To use the bookmarklet, you simply drag and drop a link to your bookmarks bar and you are ready to go. You can find the official Twitter bookmarklet here.

Twitter, of course, has every interest in getting users to share more content on its service. Most of Twitter’s more mainstream audience will probably puzzled by the idea of a bookmarklet, but the team does a good job at explaining how to use the new tool.

The team, which presented its findings during the Woot ’10 USENIX workshop in Washington, DC, found that by simply taking photographs of the screens with the right lightning and camera positions allows unauthorized users to guess a user’s security pattern.

If you think that just cleaning the screen regularly would prevent this, then think again. According to the researchers, “smudges are surprisingly persistent in time.” They found that “it is surprisingly difficult to incidentally obscure or delete smudges through wiping or pocketing the device.” In the team’s experiments, the pattern was partially identifiable 92% of the time and in 68% of cases, it was fully identifiable.

You can find the full paper here.

To invoke this feature, Android users will first have to install the necessary application on their devices (Voice Search, Google Search widget and music apps that support this feature). Then, they can invoke the app by either tapping the microphone button on the Google search box on the home screen or by pressing the physical search button on their phone.

Here is a list of the available commands:

So Long, and Thanks for all The Real-Time Goodness

It’s a shame to see Google Wave go. I had high hopes for it when it was first announced (I was actually one of the first journalists to get my hands on it). Clearly, though, it failed to gain enough users to make continued development worthwhile for Google. What is odd, though, is to see how quickly Google killed Wave. After a long beta period, the company only officially launched Wave a little more than two months ago. Ironically, the last post on the Google Wave blog from just about a week ago is called: “STOP! Waving time…”

For a lot of users, seeing others type in real time just wasn’t a good enough reason to abandon email or more traditional collaboration tools. The promised “draft” feature – which turned off the real-time typing mode – never materialized. Over the next few days, we will surely see a lot of analysis about what exactly went wrong. If anything, though, I have to give Google credit for giving Wave a shot.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Australia-based team behind Wave (which also developed the earliest versions of Google Maps) will do next.

The Announcement

Here is the central part of Google’s announcement:

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

It’s worth noting that this channel will run separately from your regular Chrome install (and you can install and use both in parallel). As Google notes, these new builds are “highly unstable browser that will often break entirely.” ¹

A few more interesting things to note:

• for the time being, the Canary Build is available for Windows only
• the Canary Build can’t be set as the default browser
• upon installing, the installer will ask you if you want to set Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default search engine

Overall, this looks like a smart extension of Google’s “launch early and often” strategy. It gives those who want to live on the cutting edge a chance to try out features before they become available to other users and gives Google’s engineers a way to gather even more feedback.

Thanks to its tagging feature, you can ensure that the right people will see your questions.

Social vs. SEO

With Ask.com, Quora, Google’s recent acquisition Aardvark and a few other startups, the Q&A market is getting very crowded now. Facebook, with its 500 million users is likely to crush all of these services, though more SEO oriented Q&A platforms like Yahoo Answers may not suffer the same effects as the more socially oriented products like Aardvark (assuming Google does anything with it) or Quora.

Chances are, though, that if users will find Facebook Answers to be a satisfactory solution (to a problem most probably never considered in the first place), they won’t go out to explore these other products.

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