AOL Becomes Aol.

As part of its retooling as it becomes an independent company (again!), AOL is unveiling a new logo. It dumps the triangle that has been part of the corporate identity since the company’s glory days, and spells the name “Aol”–upper and lower case, with a period. (It’s been a long time since AOL has called itself “America Online”–it no more uses that moniker than AT&T likes to be called American Telephone & Telegraph.)

For reasons I don’t quite understand, AOL (AOL.?) is making a big deal out of the notion of overlaying the new logo on an array of imagery (which, among other things, shows how hard it is to make typography read unless it’s a consistently light color on top of a consistently dark one, or vice versa).

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Windows? Laptops? They’ll Never Catch On!

What’s the most wrongheaded conclusion anyone ever came to concerning computers? I covered three of the most legendary ones–”There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” “640K should be enough for anybody,” and “I think there is a worldwide market for maybe five computers” in The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History. But there’s no evidence that IBM’s Thomas J. Watson said the first one, Bill Gates staunchly denies saying the second one, and DEC’s Ken Olsen and his defenders contend that the last one is him being taken out of context.

But here are a couple of seriously silly statements that can’t be disowned–because they appeared in columns in the New York Times in the mid-1980s. Both are by the same guy, Erik Sandberg-Diment (who certainly wasn’t always obtuse–he was visionary enough to found ROM, one of the best early magazines about personal computers). Between them, they add up to one of the least accurate takes on the future of computing that I’ve ever read.

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When Families Were Thankful for the Blessing of Computing

Back in the early 1980s, it wasn’t a given that a family needed a home computer–or even that they knew exactly what a home computer was. So ads for PCs and related products made sure to show happy families–sometimes eerily happy families–crowded around the computer, enjoying the heck out of their purchase.

To celebrate the more traditional gathering of families represented by the holiday season we’re entering, vintage tech guru Benj Edwards is back with a gallery of those ads. If you were around back then, you’ll be slightly embarrassed to be reminded of the era. If you weren’t–well, you may just not understand.

View 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration slideshow.

A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration

Computers: The Heart of the 1980s Home

Familiar holiday tales tell of a time in the late 19th century when loving families would gather around the hearth to give thanks for their many blessings, sing songs, read Dickens, and roast chestnuts. But by the early 1980s — if you believed computer ads of the day — the home computer had become the center of the traditional nuclear family. Chestnuts  were replaced by joysticks and computer manuals.

With the holidays just around the corner, let’s carefully peel back the fabric of time and examine ten vintage advertisements from a more civilized age when dazed, zombified android families found themselves irresistibly drawn to home PCs.

As you look through these ads, keep this in mind: When was the last time more than two people sat around your computer?

First Look: Roku Adds a Channel Store

When Roku introduced its Internet TV box in 2008, it offered a grand total of one content source–Netflix–and was in fact sometimes called the Netflix Player. Then it began adding options: Amazon Video on Demand and Major League Baseball. Tonight, it’s announcing that it plans to add a bevy of stuff via its new Channel Store, which will allow an array of providers to bring their content to Roku’s box, and therefore to your TV.

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Microsoft Surface Rises at PDC

Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer team has graduated from being a pet project of founder Bill Gates to a group that stands up on its own, and contributes back into other parts of Microsoft.

That is the impression that I left with after meeting with Surface General Manager of Software and User Experience Brad Carpenter this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week in Los Angeles. Carpenter said that Microsoft had more than four times as many partners for Surface as it did a year ago, and that the team contributed technology to Windows 7, including applications that are installed by computer makers.

While it is true that Surface hasn’t revolutionized how the world interacts with computers yet, Microsoft is very serious about the touch-screen interface. To that point, every PDC attendee received a free touch-screen laptop to write touch-screen applications with.

Silverlight 4 also allows applications to invoke Windows touch screen interfaces, so that online puzzles can become much more interactive. And that’s just the beginning.

Carpenter said that Microsoft is working with partners in over 18 markets to help them design touch screen applications that have high payback on their investment. Some of its development partners have also begun to build components for Surface applications.

At PDC, Microsoft announced that students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh designed an application that ported Dungeons and Dragons to Surface. A group of German programmers wrote an application that pulls up information from specialized designed business cards.

Some other recent deployments that he cited are with Hardrock Café, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, and Vodaphone, according to Carpenter.

Surface has momentum, and its tie into Windows 7 keeps it viable. It will remain a niche product, but its successes will help make it a much more common sight at your local mall.

Microsoft: Silverlight will “Optimize Everywhere”

Microsoft wants Silverlight to be optimized for every platform that it runs on, said Brian Goldfarb, director of developer and user experience platforms at Microsoft, during an interview at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on Wednesday (Nov. 18).

Silverlight runs on Mac OS X and Windows; it is available on Linux through Mono Moonlight, an open source project that Microsoft supports. I also expect that Moonlight will be running on Android in near future. Goldfarb explained that it was not enough for Silverlight to “run everywhere,” but that it should “light up” specific platforms.

Microsoft needs to consider screen size and other aspects of a device, which is particularly relevant in the mobile space, he explained. There are also mobile platform features such as SMS, phone dialing, and address books that Silverlight could exploit, he added. That would allow Silverlight applications to be customized for smartphones.

Silverlight 4, which Microsoft announced at PDC, will allow applications to access Windows features, hardware, and the local file system. That allows devices such as Webcams to accessed by Silverlight. However, the same level of optimization is not currently being offering for other platforms.

Microsoft will give Silverlight “trusted” access local resources on Macs, meaning that all features work except for COM integration, Goldfarb said. More work is needed to extend Silverlight for non-Windows platforms, Goldfarb admitted, saying that the company was “thinking around” the concept of extensions.

COM is a Windows technology that enables applications that may have been written in different languages to communicate with each other. Microsoft Office makes heavy use of COM. “We are actively evaluating the best way to get COM like features on other platforms,” Goldfarb wrote in a follow up e-mail.

To that end, the company has started an open source project called Managed Extensibility Framework for .NET and Silverlight. The Mono team is working on an equivalent project, Goldfarb said. He expects that Mono will “accelerate dramatically” in the near future, delivering more features to Linux users.

I expect that anything but Windows will be a second-class Silverlight citizen for some time. But Microsoft is making strides toward delivering an optimized experience on other platforms, and in doing so, will gain a foothold on the Web beyond Windows.

What’s Wrong With Android Gaming?

The latest in self-important mobile app developer drama comes from Gameloft, but it’s not the usual iPhone bashing we’ve come to expect.

Instead, Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort declared (via Reuters) that the company’s got beef with Android. “We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” he said at an investor conference in Barcelona. He explained that the Android Market is just too weak compared to the iPhone’s App Store, on which Gameloft sells 400 times more games.

“Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products,” Rochefort said. “On Android nobody is making significant revenue.”

I’m not an Android phone owner, so I can’t speak at length about the Android Market experience. From my understanding, it’s no great shakes. But as a gamer, I can spot a few things that are holding Android back.

For starters, Android 2.0 was the platform’s first version to support multi-touch, a vital feature for first-person shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D or the excellent Eliminate Pro. In Gameloft’s case, no multi-touch means no Assassin’s Creed 2 or Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, both of which rely on multi-touch controls.

Then you’ve got the low application storage limits found in most Android hardware to date. Even the latest, Motorola’s Droid, only allows for 256 MB of app storage. As Android and Me notes, that rules out a game like Myst, which on the iPhone occupies 727 MB.

I also think there’s a silent killer at hand in the form of emulators. I sampled a friend’s Droid last weekend, and I couldn’t believe that he could play classic Nintendo, Genesis and Super NES games on his phone. That’s an asset if you’re a consumer, but I don’t doubt that emulators cannibalize game sales in the Android Market.

To top it off, I don’t get the sense that Android phone manufacturers and carriers are marketing video games as a big use. Check out the pinwheel on Verizon’s Droid Web site — gaming barely gets a mention.

The sad thing is that most of the points I mention are being addressed, or are at least fixable. Gameloft has every right to complain, as developers do, but maybe the company is bailing out at precisely the wrong time.

Chrome OS: Move Along, Nothing to See Here (Yet)

So I took the plunge and installed Chrome OS on a virtual machine on my Windows 7 laptop. I used Sun’s free VirtualBox virtualization software and the downloadable version of Chrome OS hosted by Gdgt. Actually, when I used the Gdgt download in the form of a VirtualBox image, I couldn’t get it to boot–so I tried again with the VMWare download (also compatible with VirtualBox) and all went well.

Except for one thing: There’s very little reason to check out Chrome OS just now. What you get is a somewhat stale version of the OS that has features that don’t work unless you have an e-mail address at Google. And the version of the OS you get is pretty much Chrome-the-browser with a few differences in terms of window management, plus OS-related fripperies like a battery gauge. And some fripperies are still missing, such as the ability to power down the OS. (Fair enough–at yesterday’s press event, Google warned us that Chrome OS was still subject to lots of change before it shows up on netbooks about a year from now.)

Of course, even in its final form, Chrome OS won’t be much more than a browser with enough underpinnings to qualify as an operating system. That’s the whole idea. But we’ll need something closer to the final version before it’s reasonable to start critiquing the OS. And while a virtual machine is a great way to try Chrome OS with a minimum of hassle, it’s a lousy way to get a sense of what it’ll be like in the real world. You want to run this thing on a machine where it’s your one and only OS, and you can’t cheerfully <Alt><Tab> back into Windows the moment you discover something you can’t do in Chrome. Which is why I’m still intrigued by the idea of getting it up and running on my Asus EeePC 1000HE.

Anyone else out there given Chrome OS a try yet?

Flook, a Location-Aware Microphotoblogging App for iPhone

I’ve been playing with Flook, a clever new program that’s now available on Apple’s iPhone App Store. Conceptually, it’s very, very simple: You use it to capture images with your phone and attach brief titles and captions to them. Flook then turns the image, title and caption into a full-screen combo it calls a card, uploads them to its servers, geotags them, and lets other Flook users browse through them.

The most obvious way to browse through Flook cards is to peruse ones that are near your location, in case they give you an idea of something nearby to see or do. But you can also view ones from people you follow, or new ones, or the whole shebango of cards from around the world. Flook also creates some local-information cards of its own, by sucking in content from sources such as Upcoming.org and formatting it. Zipping your way though cards is easy, fun, and addictive–the experience has a StumbleUpon-feel of serendipity to it.

Even more than just browsing other folks’ cards, I like the idea of using Flook for tiny acts of photojournalism. The service can can automatically send out tweets about your new cards. Which means that I can consider using it to tell the world about quirky stuff I run across and photograph as I travel around town, throughout the country, and around the world. (Up until now I’ve just been uploading my pictures to TwitPic.)

Flook (which is also available in a traditional Web-based version for PCs and Macs) is free, and currently free of ads. Like every other company involved in geographically-aware apps, the one behind Flook thinks there’s lots of potential in eventually targeting its users with ads that know where they are. In the case of Flook, one of the company’s founders told, those ads might be in the form of sponsored cards that tell you about things like discounts at stores you’re near.

This service could use something like Facebook Connect integration to help you find friends who are already using it. But it’s entertaining as is–and easier to show than explain. After the jump, some images from the iPhone app.

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Twitter’s Ad-Free Nirvana: Going, Going, Gone?

I‘m at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp, an interesting conference in San Francisco on the booming subject of Web sites and services that move just as fast as the rest of the world does–Twitter, some aspects of Facebook, and lots more. The first session this morning was a conversation between TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo. And Costolo said that Twitter is gearing up to add advertising to the service.

We will have an advertising strategy. You will see that from us in the future. It will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.

[snip]

We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.

That would seem to be a significant shift in strategy for Twitter: In the past, its executives have famously dismissed advertising for not being sufficiently “interesting.” Now, Costolo is saying the company’s working on something that isn’t just interesting–it’s fascinating!

There are a million ways ads could go wrong on Twitter. (I’ve mocked up one of them in the fake screen shot to the right.) Costolo is presumably telling us that the advertising wont be anything as conventional as banner ads or Google-style text links, or the mere insertion of tweets that are controlled by marketers. You gotta think it’s something that involves leveraging what Twitter knows about your friends and interests to provide ads that are more theoretically relevant; other than that, I have no guesses about the details.

Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon ads remain a good case study in just how sensitive companies need to be when they meld personal information about their customers with an advertising message. But I’m not instinctively opposed to ads showing up on Twitter–hey, it would be hypocritical–and one way or another, I want the site to figure out a way to make enough dough to stay in business for the long haul.

Your gut reaction, please?

5Words: Wanna Try Out Chrome OS?

How to try Chrome OS.

Randall Kennedy derides Chrome OS.

Better Google News for smartphones.

Better Techmeme for smartphones, too.

Refinements for Google Search Options.

New version of cool PogoPlug.

Nook sold out for holidays.

Sony building its own iTunes.

Apple’s Magic Mouse in Windows.

YouTube bans TV box access.

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Last Call for Our Windows 7 Survey

If you use Windows 7 and haven’t taken our satisfaction survey yet, I beseech you: Please take a few minutes and tell us about your experiences. We’re going to close the survey shortly and can use all the real-world data we can get. Thanks!

A Night to Remember

I’m happy to report that I spent Thursday night in the company of a couple of hundred old friends, new friends, people I’ve admired from afar and wanted to meet, and assorted members of the Technologizer community. Our Tech the Halls party in San Francisco was a blast–mainly because the folks who showed up were so darn interesting.

Oh, and the ones who stuck around until the end got to witness something pretty special. After we raffled off some prizes, our friend Dale Larson–who, among other things, was an Amiga engineer–sent a Tweet to his girlfriend Laura La Gassa from the stairs where we’d been giving away stuff:

Laura, you’ll be pleased to learn, replied thusly:

What we all saw wasn’t the first Twitter proposal, but it still felt like a little moment of history. Here’s a Tweetstream from party attendees with coverage of the memorable moment and the rest of the bash. Thanks to our sponsors–SugarSync, Marvell, Eastwick Communications, and Marketwire–for helping to make it all happen.

Is the Cloud All You Need?

When you think about it, every netbook to date has been misnamed: They’ve run traditional operating systems, and worked just fine even when you didn’t have an Internet connection. But netbooks based on Google’s Chrome OS will be different: At best, they’re going to have very limited functionality when you’re not online. Whether they turn out to be wildly popular or a legendary flop, they’re something new. They’re…netbooks!

So let’s keep this T-Poll short and sweet:

Twitter No Longer Cares About What You’re Doing

Though not as noticeable as Retweets or Lists, Twitter has stopped asking users the completely uninteresting question, “What are you doing?”

Instead, the social messaging service now asks, “What’s happening?” It’s a simple alteration that could help point new users in a different, less mundane direction. Or, in the words of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, “maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.”

Twitter is catching up to its users, who in large part abandoned the literal description of their activities long ago. My feed might not be an indication of everyone else’s, but looking at the last 40 tweets in my timeline, only six are descriptions of what the person is up to. Stone has noticed the same thing. “Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more,” he writes.

I wish Twitter had picked up on this shift sooner, because I think a lot of people missed the point of the service during its rise to the mainstream this year. After Twitter traffic ramped up sharply from February to April, it took an 8 percent dive in October, according to comscore. Anecdotally, I’ve got a lot of professional contacts and colleagues using Twitter in cool ways, but my actual friends tend to broadcast their activities a few times, get bored, and quit.

Some companies have missed the boat, too. Look at the integration of Twitter into Xbox Live and the launch of TwitterPeek, a bare-bones tweeting device. Neither are well-suited to what Twitter has become, because you can’t upload photos or look at videos, and TwitterPeek has a minimal Web browser while the Xbox 360 doesn’t have one at all. Users of these tools are pushed towards a “What are you doing?” mentality, and they’ll get tired of it.

Harry has said there’s no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but hopefully this small change in wording will steer people towards a usage that they’ll actually enjoy.