Gadgetory

it's Wednesday November third I'm Natali del Conte and it's time to get loaded ebay launched something called group gifts it's designed to let you buy expensive things for someone by having several friends pitch in this is much better than collecting contributions for someone's going away gift at the office instead you hook up with your friends facebook or otherwise and contribute to the amount of the gift you won't be charged until you've collected enough money in the pool once the gift is fully funded you choose to send it along with all the normal gifting options you can find out more at group gifts ebay.com and we could see Google's Chrome operating system as early as this month digit times reports that smart books may come out in November with Google's windows and OS 10 competitor but Google might also announced their own google-branded smart book with chrome OS hmm we didn't think we'd see this in time for the holiday season but I'm anxious to give it a spin well let you know when we know more Apple is increasing the time it lets you sample a song from 30 to 90 seconds Apple notified the music industry of its intentions to do this for songs that are at least two and a half minutes long there was some licensing hurdles for them to go through but they did it so now you can sample your music a bit more thoroughly and you can now buy your Facebook friends an amazon gift card amazon announced that customers can connect to their facebook account on amazon.com and create a personalized gift card that will be delivered to someone's facebook wall you can specify up to five thousand dollars and even set a delivery date of up to a year in advance to learn more go to amazon.com / gift cards dash Facebook Microsoft is removing the 3d layer to bing maps in favor of the 45-degree angle viewing of maps called birds I the 3d and birds eye angle used to necessitate a silverlight plugin but no more birds eye is the new default view maps that used to be in 3d will be updated quickly so that any links to those locations will not be broken Google is crowdsourcing its security efforts they're offering cash rewards for anyone who finds vulnerabilities in any Google web property including YouTube bloggers and orkut they're looking for serious bugs that could attack Google's corporate servers if you identify one that the Google team had previously not known about you could be compensated over $3,000 and google has also settled the suit that accused the company of privacy violation with Google Buzz the class-action suit was by Gmail users who sued over privacy violation when Google Buzz auto accessed a lot of sensitive information the settlement calls for Google to pay 8.5 million dollars towards a fund for organizations focusing on internet privacy and education those are your headlines for today I'll see you tomorrow I'm Natali del Conte for cnet.com and you've just been loaded