Google Wave has finally turned on email notifications as a feature for users who want to see immediate, hourly, or daily email notifications for new and updated waves.
Email updates can be turned on via the Inbox dropdown menu. Once on, Google Wave will notify you with a summary of updates to your waves and email you when you're added to a new wave. Thankfully you'll only receive one update for each individual wave — instead of receiving an email for each update to a wave — until you log into that wave again.
As notifications are still in the testing phase you can definitely expect the experience to be somewhat buggy. Google warns that you could get notifications for updated waves even if you're the one that made the update, you can't turn off notifications via the email link, and information in the notification may not show all the participants in a wave.
Still, the option of email notifications is far better than no option at all. We have a sneaking suspicion that Google may have rushed the feature out to get inactive wavers absent in the past few months back into the wave experience. To that same purpose, Google recently released a smarter API in an effort to spur more developer interest in their preview product.
Bizzy has collected more than 173,000 local business reviews since March by making them simple and mobile. Now it's adding the third variable that it hopes will compete with long-form review sites like Yelp: community.
A new version of the iPhone and Android apps went live on Tuesday that allows users to follow and comment on other users' reviews.
Until this point, Bizzy has recommended local businesses to users by matching them with other users who have similar tastes — as determined by the businesses visited in the past and a survey at sign up. In March the app added a "check out" feature that allows users to leave short, emoticon-style reviews ("Love It," "Meh" or "No tnx") of venues as they're leaving and thereby easily add more recommendation data to Bizzy's database.
The matching process by which Bizzy makes its recommendations has been invisible to users until now.
The reviews and a short comment could be shared on Facebook and Twitter and users could see the people who liked certain venues, but there was no way for them to keep track of each other. Now Bizzy has added a network of its own to help them do so.
"Your friends on Facebook and Twitter are not necessarily the same people interested in you reviews," Bizzy founder Gadi Shamia says.
Bizzy's new app helps you find people by combing your address book, Twitter and Facebook for other Bizzy users. Then it recommends a handful of users who have similar tastes.
Theoretically, adding these people will result in a continuous feed of relevant reviews. Someone who loves to eat at Subway will get one kind of recommendation, and someone who loves five-star French restaurants will get another. There's also a tab for finding reviews in the area and a "Try it" list that is similar to Foursquare's "To-Do" list.
Creating a Twitter-like feed for recommendations is a concept that's been used for dining recommendations before. And it makes a lot of sense for customization.
But is Bizzy's user base broad enough to sustain this sort of feature? I might like Bizzy, but how many of my friends — whose reviews I would be most interested in — are also logged into the relatively new startup? The feature that matches you with people who have similar tastes and the local tab might be enough to overcome this hurdle.
"The 308th review does not add a lot of value," says Bizzy VP of Marketing Ryan Kuder about the new strategy. "At some point you need to come up with a new way to discover places."
Ellen DeGeneres is a comedian, actor, talkshow host, and writer born Jan. 26, 1958. Ellen first burst into the scene as a standup comic in the early 1980s. Later, Ellen appeared in her own sitcom, Ellen, and a number of films starting in the 1990s, including Mr. Wrong, The Love Letter, and voice acted as Dory in the Pixar film Finding Nemo, and its sequel, Finding Dory. Since 2003, Ellen has hosted the daytime talkshow The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which has embraced internet and web culture, often inviting the starts of viral videos on the program, such as the teens behind Damn Daniel and Noah Ritter, a.k.a. Apparently Kid. In 1997 Ellen came out as gay on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was later portrayed on her sitcom, Ellen. In 2008, Ellen wed her girlfriend Portia de Rossi, who later changed her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres. In 2016, Ellen was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, nation's highest civilian honor, by then President Barack Obama.
After more than a year of Apple teasing its smart home platform, we're finally getting a look at how some of the first HomeKit-enabled products will work with Siri.
If a new report is to be believed, Apple is working on turning Siri into a full-blown Google Now competitor.
Watch the woman behind the voice of Siri, Susan Bennett, answer some awkward questions from her "daughter."
The Russian-language version of Apple's digital assistant Siri recently gave some users a surprise when asked questions with the word "gay" in the sentence.
A company working to build a smarter, more adept version of Siri just closed a $12.5 million funding round.
Jimmy Kimmel pitted Amazon's Alexa against Apple's Siri during Monday's show to prove Siri is one badass software.
A 20-year-old Florida man accused of killing his friend had a screenshot of a query with Siri for tips on where to hide a dead body, evidence suggests.