With today’s Beta launch Boxee aims to enter newer territories with the launch of a dedicated Boxee Box in partnership with D-Link. What’s more important is a totally revamped and redesigned interface for Boxee, that makes using it even more fun. The UI changes aren’t the only changes though, Boxee beta brings about many major under the hood changes that will allow for less resource intensive playback of your media.

Boxee for Windows will shift from using the OpenGL graphics engine to DirectX runtime, along with support for Nvidia’s cheaper but faster Graphics chips. I believe these are major steps for Boxee, because for so long it has remained in the confines of Mac and AppleTV users, with Windows/Linux Adoption being almost negligible.

Before I tell you about the Dedicated Boxee box, lets have a sneak peak into the new Beta interface. And I have to say the new UI is a marked improvement over the old one, and I can’t wait for the nice people at Boxee HQ to give me access to the beta

This is the new Home screen. The most visible change is the shifting of the navigation from Left to top center. Along with it comes a new centralized hub for all your content. You can now see recommendations from friends on Boxee, Facebook or Twitter (via RSS feeds), recommendations from Boxee’s staff and partners (Featured) and the latest episodes from your favorite shows or things you’ve saved for later (Queue).

The new global menu, makes Navigation even more easier than it was before. This menu makes it easy to access helpful resources (TOP – Logout, Settings, Now Playing, Queue, Feed, History), the main menu (MIDDLE – Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps, Files) and shortcuts (BOTTOM) to your favorite Apps, TV Shows, Movies, or folders. This has to be my favorite new feature of the Boxee Beta. Makes me feel that the old navigation was boring and slow!

The screenshots above show the new TV Shows Library and Photos in action. The new sidebar on the left, makes searching/sorting etc. even more easier than it was before.

The New Boxee makes sharing even more fun and easier. After all the entire Boxee experience is a social experience. So now you’re gonna have an endless amount of media to consume thanks to your friends.

At the heart of the new Boxee is the Queue that runs thorough out the software. As you browse your library, you can continuously queue up items. So the next time you don’t have to remind yourself that you wanted to catch up with the latest episode of “How I Met Your Mother”!

There’s a lot more that’s changed in Boxee beta, which I can’t talk about, because I don’t have direct access to the Beta. But looking from the screenshots already posted on the internet, I’m already in love with the new Boxee.

Now coming to the Boxee Box from D-Link, here’s what Senior Marketing Executive Daniel Kelley at D-Link had to say :

“By pairing Boxee’s innovative social entertainment platform with D-Link’s technology we’re able to create a solution that introduces people to what TV should be. Additionally we’re bringing a new level of social interaction to the living room.”

The Boxee Box will have HDMI, SPDIF and RCA Audio connections, Plus two USB ports and it will work on both 802.11N. The price isn’t known yet, nor are the other technical details. What we all know is that Boxee will debut it during at the CES 2010. However rumors point to sub $200 price point which I believe will be very attractive to many home users.

Looks like 2010 will be the year when Digital Media finally makes the transition into our Living rooms. Thanks to Boxee, this is a space that we are all excited going into 2010.

Image Credit : Phil Campbell | Screenshots via Boxee Blog

Looks like we will be very soon seeing the first iPhone only Social Network or a Consumer Network as the guys behind TheBlackApp put it.

Nothing much is really known about this startup at the moment, but it could potentially be a hit considering how much Internet crazy iPhone users are. They plan to launch it on June 5th which means that it will possibly launch before the iPhone firmware version 2 appears at the WWDC this June.

The only question will this be a native app that runs on Jailbroken iPhones, or will it be a native app using the SDK or will it be a web app?

I tried finding out as much as possible, but couldn’t. I’ve emailed the developers and am awaiting their reply. Once they do, I’ll update this post with more details. Until then lets keep our fingers crossed people!

Right now the registrations are on, so you might as well signup before the slots run out.

Have a look : TheBlackApp, Thanks Shankar Ganesh

Here are the answers to the questions that I put forward to the developers of The Black App :

• Will this work on the official SDK or Jailbroken iPhones? Or will it work as a Web App via Mobile Safari?Both
• What kind of social/consumer network are you trying to build?This will not be a social network, it will be a consumer one. Meaning, members will receive benefits such as discounts, special offers, etc. These will be based on the type of app–each one being more exclusive than the other.
• What are the special features of The Black App?Can’t get into that yet
• Could you tell me about your motivation behind this?iPhone/iTouch owners are a special group of consumer. Together they form a considerable buying demographic.
• Will we get to see a preview of The Black App before the 5th of June?Yes, but I can’t give you a firm date yet.
• Could you please mail me some screeenshots of The Black App in the early stages of its development?Sure… But closer to the launch date.

The developer has asked me to withhold his name from this post, and I honor that request. I will be watching The Black App and see how it goes. IMHO it should provide some real benefit to iPhone users worldwide.

Here is what Wei Zhu of Facebook had to say about the new library

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

I have to say, that this really is a good move considering the popularity that the Facebook Apps have. If the developers could take it beyond Facebook and leverage the power of the Open Web, then it means a big win for Mark Zuckerberg and team.

Well this announcement has its own share of privacy concerns as well. The most important thing is that Facebook now have a way from which they can collect even more data about its users and what they do on the web, by using the power of cookies.

Facebook is definitely trying to be a Internet major here, and is trying to muscle up its power to control the web. Looking from another perspective though shows Facebook trying to unleash the potential of the Web. By allowing developers to build more and more applications for the open web, Facebook now has a way to add more and more new members into its service, while retaining control over the millions of relationships that other users of Facebook have aka the Social Graph.

But this announcement can possibly be a game changer and by becoming a application host. This move would surely make other competitors think about become app hosts themselves, by opening up their platforms for developers to use and build apps that would run anywhere on the Web.

One of the biggest problems with Facebook is that, app requests keep pouring in at a rate more than you can keep up with. I had over 250 invites to various Facebook apps ranging all the way from boring to fun. I just wanted to ignore all of the app requests in a simple elegant solution, but there was no “Ignore All” button to be found anywhere on the app requests page.

Clicking the Ignore button on every single app request would have taken eternity for me to clear them and make it easy to figure out the other stuff on Facebook. Well thanks to a simple bookmarklet I could remove all the pending requests in about 15 seconds. Neat Uh!

Just Go to Ignoreall.com and bookmark the bookmarklet in your browser (currently works on Firefox and IE). Once you have it bookmarked, head over to this page and click on the bookmark. This should remove all the pending app requests.

And the nicest thing, this trick only removes the app requests, which means your friend and group requests stay unchanged.

Now if only Facebook would make things simpler for us.

Via Digital Inspiration

This is not good news for the News Corp owned Myspace.  Myspace has had its fair share of privacy concerns in the past. But this major leak puts all of them to shame. Over half a million photos have been leaked on BitTorrent, and the catch here is that all the leaked photos have been taken from private albums on Myspace.

Well that just made just about everyone’s private moments for the whole world wide web to see. This sets a very bad precedent for Myspace, and I am sure we’d be seeing some big legal battles on this.

The creator of the file says he used the Myspace Security hole that was revealed last week by Wired, and while he created this 17GB of a file, just to demonstrate that this could be done, and he believes that a lot more of others could be using it for more nefarious purposes.

The security hole was closed last week after the Wired report, but by then DMaul (the creator of this file) had run an automated script to run through over 44,000 private Myspace profiles and extract all the private pictures out of them. He has rolled these images over into a Zip archive and released it on the Piratebay, advertising the torrent with a tagline saying Pictures taken exclusively from Private Profiles.

Well I just popped onto Piratebay and as of now the torrent has 7 Seeders, with nearly 1000 people downloading the torrent. Here are a few comments from the torrent for you :

bygtyme69r : why did you zip 17GBS?? it will take weeks or months to DL

twdmaul : I had to zip it. nothing plays well with that many files. it was very difficult to handle. i will have additional seeds on monday. should take no longer than 5 days to get it fully spread.

TheKogut : Just be patient, kids. We’re all sitting on this thing, and soon enough it will get distributed.

This is a significant breach into Myspace, and the saddest thing is that News Corp hasn’t yet come up with an explanation on this one yet. I had this story running as a draft the whole day yesterday waiting for someone like Techcrunch or Mashable to pick up this, but sadly no one did.

Does this mean, that we blogger’s don’t care. I personally take this breach very seriously, and it shows that Internet however private place it claims to be, it just doesn’t cut it. What depresses me more, is that no major media outlet took this news out and gave it the fire it deserves.

Do we all grown ups really like outsiders looking at the private pictures of our Kids? Thats one question I would like to ask all of you.

And for obvious reasons, please don’t comment asking me where you could find the torrent. I won’t tell you where it is, because it isn’t meant to be shared. Come on guys, show some decency..

Via Wired

 Digg is about to Launch the most awaited Images Section later tonight. In conjunction with the release of the image section, Kevin Rose also decided to bump a few things up, and add a couple of new features here and there. Most of the new stuff is related to Images Anyways :

Well here is what Kevin Rose has to say about the new stuff on Digg :

• New Universal Taxonomy
  Now you can submit news, images, or videos to any category on Digg! Categories will be consistent across the board, which means you can view all media types in a given topic, or view one media type at a time (e.g., only images under the “sports” category). We’re also excited to support the launch with new categories. “Offbeat” will be its own category, with new topics, and we’re adding a whole new “Lifestyle” category with topics like Autos, Food & Drink, and Travel. As always, if you don’t want to see a particular topic or media type on Digg, you can click the customize button in the navigation to filter your view.

• New Images Crawler
  Submitting images to Digg is basically the same as submitting news and videos, with a few notable differences. When you submit a link to a web page containing multiple images, Digg will crawl the page and present up to ten image thumbnails from that page for you to choose the one you want. We’ve also added this technology to news submissions.
• Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
  We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

Along with these new features, a new Comments system is also expected to make its debut today. I am subscribing to the Images Popular feed right away. I’m sure its the best way to kill time.

Via Digg Blog

The Rumor mills are at work again, and this time its Digg which is making the rounds. Apparently Digg is up for sale for about $300 Million. Valleywag editor Owen Thomas tells that "a source rules out all the big Internet players–not Microsoft, not Google, not Yahoo, not News Corp.," and that CBS had "taken itself out of the running."

Thomas also went on to speculate who the actual buyers might be, and he thinks it might be the New York Times, or the Washington Post. The reason you are not seeing a big technology company here is because, Digg has always been a news oriented site and a Big Media company might be the ideal fit for Digg incase it does get sold.

Also Webware reports that the Digg CEO has decided not to comment on the rumors. This could still mean something, because normally companies on the verge of Acquisition deny all kinds of rumors regarding their Acquisition. It would be nice to see the poster child of Web 2.0 go, but I just hope that Digg lands in the hands of a company that would maintain the Digg brand and not manipulate it for its own needs.

 The New Homepage. One of the best homepages of a blog network I have ever seen all my life as a blogger. Just love the way the logo is positioned and the nice light rays in the background.

The Network homepage. This page shows all the recent entries from the member blogs. A Very beautiful header, that stands out on the page. There is a glitch though, they should be removing the banner saying that Ali2 launches on 9th October. The page is visually pleasing, and it is extremely easy to read the stuff written on the page.

 my.9rules Homepage. my.9rules is the social network of the 9rules Network. This page has been redesigned extremely well, and is definitely the best page on the new 9rules website. You can share interesting stuff with other 9rulers on my.9rules.

Overall the new design is refreshing, and I must say 9rules is one of the elite Blog Networks, where every blogger wants to be a part of. I am now going to take part in the 9rules community actively and find a lot more interesting stuff to write about.

If you haven’t already heard of Streamy the Digg Killer then Streamy is the web aggregator that brings you the best news from all the over web. I have been playing around with Streamy for the past few days and I must say that it exceeded my expectations from it by leaps and bounds. From now on Streamy becomes my chief source of Blogosphere news after Techmeme and Digg. So if you want to try out Streamy then drop in a comment in the following posts :

• Firefox Campus Edition Sucks! Really!
• Back to College : 10 Must Have Apps
• 23 Must Have Mac Apps
• 16 Windows Freeware that you Didn’t Know About
• 15 Must Have iTunes Addons

Once you have dropped a comment on those posts then let me know by dropping a comment on this post or by contacting me by email. The first 5 commenter’s will get the Streamy invites. Please make sure that you leave comments that are relevant to the blog post and not just write random stuff.

Old Design :

New Design :

From what the above screenshot looks like I feel Google has done a brilliant job by making sure that the new interface is not completely alien to its huge base of users and at the same time it has made it more attractive and functional. Job Well Done Google!

A Few Notable Changes Include :

• Removal of Stylish First Alphabet of a user from the profile.
• A New Navigation bar.
• Rounded Edges (Web 2.0 huh!)

I can’t wait to test out the new design myself. I’ll post a detailed screencast with details with what is new on orkut..

Image Credits : Google Blogoscoped