Power of Thought

News Corp.’s MySpace is set to release a major redesign next week, company representatives said late Thursday evening. The site doesn’t look that different; it’s still clearly MySpace. But a number of features have been revamped to improve user experience: namely, the homepage, navigation tools, profile editor, search features, and the MySpaceTV player.

A formal release is set to go out on Monday, and the first new features will show up on the site on Wednesday.

The redesign effort has been under way for more than six months, with the goals of appealing to a broader demographic and letting users interact with the site more (i.e. keeping them around), and has involved in-home studies for testing purposes.

The relaunch of the homepage proper has been kept somewhat under wraps, likely because a “major” advertiser is set to take over the site when it debuts. But MySpace has been liberal with the details of most of the other new improvements. They’re not particularly revolutionary, but should still do a thing or two to combat user experience complaints on the social network.

The MySpace profile editing tool, for example, has been modified so that HTML expertise is less of a prerequisite. A sidebar lets users browse through themes and alter them with a color palette, rather than hard-coding changes.

The MySpaceTV player, which technically competes with YouTube, has been improved to support high-definition video and improved full-screen mode as part of the Flash 9 release. The embeddable player now has internal search as well as a way to view the top MySpace videos; it’s still playing catch-up with the likes of YouTube, but it’s still a big improvement.

One of the most heavily altered sections of the new MySpace is search; now, MySpace members will navigate through a set of tabs to search personal profiles, music profiles, the entire MySpace site, videos on MySpaceTV, or the Web as a whole. The site has also worked with the Lucene open-source search engine project.

MySpace’s chief rival, Facebook, is also set to unveil a redesigned profile page in the near future; developers on its application platform are already testing it out. MySpace’s redesign does not appear to alter the experience for developers who are building on its OpenSocial-compatible platform.

MySpace additionally has a data portability project, “Data Availability,” on the way.

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Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags–information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken–and now it’s trying to let users get more out of them.

At the Web 2.0 Summit Friday, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to demonstrate two new features, which are scheduled to debut in coming weeks. First is a revamped Flickr map page, an interface that lets people look at the photos taken at a specific location. Next is a new “places” feature that lets people explore specific geographic sites–a catalog of more than 70,000 so far.

For a look at the new pages, you can look at a gallery of Flickr screenshots posted by CNET.

The changes bring some refinement to the current world of geotagging, which is not for the faint of heart. (Though my experience has been a lot smoother once I got the time zone issue straightened out.)

Flickr’s current map interface presents users with a map dotted with pink circles; a number in each circle indicates how many photos tagged with that location have been recently uploaded to Flickr. The new maps interface replaces those circles with the descriptive tags commonly used to label regional photos.

For example, some areas are likely to show tags with geographic descriptions such as “London.” Others could get event-based tags that show a spurt in popularity, such as the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race, Butterfield said. Not too many words fit on a map of the world, but users can click a button to bring up a fresh supply.

“The current user interface is slow and confusing. People don’t get the idea of a paging through photos in this kind of user interface,” Butterfield said.

So far the tag interface appears at the global map level, but Flickr will gradually spread it to more local views, said Dan Catt, a Flickr engineer who works on the mapping technology.

The places pages offer a pre-packaged view of thousands of locations. Clicking on a link on the maps page can take a user to the nearby place page, sifted to show the tag on which the user clicked. The page itself shows recent and interesting photos taken at the site, featured photographers who have photographed the region often, and popular and recent tags that lead to a new category of photos for that area.

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The advent of digital photography has opened up a new world of image editing possibilities including the ability to fill-in blanks or replace unwanted parts of an image. A new algorithm devised by James Hayes and Alexei A. Efros of Carnegie Mellon University facilitates this process by drawing on a huge database of more than a million images from the World Wide Web in order to seamlessly fill in the missing areas of incomplete photographs.

There could be many reasons for an image to feature an undesirable blank area - a patch of bright light that needed to be cropped out or perhaps a shadow, a person or an object ruined an otherwise perfect shot.

The algorithm tackles this problem by completing a given image in a number of different ways leaving the user to select the one which is deemed most suitable. This can be achieved without the user having to label the image fragments being used, or for that matter, offer any direction at all.

‘Holes’ in images are ‘patched’ as suitable image fragments are found and re-arranged to complete the image in a manner that is claimed to be semantically valid. That is, the patched area is consistent with the rest of the image. Hays and Efros claim that their algorithm is a means to restore data missing from an image that ‘should have been there’. Existing methods of filling such blank areas have largely involved drawing image fragments from other parts of the same picture. This algorithm is quite unique in that it draws from an exterior database and also in the means by which it achieves this.

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Apple Inc. unveiled a line of slimmer desktop computers on Tuesday in a long-expected update of its iMac brand, positioning it for the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons.

The new iMacs, which will sport thinner aluminum casings, have displays measuring 20 inches and 24 inches and will cost $1,199 to $1,799, depending on their configurations, said Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs at a media event at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The cost of the 24-inch iMac has been dropped by $200, and Apple has eliminated the 17-inch iMac computer, Jobs said.

The last update to the iMac line was in September 2006, when Apple introduced a model with a 24-inch screen — its largest — and said the entire model line would be powered by Intel chips instead of ones from International Business Machines Corp.

“Apple has grown two to three times the market for the past several quarters,” said analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research. “This product launch should position them well for the back-to-school and holiday seasons.”

Apple recently launched the iPhone mobile device in a bid to build a third major product line alongside its Macintosh computers and iPod media players, but desktop and laptop sales still account for the bulk of its revenue.

In its third quarter, Apple sold 634,000 desktops for revenue of $956 million, accounting for about 18 percent of total revenue.

“The iMac has been really successful for us and we’d like to make it even better,” Jobs said. “We’ve managed to make it even thinner than before.”

Apple laptop sales totaled $1.58 billion in its most recently reported quarter. The MacBook laptop line was not affected by Tuesday’s announcement.

Sales of Macintosh computers have grown faster than the overall PC market, but Apple’s share of the market by unit sales is estimated to be less than 5 percent.

Apple has also used the iPod and, now, the iPhone as “halo” products to draw customers into stores and get them interested in its computers.

Jobs also said that the company was adding a software “button” to the iPhone that allows users to upload photos taken with the built-in camera on the iPhone to Apple’s .Mac online data and Web-hosting service.

Apple shares rose $1.30 to $136.55 in afternoon trading on Nasdaq. The stock has risen 59 percent so far this year, largely on anticipation of strong demand for the iPhone and that enthusiasm for the device will translate into stronger sales of other Apple products.

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Firefox is seeing tremendous adoption rates in some parts of the world. In order to perpetuate this growth trend, Mozilla has to continue to find new ways to bring Firefox to a broader audience. Mozilla is tackling this problem from many different angles, but user retention has emerged as a significant priority for the organization’s Firefox promotion efforts.

According to Mozilla, only fifty percent of the people who download Firefox actually try the browser and only about half of the people who try it continue to use it. Although this is a pretty decent user retention rate for a piece of software that can be downloaded for free, Mozilla recognizes that improving retention is probably the most productive way to increase overall market share. Mozilla has been working with the community to devise strategies for improving retention rates, and the result is a 12 point plan for getting users to stick with Firefox.

Mozilla is working on creating a new support site to address documentation issues and plans to create new download and first run pages that are more instructive. On the development side of things, Mozilla plans to make common plug-ins work better out of the box, work on user interface enhancements that make the browsing experience more natural, and make add-ons easier to manage and install. On Windows, Mozilla plans to change the Firefox icon name to make it more apparent to users that the program is a web browser and improve desktop and quicklaunch icon placement to make the program more accessible. Mozilla is also going to work on brand marketing.

User retention is likely a problem for other cross-platform open source software applications as well. Mozilla’s efforts in the area could provide valuable insight into practical methods that could potentially be employed for other open source projects.

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