Archive for: October 15, 2009

Twitter is rolling out its new Lists feature to a select few users, and my account was among those selected to participate. Lists, which Twitter announced in late September, allows you to group friends into different lists. Those lists can then be kept private or be made public so that other Twitter users can follow them.

Users included in the beta will be met with the greeting above, asking you to create a list. A pop-up window will then ask you to name your first group and choose whether it is open or private. More details and screen shots after the jump.

Twitter will take you to your Lists page, where you can go to the following page to add people to your List. Find a Twitter follow you want to add to your list and click the left-hand button for a drop-down menu of all your Lists. Click the box and you're done. Created Lists will now live underneath the Search box, and clicking on a List will show you Tweets only from people in your List.

I've wasted the last couple of hours of my life. It's my fault, really, I admit it. It's just that I got excited and jumped into a project without taking all of the proper precautions. You see, there was a post on TechCrunch today with the title "Want That Early Chrome OS? You Got It." We picked up the story and ran with it. And then I took it upon myself to install the OS on a system in the PCMag Labs--well, I tried to.

Backing up for a second, here's the story: Earlier in the week, Google posted a folder on its dev site with the title "chromeos." Word got out, and the folder was quickly pulled by the company. One user who had already downloaded the app took it upon himself to share it with the world via RapidShare. That file went up today and is still up. TechCrunch reported about the "leaked" OS in the aforementioned post yesterday.

Here's the thing, though: it's not an OS at all. It's a browser, the Chrome Browser.

I downloaded the thing and attempted to unzip the file on a Windows PC. The thing has an unusual extension, though: .deb. It's a compressed file that can only be unpacked on a Linux system. So I installed Unbuntu on a netbook in the labs.

Once installed, I attempted to open up the RapidShare file, only to be greeted with the following text, "The Web browser from Google. Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the Web faster, safer, and easier."

In other ...

A Senate panel on Thursday approved a bill that would require terrestrial radio stations to pay royalty rates just like their Internet, satellite, and cable counterparts. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Performance Rights Act by a voice vote after adopting one amendment.

Traditional radio stations currently pay nothing to performers, arguing that exposure on their stations results in record sales--and money--for the artists featured and their record labels. Instead they pay about $550 million in fees to songwriters each year, according to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

Internet, cable, and satellite radio stations, meanwhile, pay royalty fees for the right to broadcast the same music.

Under the bill, stations with annual revenues under $50,000 would pay a royalty fee of $100 per year. Stations with revenues between $50,000 and $100,000 would pay $500 per year, stations making between $100,000 and $500,000 would pay $2,500 per year, and stations making between $500,000 and $1.25 million would be charged $5,000.

Any stations that make more than $1.25 million in revenue annually would have their royalty rates set by the government-run Copyright Royalty Board.

Public stations, like NPR, would have similar rate structures, except that any station making more than $100,000 would only have to pay $1,000 per year.

Meanwhile, stations that make less than $5 million per year would have three years from the time the bill was signed before they had to pay up. Stations making more than $5 million would have one year.

The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration. A House version of the bill was approved by the House Judiciary Committee in May, but the full House has yet to consider the legislation.

The issue has prompted strong reactions from supporters and detractors. Groups like musicFIRST ...

Word of advice. If someone has a restraining order out on you, don't "poke" them.

Tennessee resident Shannon Jackson (above) learned that the hard way when she was arrested for poking Dana Hannah on Facebook, a local news station reported. A poke is essentially a virtual greeting that shows up on a user's Facebook homepage. Depending on your account settings, you don't have to be friends with someone to poke them.

Hannah took out a protection order against Jackson in June for alleged stalking. The September poking incident could now land Jackson in jail for up to a year. She faces the judge in late October.

Thanks to a plethora of rights issue with its public domain Books project, Google hasn't always been on the best terms with the publishing industry. Still, such on-going squabbles aren't going to prohibit the company from pushing further into the space. At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the company's director of strategic partnerships, Tom Turvey, told crowds about the Editions project, but added, "We're not focused on a dedicated e-reader or device of any kind."

Editions is set for launch the first half of next year. At launch, it will offer half a million e-books directly from Google or other online sites such as Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

Unlike Books, Google will be making money on this venture--money it will split with publishing houses. Publishers will get a 63 percent cut of the revenue, according to the company. Books purchased through the store will work on a number of devices, including the iPhone.

Hey Twitter users, would you like some cheese to go with that whine? No? How about some wine to go with that whine? It seems that if this whole microblogging thing doesn't pan out for the folks on Twitter, they've got another promising career to fall back on: wine making. The company has entered into a deal with a San Francisco-based winery Crushpad (not, to the best of our knowledge, owned by Michael Arrington), which will bring the world what it's been clamoring for: Twitter-branded wine.

The proceeds from Twitter wine will go to the non-profit children's literacy group, Room to Read, as part of the Bottles for Books program (perhaps taking a page out of the Crumpler game book). Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams explain the reasoning the Fledgling Initiative--and wine--on their storefront:

As a company that's only one percent into its journey, we're always thinking about our long term impact on the world. The Fledgling Initiative embodies two things that are at the core of Twitter's mission: providing access to information and highlighting the power of open communication to bring about positive change.

If you're like me, you've been losing sleep at night, worrying that third-party companies haven't been able to effectively leverage the Twitter platform for their advertising benefit. Have no fear! Check out the admittedly clever ad above from the Service Employees International Union.

The ad contains canned text, which Twitter users can post to their stream, in order to drive interest in a cause. This one's for a union, sure, but who wouldn't want to tweet about some delicious McDonald's fries?

YouTube has struck a "pioneering" content agreement in the UK with Channel 4, which will make the broadcaster's content available for free through the video streaming site. The deal involves shows like Skins, Hollyoaks, The Inbetweeners, and a personal favorite, Peep Show.

Channel 4 already makes its content available on the Web via its 4od service. Like that offering, episodes will be made available on YouTube shortly after airing. Content will begin trickling in over the next few months, but will not be "fully available" until early next year.

Feeling the burning desire to get your hands on an early build of Google's mysterious Chrome OS? Need it now? No problem. A couple of days ago, an intrepid Google fan named Jonathan Frederickson spotted an early version of the operating system on Google's build site, located in a folder labeled "chromeos."

After the discovery was made public, Google pulled the folder, but not before Frederickson could download it. Now he's made it available to the world via his Rapidshare account.

Google can certain attempt to have Rapidshare pull the file, if it's so inclined, but it would be a bit of a surprise if the company got too aggressive, given the software's open-source nature.

In my office, every time we request a quote on pricing for a product or service from one of our vendors, they send us back a PDF document with the information we've requested. Unfortunately, those documents have a lot of extra information in them, and sometimes I need only the important bits (like the price and the total) for a quick e-mail or to paste into a purchase order. Thankfully, the PDF Text Extractor allows me to import the PDF document and export text only, perfect for highlighting and pasting into other applications.

Some PDF documents are created so it's easy to highlight and select the text inside the document and paste it elsewhere. Unfortunately, most of them are created as an image, which means it's impossible to get just the text out of the document unless you have an optical character recognition (OCR) application. Thankfully, the PDF Text Extractor does something very similar, and it's completely free.

When you open the PDF Text Extractor, it asks you to select the input PDF file and the output folder for the text document the app will create. The app is tiny, and once you provide the input file and destination folder, all you have to do is click Convert to make the app do its stuff. It'll crunch the file for a few moments and let you know with a pop-up dialog that the conversion is complete.

Unfortunately, you can't choose the output file name and the app creates files named ...

Looks like Monsoon Multimedia isn't taking this whole SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone thing sitting down. The company has just released its Hava Player mobile app, which lets iPhone and iPod touch owners view and control Hava devices (like the Hava Titanium HD WiFi) connected to cable, satellite, and TiVo over Wi-Fi.

Essentially, the app offers remote control of the Hava device. That includes channel changing; the ability to browse program guides for schedules, series, and episode descriptions; and a 'Favorites' feature to label favorite channels. It's also optimized for the video-streaming app that Monsoon also sells for PCs, netbooks, and other mobile devices.

The app costs $9.99, requires iPhone and iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or higher, and is now available in Apple's App Store. Sadly, just like SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone, Hava Player doesn't stream video over 3G--because if it did, AT&T's entire HSDPA network would collapse to a single, highly dense point that only the Large Hadron Collider could decipher.

Dining Web site Urban Spoon is reportedly the latest company to incorporate "augmented reality" into their iPhone app.

A new feature, known as Scope, will allow you to get information about a nearby restaurant simply by pointing your iPhone in its direction, according to the New York Times. Colored bubbles will pop up once the app recognizes the restaurant, and you can tap on them for more information.

The feature rolled out on Wednesday and only works with the latest iPhone 3GS. If the GPS-based suggestions are somewhat off, Urban Spoon incorporated a feature that lets you adjust your position on a map to get better results.

In August, Yelp incorporated augmented reality into its iPhone app with the addition of Monocle, a hidden feature similar to Scope that appears when you shake the handset.