Now that Google Chrome has entered the world of fully-extensible browsers, with its recent addition of extensions and Greasemonkey scripts , you’ve likely found yourself perusing the libraries and tweaking until your heart’s content. With that, however, comes the inevitable – browser crashes. While Google Chrome doesn’t have a safe mode in the same way the Firefox or Windows does, it does offer another option that provides the same functionality and can save you a whole bunch of trouble. Sponsor The folks over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out this tip today and we thought it was a worthwhile how-to for our readers. If you’ve found yourself in the terrible position of having a broken version of Chrome and you don’t want to uninstall and start over from scratch, you can instead launch Chrome using “incognito mode”, which disables extensions and allows you to disable your the bad apple extensions.
Google just announced an interesting update to Google Reader. Google’s online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page – even those that don’t feature an RSS feed. Google will create its own custom feeds for these sites and update the feed whenever it notices a change. Google Reader will display a short snippet of the page changes in the RSS feed. Sponsor Until today, Google Reader would simply respond with an error message if you tried to subscribe to a site that didn’t offer an RSS feed.
OneRiot , one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot’s partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user’s stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby , for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users’ streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot’s API, developers are free to use them in whatever way the see fit. Sponsor OneRiot’s ad network, RiotWise, launched about 2 months ago as a closed beta with roughly 20 partners.
People can’t stop talking about discoverability — how a mobile application can stand out in an app store against 10,000 or 100,000 competitors. Tom Conrad , chief technology officer at internet radio service Pandora , threw out a few novel ideas for improving the process today during a panel discussion at SDForum’s Business of New Media conference in Mountain View, Calif. First, Conrad said he would like to see a “ PageRank for applications.” While Google uses PageRank to deliver the most relevant web pages (theoretically) as search results, app stores should develop a similarly rich search experience. For example, if you search for “ Slanted Door, San Francisco ” in Google, one of the top results is a link to the relevant restaurant profile on Yelp . Users should be able to perform a similar search in an app store and bring up the Yelp app, which would open up to Slanted Door when downloaded. Or when a user searches for “Beatles radio,” they should be able to see a link to the relevant station in the Pandora app.
