On the Reddit blog today the social web sharing site announced that their reddit@gmail.com account had been hacked, adding that the account is used only for feedback e-mail, thus no confidential data was compromised. Reddit is now using reddit@reddit.com as their official e-mail for the time being.

Reddit released the following statement via their blog:

“We’re in contact with both google’s and twitter’s security team, and the site has not been broken into. All he’s done at this point is ruined everyone’s night. We don’t recycle passwords, and we don’t store passwords in the reddit email. No one’s account has been compromised. We don’t store any confidential information in that account; it is just for feedback email.”

The part about the team contacting Twitter was added because their official Twitter account was also compromised leading to fake Tweets being added to their account. The fake Tweets have now been removed.

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After releasing the template designer upon Blogger in Draft (which is Blogger’s eternal beta site), Google has decided to drop the beta for BlogSpot’s theme feature and release the tool for the masses to try out.

Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone. [...]

With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme. (Blogger Buzz)

This latest move should help Blogger maintain its lead against WordPress (the latter who has been busy announcing new themes almost weekly), as well as inspire a few BlogSpot addicts to make their Blogger blogs a little more aesthetic.

Thus far Blogger has a little under two dozen official themes total, although the ability to alter each theme with hundreds of customizations should help the world’s largest blogging platform remain viable in the foreseeable future.

It looks as if Intense Debate (which is owned by WordPress) may have to rethink its commenting approach after Disqus (its chief rival) announced its new default commenting box whose focus seems to emphasize upon the reader.

This change makes posting comments much more appealing to your community by allowing them to think only about commenting and not logging in. [...]

You may have noticed that the login buttons (for Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, etc.) are no longer showing on your site. This doesn’t mean that your community can’t log into these services anymore. They still can, but they’ll only need to do so after they’ve decided to post a comment. (Official Disqus Blog) read more

Flickr photos can now more easily and eloquently be displayed on a users Facebook account, directly on their News Feeds. The connection between both accounts, which can be easily setup by users, allows publically uploaded photos and videos to be auto shared with the users Facebook account.

To turn on the feature simply visit www.flickr.com/account?tab=extend and then click on the “Connect” option.

If you have private photos on Flickr, don’t worry, they won’t be uploaded to your Facebook account, even more promising is the fact that if you set a private photo to “public” status at a later date it will also be shared on your Facebook news feed.

Just remember to turn off the Flickr app via your Facebook account if it’s currently being used or you’ll end up annoying your friends with double posts of those pictures you took when you were on vacation and they were sitting in their cubicle wishing they got to go to Cancun.

With iOS4 (formally known as iPhone OS 4) about to immerse the cult known as iPhone this summer, the WordPress team is busy adding the final touches to their updated iPhone app, which will include video and stats.

However before Automattic (the company behind WordPress) releases the new iPhone app to the masses, they are seeking feedback from the WP community on what features they should add to improve their beloved mobile app.

We’re very close to releasing 2.5, which will include support for iOS 4 and addresses some long-standing issues including cut-and-paste on the iPad. We’ve also got a nifty new setup flow for WordPress.com users: If you’re creating a new blog the process has been simplified, and if you’ve got existing WordPress.com blogs we’ve made adding all of them a breeze.

What we’d like to hear from you moving forward is what you’d like to see in the short term from the app. What do you think it needs most for the next release? We know several people have mentioned video and stats, so we’ll definitely be working hard to get those out. But what else? What haven’t we covered yet? If you could have one feature included in the next month, what would you want it to be? (Making WordPress for iOS)

Users are already posting comments on features they desire for the upcoming app (including yours truly), although here are seven features WordPress needs to incorporate in the upcoming WP iPhone app. read more

Just as Twitter shook the developer ecosystem by announcing official apps for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry, Twitter’s roll out of an official URL shortener could once again shake the URL shortening startup industry (like TinyURL).

[A]ll links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service. (Official Twitter Blog) read more

Google Maps navigation for Android devices has been one of the biggest headaches for Garmin, TomTom and various other GPS companies who watched as their stocks tumbled upon the initial release of the software in the United States on October 2009, now Google has announced a more widespread launch of the program.

Under current capabilities voice-based turn-by-turn voice directions are now also available in the U.K and Ireland, most of mainland Europe and all of Canada.

The exact countries now supported according to Mobiflip.de are:  Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium.

The best part? Google Maps is still 100% free for Android users and the program supports voice commands and voice search, along with traffic warnings, millions of POIs (Points Of Interest), step-by-step directions and street view capabilities.

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After updating Gravatar profiles in March, WordPress has recently allowed Gravatars to be displayed publicly (as they were previously only accessible by logging into one’s account).

Thus far Gravatar profiles have attracted a decent following, as the boys and girls at WordPress reveal.

It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details[.] [...]

You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself. (Official Gravatar Blog) read more

Google today unveiled a new Google Maps preview feature for their popular Gmail email client and their newly minted Google Buzz service.

The new service allows users to paste a Google Maps link into their messages, at which point a preview of the location on Google Maps is shown.

The feature isn’t enabled on it’s own for Gmail, to turn it on simply log into your Gmail account and navigate to the Gmail Labs sections, then under “Settings” enable the “Google Maps Previews in Mail.” Google Buzz users simply paste the URL into your Google Buzz box and you’ll automatically see the preview.

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It looks like Tumblr has had its fill of the oil fiasco that has now turned the bluish green gulf of Mexico into a red and black dead zone that is threatening wildlife (as the image above shows).

In order to encourage users to help fund efforts to protect what’s left of the gulf ecosystem, Tumblr has changed everyone’s dashboard background to a “heart-of-BP-executive black” unless they choose to donate $5 to a specific charity. read more