You can find a whole collection of historical tweets over at historicaltweets.com. Most of them are hilarious. I loved the Elvis tweet “so comfortable, you’ll think you died and gone to heaven.” and the Benjamin Franklin’s “It’s all about the me’s, baby“. What would Jesus have Tweeted? It’s there!

Can you think of other historical figures and what they would have tweeted?

Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it.

It works for videos as well – you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems.

Can you imagine how much fun we are going to have with this? I can’t wait! More information at ZunaVision but first watch the demo video:

When the iPod was becoming popular a few years ago and other manufacturers started to realize they were missing out on a huge opportunity there were frequent (daily!) reports of the next ‘iPod Killer’. Eager to find out what innovations were being made we checked them all out. Generally it didn’t take more than a few seconds to realize that the moniker ‘iPod killer’ was born more out of wishful thinking than true product innovation. The Zune, and countless other iPod rippoffs, came and went. But as we know now, nothing could kill or replace the iPod.

Then came the iPhone. And yes, again there are several companies announcing their own ‘iPhone killer’. Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, is secretly (but not TOO secretly) working on something they call their iPhone Killer. The Verizon Voyager is another example of a phone branded as the iPhone killer. But one look is enough to know it isn’t. And HTC was rumored to be working on their own ‘iPhone killer’.

Yesterday HTC unveiled their HTC Diamond. And I must admit: it looks pretty cool.
You might even say that the interface looks slightly cooler and more futuristic than what the iPhone currently offers. The interface is completely dynamic and fluid. Screens blend into each other with great effects. The weather screen doesn’t just display a static image of the sun or a few clouds but actual moving images of clouds or even a thunderstorm.

I’m not claiming that this will be an iPhone killer but I can image a lot of Windows users who don’t want to switch to Apple products being very happy with this gadget. Check it out yourself:

No search engine since Google has been able to captivate me for more than a few seconds. But this morning I found one that I sorta kinda maybe liked. A bit. And that is huge news!

The service I am talking about is ManagedQ, a Palo Alto based startup company founded by engineers from Stanford. ManagedQ is officially in ‘deep stealth’ right now but apparently not THAT deep because anyone can use it.

ManagedQ is not a Search Engine, or so they say. They aspire to become the first Search Application. The difference? Well according to their blog “A Search Application is dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query”.

Their story is that regular search engines are not helping you much. It is simply a matter of entering a search query and getting a bunch of results spat back without any form of interaction beyond that. This makes the Search engines of today little more than front-ends to large databases. ManagedQ wants to guide you through the whole search process by showing you a large screenshot of every result from your query and then create an ‘Executive Summary’ of each link they found. Then they shows you Persons, Places and Things that are related to your query. By hovering over menus you see new results clustered around your query. This works amazingly well.

As Pete Warden (The guy who first discovered ManagedQ) describes:

Traditionally you do a search and then click through to the results pages, eyeballing each one for the information you want. If the results aren’t good enough, you’ll go back and refine your query, doing a complete new search.

With ManagedQ, you’ve suddenly got an interactive refinement stage that lets you poke and prod the result set and easily get a lot more information. You can instantly narrow your search by ignoring bad results that don’t contain terms you want, without throwing away all the others that could be interesting. You can get a quick feel for whether the results are worth exploring by throwing in good indicator terms that are likely to be in the ones you want.

So will I trade in Google for ManagedQ? Probably not. But I might use it to visualize connections between people, things and places connected to stuff.

UPDATE: I got a message from the management team at ManagedQ with some comments:

The reason we call ourselves a Search Application is because we actually run on top of Google. So you’re still getting the exact same Google results except with a radically improved Search Experience. So for all the Google users out there, you’re not going to suffer any reduction in Search quality, only a drastic improvement in the Search process.

Additionally, the back-end is modular so we can connect it to Yahoo, Powerset, enterprise search engines, or any combination of the above.

We know we’re still brand new to the game, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. But we are constantly improving ManagedQ and with the help of the community we’re going to have the best Search Product.

With some time Boris, we hope to win over all of your Searches. But for today, thank you for searching with ManagedQ.

The Yahoo! OpenID (beta) which was announced earlier this month has just been launched. You can try it out right away. This is expected to move the OpenID movement ahead considerably. All 250 million members of Yahoo are now able to log in to any website, not just Yahoo, that supports OpenID 2.0.

At this moment you can find very limited list at Yahoo which I hope will be expanded soon.

I have been testing OpenID login with Wordpress.com who also offers OpenID. Right now it seems Wordpress has a more attractive offer than Yahoo. At Yahoo my OpenID URL is:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/rEOH03k2oZKSWDlu_x22Z12oud0-

While at Wordpress.com it is:

http://bomega.wordpress.com

I think I prefer the Wordpress version…

UPDATE: It is possible to change your Yahoo identifier URL into something more easy to remember. I overlooked this possibility when I checked the service yesterday. This means that my Yahoo identifier is now https://me.yahoo.com/openidboris. I still think http://bomega.wordpress.com is easier to remember. Thank you Adam for pointing this out to me.