Google Listen

Google Listen is officially dead

A long, long time ago, in an Android ecosystem far away, Google Listen was our favorite podcatcher app. It was easy. It was simple. It synced with Google Reader, making adding new podcasts a snap. But it never seemed to be a very high priority, and today Google has put Listen out to pasture, as was first noticed by some of our own, as well as by folks on Twitter. The reason? There are other, better apps out there.

Says Google:

We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function. You can access your podcast subscriptions in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and download them from the Import/Export tab.

We're a little sad to see it go, but there really are a number of great podcatchers out there. Oh, and if you're needing to re-add the feed to the Greatest Android Podcast in the World, here's the audio feed.

Source: Google

link: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-listen-officially-dead

iPhone & Android mobile apps

Twitter updates iPhone & Android mobile apps with expansive experiences

One hundred and forty characters are no longer enough for microblogging platform Twitter. As social media users gravitate towards a more visual web, Twitter has started rolling out the second phase of its “expanded tweets” tweets feature.

Both Twitter’s iPhone and Android mobile apps have been updated to include Twitter’s new expanded tweets -- enabling microbloggers to see image and video content previews from Twitter’s selected partners when they click on a link contained within a tweet.



“When you tap a Tweet linking to a Kickstarter project, for example, you can play its video directly from the Tweet details view in your app. You can also read article summaries when you tap Tweets linking to sources like The Atlantic or play videos or view images when you expand Tweets linking to websites like Etsy andVimeo,” said Twitter project manager Sung Hu Kim in a post on the company’s blog.

The change reflects a wider trend towards visual storytelling taking place within social media. As image- and video-sharing social networks like Pinterest, Instagram and Viddy gain viral popularity with users, more mature social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are updating their design to cater for a more visual community of users.

Twitter introduced expanded tweets on its website less than a month ago partnering with websites including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Breaking News, TIME, WWE, BuzzFeed, TMZ, Lifetime and Daily Motion.

Twitter has also made updates to notifications and search within its mobile apps.

Both Twitter for Android and iOS now support push notifications for tweets so you can configure the app to send you a notification when one of the people you follow posts something new.

Twitter has improved the search experience on its mobile apps too with enhanced autocomplete and additional name suggestions when you search for people.

The updated versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android are available for download now from https://twitter.com/download.