LEAK: FACEBOOK PHOTO SHARING APP

A new Facebook iPhone app built around photo sharing has leaked. Some images make it seem as if the service will eventually reside within the existing Facebook iPhone app, while others seem to showcase an entirely new app (or a completely redesigned Facebook app). It’s entirely possible that both will be correct. It would make a lot of sense for Facebook, which is by far the largest photo service on the Internet with close to 100 billion photos, to make their own dedicated photo app. The space is exploding with popularity right now as Instagram and others are gaining millions of users quickly. Regardless, Facebook’s focus on mobile photos going forward is very clear.

It also looks as if at least a part of these apps are using the some HTML similar to what has been recently rolled out to m.facebook.com. This is not surprising. Given their talk of commitment to HTML5, Facebook likely wants to make an app that is as portable as possible. That is, while it may be built first for iOS, it can easily be ported to Android and other platforms with the HTML5 elements in place.

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES INSTANT PAGES FOR DESKTOP AND MOBILE

At an event by the name of Inside Search on the 14th of June, 2011, Google announced a massive addition to their search results functionality. While they’ve had Google Instant for some months now, a functionality that allows you to get your results before you’ve even completed typing your query, they’ve announced a function that will be available today in Beta for developers and in full in the coming weeks. This function is Instant Pages, a basically instant loading of pages as included in the search time you’ve already been accustomed to from Google.

What Google has explained Instant Pages to be is a pre-loading function that goes a step further than anyone’s done before, grabbing not only the java and html of a page, but the images and the rest of the content as well. While it may seem that this would eat up one whole heck of a lot of bandwidth for Google, they assure us that they’ve got it set up so that only the predicted results, aka the items they know that you’ll click on, will be pre-loaded. This doesn’t mean that only a couple of pages will be loaded, nay, it just means that, for example, the ad links aren’t included in Instant Pages, and only the first page of results are loaded (at first.)

This functionality is available today to developers, will be available to desktop in the coming weeks, and will be coming to mobile in the near future.

GOOGLE RELEASES CHILDREN'S BOOK ON BROWSERS AND THE WEB FOR FREE

Wondering how to explain the brave new world of Web 2.0 and HTML5 to your children… or simply want to correct your own childlike understanding of how the internet works? Search giant Google has just the picture book for you… and best of all, it’s both free and charming.

The book is called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web

Sure, we all use the internet every day, and most of us are pretty astute with it… but it’s surprising how little many know about the inner workings of the web behinds its various sites and interfaces.

As such, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web is a breath of fresh air, offering eminently understandable primers about HTML, Javascript and Ajax. It’s also a future-looking book, spelling out many of the developments we can expect next from both browsers and web apps. Even security, privacy, open source and design are touched upon.

The book reads like a picture book written as a Christmas present from the Google Chrome team to its children, and in fact it is: the collective Chrome team is the book’s author, and we — the users — are their children. [Geek]