[Download Squad] 2 New Entries: Twitter relaunches people search

Twitter relaunches people search

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0, Web

For a surprisingly long time, there's been no way to look up Twitter users by name. Twitter used to offer a people search feature, but removed it when the service was experiencing some technical difficulties. Today the microblogging service has relaunched Twitter Name Search with a few improvements thrown in for good measure.

The new name search is faster and attempts to find names that are similar to the words you type into the engine. So if you mispell a name, Twitter will try to help you find the correct user anyway.

Results are ranked by the number of followers each user has. You can search for users by clicking the "find people" button on the upper right side of the page.

[via VentureBeat]

Twitter relaunches people search originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Pirate Bay launches browser toolbar, video compression utility

Filed under: Internet, Video

BitTorrent search engine the Pirate Bay has launched two new utilities (with a single installer): A video compression tool and a browser toolbar. The VIO Mobile video compression utility looks a lot like scores of other programs designed to help you shrink your video collection down to cellphone size. Videos are saved as MP4 files, and there are a bunch of presets for common phones. But you can also adjust the bitrate, framerate, resolution, and audio settings manually.

The browser toolbar has a rather comprehensive list of online video sites that you can access from a drop down menu. But the rest of the features in the toolbar are kind of useless. There's a menu for "YouTube Rippers." But one link under that menu takes you to the page for VideoDownloader, while the other two links take you to pages where you can download browser plugins for ripping YouTube videos. Silly me, when I saw the Rip button I thought I'd alreaday done that. It seems silly to waste space in a toolbar with links to pages that you might only need to visit once.

There's also a search button, which explains the real reason The Pirate Bay released this toolbar. The search engine is powered by a custom Google search engine that comes loaded with a fair number of ads and results that don't appear to be much more videocentric than a generic Google search. If you want to support The Pirate Bay by using a search engine that will kick a few cents their way when you click on the ads, then install the toolbar. But otherwise, there doesn't seem to be much reason to do so (aside from the nice big list of streaming video web sites).

[via TorrrentFreak]

The Pirate Bay launches browser toolbar, video compression utility originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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