” the endless tangle of relationships among people and information on the site.

 

“We wondered what an infrastructure built by Facebook for Facebook would look like,” says Facebook director of engineering Venkat Venkataramani.

 

The system — which Facebook discussed for the first time this week — is yet another example of the company building entirely new software to streamline and accelerate its ever-growing online empire. Like Google and Amazon and even Microsoft and Twitter, Facebook has reached such an enormous size, it can no longer rely on software originally designed for much simpler sites.

 

Vert often, Facebook will “open source” its new software creations, sharing them with the world at large. But the company has yet share the code behind TAO. Venkataramani says the company is still considering whether it will do so. Though TAO helps drive the live Facebook site, he says, it is still under development.

 

 

As Social Media Swirl Around It, Supreme Court Sticks to Its Analog Ways

They will be joined, if Twitter is any guide, by thousands of anxious, curious people across the country eagerly waiting for the court to rule on a remarkable number of major cases with huge implications. With just days remaining in its 2013 schedule, the court has left dangling its considered opinions on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the nation’s voting rights laws.

 

“We all crave information instantaneously,” said Ms. Blatt, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who has argued 33 cases before the court, including one that is still pending this year. Last Monday, and again last Thursday, she found herself scouring legal blogs, looking for whatever clues might exist.

 

“I always thought those people were strange, and there I was, doing it,” she said. “People are dying to know something that they can’t.”

 

In a city beset by leaks — a young programmer recently gave a hoard of top-secret documents to newspapers — the high court’s annual rulings remain stubbornly opaque until they are handed out (on paper, first) by the court’s public relations staff. Meanwhile, the nine justices have the luxury of appearing publicly oblivious to the swirl of social media, the angst of Washington’s legal community and the voracious appetite of America’s 24-hour news cycle.

 

Many Washington institutions are making the high-tech transition; even the chairman of the Federal Reserve holds regular news conferences now. But like the Kremlinologists of the cold war, who deduced Communist power struggles by a leader’s presence on the Red Square reviewing stand, modern-day court watchers can do little more than speculate about when and how the court might rule.

 

“You never know when it’s going to come down,” said Mr. Olson, a former solicitor general who would know, if anyone would. A court observer for decades, he has shown up on each of the last three decision days at the court. “I just try to prepare for anything.”

 

Mr. Griffin is a founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization that filed the legal challenge to Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. Four times in the last two weeks, the court has issued decisions in other cases but not about that law’s constitutionality. Each time, Mr. Griffin has returned home and unpacked, lest his suits become wrinkled.

 

On Monday, Mr. Griffin will return once again, joined by the four plaintiffs in the case, who plan to stay in Washington until the high court rules, before they return home to California. If the court overturns the ballot initiative, the couples hope to have a wedding ceremony as soon as possible.

 

Across California, gay rights organizations have started many early mornings refreshing their Web pages for news and then going back to bed. Staff members at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center have elaborate plans for action after any outcome, and they are preparing to head into the office in the early morning as they anticipate widespread celebration or protest in West Hollywood.

 

And lawyers at the office of California’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, have been preparing for weeks with legal memos anticipating a wide range of possible outcomes.

 

The Web is ready, too. On Thursday, after the justices once again did not issue rulings in any of the biggest cases, news organizations blared the “news” to their followers. “BREAKING NEWS: No major decisions from Supreme Court today,” the Yahoo News site announced on its Twitter feed. Another Twitter user wryly observed: “Clearly all Supreme Court judges were unpopular kids in high school and, excited by all the attention now, are gonna drag this out.”

 

A year ago, in the minutes before the court announced its decision on President Obama’s health care law, Twitter users posted more than 13,000 messages a minute about the court. (By comparison, there were 160,000 a minute at the height of the presidential debate in Denver last year.)

 

The court’s term is dwindling fast. The schedule calls for a round of rulings on Monday, and court observers believe the justices may issue decisions on Wednesday and Thursday as well. There has been speculation of a July 1 session, though Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is scheduled to teach a class on the history of the Supreme Court in Prague on July 2.

 

There will be other issues in Washington this week. The Senate is set to take a final vote on an immigration overhaul, perhaps on Thursday. (If the court overturns the federal Defense of Marriage Act first, lawmakers may not need to seek immigration protections for same-sex partners of immigrants, advocates said.)

 

But most of the intellectual guesswork will be about the justices and their rulings.

 

There are ways, if you know them, to offer educated guesses about the timing and authorship (if not the substance) of the court’s coming decisions. The tricks have become de rigueur among the Washington social set, whose members swap Supreme Court theories at cocktail parties the way Angelenos swap movie industry gossip.

 

“Everybody around this time starts to try to predict who has the decision and what it’s going to say,” said Irving L. Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University. Mr. Gornstein calls himself a “participant” in the court-guessing parlor games. This year, he said, is the worst he can remember.

 

“Here you have four huge cases, which is really extraordinary for a Supreme Court term,” Mr. Gornstein said. “I can’t remember when you’ve had this many cases at the end of a term.”

 

Among the tricks of the court-watching trade is knowing that each of the justices is assigned to write the majority opinion in at least one case during each two-week “sitting,” when cases are heard for oral arguments. On Monday, if there are rulings yet to be announced from a particular sitting, and a justice who has not yet written an opinion from that set of cases, that justice might be a good bet.

 

Knowledgeable observers also keep close watch on the number of boxes of rulings set out by the public information officers at the court. The more boxes, the more rulings.

 

“It is a game that everybody’s playing because it’s so important,” Mr. Olson said. “These decisions are really important to the people involved, and they have consequences for a long time.”

 

 

Adam Liptak contributed reporting from Washington, and Jennifer Medina from Los Angeles.

 

 

Mormon missionaries to use social media, go door-to-door less

SALT LAKE CITY -- Mormon missionaries will soon spend less time knocking on doors and more time chatting online with potential converts.
Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced the strategy shift Sunday night in Provo, Utah, during a two-hour presentation to mission presidents that was broadcast worldwide.
Church apostles said the change reflects the growing importance of social media and people's preference to connect over sites such as Facebook rather than opening their homes to strangers.
Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said missionaries will be using social media, blogs, email, text messages and the church's website in their ministry. It will start in a limited number of locations this year and should be in place worldwide sometime next year, leaders said.
"The church must adapt to a changing world," Perry said.
The move is the latest step in the loosening of traditionally strict rules for missionaries expected to devote all their time and attention to "serving the Lord, leaving behind all other personal affairs."
In April, church officials said they would begin allowing missionaries to send emails to friends, priesthood leaders and new converts. Previously, missionaries could only email immediate family members. They've always been allowed to send written letters to friends and others.
Missionaries must send emails through the church's filtered email service on a designated preparation day each week. Emails also must be sent from public computers at locations such as a library where a fellow missionary can see the screen.
The new embrace of technology comes as the church sends more proselyting missionaries around the globe than at any time in history. There has been an unprecedented surge of missionaries since the church's announced in October it was lowering the minimum age for missionaries from 21 to 19 for women and from 19 to 18 for men.
There are 70,000 young men and women on mission now, and church officials say there will be 85,000 by the end of the year. The previous record total of missionaries at one time was 61,600 in 2002, church figures show.
Missions are considered rites of passage for many Mormons, broadening their perspective on the world, strengthening their faith and helping prepare some for future leadership roles within the church.
Young Mormon men are expected but not required to serve missions while women have faced far less pressure to serve. With women now able to undertake missions two years earlier, they are making up a larger percentage of missionaries.
Men serve two years while women go for 18 months.
LDS officials also announced Sunday night that chapels will open more to encourage people to learn about the faith.