Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.
We’ll look back on the good old days when your reputation was really only on the line with eBay via confirmed, actual transactions and LinkedIn, where you can simply reject anyone who leaves bad feedback on your professional life.
Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access. → Read More
Don’t let anyone tell you it is easy to create a successfully engaging Facebook Fan Page. It is not.
It’s not an insurmountable task either. But it requires planning, time, some kind of HTML knowledge, design skill, and imagination. Originality doesn’t hurt either.
There are great tools and tips available that will help you create an outstanding page for your brand without an immense amount of time or capital invested. I’ve been working to improve our own Go2web20 fan page and I have some tips from my experience that I’m more than happy to share. → Read More
For most geeks, the only thing that can trump video games is, well, porn. Which is exactly why so many companies are exploring the world of sex based video games. For those old schoolers, you may remember games like Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry Series, which was a computer adventure game about a guy trying to get lucky in any way possible. Of course we are talking about pixelated cartoonish sexual imagery but hey, back in the day this stuff was awesome! Certain game development companies continue to make straight out porn focused games, but there are also some ‘mainstream’ games including sex as part of a storyline like Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2 (again), and the always controversial Grand Theft Auto series. With the advent of the video → Read More
Remember that DSi XL that’s coming out next week? Well, I hope you didn’t spend a bunch of money in the DSiWare store with your regular size DSi. Yep, turns out that you can’t transfer games to your new hand-held. That really sucks. → Read More
Man alive, how great would it be to be rich? You could afford crazy things like, I don’t know, new shoes, healthy food, and six 20-inch monitors to play Modern Warfare 2 with. That’s the dream. → Read More
Paul Tarjan had been at Yahoo for three years. That was enough.
Yesterday, to commemorate his last day at the company, Tarjan released a video on YouTube (embedded below) that he says sum up his 1,032 days at Yahoo. In “White & Nerdy,” he raps about PHP, SearchMoney, and YUI — all things his hands were heavily involved in at the company (he was one of the creators of SearchMonkey and was serving as the Tech Lead for the project) — among other nerdy things. → Read More
Patents, patents, everywhere! It seems you can’t swing a cat these days without infringing on someone’s patent. The latest victim/perp is Microsoft; an Illinois doctor is suing them because of a patent he was granted in 2002 which allegedly covers the Zune’s ability to tag a song directly from the radio and then download that song once an internet connection is established. Obviously it’s for the lawyers to work out the details, but it seems to me what he must have been granted was more a method of identifying and later purchasing a song, not the plain act of tagging and downloading later. → Read More
For the past few years, being the “Twitter for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK” has been a popular trend among startups. Now, we’re starting to see a shift. Several new startups are launching as the “Foursquare for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK.” And big brands are actually starting to take notice.
Miso is an iPhone app that incorporates the “check-in” idea with watching movies and television shows. So, for example, if you’re watching that NCAA Tournament this weekend, you can check-in to let your friends what you’re doing. You can then send these check-ins to Twitter, Facebook, or yes, Foursquare, checking you in there in the process (assuming you’ve also attached an actual location to your movie/TV show check-in). → Read More
Reader Nate writes, So here’s my problem. The kit lens for my Nikon D40 is busted –something’s rattling around inside — and I don’t know what to do. My options are either buy a new lens for about $200 or spend $600 on either a Nikon D5000 or the Olympus E-PL1. On one hand, I would like to save some cake and $200 isn’t that bad for a camera that I don’t mind. I already have a 50mm f1.8 Nikon lens and Nikon SB-600 Speedlight anyway. But a new camera would be nice so I was thinking another entry level Nikon because it will work with my gear anyway. Then there’s the Olympus E-PL1 that’s calling my name. It’s a lot more portable (read: wife-friendly) and Biggs says in his review that the picture quality is fine. It’s not like I even consider myself an armature photographer. I’m more like a weekend shutterbug so the I don’t need all the fancy manual controls found on DSLRs that I honestly don’t know how to use anyway. So what do I do, CrunchGear? → Read More
If one, and only one, photo could be said to represent PAX East 2010, I’m gonna said it’d be this one. Two gentleman in full-on cosplay mode (unless that’s just what they wear every day!), hunched over a computer monitor, playing to their hearts’ content. It almost brings a tear to your eye. → Read More
Last week I sat down with Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive who now runs all of AOL’s social and mobile products. You can meet Brad, who joined AOL six months ago, at our upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York.
Brad spoke about his product plans for AOL mail, saying that it’s time we reinvented the inbox to aggregate all of the different ways people communicate with each other online today.
There hasn’t been much innovation in e-mail in a long time. I mean, listen I’ll pick on a different competitor. You know, Gmail was profound when Gmail came out. Gmail hasn’t done as much in the last 5 years. The interesting about this is there continues to be pain in the consumer experience, right? When you think about the inbox, it has proliferated and there are more and more inboxes in my life.
Full video and transcript is below: → Read More
In the last few days, we’ve uncovered some major new features that Facebook is going to announce at its f8 developer conference, including its plan to offer a Like button for the entire Internet and a creepy auto-Connect feature that will share your data with sites you never signed up for. Now we’ve heard from multiple sources about a third major product the company plans to unveil: a persistent Facebook toolbar that third-party sites can integrate that sounds a whole lot like the Meebo Bar.
Details on Facebook’s toolbar are still scant, but we hear that it will rest at the bottom of the browser window using AJAXy technology, the way Meebo’s Bar does (and the way the chat bar previously integrated into Facebook.com did before it). We can expect the Facebook bar to include sharing features and chat, just like the Meebo Bar. It’s unclear if Facebook will be launching its bar with advertising but we can almost certainly expect it to come eventually. → Read More
You’ll find no one here who’s not down for a round or two (or 10) of Street Fighter. No one! In fact, I’m half-convinced that that’s Greg under that helmet. → Read More
Earlier we made fun of Bing for going “dark” today to save energy in a way that doesn’t at all save energy. But Foursquare has an actual way to do that: take down the entire service.
Yesterday, Foursquare had some downtime. That’s nothing new, startups have downtime all the time — see: Twitter, that was their M.O. for about a year — but the reason for Foursquare’s appears to be a little humorous. → Read More
Yesterday, Facebook released a proposed privacy policy that foreshadowed a bold (and creepy) new feature: some third-party partners are going to be allowed to access and use your Facebook data without any prior consent. Make no mistake — there will be backlash. That’s par for the course for Facebook, which has shown time and time again that it isn’t afraid of a little bad press. But this time could be different: Facebook users may not only object to having their social graphs shared without their permission, they could also finally get a wakeup call as to what the site’s infamous ‘Everyone’ setting really means, as well some of the other unsettling privacy changes Facebook made last December. And things could get ugly.
Imagine what will happen the first time Joe Facebooker visits a third-party site he’s never been to and is greeted by the smiling faces of his friends, his most recent shared updates, and content tailored to his gender, location, and age. There’s a decent chance he’s going to assume something has gone terribly, terribly wrong — maybe he’s been hacked or phished. Or maybe he’ll realize that the privacy wizard he went through last December wasn’t as benign as he thought. → Read More
Same headline as two years ago, just a different company. In honor of Earth Hour, Bing will go with a darker version of the site this evening.
And just like Google two years ago, it’s an interesting gesture to support the cause, but it is akin to beating a baby seal to death to support a ban on seal clubbing. Or Al Gore taking a private jet to a conference to wag his finger and tell us not to drive our SUVs. Or Pepsi doing this. Or California doing this.
That’s because it uses more power to show black on a flat panel screen than it does to show white. → Read More
Go to Apple.com. See that search box, top right? Type “iThing” or “iStuff” and you’ll find that there are no shortcuts to product or related pages – evidently because there are no Apple products called iThing or iStuff to find on the website. Now, run a search for the term “iSlate”. Interesting, isn’t it?
At the end of last year, MacRumors discovered that Apple once owned – and likely still owns -the domain name islate.com, after which we ran a search for U.S. and European trademarks related to the term. Applications for the marks existed indeed, only they were filed by a company called Slate Computing, more than likely a shell entity set up by Cupertino in order to hide the associated documents from public sight.
Later, MacRumors found that Slate Computing also applied for a trademark for “Magic Slate”, further fueling rumors that Apple’s tablet device – which was still unannounced, unconfirmed and thus unnamed at that point – would be given the name iSlate. Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on to unveil the device in January 2010, named it iPad, and everyone sort of forgot about those other trademarks. This morning, we took another look at them. → Read More
Hope you got your iPad already pre-ordered because Apple has pushed back the shipping date for all new orders to April 12th. It’s really not that surprising seeing as there have been reports stating Apple may already have 500,000 iPads in the bag. It might be quicker at this point to start camping Apple Stores or Best Buy if you *must* have an iPad the moment it’s released. We know that retail outlets will at least have a small supply on April 3 to serve the Apple faithful. → Read More
We pay lots of lip service to Turing but has anyone actually seen or thought about what Turing did for computing? Aside from the Turing Test, Alan Turing invented his Machine, a “tape-based” system for digital computing. The machines have always been thought of as a “thought experiment” but on crazy man actually built one.
Although this Turing machine is controlled by a Parallax Propeller microcontroller, its operation while running is based only on a set of state transformations loaded from an SD card and what is written to and read from the tape. While it may seem as if the tape is merely the input and output of the machine, it is not! Nor is the tape just the memory of the machine. In a way the tape is the computer. As the symbols on the tape are manipulated by simple rules, the computing happens. The output is really more of an artifact of the machine using the tape as the computer.
The heart of the turing machine is the read-write head. The read-write head transports the tape and positions cells of the tape appropriately. It can read a cell determining what, if any, symbol is written there. The machine works on, and knows about, only one cell at a time. The tape in my machine is a 1000’ roll of white 35mm film leader. The characters, ones and zeros, are written by the machine with a black dry erase marker.
What if everything we did was a little more fun?
Ever since Foursquare burst onto the scene with its clever badges and simplified “mayoral” achievements, people have been going gaga for game mechanics (and Gaga videos, circumstantially). Its competitors and allies, from Gowalla and Yelp to Miso, Hot Potato and my own startup, beamME, have been evangelizing the value of points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements as an easy and powerful way to get consumers to engage with a product or service.
This use of game mechanics outside of games—also known as Funware—is taking the social web and mobile apps world by storm. Almost every aspiring startup—and many established brands, including Chase, NBC and the US Army—are turning to Funware to deliver results that traditional/social marketing simply cannot deliver. As I explain in my new book, Game-Based Marketing, game mechanics can make any service or community more fun; and when given a choice between two similar activities, consumers will always choose the one that’s more enjoyable.
Editor’s note: In this guest post, Gabe Zichermann argues that fun is good and that game mechanics will find their way into all sorts of products and businesses. → Read More
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