How to translate your tweets into other languages using hashtags

While you probably wouldn?t want to do it too often, there are might be times tweeting the same message in multiple languages might be useful. A new app has been designed to let you easily do just that.

Developer Chi Poon says he created the app as a reaction to Japan?s recent troubles.

?Being in Japan, I kept up to date on the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation situation by following my Japanese friends? Twitter feeds,? he explains. ?Unfortunately my Japanese is not the best and I couldn?t understand what they tweeted, so I relied heavily on regular English news which was delayed. Some of my friends even manually posted once in Japanese and once in English.?

To solve this problem, Chi built an automatic translator tool based on the Google Translate API. Once signed up, all his friends had to do was add the hashtag #en to their Japanese tweets to automatically generate an English version.

Once you?ve linked your Twitter account to the app, you just need to add the relevant hashtag for the language you want to translate into at the end of your tweet. 58 languages are supported and you can even add multiple hashtags to produce tweets in a number of languages at once.

The only bug I?ve found while trying it out is that replies have the ?@? separated from the username, meaning that all your followers will see foreign language replies show up in their feeds. Poon says that this is down to Google Translate and he will be working to fix it

Using this tool constantly would probably annoy your users, but for those times when you need to spread a message quickly in a number of languages, it?s a useful tool to try.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/04/02/how-to-translate-your-tweets-into-other-languages-using-hashtags/

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Social Search, without a Social Network

Google may be built on an algorithm for taming the Web, but yesterday the company added social features that will let your friends help determine what ranks high in the search results you see. The approach requires Google to know the social connections of its users?something that so far is not a core feature of the company's products or uppermost in the minds of people using them.

Google's new social tool is the +1 button, which it wants you to click to signal which search results and Web pages you appreciate. The button will appear alongside every page listed in search results, and later on sites across the Web (enable +1 on your account now here). Your +1 clicks will be used to boost the ranking of that page in the results friends see. To Google, "friends" means people you are connected to by the company's e-mail or instant-messaging service or its Twitter clone Buzz. The new +1 service will eventually appear on other Google products like Maps and YouTube, says Google.

In design and intention, the +1 button is a close imitation of Facebook's Like button, which appears both on Facebook's site and on pages across the Web as a way for users to share content with friends with a single click. Facebook says that every week more 250 million people engage with Facebook's tool for external sites?most often via the Like button.

Google's plans to shape search with +1 have a precedent, too. Microsoft's Bing search engine has since late 2010 used Like-button data in a partnership with Facebook, in which Microsoft owns a stake. The results of some types of searches?for example, for restaurants?promote or highlight pages that have been Liked by a person's friends. To use this feature, the person must be logged in to Facebook.

"I think +1 is a big step forward," says Vivek Wadwha, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, who last month organized an event examining the problem of search spam. However, it is unclear whether Google has enough information about its users' social connections for the strategy to be very powerful, says Wadwha. "It is clear that Google is on the defensive and is trying its best to give consumers what they need," he says. "But it is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a social graph in the same way Facebook does." Microsoft's close relationship with Facebook gives it access to more powerful and comprehensive data, says Wadwha.

Not only does Facebook have more users enrolled in its Web-wide scheme, but its users have more incentive to click Like buttons than Google users do to click +1. Clicking Like shares a link to that page with Facebook friends, or even adds something?say, a movie?to your Facebook profile. Clicking +1 only adds a link to your Google profile page, a widely ignored feature that Google wants to encourage more of its users to embrace. It is possible to view what Google considers your "social circle" at a dedicated page, but there is no way to edit that list of friends without deleting e-mail, chat, or Buzz contacts.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=f4dffffcf09599d911c9ee5ee19dfba8

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Budget Battle to Be Followed By a Bigger One

Even as the two parties struggled over the weekend to reach a deal on federal spending for the next six months and avert a government shutdown at the end of the week, House Republicans were completing a budget proposal for next year and beyond. It is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

The plan, which is scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday, will be the most ambitious Republican effort since the November elections to put a conservative stamp on economic and domestic policy. It involves far greater stakes for Congress and for President Obama ? substantively and politically ? than the current fight over spending cuts.

The outcome of that fight was still uncertain on Saturday as Congressional staff members assembled new proposals and the White House said that Mr. Obama had called House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, to urge them to find an acceptable compromise. He reminded them that time ?is running short.?

The longer-term budget proposal has been led by Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who is the party?s leading voice on budget matters, and will go beyond numbers to provide policy prescriptions.

It will call for deep spending cuts again in 2012, chart a path to reducing the deficit and slowing the growth of the accumulating national debt, and grapple with the politically volatile issue of reining in the cost of entitlement programs, starting with Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor.

?We want to get spending and debt under control, and we want to get the economy growing, and we want to address the big drivers of our debt, and that is the entitlement programs,? Mr. Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, said in an interview. ?We have a moral obligation to the country to do this.?

The efforts of Mr. Ryan, backed by Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders, are certain to meet serious resistance from the Democratic-led Senate and from Mr. Obama. In many respects, the nasty fight over financing the government for the next six months has been a warm-up for the longer-term budget battle, which could be further inflamed by a debate over raising the federal debt limit.

House Democrats, who are preparing an alternative budget, say the Republican approach would cut off aid to some of the neediest Americans and shortchange education programs vital to staying economically competitive.

?It seems to be the same old, same old,? said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee. ?It is going to be continued big tax breaks for millionaires and big corporate special interests like oil companies and deep cuts in education for kids and health care for seniors.?

?How you get your deficit reduction is important,? Mr. Van Hollen added.

Republicans have been urging Mr. Obama to seize the opportunity provided by a divided government and lead a legislative push to rein in spending on programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Emboldened by their election wins and a sense that the public is ready for a new approach, House Republicans say they will push forward on their own and try to draw the president and Senate Democrats into a broader discussion about long-term deficit reduction and the soaring costs of the entitlement programs.

Details of the House budget are being tightly held. But lawmakers and other officials predict serious proposals to change Medicaid and Medicare, with talks continuing about how hard to push for adjustments in Social Security.

?You are going to see major reforms in Medicare and Medicaid; you are going to see a change in the deficit trajectory that is pretty dramatic,? said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who is on the Budget Committee.

?Ryan isn?t touching the third rail,? Mr. Cole said, employing the expression used to suggest that messing with Social Security and Medicare can be politically fatal. ?He is wrapping both hands around it.?

The budget for 2012 and beyond could heighten the partisan tensions surrounding the financing debate for the current year. If Congress cannot settle that issue by Friday, authorization for some government spending will expire and parts of the federal government will be shut down.

Some Republicans had wanted to delay putting forward Mr. Ryan?s plan until this year?s negotiations were completed. They were worried that introducing another set of proposals might confuse the debate and give Democrats two targets to exploit in their effort to persuade voters that Republicans were going too far in slashing programs.

Others argued that the Ryan proposal could help Mr. Boehner gather the Republican votes he needs to get a compromise on 2011 spending through the House. Any deal for the current fiscal year is likely to fall short of what the Tea Party movement and some other fiscal conservatives are demanding, but Republican leaders are already signaling that the big prize is a deep spending cut for next year and a start on reining in the entitlement programs ? steps that could involve trillions of dollars over coming decades, as opposed to the tens of billions of dollars on the table in the budget battle for this year.

While Mr. Ryan and top Republican aides would not discuss specifics, there are strong indications that the proposal will draw on deficit reduction plans that Mr. Ryan laid out in his 2010 ?roadmap plan? and a second proposal he wrote with Alice M. Rivlin, a director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d73b87f060d18339d6091363614dbd30

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Social Search, without a Social Network

Google may be built on an algorithm for taming the Web, but yesterday the company added social features that will let your friends help determine what ranks high in the search results you see. The approach requires Google to know the social connections of its users?something that so far is not a core feature of the company's products or uppermost in the minds of people using them.

Google's new social tool is the +1 button, which it wants you to click to signal which search results and Web pages you appreciate. The button will appear alongside every page listed in search results, and later on sites across the Web (enable +1 on your account now here). Your +1 clicks will be used to boost the ranking of that page in the results friends see. To Google, "friends" means people you are connected to by the company's e-mail or instant-messaging service or its Twitter clone Buzz. The new +1 service will eventually appear on other Google products like Maps and YouTube, says Google.

In design and intention, the +1 button is a close imitation of Facebook's Like button, which appears both on Facebook's site and on pages across the Web as a way for users to share content with friends with a single click. Facebook says that every week more 250 million people engage with Facebook's tool for external sites?most often via the Like button.

Google's plans to shape search with +1 have a precedent, too. Microsoft's Bing search engine has since late 2010 used Like-button data in a partnership with Facebook, in which Microsoft owns a stake. The results of some types of searches?for example, for restaurants?promote or highlight pages that have been Liked by a person's friends. To use this feature, the person must be logged in to Facebook.

"I think +1 is a big step forward," says Vivek Wadwha, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, who last month organized an event examining the problem of search spam. However, it is unclear whether Google has enough information about its users' social connections for the strategy to be very powerful, says Wadwha. "It is clear that Google is on the defensive and is trying its best to give consumers what they need," he says. "But it is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a social graph in the same way Facebook does." Microsoft's close relationship with Facebook gives it access to more powerful and comprehensive data, says Wadwha.

Not only does Facebook have more users enrolled in its Web-wide scheme, but its users have more incentive to click Like buttons than Google users do to click +1. Clicking Like shares a link to that page with Facebook friends, or even adds something?say, a movie?to your Facebook profile. Clicking +1 only adds a link to your Google profile page, a widely ignored feature that Google wants to encourage more of its users to embrace. It is possible to view what Google considers your "social circle" at a dedicated page, but there is no way to edit that list of friends without deleting e-mail, chat, or Buzz contacts.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=f4dffffcf09599d911c9ee5ee19dfba8

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Choice Kills

Our natural instinct for accelerating sales growth is to give customers more of everything. But it starts with choice.

Stop there! Have you forgotten how powerless and indecisive we are in the face of variety?

Any more than one and we fear making the wrong decision. It?s hereditary. We?ve been doing it since our days in the caves. The artist and the hunter. Survival or statement.

How amazing the switch in mindset between consumer and business owner. Remember the last time you stumbled down supermarket aisles looking for assorted condiments?

Humour me domestic types, who either shop online or make your own. I?m down with that, but I just can?t seem to find the time to fabricate bouquet garni and I like to see what?s actually in stock before laying down a wad (ask me about the time I ordered lemons from an online retailer only to receive lemon-scented dishwashing liquid as an alternative).

I loathe choice so much when I?m in Las Vegas and in close proximity to the roulette tables, I always bet on red.

Better I give you a celebrity-fuelled example of the negativity of choice-abundance, because we all respond better to something with a bit of glitz and glamour. Sorry, Tesco.

Choice hurts

On the news this morning: Top of the Pops, era-ridden visual bastion of musical exhibition and a victim of the e-sound culture here in the UK, is making an unashamed comeback on digital terrestrial channel BBC Four.

BBC What?

BBC Four. It airs documentaries, arts programmes, esoteric musical moments and stuff you wouldn?t see on other channels. This is an oxymoron in televisual stakes. It?s niche-generic: A bucket, if you will. A white elephant, if you?re sceptical.

Let?s hope things have changed significantly from 2003 when, a year after the station was launched with a murmur from Auntie Beeb and a simulcast with BBC Two, it didn?t seem like BBC 4 had garnered many fans.

On the ever-popular AVForums here in the UK, someone protested after it was suggested BBC 4 was garnering audience figures bouncing around the zero mark:

I watch it. Not all the time, but more than ITV or CH4.

To which one smart, funny arse replied:

Can you switch off the transmitter when you?ve finished watching please.

There are two life lessons from BBC Four. If you don?t specialise, how can you ever hope to find a loyal customer base? We don?t all have a fairy godmother in the form of the British Broadcasting Corporation willing to find a drain to annually leak nearly £54 million into.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/04/02/choice-kills/

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News Analysis: Job Growth Alters Playbook for Obama and His Critics

PRESIDENT OBAMA has not had a lot of good news in a term defined by assorted crises. But on Friday he reported the ?good news? about job growth in March to an appreciative audience at a United Parcel Service shipping facility here ? and did so with a bit more of a celebratory air, and less caution, than in the past.

After 12 months of up-and-down job creation, the significant increase in March suggested that maybe, just maybe, the economy was gaining enough strength to grow and bring unemployment down substantially this year.

And as the unemployment rate ticked down, the hopes of Mr. Obama and his party ticked up: perhaps by the approaching election year they could claim vindication for the stimulus policies Democrats have enacted, or at least dodge the sort of blame that Republicans so effectively stuck them with last November in the midterm elections.

At the same time it has given Democrats new ammunition to argue that Republican efforts to cut spending could hurt the recovery just as it is gaining traction, and that forcing a government shutdown could put more people out of work.

?You should know that keeping the economy going and making sure jobs are available is the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning,? Mr. Obama said. ?It?s the last thing I think about when I go to bed each night.?

No doubt. Few metrics are as critical to re-election as the employment rate. Even at 8.8 percent in March, the lowest level in two years, the jobless rate is still high in political as well as economic terms, and it is not expected to fall significantly before November 2012.

The administration does not project the rate dropping below 8 percent until 2013. It was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office after the recession began, and rose to a peak of 10.1 percent in October 2009 as the economy shed about 700,000 jobs a month.

The White House and the Democratic Party are banking on voters focusing not on the unemployment rate, but on a trend of job growth. That assumes, of course, the trend continues.

?While today?s jobs numbers are headed in the right direction, most Americans believe the economy is still pretty seriously off-track, making the jobs issue still a challenging one for the president,? said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. ?Looming on the nation?s economic horizon is the after-effects of the Japanese tsunami and the Middle East unrest, hardly the kind of stable economic environment needed for significant U.S. job growth.?

The United States Chamber of Commerce, in its statement noting the improved employment picture, emphasized caution given the global crises.

?The outlook for the international economy has worsened recently,? the chamber said. ?If these problems were to spill over to the U.S. economy, causing growth to slow below its potential rate of growth of between 2.5-2.75 percent, they could upset the modest job gains we?ve seen thus far.?

A year ago, the effects of a European debt crisis set back the administration?s hopes that a full, self-sustaining recovery was under way. Last fall, Republicans won elections on the argument that Keynesian-style economic stimulus measures had failed, and that it was time to try an austerity policy of big cuts in government spending.

On Friday, Republican leaders in Congress pressed that policy argument even as they welcomed the new jobs report.

?Washington needs to do more to end the uncertainty plaguing job creators,? John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the speaker of the House, said. ?That means getting control of government spending, ending the threat of tax hikes, removing regulatory obstacles to job growth and approving stalled trade agreements that would open new markets for American exports.?

Since Republicans took control of the House in January, they have forced Democrats to agree to $10 billion in cuts from current spending and are seeking roughly $50 billion more. They will soon unveil plans for deeper cuts in 2012 and beyond.

Yet the potential for such deep cuts in domestics spending recently has caused a number of analysts at major corporations and economic forecasting firms to shave their projections of economic growth.

?This sign of jobs growth shows the president?s economic plan is starting to work,? said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. ?We should stick with it, and quickly reach a budget deal to avert a government shutdown that would risk these fragile gains.?

Many voters are not persuaded that the president?s policies are working; in nonpartisan national polls, slight majorities have disapproved of his handling of the economy. Future monthly unemployment rates will be central to whether those numbers improve as he seeks another term.

?If the economy continues to improve over the next year, the fact is it will strengthen President Obama?s political position,? said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. ?And,? he added, ?if the economy slows down in the next year, the Republicans put themselves in a position to take a good share of the blame for that, because now a good case could be made that the president had the jobs numbers moving in the right direction until the Republicans pushed through their own fiscal policies.?

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=365ce275204db388634f612b944ad45f

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