A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees.
Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists,” Zuckerberg admitted. → Read More
E3 is over, Gamescom is over, and now we’re looking at the Tokyo Game Show as the next obvious bullet point on the list of “times to announce cool games stuff.” Microsoft seems to be taking advantage, and will be doing one of the big keynotes for the show. “Xbox 360′s Vision and 2010′s Strategy” is the tentative title… not exactly raising the roof with that one, Microsoft, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. → Read More
I’ve been aching to get my hands on a Mint ever since it was introduced at CES this year. It’s a little cleaner robot like the Roomba, but created with hardwood floors in mind. Think of the Roomba as a broom and dustpan, while the Mint is like a Swiffer.
I’ve only had this little guy for long enough to charge him for a few hours and give him the run of the living room once, so this is just a quick overview. → Read More
As seen by the entire Internet, the August 19th premiere of Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You” will go down in history as the day the phrase “fuck you” became totally benign and commonplace.
But, in another case of loud web hipster chatter not resulting in a proportionate amount of viewers, “Fuck You” did not get to 1/2 million or 1 million mark faster than glossy stuff like Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone,” which had surpassed the Cee-Lo video’s current 2,822,225 million views IN A DAY. → Read More
Crafty commerce site Etsy just raised another $20 million in its fifth venture round (that would be the Series E). Index Ventures is the new investor leading the round, with partner Danny Rimer getting an observer’s seat on the board. (The board is made up of founder Rob Kalin, Caterina Fake, Accel partner Jim Breyer and Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson). Previous investors Accel and Hubert Burda Media put in some money as well in this round.
The round gives Etsy a pre-money valuation of just under $300 million, about triple the valuation it got during its last, $27 million round in January, 2008. Most of the shares sold—nearly $14 million of the $20 million—were secondary shares held by some of the early investors. But unlike other rounds we’ve seen lately, this wasn’t a liquidity event for founders. Kalin says he did not sell any shares, nor did any employees. → Read More
Earlier this evening, Facebook held a developer’s garage event at their headquarters — sort of like a State of the Union for third-party developers. Notably, they announced a new partnership with Y Combinator that has the goal of creating new startups with deep integrations with Facebook’s newest tools. But there was also a Q&A session with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Bret Taylor, and Y Combinator’s Paul Graham that was pretty interesting.
One question asked if Facebook was working on their instant personalization technology for mobile devices. Taylor fielded the question noting that mobile brought about some interesting technology problems in this regard. Most notably, he said the issue is with password entry on mobile devices. According to Taylor, that’s something they have an entire team focused on right now → Read More
And boy is he delicious! The Stay-Puft Marshmallows are caffeinated bite-sized pieces of the Destructor and come in a groovy collectable box. No need to claim to be a god on this one, Ray. Just pop ‘em in your mouth! → Read More
Formspring, the Q&A service that lets users invite their friends to “ask them anything”, has had a wild year: since officially launching last November, the service has skyrocketed to over 16 million registered members, 40 million monthly uniques, and it’s now closing in on one billion questions answered. Because the company is still quite small and has had to deal with actually scaling the site, Formspring’s feature set has been pretty spare until recently. Now the company has a few key new features in the pipeline.
The biggest upcoming feature, which will be launching in the next few weeks, is called ‘Connections’. Before now Formspring has had a very limited social graph — you could ‘follow’ other users, but you couldn’t see who was following you (nor could you see who was following anyone else for that matter). → Read More
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Valve’s own Gabe Newell took some time to talk about the possibility of a Half-Life movie. Apparently after the smash success of the first game, they were inundated with crappy scripts, and directors who didn’t get what the game was about. As a result, Valve started thinking about how they would make a movie. The result is the ever amusing “Meet the Spy” features that Valve has produced at various times. Newell went on to say that the best people to make a movie about a game, would be the people that made that game. I agree to a certain extent, but keep in mind that scripting skills in a game doesn’t necessarily equal scripting skills for a movie. I have to admit though, I love the storyline in Half-Life series, and would love to see more about the adventures of my brother. → Read More
Well well! I think we all saw this coming! An unmanned robotic combat helicopter, losing its control signal, continues on its merry way into restricted airspace over Washington, DC. Really, what were they thinking? → Read More
Now that TweetDeck’s Android app is out in beta mode, with its multiple streams (notably Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Google Buzz) and blended options, many users want to know when TweetDeck will overhaul its iPhone app. The company’s CEO and founder, Iain Dodsworth, who dropped by TechCrunch’s headquarters on Wednesday, says it could be a “good couple of months.”
So, what is taking the British startup so bloody long?
According to Dodsworth, his 15-man team is pretty strained, from working on updates to the desktop client, the Android app, the iPhone app and new features like User Streams.
Dodsworth, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, also has a few tricks up his sleeve. As we speak, the TweetDeck lab is working on several “stealth” ideas. Although Dodsworth was generally vague during our off and on camera interviews, he seemed especially excited about the idea of allowing nearby TweetDecks to talk to each other (See video ahead). → Read More
http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=lwaWRvMTrOVGHmKNs1kfU–673aJeWxL&version=2 I realize pictures can go but so far, so here’s a quick video of what you can expect when reading on the new Kindle. → Read More
E-ink, you are everywhere already. But LG wants you even more everywhere. So they’re putting more effort into the production of bigger, better E-paper displays. They’re showing off a couple new models, though nothing radical. Still, a 9.7″ color E-ink display and a gigantic, flexible tabloid-sized one? Sign me up. → Read More
When it comes to trademarks, Facebook is proving to be a bully. It is going after Teachbook in court for using a similar name, and already forced Placebook to change its name. But that is only half the story.
It is not just the word “book” at the end of a company or product name that Facebook might object to. If it has its way, the word “Face” at the beginning of a name might also bring out its lawyers. In fact, Facebook is currently trying to register the word “Face” as a trademark. (It already owns the trademark on “Facebook”). Facebook took over the trademark application for “Face” from a company in the UK called CIS Internet Limited, which operated a site called Faceparty.com. Presumably, Facebook bought the application sometime around November, 2008, which is when its lawyer started dealing with the USPTO.
However, at least one person is objecting to this trademark: Aaron Greenspan. Yup, that Aaron Greenspan, Mark Zuckerberg’s classmate at Harvard who laid a claim to helping create Facebook, which he later settled. → Read More
Startups that enter the Y Combinator program don’t generally do it for the money alone — most companies receive $20,000 or less in seed funding. Instead, they do it for the exposure, connections, mentors, and resources that the YC program affords. And they just got one more major perk: Facebook has announced that it will be working to help YC companies create “transformative social experiences”, and it’s going to give them preferential treatment and access to company resources. From the Facebook post:
We’ll provide product, technical and design resources to support new Y Combinator companies interested in working with us to build deeply social products, whether a website or an application on Facebook.com. These companies will have priority access to our technologies and programs such as Facebook Credits, Instant Personalization and upcoming beta features. → Read More
High speed photography is really cool to see, but difficult to do right. Photographer Lex Augusteijn doesn’t have that problem though, he’s taken some amazing high speed shots using a coilgun and some very careful timing. The end result is amazing, and a lot of fun to look at. Lex also has a complete gallery of his other work that is definitely worth your time to take a look at. [via Make] → Read More
Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.
That’s good news. But even though it has only been three months since the initial buzz began about the project, the online world has slightly changed. Back then, it seemed as if everyone with a voice on the web was screaming bloody murder about Facebook and their privacy issues. That plus a timely New York Times profile helped Diaspora raise over $200,000 from the crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter — the most ever raised on the site and an amazing $190,000 more than Diaspora’s original goal. But today, again, just three months later, Facebook is still growing like a weed. Controversy keeps bubbling up, but it just as quickly subsides. → Read More
The autostereoscopic technology behind the 3DS and Toshiba’s HDTVs (to say nothing of glasses-free 3D products for years) is far from secret, so it makes sense that once 3D started blowing up, we’d see it everywhere. Here’s an example: a tiny 3D tablet aimed at 3D movie-watchers. → Read More
If you’ve been on the new Digg at all in the past day or so you’re probably already familiar with the above “Fail Ox” image, especially if you’re trying to use Digg search. The image is new, and is the result of Digg designer Tyson Rosage’s obsession with The Oregon Trail, you know the old school computer game.
Founder Kevin Rose told TechCrunch and Twitter last night that Digg experienced over 1 million unique visits on its launch day (the site has been averaging about 8.7 million unique visits per month, according to Comscore) as well as “a handful of new bugs.” “We hope to have all the major issues fixed in the next 24hrs,” says Rose, which might affect the ubiquity of the “404″ page. Consensus among users I’ve talked to is that the site seems to be moving forward from the scaling issues it had yesterday both in terms of speed and in terms of frequency of “Fail Oxen.” → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Kim-Mai Cutler.
Nearly four years after Apple launched the iPhone and two years after Google open-sourced the code for its Android operating system, Microsoft is finally set to re-enter the mobile market this holiday season in a serious way with Windows Phone 7.
It is trying to catch up to those more modern smartphones the only way it can — with cold, hard cash.
The company could spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing costs and payments to developers and handset manufacturers to subsidize the expense of building phones and apps, so that the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem is well-seeded at launch. → Read More
