Archive for: March 11, 2010
March 11, 2010
 Not a bad way to spend one's birthday. The Foursquare team is headed down to SXSW in Austin (along with our own Foursquare fan Dan Costa) to celebrate its first birthday. In one year, the location-based service has aggregated: Over 500,000 users Over 1,000,000 badges have been awarded Over
1.4 million venues with 1,200 offering specials
Over 15.5
million checkins"I can't tell you how psyched we are to see you all again in Austin this
weekend," the site's founders wrote in a blog post. "It's been an amazing year and thanks to everyone who's pitched
in to help and support us along the way." Not surprisingly, the universe of Web apps has also got that old-time location religion, with Facebook reportedly adding location information to status updates, and Twitter joining the party by asking users where they are. It 's all an evolution of mobile search, which attempts to match you with search results in your immediate location.
    
 If you think cooking like a man just involves grilling pounds and pounds of meat, you couldn't be further from the truth. Man Tested Recipes is out to prove that even the most macho of men can grab a saucepan and hit the stove with the best of cooks and make everything from Thai chicken to banana rum Bundt cake. The site is a community of food-loving guys who are interested in learning new recipes or in sharing their own, and members can rate, comment, and share one another's recipes. Normally I would say that cooking doesn't have to be a gendered thing, but when you have a site with over 130 bacon-related recipes, it's kind of difficult not to.
Even if you're not a macho man and you just want to find a new tasty recipe to make, Man Tested Recipes can help. The service does focus on hearty foods, competition cooking, and some more traditionally "guy" foods. For example, some of the popular categories include bacon, beer, potatoes, and beef. You'll find vegetables in there too, but not in quite the same volume. In addition to the 131 bacon-related recipes, you'll find 290 beef-related recipes including several varieties and flavors of chili and 99 recipes using potatoes as the main ingredient.  You can see the most common main ingredients on the left sidebar, so if you're looking for a recipe that involves beer, you can click on it to see all of the site's recipes that use ...
 If you're having a stressful day and could use some sounds to relax you while you work, head over to MoodTurn for some soothing music and beautiful landscapes. You can select the type of sounds the Web app plays as well as the imagery in the background to help you relax. The site loops music and visuals if you'd prefer to let it play in the background while you work in another window. If you're looking for a little desktop vacation, or soothing nature sounds really do help you relax, MoodTurn might be the best way to block out your noisy cubicle neighbor.
 The service automatically rotates background images and re-plays songs without your help. You can open it, go back to work in other windows or tabs in your browser, and forget it's even running in the background, giving your entire day a nice soothing soundtrack. If you prefer more manual control, you can easily switch moods and backgrounds whenever you choose from the menus on the left side and top of the page. Each of those menus easily slides in and out of view when you want them to so you can maximize your browser and get a nice, full-screen view of the background image that matches the sounds playing.  MoodTurn features four moods: rainforest, birds, storm, and beach. You have to choose one to get started, but the service rotates through audio without ...
Poor, poor Bill Gates. The guy is now only the second
richest person in the world. It's a good thing he's got the foundation to keep
him busy, or else he might be taking this pretty hard. According to Forbes's annual
ranking, the new richest person in the world is Carlos Slim Helú, the CEO of
Mexico's Telmex, Telcel and América Móvil.
The gulf between the two isn't huge--Slim is work $53.5
billion according to the list, just edging out Gates at $53 billion. Maybe if
Gates wasn't so busy, you know, saving the world...
A number of other techies made the list, including Gates's
former partner, Paul Allen, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
 
Kids today. You know, when I was your age, we used to listen to quality bands like Weezer and Green Day. Wait, what? Really? They're still big? Okay then. Carry on.
Surprisingly resilient pop-punk group Green Day is confirming the contemporary conventional wisdom that you're not really a successful music outfit until you get your own guitar controller-based video game. Harmonix and MTV Games this week announced that the latest title in the Rock Band franchise, Green Day: Rock Band, will be hitting store shelves on June 8th.
The game lets users play as Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool, "progress[ing] through the story and history of Green Day," which means, apparently, that 924 Gilman street will finally be making its video game debut—much to the acclaim of anti-materialist East Bay punk rockers, no doubt.
The game features 47 Green Day tracks from over the years, including "Jaded," "Hitchin' a Ride," "American Idiot," "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." The songs can all be exported to Rock Band and Rock Band 2.
The game will be available for the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3.
 
Microsoft made quite a splash last year with its new Bing search engine. Though still a distant second, Bing, according to recent reports, is gaining on Google and watching Yahoo fade. How is Microsoft doing it? What's next for Bing? Good questions, but when I sat down with Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz, I thought it might be fun to let my Twitter followers ask the questions.
What are the key differentiators with Google? (@Chrisbe166)
What makes Bing better than Google? (@epgomez)
Weitz: Bing is a decision engine. It's designed to take the more complex tasks you have and provide you with more answers and not links, especially in the areas of shopping and local and travel. We built those decision tools on top of core search to actually help you resolve those more complex questions.
Google maps integrates nicely with iPhone how will Bing be able to do the same? (@Chrisbe166)
Weitz: "I would encourage him to install Bing iPhone app. We have an amazing mapping prod out there with smooth streaming technology, with freeform search, with reviews from Bing. So I would encourage him to install that app--it's a good app."
Is there a certain irony to the iPhone having the best mobile Bing app? Any plans for deeper Bing/iPhone integration? (@jonfingas)
Weitz: "Safe to say we are actively working on the next version of the iPhone app. Is it ironic? I would say, look at Windows Phone 7 Series for what I think will be the next generation of mobile search."
When will Bing replace Google as the iPhone's search engine? (@jameszrp)
Weitz: "We'd love to be on the iPhone"
What is Bing doing to motivate invention instead ...
 Webmasters, start your engines! It's speed test time on AppScout thanks to Google and their new Page Speed browser plugin.
Actually, Page Speed is a plugin to a plugin. It runs inside Firebug which runs inside Firefox! That's not as important as what Page Speed does.
Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
Google likes this idea because a more efficient web means less resources are needed by them. In this case the interests of Google and webmasters in general are in sync. Webmasters want fast websites because many web surfers have the attention span of a gerbil. Fast also usually means optimized which gives the webmaster much of the same resource pass Google gets.
Google is trying to promote the use of "best practices" and they're not shy in saying so.
We provide documentation of each of the rules here, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool -- maybe you're just developing a brand new site and aren't ready to test it -- you can refer to these pages at any time. We give you specific tips and suggestions for how you can best implement the rules and incorporate them into your development process.
OK, enough jabber. Let's embarrass some folks.
NYTimes.com - Uh oh. The Times came in with 69/100. Among other things the Gray Lady was delivering readers "identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and ...
In the list of complaint users have against the popular social-networking site Facebook, limits on the ability to share personal information is likely not at the top. Most issues seem to revolve around the compulsion to share anything and everything personal through such sites. That said, one can hardly blame Facebook for wanting to jump on the success of location-based services such as Foursquare.
According to The New York Times, Facebook is getting ready to add location-based information to status updates. This information comes from a number of anonymous sources who were reportedly briefed on the matter. The feature will reportedly debut late next month at Facebook's annual developer conference.
According to The Times, the existence of the feature is reflected in Facebook's new privacy policy, which reads, in part, "When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post."
We reached out to Facebook on the matter and received the following response: "We are constantly experimenting with new ideas and products internally. We don't have anything more to share at this time."
 
In an effort to showcase more of what is available via its RSS reader, Google on Wednesday introduced a new Labs feature, Google Reader Play.
Reader Play lets users flip through selections from Google Reader without actually setting up a formal Reader account. It pulls up links, videos, or photos at random in a style similar to StumbleUpon, though a filmstrip at the bottom of the page shows previous and upcoming selections.
"Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the 'like' button, and we'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like," Google's Garrett Wu wrote in a blog post.
Users can also choose to see items from specific categories like arts, business, entertainment, health, news, science, sports, technology, shared, and recommended.
When I perused Reader Play, for example, it was set to "recommended" by default and featured a cartoon strip from Gizmodo, a chart illustrating why salads cost more than Big Macs, and a collection of photos featuring the many faces of Johnny Depp.
You don't have to sign in or even have a Google account to peruse Reader Play, but you do have to sign in to like, share, or star a particular item.
"If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you're following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you've previously liked, starred, or shared," Wu wrote.
Wu stressed that Reader Play is complementary to Google Reader and will not replace it. Reader Play is "designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to ...
How will MySpace regain its footing in the social networking space? A month after losing Owen Van Natta as chief executive in favor of two co-presidents, the News Corp.-owned site announced Wednesday that its new focus will be on gaming.
"Just as music was our springboard for revitalizing our platform, we're taking a similar approach to gaming which you'll see in new features throughout site," co-president Mike Jones wrote in a blog post.
MySpace launched a revamped games homepage at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco today.
"For users, this means it's going to be easier than ever to discover and share games virally," Jones wrote.
Game activity will posted via users' notifications and streams. The revamp also includes personalized game recommendation, popular game charts, and the ability to rate games.
"For developers, we've improved application engagement and analytics tools so you have more intelligence on the demographics of who is using your games, how they're discovering them and how they're being shared," Jones said.
Developers can now: review app-specific analytics via a new API; build 3D games using technology from Unity; pub to other platforms using Scoreloop; use the cloud-based GroovyCortex for low latency push data on multi-player games; and track the source of app invitations to know how players are finding you.
The company also launched a new iPhone app, known as MySpace Neon, which will provide users access to their games on the iPhone.
The new homepage will also include several new games, including Fish Isle, Hoop Fever Live, Kingdoms of Camelot, Paradise Paintball, SPP Ranch, Warlords, Wild Ones, and Zombie Revenge.
...
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