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Though Yahoo may have wanted to buy Foursquare, the company has found another way to hook into the world of location-based social networking.

Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has bought Koprol, a social network for mobile users. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, Koprol lets people make friends, share photos, and find popular nearby locations all on the go. The news comes a day after Yahoo and Nokia extended their 5-year-old partnership with an eye toward the rising interest in geo-location offerings, pledging to bring Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo, and Yahoo's e-mail and instant-messaging technology to Nokia's … Read more

In a feature I'll likely find useless, Google has added the ability to drag images directly into e-mails written in Gmail in the Chrome browswer rather than rely on a dialog box to select them as an attachment.

It's a nice idea and I'm all for it, but here's why it's not for me: screen real estate. For most programs I use, they're set to fill the entire screen, so to drag an image into Chrome, I'd have to resize the browser, position it to one side, position the image elsewhere, and then … Read more

With a new version of Chrome, Google has taken a second crack at shielding users from a technical detail that browsers traditionally show: the "http://" in the browser's Web address bar.

Did Google just do us a favor and free up a few pixels in the ever-more-crowded area around a browser's viewing area? Or did it hide some genuinely useful information?

I'm inclined to think the former. Many people don't know that HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and that there could even be something else there, such as "ftp://" for File Transfer Protocol. … Read more

Download has an opinionated, intelligent, attractive (ok, now I'm just brown-nosing) user base, which is what makes user reviews on Download my favorite feature of our site by far. Sure we have our own software-obsessed editors who review this stuff for a living, but if you want color commentary, or maybe if you just like ALL CAPS, the user reviews are where the action is.

It's for this reason that we decided to spend some time improving the experience of viewing and navigating user reviews on Download. The first phase of this project went live this week and … Read more

It might not seem like much, but a Monday announcement from Facebook to unveil its new "Community Pages" feature is one of the boldest steps that the social-networking site has taken toward, well, consuming your life.

"Community Pages" take the concept of a Facebook "fan page" and apply them to concepts, places, and ideas, rather than brands. An announcement at the top of Facebook's prototype community page for "cooking" explains that it aims to be "the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic," and sources quite a bit … Read more

Google on Friday announced that it's got an iPad-centric version of its Gmail Web app that gives users a two-pane reading view of their in-boxes. The funny thing is, you don't even get this on the normal version of Gmail, or on most mobile clients.

You can, however, trick Gmail into thinking you're on an iPad with some tweaking. All that needs to be done is to change the browser's user agent, which can be done with just a small amount of effort on some browsers. Here's how to do it in three of them (… Read more

Security firm Symantec on Friday released results of a survey on password management that showed 63 percent of respondents don't change their passwords very often, 45 percent use a few passwords that they alternate for all accounts, and some 10 percent don't change their passwords at all.

These are a startling numbers as, according to the survey, 44 percent of respondents said they have more than 20 accounts that require a password.

Worst of all, the survey also found that about 10 percent of respondents have used their pet's name as a password. This is as bad … Read more

For its Xperia X10 smartphones, Sony Ericsson designed a new user interface from scratch. Called the User Experience Platform (or UXP), it sits on top of the Android OS for the Xperia X10, X10 Mini, and X10 Mini Pro.

Last week, Nicole Lee and I took an in-depth tour of UXP with George Arriola, Sony Ericsson's head of human interface design, at the company's lab in San Francisco. On the whole, we liked what we saw. UXP is clean, easy to use, and attractive, and we like that it lets the basic Android framework shine through.

For the … Read more

Looks like those who love messing around with HTC software can't get enough of the Desire's Sense UI. After its first appearance on the Nexus One, someone has now installed it on a Motorola Droid (Milestone for us GSM folks). From the discussion thread on AllDroid, capabilities such as pinch to zoom and Flash on the browser are demonstrated in images and videos.

In the video embedded above, certain aspects of the implementation still appear a little unresponsive, but that's to be expected since the software wasn't designed for the Motorola hardware.

(Source: Crave Asia via … Read more