Boot up: meta email, Murray's Twitter, WebTV dies, and more

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life >> MIT

Once you log in, Immersion will use only the From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails in the account you are signing in with. It will not access the subject or the body content of any of your emails.

Upon logging out of Immersion, you will be presented with a choice to save or delete your data, which contains your compressed email metadata and user profile.

See your world the way the NSA sees it.

Murray wins Wimbledon >> Twitter UK

In a Wimbledon championship that played out on Twitter, it was fitting that tennis fans from across the globe came together on the platform to celebrate Murray's success. At the point of his victory, eight of the UK's 10 trending topics were Wimbledon-related.

Over the last 12 hours alone, the Wimbledon final has been mentioned more than 3.4m times on Twitter. The peak in mentions of the match came at its climax at 17.25 BST with 120,000 Tweets per minute. That outstripped the 116,000 Tweets per minute that happened during the Spice Girls' performance at last summer's Olympics, a moment that saw the largest spike in Tweets per minute of the London 2012 Games.

Facebook advertisement studies: Their ads are more like TV ads than Google ads. - Slate Magazine

So, the question persists: How does Facebook expect to become a huge business if most people you know never click on ads?

The answer is surprisingly obvious. It's a fact well-known to advertisers, though it's not always appreciated by people who use Facebook or even by folks in the Web ad business: Clicks don't matter. Whether you know it or not—even if you consider yourself skeptical of marketing—the ads you see on Facebook are working. Sponsored messages in your feed are changing your behavior—they're getting you and your friends to buy certain products instead of others, and that's happening despite the fact that you're not clicking, and even if you think you're ignoring the ads.

This isn't conjecture. It's science. It's based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site. The studies demonstrate that Facebook ads influence purchases and that clicks don't matter.

Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted >> Hacker News

(The original article is from a German website, and linked in the piece.) The first comment is from RyanGaz:

I was thinking about this further, and while it comes off as fairly irrelevant to start with, it's actually an extremely bad thing.

In essence, this has set up two tiers of advertising: those we have paid for white list privileges, and those who haven't. This is heavily in Google's interests as they are the only advertiser powerful enough to get by with only text adverts - nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability.

By using Adblock Plus as a weapon against non-Google adverts, Google is removing the ability for other players to compete on level footing. It's very similar to the idea of paying AT&T for prioritization for Google traffic, and it destroys a lot of the foundations that the web is built on. It definitely crosses into 'evil' territory for me, in the same way as paying AT&T to slow down access to Bing would be.

While [AdBlock] is just an add on, it's a bad precedent to set.

Microsoft quietly shuts down MSN TV, once known as WebTV >> AllThingsD

Kara Swisher:

Microsoft said that its MSN TV service will be closing down at the end of September, in a post on its website and in an email to users.

MSN TV, of course, was born of WebTV, which was thought up by well-known entrepreneur Steve Perlman. The software giant bought it at the height of the Web 1.0 boom in mid-1997, paying $503m.

The service, which included a dedicated hardware device attached to a television, went through a number of iterations over the years, including being rebranded as MSN TV in 2001. Some of its technology went into the Xbox, but — in general — its recent history was one of dwindling users.

Google Reader: what happens to my data? >> Google

Frequently-asked questions

Q: What will happen to my Google Reader data?

All Google Reader subscription data (eg. lists of people that you follow, items you have starred, notes you have created, etc.) will be systematically deleted from Google servers. You can download a copy of your Google Reader data via Google Takeout until 12PM PST July 15, 2013.

Q: Will there be any way to retrieve my subscription data from Google in the future?

No -- all subscription data will be permanently, and irrevocably deleted. Google will not be able to recover any Google Reader subscription data for any user after July 15, 2013.

You've got a week.

The topography of Tweets >> Twitter Blog

Simon Rogers:

The mountain ranges you see here are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets — billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from, the troughs the fewest. Explore New York closely and you can pick out the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridge — even the Staten Island ferry.

Hugely cool.

Microsoft SST program not attracting brand vendors >> Digitimes

Microsoft's Small Screen Touch (SST) program, which offers Windows licensing discounts on touchscreen devices with a display size of 11.6in or below, is struggling to attract notebook brand vendors to develop Windows-based tablets, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

So far, Acer's 8.1in Iconia W3 is the only tablet in the retail channel that has been subsidized by the SST program, but its unfriendly price of NT$14,000 (US$467) is still creating difficulties for the device to attract consumer demand.

The Iconia price is subsidised? Ye gods.

Bing Audio, Windows Phone's built-in music matching service, rolls out to 14 new countries >> Official Windows Phone Blog

Michael Stroh:

I was watching an old episode of Breaking Bad the other day when they played this soulful tune I couldn't quite place. I just knew I loved it and wanted to hear it again. So I pulled out my phone and fired up Bing Audio, the built-in feature for identifying any artist, song, or album that's playing around you.

Boom. Moments later my phone had the answer: The track was "Didn't I," from some semi-obscure '70s-era musician named Darondo. He's now the star of my music collection.

Bing Audio is one of those Windows Phone features that, once you know it's there, you find yourself using all the time.

Sounds just like Shazam, which is already available on Windows Phone. Interesting strategy.

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