Twitter users can now make voice calls to each other

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing "@call @username"--where "username" is someone's Twitter ID--into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period--after which the call will end--as "the verbal equivalent of a tweet."
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Fast Flip: Google's new content browser

Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical "turn the pages" metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it'll feel natural to use.

Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast. But it still feels forced. It's an intermediate online format that gives you an experience that's even more linear than a print publication, and it provides less overall context than you can get from a moderately well-design Web site.
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Ads--the new malware delivery format

Instead of hacking into major online sites to embed malware, malicious hackers are going in through the front door by exploiting security holes in systems for delivering ads.

It happened just days ago, for instance, to the Web site of The New York Times. The newspaper company informed readers on Sunday about a rogue ad that was popping up on its site. The ad warned visitors to NYTimes.com that their computer may be infected with a virus and redirected them to a site that purports to scan the computer and offers to sell antivirus software.

This is common behavior for what is known as fake security alerts, or "scareware," designed to trick people into paying for something they don't need. Use of this type of scam is on the rise.
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Microsoft believes Windows 7 will ace Chrome OS, Apple

Although the conventional wisdom is that the rise of the Netbook is hurting the Windows business, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday that lower-cost laptops can actually be a good thing.

Speaking at an investor conference, general manager Charles Songhurst said that overall, most people buying Netbooks are either multiple PC owners in developed markets or first-time PC buyers in emerging markets.

"From what we see they are incremental," Songhurst said. "They are new scenarios."

Even if that is true, the fact is that Netbooks have been growing in numbers, while traditional PCs have slumped--a shift that has undeniably hurt the average amount of money Microsoft is getting for each copy of Windows.
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Trend Tracker tracks the emerging Twitter trends

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it's more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what's pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.
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