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Sony PlayStation 3D Display Lightning Review: The Perfect Small TV for the Rich Gamers [TV]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:20:00 +0000

Online console gaming is the status quo, but nothing will ever usurp the joys of throwing your controller in disgust, cursing, and punching your friends in the arm during couch multiplayer. Sony has a magical, magical reinvention of offline competition. More »

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Sony PlayStation 3D Display Lightning Review: The Perfect Small TV for the Rich Gamers [TV]

Herman Cain’s 404 Page Is Actually Rather Clever [Politics]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

I see what you did there, Herman Cain. Sneaky and hilarious, but for what it’s worth, your 404 page is probably getting more hits this week than your entire site. Even though you’re probably not going to be president, you, sir, win Internet of the Week. Now let’s go and celebrate with some manly, meaty pizza . My treat. [ Copyranter ] More »

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Herman Cain’s 404 Page Is Actually Rather Clever [Politics]

Hosain Rahman Shows Me His UP (TCTV)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:52:40 +0000

All of the dudes in our office (okay, only Rahul ) want one of these UP bracelet things. Apparently they use your wrist movements to determine how healthy you are, and then constantly judge you graphing your healthstyle against your friends’. Because I am insatiably curious and extremely health conscious, I swear, I took Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman aside earlier this week and asked him to show me the goods, which to his credit he did. Note to non-regular readers: This post is a subtle homage to this other post , which I find well, pretty silly. Sorry if you don’t get it, I’m pretty terrible about conveying context. So sue me.

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Hosain Rahman Shows Me His UP (TCTV)

10 Social Ways to Find and Send Gifts Online

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:14:19 +0000

If you spend half as much time gift shopping as you spend on Facebook , my guess is your holiday shopping would already be finished. So, why not combine the process? Many of the apps below produce personalized gift suggestions for your Facebook friends. Others match those friends to products on specific sites, such as Etsy and Amazon . Some of these apps crowdsource cash or creative contributions for truly special (and convenient) gifts. The gallery below features 10 online social tools for discovering and sending gifts this holiday season. Please share more in the comments section below. 1. Etsy Connect your Facebook account and search for Etsy gift recommendations by friend. The results are based mainly on Likes and interests, not necessarily on your friends’ status updates, so privacy doesn’t seem to be an issue. Also filter by price preference to tailor gifts to your budget. Click here to view this gallery. Image courtesy of Flickr , Xelcise More About: Facebook , features , Gifts , Holidays , Social Media , web apps

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10 Social Ways to Find and Send Gifts Online

Stop Making Apps

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 07:55:48 +0000

There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren’t limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can’t Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can’t even remember. Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And in some cases I really wish I did, because it would make my friends happy and the world a better place. The mobile few apps that I actually open daily ( Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , Foursquare , S potify , Reminders, Safari, Messenger, and Yammer sadly enough) are securely fastened to my homescreen. For those relegated to the “app ghetto” I usually either substitute Google or SMS because I’ve forgotten that I’ve downloaded them and am too lazy to swipe past my first screen. Dispersed throughout my app ghetto, or the neighborhood ten or so swipe screens past the iPhone homescreen, are things I’ve downloaded for work, apps that people joke about not using ( Color , Path ), new apps that people are still trying to figure out ( Batch , Oink ) and perfectly legitimate apps that lend themselves to more casual usage (Uber , Quora , Yelp ). And all the apps that fit into one or more of those categories. Oh, and I just bought Camera+ (not to be confused with Camera Plus) — it’s not homescreen worthy just yet though it might just be the best 99 cents I’ve ever spent. If I ever want to use an app ghetto app I just use iPhone search (a swipe right) because there are just too many! There should be some sort of app that makes your app ghetto apps disappear if you haven’t used them in a while. Sure we’ve written before about app fatigue , but it seemingly hasn’t discouraged app makers from continuing to churn out countless useless apps or SocialMobileLocal offerings that would be better suited as sub-features of Foursquare . And it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop anytime soon; Android growth is insane, iOS influence is crazy. Coupled with minimal development costs, you get the fact that the Bump app has 50 million downloads . Yes, Bump, that thing that lets you “bump” contact info over your phone and nobody I know uses. If Bump’s existence proves anything, it’s that many SoMoLo apps are basically competing with SMS. Why go through another tiresome two-second increment of human communication and exchange your contact info WHEN YOU CAN “BUMP”? YES THERE IS INDEED AN APP FOR THAT. I realize that asking y’all to stop making apps is a quixotic endeavor (so go ahead and have at me in the comments); 74% percent of you think that the world needs more mobile apps even though we’ve already got over 500K of them with 18 billion plus downloads– on iOS alone. The app economy is/will be huge and is inexorable, and I don’t want to deprive anyone of the jobs it will eventually create, even though a lot them will be building things that will eventually fail. Oh well. The truth is that if you imagine the homescreen of your phone ten years from now, your favorite apps will be ones that don’t even exist yet. And that’s pretty amazing. So if you can’t beat them join them. But if you join them I’m going to ask you to consider one thing; rethink the notion of an app versus a service; Stop making apps , or gimmicks, things that don’t solve problems. Don’t build something silly and ill-thought out just because you have a celebrity co-founder and/or lots of investor money that will help you scale initially no matter what. The truth is that the hardest part is hanging onto that first spike of users, and there is no number of TechCrunch posts about your every-single-decimal point update that will get you there, you actually need to solve a problem – even if that problem is “How the hell do I entertain myself for the next fifteen minutes?” Focus on building a service not just an app; a service may have an app component — like Spotify , for example — but that app component must only exist to make life easier for the user of your service, exist to add value not just to be cool. Listen to PG ; start with a problem, then let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form. It’s pretty simple, solve a problem and focus on solving that problem across as many platforms as you can, even if one of those platforms is an app store. This whole “solving a problem thing” is why people are liking Batch, even if they’re skeptical at first, because it solves the real problem of, “What do I do with all these random photos on my phone?” Maybe that’s not enough to be a long-term business? Well, at least it’s a start.

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Stop Making Apps

8tracks, SimCity Deluxe, Hockey Nations 2011 and More [Android Apps Of The Week]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

8tracks : 8tracks has always been a great way to combine your favorite songs into a custom playlist and share it with your friends. It’s now on Android. Lifehacker says , “the service allows you to create a social playlist of songs with 8 or more songs, pulled and organized from their huge database of tracks. Music reviewers like Pitchfork, Spin, and Rolling Stone contribute playlists, and the service promises a social music discovery experience that lets you discover music that real people think works together” More »

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8tracks, SimCity Deluxe, Hockey Nations 2011 and More [Android Apps Of The Week]

It’s 11:11 11-11-11! You Know What That Means [The End]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:11:11 +0000

In binary, 1111 11 11 11 means “The world is ending right now and I’m still in bed wearing my Wolverine underpants.” Good bye my friends. More »

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It’s 11:11 11-11-11! You Know What That Means [The End]

The Day Privacy Died [Twitter]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The other day, while sitting in our car with the windows down, my wife and I had a heated argument. Bad words. Yelling. A fist or two slammed into our Volvo’s center console. Though we both received nominations, we never reached consensus on which one of us was wrong, and the whole thing blew over by time we pulled into the garage. More »

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The Day Privacy Died [Twitter]

Google Acquires Katango, The Automatic Friend Sorter

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:38:54 +0000

Back in September we broke the news that Google was in talks to acquire Katango , a small Kleiner Perkins-backed startup that launched this past summer. Today, they’ve made it official: Katango just announced that it’s been acquired by Google, and that it’ll be joining the Google+ team. Katango is a logical fit for Google, though their initial product was focused primarily on Facebook. The startup first debuted an iPhone app in July , setting out to made it easier to selectively share with various groups of friends on Facebook. Facebook’s List feature has long allowed users to share certain pieces of content with different friends, but it did little to automate the process of actually breaking your friends out into different groups. That’s where Katango came in: you’d connect the app with your Facebook social graph, and it would analyze your friends to automatically sort them into different buckets. It was powerful, but the competitive landscape changed significantly shortly after Katango’s launch. In September, Facebook unveiled Smart Lists , which also help automate the process of separating friends into lists (it offers some pre-built lists, like coworkers and people who live nearby, and its suggestion feature makes it easy to build custom lists as well). In other words, Facebook is solving the problem itself. But Google+ has a feature that’s analogous to Facebook’s Friend Lists: Circles. And while Google has promoted Circles heavily, both in its marketing and on Google+ itself, it doesn’t do much in the way of automatically helping users sort their friends into Circles — there’s still a lot of legwork involved. Which Katango seems perfectly suited to help with. Here’s a statement from a Google spokesperson: “We were impressed by the Katango team’s innovative approach to making your social circles smarter, and we think they’ll be a great addition to the Google+ team.”

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Google Acquires Katango, The Automatic Friend Sorter

Facebook Settles With FTC To Make New Privacy Changes Opt-In

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:33:06 +0000

Facebook has reached an agreement with the FTC to make all future changes to privacy settings opt-in, presumably including new features with their own privacy controls. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the social network was nearing a settlement on the issue and now its Marketplace editor Dennis K. Berman says that settlement is for new privacy controls to be opt in. The agreement could limit Facebook’s ability to drive adoption of new features, as they won’t be able to immediately go viral. Users rarely visit their privacy settings, so Facebook will need to devise a way to get them to do so. Facebook has come under fire from the FTC and privacy advocates for enabling a facial recognition feature by default for European users. It was made opt-out rather than allowing users to decide whether they wanted their photos scanned for faces to assist them with tagging, and whether their faces would be identified in the photos uploaded by friends. Facebook attempted to quell unrest by showing alerts on the home page directing users to check out their privacy controls. These notices apparently weren’t enough, though, and so the FTC has stepped in to prevent what it sees as future privacy violations. Existing privacy settings will be left intact, but if Facebook wants to release a radically new feature that’s not covered by its existing privacy controls it will have to make it opt out. Facebook will also be subject to privacy audits from the FTC for the next 20 years. We’ll have more analysis shortly.

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Facebook Settles With FTC To Make New Privacy Changes Opt-In