Facebook Takes Another Page from Twitter’s Playbook

Facebook insiders are reporting that a beta version of the site’s “publisher” allows users to choose whether anyone on the Web can view their status updates. Can you say “Twitter?”

What would be interesting would be to see Facebook separate its events stream from the rest of the site, essentially creating a Twitter clone. It could then focus on letting developers build services that piggyback on top–targeting one of Twitter’s strengths. 

Regardless of how aggressive it plans to be, I’ve been continually impressed by Facebook’s ability to evolve itself to remain relevant. It went from being a static social networking site that offered basic messaging capabilities to a site that is focused on actions, events, and mobility. Friendster and MySpace were too late to adapt, and lost their luster.

Earlier this month, Facebook made user names available to its users as a replacement for the random string of numbers that used to represent people. These are all small steps in the right direction that preserve what I like about Facebook while selectively adding what’s best about Twitter.

Wii Getting Hollywood Movies (In Japan)

Nintendo is getting closer to a streaming Wii video service that would translate well to Western audiences.

In Japan, where the Wii’s video channel launched in April, Hollywood films will be available through the same service that powers Blockbuster’s on demand offerings. Sonic Solutions, with its Roxio CinemaNow service, will partner with Fujisoft, which handles Nintendo’s “Minna no Theater Wii” (“Everyone’s Theater Wii”) channel.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to see this video service coming to the US and Europe. In addition to Blockbuster, CinemaNow is already available in the West through LG Blu-ray players, Dell PCs and Archos portable media players.

Paramount Pictures will be the first to offer content on Japanese Wiis, with new releases and catalog titles. Presumably, other studios will follow, and if I had to venture a guess, I’d say Nintendo will line up more content before considering a western migration.

In its current form, the Japanese video service is vastly different from those of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It’s more like Second Life, with Mii avatars socializing in a virtual living room. There are also coupons to download onto Nintendo DS handhelds and celebrities who drop in to peddle their own content. Before the CinemaNow partnership, videos were created specifically for the Wii.

I’m not sure whether that format would work outside of Japan, but with the addition of Hollywood films, a Wii video channel seems readier for export than ever.

Google Voice Starts to Open Up

Betas of Google services are legion, but Google Voice‘s beta has gotta be one of the most suspenseful of them all: In the two years since Google bought the service formerly known as GrandCentral, it’s restricted access to folks who were using GrandCentral at the time of the acquisition.

It has, however, allowed interested parties (of whom there are scads) to get on a waiting list for invitations–and today it announced that it’s beginning to let in new users who have requested invite codes. That’s great news, since Google Voice is among Google’s coolest services, and it rates extemely high on the “I can’t believe they’re providing this for free” meter. (I’m lucky enough to have signed up during the brief period when GrandCentral was in an entirely public beta.)

The service does so many phone-related things that it’s hard to explain briefly, so I’ll embed Google’s own explanatory video:’

Google still isn’t opening up the floodgates by simply allowing anyone to show up at Google voice, register, and immediately begin using it, and today’s announcement doesn’t address when that might happen. Given that the service must be among the company’s more demanding ones from a scalability standpoint–and involves a somewhat scarce resource in the form of the phone numbers that are doled out–it may be a while before Voice is easily available to everyone who’d like to try it. I’ll choose to look on the bright side and be impressed by the patience Google is showing in keeping the service semi-private until it’s absolutely, positively sure it’s ready for prime time.

Google also doesn’t seem to be saying how quickly it’ll release those invites. If you applied for one, let us know if you have (or haven’t) been ushered in…and what you think of the service.

Study Says Education Deters Cyberbullying

For many of us the bullying we experienced in school happened on the schoolyard: however, today’s kids have to also deal with those same bullies making their life hell online as well. A study sponsored by AT&T indicates education on how to deal with these situations goes a long way in prevention, though.

At its core, the study aims to show the successes of a cyberbullying program sponsored by D.A.R.E. in which instructors teach kids strategies to deal with and prevent bullying online. The program has been taught to fifth and sixth graders all across the company, the group says, although it is part of a larger program also offered to first through fourth graders.

As part of the program by D.A.R.E., the three “keeps” of Internet safety from online safety group iKeepSafe are taught: “Keep Safe,” “Keep Away,” and “Keep Telling.”

About 3,200 D.A.R.E. volunteers have been trained so far to give the talk, it said.

Results show that education is likely the best deterrent. Following the program, researchers found that 43 percent more students were able to describe effective responses to cyberbullying, and recognition that persons whom the child trust should be told of the situation increased by 77 percent.

This is extremely important: there have been several notable cases as of late where kids weren’t telling their parents or those in charge about cyberbullying incidents, and it ended in tragedy.

A question to those with children out there: have your kids been a victim of cyberbullying, or are you teaching your kids on your own about the possible dangers of the Internet?

Is No Nudes Good News?

Among iPhone OS 3.0′s 100+ new features are parental control settings. But that apparently doesn’t mean that anything  goes on the iTunes App Store–or even that apps can be as racy as music or movies available from iTunes. There was brief, um, excitement yesterday when an existing iPhone app called Hottest Girls added photos of hot topless girls. I didn’t see it, but it sounds relatively tame. But over at TechCrunch, Robin Wauters is reporting that the new Hottest Girls is now missing from the App Store.

Robin says that other iPhone apps remain with the rating “Rated 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity,” so it sounds like nakedness isn’t taboo on the iPhone, period. As usual with the App Store approval process, I guess we’ll find out what’s permissable and impermissable over time as apps are accepted and rejected…and even then we may be kinda confused.

[VITAL UPDATE: TechCrunch's MG Siegler says that Hottest Girls, which downloads images from a server, was temporarily withdrawn by its seller for being too popular. Apple isn't apparently depriving anybody of their iPhone hotties. And that's the naked truth.]

When Tech Products Go Pro, It’s…Utterly Meaningless!

You may think you’re a pretty adept user of technology, but are you ready for the next level? Do you have the guts, the determination, and the penchant for arbitrary naming conventions to go pro?

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this month, keynote presenter Phil Schiller explained that what had formerly been the 13″ aluminum MacBook now had what it took–FireWire 800, higher RAM capacities, and longer battery life–to be considered a MacBook Pro alongside larger-screened siblings. (The 13″ MacBook Pro also has a slot for Secure Digital cards which, unlike their Memory Stick rivals, never turned “Pro”) That leaves the entry-level white Macbook and the svelte MacBook Air as Apple’s “non-Pro” notebooks, although the MacBook Air is clearly targeted toward that user group often called “mobile professionals.” The lines are more clearly drawn between the pros and the no’s in Apple’s desktop line, where the pricey Mac Pro maintains high configurability and a high price, and the consumer line includes the LCD-based iMac and the hanger-on Mac mini.

But long before Apple renamed the PowerMacs and PowerBooks with the Pro label, the company used it on the software side. Back in 1993, Apple followed up its System 7 operating system with System 7 Pro. Quaintly touted in its press release as “the on ramp to the information superhighway,” it marked the debut of the PowerTalk messaging system, one of the company’s failed system software initiatives of the era along with OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX. On the other hand, System 7 Pro also featured two smash software hits that thrive in Mac OS toda, AppleScript and QuickTime.

Some of the Mac’s earliest applications also eventually went pro, as Apple’s Claris subsidiary churned out products such as MacDraw Pro and MacWrite Pro. But Claris was never spun out as had once been the plan, leaving its pro developers back at Apple. Even today, Apple continues to own FileMaker, Inc., the eponymous product of which is still called FileMaker Pro. (FileMaker Pro is the most basic version of the product–the more advanced one is known as FileMaker Pro Advanced.)

Microsoft has also associated databases with pros, making Access one of the applications included in Office Professional 2007, but its best-known pro product has been Windows XP Professional. XP Pro had a number of security and management enhancements beyond Windows XP Home, as well as multprocessor support, dynamic disk support, a personal Web server, and fax capabilities.

At its debut, Windows XP Professional boldly advertised its presence as a PC was starting up, but Service Pack 2 did away with that bit of vanity and all XP startup screens simply said “Windows XP”. With Windows Vista, Microsoft stopped focusing on “professional”-ism and instead gave users the business, Windows Vista Business, that is. And Windows 7 Business will arrive in the fall, where it will compete with a Mac OS X Leopard update that has added not “pro” but “snow”.

Microsoft has also developed a pro version of Windows Mobile optimized for touch-screen devices as opposed to the Windows Mobile Standard offering aimed at products such as the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. But in what could be interpreted as a part of the image problem of Windows Mobile, AT&T has latched on to the “Pro” suffix to designate handsets that run Windows Mobile, period. The first example of this was with the Pantech Matrix Pro. a dual slider differentiated from the vanilla Pantech Matrix dual slider feature phone by running Windows Mobile. But the Matrix itself came after the Pantech Duo, which also ran Windows Mobile but lacked the “Pro” designation. More recently, AT&T followed up its successful Samsung Propel QWERTY vertical slider with the Propel Pro, the most “pro” phone on the market by dint of it having “pro” twice in its name. And yet, like the Matrix Pro, it doesn’t use the “pro” version of Windows Mobile.

Over at Sprint, HTC followed up on its launch with the HTC Touch, Sprint’s first touchscreen smartphone answering the iPhone, with the Touch Pro, which included a horizontal QWERTY keyboard; both phones ran Windows Mobile Professional. But how do you do the Touch Pro better? HTC added a larger screen and some spiffy call management and user interface features. The result is the Touch Pro2. Pro-”Pro” AT&T also carried the Touch Pro, but it called it the Fuze (which may be short for “con-Fuze-ing”). Now, of course, Sprint is answering the iPhone with the Pre, which we can only hope will never be followed by a Pre Pro.

In the end, “Pro” has become a tech product modifier  so dependent on context that it has become meaningless. The flames aimed at it can be fueled by only one thing: “pro”-pain.

Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research firm The NPD Group. He maintains his own blog at Out of the Box and you can follow him on Twitter at @rossrubin. Views expressed in Technoloizer are his own.

Microsoft Chops Some Windows 7 Prices

Microsoft has dropped one of the lat  remaining veils relating to Windows 7 by announcing the OS upgrade’s pricing.  It’s not exactly stunning that the company chose not to follow Gizmodo’s advice that Win 7 should be free for all Vista owners. But there are a number of price breaks associated with the rollout.

The largest and most interesting price cut is for folks who preorder Windows 7 right away: In the U.S,  you’ll be able to reserve a copy from Best Buy, Amazon, or the Microsoft Store at a discount of more than 50 percent. This preorder price for the upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium, for instance, will be $49.99, versus a list price of $119.99.

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The Simpsons Are Making Money Online

Normally, I wouldn’t write here about ad rates for Web content. But as a consumer of Web-based entertainment and information, I found this kind of encouraging:  Bloomberg is saying that The Simposons is making more money on ads in its online incarnation on Hulu than it is on broadcast TV. Um, that’s revenue per thousand viewers, which is how these things are usually measured–the show still makes three times as much from Fox airings than Hulu, simply because there are so many people watching prime-time TV.

I’m happy not because I care where Rupert Murdoch’s spending money is coming from, but because the financial success of the Simps on the Web is evidence that advertisers are willing to sink real money into good stuff on the Web. Advertising, in case you hadn’t noticed, pays the bills of most sites. And in a world in which everyone from Hollywood mo guls to press barons are questioning the Web’s ability to pay for content, any sign at all of money being made is heartening. (Especially since most of the Hulu shows I watch seem to be accompanied by public-service messages–as if nobody wants to spend a nickel to advertise on them.)

Of course, the business model for big-time entertainment is still going to change a heck of a lot over the next few years. Would Bart and company exist at all if there’d been a Web but no network TV back in 1987, when Matt Groening created them? Maybe–the family started out on low-budget shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show. Ones that would perfectly at home on the Web. But it’s going to be a while before, say, a Lost or 24 can be paid for through online ads.  I think the day will come when it’s doable, and maybe sooner than we expect. But for now, the Web is still freeloading on content that’s being subsized by other media.

Microsoft: Outlook is Not “Broken”

Microsoft has officially put the kibosh on any effort to get the company to ditch the Word rendering engine for HTML based e-mails in Outlook 2010. Over 20,000 twitterers have taken up a call by fixoutlook.org to call on the Redmond company to switch — but the company isn’t having any of it.

“We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages,” said the Outlook team in a blog post Wednesday.

The company also goes on to say there is no standard for HTML in e-mail. It does not address however the evidence that Word rendering is faulty, as shown by Fix Outlook’s comparison of an email in Outlook 2000 and 2010. The rendering in 2010 is frankly horrid.

I’m not sure this is a battle that Microsoft can truly win here. With HTML e-mail now all but a de facto standard in an age of advanced e-mail clients, using a word processor to render it seems almost backwards in thinking.

Microsoft’s refusal to budge also opens the doors to competitors, notably Mozilla, to capitalize on. Remember the last time the company failed to listen to users that one of its products wasn’t up to snuff? An upstart browser captured a quarter of the market.

What do you think? Who’s right here?

Talking, Turn-by-Turn Driving Directions Come to the iPhone

The iPhone 3.0 app goodness continues  roll in. An iPhone version of AT&T’s Navigator turn-by-turn GPS driving directions app is live in Apple’s App Store. It’s one of several navigation apps that have already appeared in the week since iPhone OS 3.0′s arrival. (The most eagerly-awaited one, though, is probably from TomTom–and it’s not due until later this summer.)

Navigator is powered by GPS stalwart TeleNav, and worked reasonably well as I used it on my iPhone 3GS while tooling around the Bay Area today. I was worried that it might not work as well as a dedicated GPS handheld, since early scuttlebutt had it that the iPhone 3G had a wimpy antenna. (I spent $150 on TomTom’s Windows Mobile version for my AT&T Tilt phone, and while the software was great the Tilt wasn’t much better at figuring out where it was than I am. And I have a cruddy sense of direction.)

Navigator had no problem keeping up with me even at 60mph. It has decent search for addresses and businesses, live traffic updates, and a bunch of other features that my current GPS system (a five-year-old one built into my Mazda3) lacks. However, it works only in portrait mode as far as I can tell–I wish it also offered a more windshield-mimicking landscape view. And the quality of its spoken directions was surprisingly muffled, which occasionally left me straining to understand them.

If you’re serious about using Navigator or any other GPS application for the iPhone, there’s no doubt that you’re going to want some sort of mounting system that pumps its audio through your car’s stereo and provides power–otherwise, the phone will be too hard to see and too hard to hear, and its battery will be drained in a jffy. Devices of that sort already exist, and TomTom plans to sell one as an option for its software.

AT&T being AT&T, it’s selling Navigator as a service, not a program–typical for phone GPS (although one of the benefits of getting the Palm Pre and paying for Sprint’s $99 voice and data plan is that it comes with driving directions). Navigator is $9.99 a month. I’d really like the option of paying a one-time fee. (Especially since I’m most likely to need this software when I’m on the road for business or pleasure in a rent-a-car.)

Bottom line: Navigator’s not bad, but I’ll wait until TomTom’s out before I decide which GPS application will live on my iPhone.  After the jump, a few screens of the AT&T product in action.

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Hey Apple, Pick an iPhone Game Controller

Accelerometers and a touch screen have their place in iPhone games, but when a classic like Mega Man 2 has its gameplay drastically altered to accommodate for dodgy controls, there has to be another way.

A couple of companies have created pad-and-button controllers for the iPhone. Most recently, 22Moo introduced the GameBone Pro in hopes of getting worldwide distribution. The controller uses the iPhone 3.0 OS’s new Bluetooth capabilities to connect wirelessly (a 30-pin dock connector also works). 22Moo also said it’s making a clip-on accessory for holding the smartphone and controller together.

GameBone isn’t the only controller concept out there. The iControl Pad, which has a Web site but not a commercially available product, snaps to the iPhone to allow PSP-style controls on either side.

I like these ideas, but their success rests squarely on support from Apple. Without it, game developers won’t program for the controls and players can’t be sure that enough games use the controllers. The GameBone’s official Web site touts “Made for iPod” and “Works for iPhone” certification, but the fine print clarifies that Apple approval is pending.

Apple may not want to approve iPhone game controllers for several reasons. Ars Technica once argued that button controls are a “regression into an old way of thinking,” and Apple may not want any part of that. Along the same line, button controls could encourage more people to seek old console emulators, which aren’t available without jailbreaking.

Still, there’s a level of precision buttons provide, and games like Doom would be better off with the added tactile feedback. If Apple wants to step up the iPhone’s presence as a game machine, it’ll allow for games of all kinds, not just those that require multi-touch and wrist-twisting.

5Words for Wednesday, June 24th 2009

Apple, Steve Jobs, and privacy.

Comcast, Time Warner join forces.

Boxee adds Windows and…baseball!

“$100 PC” becomes $5 stick.

Wait for iPhone Flash? Nope.

Inductive charging for iPhone, Touch.

Android’s new Heroic Android phone.

Motorola going gaga for Android.

China is apparently blocking Google.

150,000 Pres sold so far?

Microsoft Does Energy Management With Hohm

Microsoft has decided it wants to help America–and, eventually, the world–save energy. So it’s launching Microsoft Hohm, a new service that Microsoft honcho Craig Mundie is announcing this morning at the Edison Electrical Institute conference in San Francisco. The service is scheduled to go live in the next week or so at Microsoft-Hohm.com.

At first blush, Hohm sounds suspiciously similar to Google PowerMeter, a service Google launched a few months ago to help consumers monitor their power consumption and figure out ways to cut usage and costs. But while PowerMeter requires a special smart meter or other power-monitoring equipment in the home and is  the result of collaboration between Google and a few utilities, Hohm is designed to be immediately useful to anybody with an interest in using it. Microsoft does plan to collect data from smart meters (as well as smart plugs, which plug into the wall and then monitor the devices you plug into them). And the company is planning to work with utilities to let consumers transfer information about their power usage for detailed analysis.(So far, it has only four utility partners, in Seattle, Sacramento, and the midwest, but it says it hopes to have a bunch more on board by the end of the year.)

But all of this is optional–Hohm will also provide advice if all it knows about you is your zip code, the age and size of your house, the type of heating you have, and a few other facts. Or, if you’re really serious about going green, you can fill out a 200-item (!) questionnaire to get the most sophisticated advice possible on how to reduce your power usage.  The advice it gives is the sort of stuff you’d expect, from installing compact fluorescent lightbulbs to having your home’s ducts sealed, and the service includes a planning feature that lets you set deadlines for yourself for accomplishing each task. (Microsoft says it plans to make money eventually by selling advertising to contractors and others who might help you with more elaborate energy-saving steps.)

I was one of several journalists who Microsoft briefed on Hohm yesterday;  the service looked slick. useful, and ambitious in the company’s canned demo. But the real test will be trying it and discovering whether its analysis and advice does indeed help slash power consumption. If nothing else, I like the idea of a service of this sort that isn’t dependent on any high tech within the home. (My house is 57 years old and a shockingly high percentage of its infrastructure is original and unchanged.

Hohm is launching only in the U.S. for now, but Microsoft says it plans to roll it out in other countries around the world over time–particularly in energy-conscious ones such as Germany. After the jump, a few screens of it in action.

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New RealPlayer Moves Web Video to Devices

Want a reason to check  out RealPlayer SP, the new beta of the next version of RealPlayer, a media player that most of us have used at one time or another but which is no longer omnipresent? It’s got a new feature that’s pretty cool: the ability to easily download video from YouTube and other sites, convert it, and then get it onto a bevy of devices.

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HP’s Mini 5101: Netbook Deluxe, With All the Trimmings

The PC industry may continue to be a tad uneasy with the popularity of netbooks, but there’s no question that the little guys are selling well–and not just to folks on tight budgets. Enter HP’s latest and most lavish netbook, the Mini 5101, which the company just announced. Aimed at business types, the 5101′s pricetag starts at $449 and goes up from there–which is striking in a category where most models max out at $400 or less.

But this Mini is available with features that are anything but bare-bones. You can get it with a 7200-rpm 320GB hard drive with HP’s DriveGuard safety feature or an 80GB solid-state drive; you can it with multiple-carrier mobile broadband based on Qualcomm’s Gobi technology; you can get its 10.1-inch screen either with typical netbook resolution of 1024 by 768 or the unusually high resolution of 1366 by 768.(I’d spring for the latter option in a heartbeat if I were buying this machine–the low resolution of most netbook displays is at least as significant an obstacle to running powerful apps such as Photoshop as lack of CPU and graphics horsepower.)

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Is the iPhone Accident Prone? Survey Says: Not Much!

A TechCrunch article citing research by SquareTrade, a company that sells insurance plans for smartphones, says that Apple’s iPhone is “an accident magnet.” I wouldn’t have drawn that same conclusion.

SquareTrade’s report, “One-Third of iPhones Fail Over 2 Years, Mostly From Accidents,” should be viewed with skepticism. For starters, while SquareTrade used  a sample of many thousand smartphones covered by its warranty products, it didn’t cleanse its data (for instance by removing unlocked phones), and performed no statistical tests. Rightfully, the report includes the disclaimer:

SquareTrade has made efforts to ensure that the data we present is correct. SquareTrade makes no warranty, express or implied, about the accuracy of the data. SquareTrade is an independent third party, and has no affiliation with any of the handset manufacturers cited in this study. Users of the information in this document acknowledge that SquareTrade cannot be he liable for any damages whatsoever to any individual, organization, company, industry group or representative arising from the use of this data.

TechCrunch seized on the report’s findings that over 20% of iPhones have been damaged in the last 22 months, with cracked screens being the leading cause of damage. But the SquareTrade report doesn’t report on damage rates for other phone models, so it’s impossible to judge whether iPhones are any more likely to crack (or croak altogether) than other brands. Phones, after all, are more likely to get dropped than desktop PCs, HDTVs, or printers–no matter who manufactured them.

The study does say that iPhones are “significantly more reliable” than phones manufactured by Palm and RIM (9.9% of iPhones cited in the survey malfunctioned, versus 15.3% of BlackBerry and 19.9% of Treo phones). And it says that the iPhone 3G is a more reliable handset than the original iPhone.

My statistics are a bit rusty, but a common test called a T-test would have shown whether there was any significance difference between the iPhone’s likelihood of being damaged versus its competitors. The same goes for its supposedly higher manufacturing quality. Bottom line: It’s worth thinking twice before drawing conclusions about the iPhone from a single survey or news report. Colorful graphs always don’t tell us much.