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Mobile

Firefox for Android Beta 33

Mozilla's efforts to keep mobile Firefox competitive include adding remote streaming-media support to a new build of the browser. The star of Firefox for Android Beta 33 - released Thursday night - is the "send to device" video-streaming feature that enables you to stream videos on your mobile gadget to a TV or another second screen. When you load a site on your mobile device that includes embedded video, an icon will appear in the URL bar letting you know you can begin streaming.

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Social Networking

Twitter Will Reportedly Roll Out 'Buy' Button

Twitter is going to incorporate a way for users to easily buy things directly from its network later this year, according to a report Friday from Recode. The social network is partnering with Stripe, a payments services company, to integrate a "buy" button into tweets, unnamed sources told Recode. It is expected that the button will let users enter in payment and shipping information without leaving Twitter, allowing businesses to sell their products directly from tweets with Stripe powering the transaction.

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Microsoft

Looking Ahead To Windows 9

A preview of Windows 9 will be made available in either September or October, according to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. That timeline keeps ‘Threshold’ — Windows 9’s codename — out into the public market as a finished product likely in early 2015. The Windows 8 era isn’t merely closing, it’s racing to an end.

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Microsoft

Microsoft to kill Skype for Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone users stuck on version 7 will have to bid farewell to Skype within the next few weeks. On a support page, Skype parent Microsoft posed the question: "Is Skype for Windows Phone 7 being discontinued?" The response? "Yes." Sometime within the next few weeks, Skype will no longer be available in any form on Windows Phone 7, according to Microsoft. Further, those of you who already have Skype on your Windows Phone 7 handset will no longer be able to log in to the service.

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Google

Google Analytics Can Now Exclude Traffic From Known Bots And Spiders

Google made a small but important update to Google Analytics that finally makes it easy to exclude bots and spiders from your user stats. That kind of traffic from search engines and other web spiders can easily skew your data in Google Analytics. Unfortunately, while generating fake traffic from all kinds of bot networks is big business and accounts for almost a third of all traffic to many sites according to some reports, Google is only filtering out traffic from known bots and spiders. It’s using the IAB’s “International Spiders & Bots List” for this, which is updated monthly.

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General

LibreOffice an Open Source Alternative to MS Office

After a headline lull, LibreOffice on Wednesday renewed its drive to replace Microsoft Office with the newest version of its open source suite of applications. The latest update comes as the organization behind LibreOffice says that its products are now being used by some 80 million users around the world. In contrast, only 10 million users had downloaded the software by Sept. 2011.

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Apple

Mac OS X Gets The Dark Theme

Apple’s desktop operating system got a little more fashionable with the new Preview 3 update of OS X 10.10 Yosemite seeded to developers. The update, which can be installed by registered developers who have the existing preview version on their machines through the Mac App Store, lets users enable Dark Mode, a highly coveted feature that impressed when it was unveiled at WWDC in June, but that Apple hadn’t actually turned on until now.

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Apple

Facebook Messenger Finally Gets An iPad Version

Three years after Facebook acquired Beluga and turned it into Messenger for smartphones, its dedicated chat app today got a version specially designed for iPad rather than just running as an enlarged iPhone app. Messenger for iPad features a multi-window interface showing a list of threads and your current conversation at the same time. Messenger had over 200 million users as of April across devices, but now Apple fans can mobile message on a larger screen.

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Social Networking

Facebook Starts Using App Links To Get You Back Into Apps

App Links, Facebook’s initiative to make it easier for developers to link to specific content within an app, is about to become a lot more useful for developers who rely on Facebook to direct users to their apps. In a blog post, Facebook announced that developers will now be able to utilize App Links to send people straight from ads in the Facebook mobile app to specific points within their apps. There’s a catch though: for now, they’ll only be able to deploy these ads if they’re working with one of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developers.

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Google

Google Buys Songza

Google has acquired music streaming service Songza after weeks of speculation around a potential buyout. Songza uses information about the user and context to determine the best playlists for you at any given time, all of which are curated by music experts (DJs, Rolling Stone writers, etc.). Very few services look to human curation to enhance the music experience — Pandora, Spotify, and other big players rely heavily on algorithms — making this one of the key selling points of the service.

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