Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Things are looking up for the possibility of third party iPhone apps. This has so many possibilities. I really hope they can make it a reality. It sounds like they are actively working on it, which is great to hear.

Google enhanced it’s maps service by offering “street views”. Currently it’s only available in certain cities. Regardless it’s pretty cool. They appear as flash objects in those popup bubbles that Google Maps uses. you can drag and move around from within them as well similar to that of QuickTime VR.

I decided to take a look around NYC and make a few bookmarks. Enjoy.

Times Square

Columbus Circle

Empire State Building

Madison Sq. Garden

World Trade Center Site

Union Square

Rockefeller Center

Central Park

City Hall

On The Brooklyn Bridge

On the Verrazano Bridge

Yankee Stadium

Flushing Meadows Park (site of 1939-1940, 1964 World’s Fair).

Ed Sullivan Theater (Hello Deli is right next door).

Carnegie Hall (and Carnegie Deli).

NY Public Library

Grand Central

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Macy’s 34th Street

Flatiron Building

Port Authority

Interestingly nothing near the NY Stock Exchange is visible. It’s notably blacked out for about a block around. Same goes for the United Nations. I’m virtually certain this is for security reasons.

Vote Firefox for the Webware 100. Tell your friends.

Google launched a top 100 trends feature. The feature is pretty cool. According to Google there will be some filtering:

Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

To quote the BBC:

Requests for pornography, the weather, popular websites like MySpace.com and some celebrities will not be included.

In other words, these are popular queries # 1001 - 1100 and will exclude Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Stephen Colbert.

I’m curious how long it will take until this is “Reverse Google Bombed” with people coordinating Google searches for things. At 3:00 PM EST (11:00 GMT) everyday search for “Monkeys Rule“.

I’m surprised and disappointed to not see an RSS feed. Perhaps another campaign can be “Add RSS To Google Trends“.

Do you want to delete one item from your browsing history? Say that splash page, or misspelled site that you keep visiting when ever you type a URL with a similar name because you type to quickly? Gogle instead of Google? It happens. Just select it by entering the partial name in the URL bar, and press shift delete. That will remove only that one entry from history.

Want to remove that memory of the time you forgot to put on pants before you left the house? Sorry, that feature hasn’t been implemented in Firefox just yet. Perhaps in the next version. Patches welcome.

Minus all the papers, Al Gore has a really nice office. What a beautiful array of Apple Cinema Displays. If only he would hire someone to scan in his papers, or get a filing cabinet .

Many by now has heard about Extended Validation (EV) Certificates. This technology lets sites that meet a higher standard of verification appear differently in a browser (typically with a green background behind the URL). IE 7 has supported this technology, and Firefox has been planning this for 3.0. VeriSign (the very expensive SSL Cert guys) created an extension to add UI support to Firefox.

Very interesting to see features like this added to Firefox by an extension. I haven’t seen many security related extensions before.

[Hat tip: InfoWorld]