Google gets Facebook page updates.
Sprint’s major-market WiMax plans.
Are TV commercials now obsolete?
iPhone mod: titanium back cover.
Mossberg: new Mac Quicken “iffy.”
Engadget compares smartphone GPS programs.
Google prunes Gmail Labs features.
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If you’ve ever hung out with me at Twitter (where I’m harrymccracken), you know that it’s a kind of extension of Technologizer–an ongoing conversation among 16,000 people that’s mostly about tech-related matters. And if you ever joined Technologizer’s Facebook Group, you may have noticed that it’s…kind of quiet. Very quiet, in fact. Aside from the occasional note from me or another member, there hasn’t been much going on there.
Which is why we’re retiring the Technologizer group on Facebook and launching something much better: a Facebook page at http://facebook.com/technologizer. (I don’t completely understand why Facebook maintains a distinction between groups and pages, but pages are much more flexible and powerful.) Our page will be a central clearinghouse for Technologizer-related stuff: It’ll have links to every story here, plus all of my tweets, and you can comment on them or share them right there if you feel like it, or post a new question or idea on our wall. It’s also got some photos from our live events, plus discussion boards. Basically, it’s the sort of presence we always wanted but couldn’t implement in the group, and we plan to add more features as time goes on.
Three hundred folks have already joined the page during our quiet beta period. I hope you’ll join them by visiting us on Facebook and clicking the Become a Fan button. See you there…
Cloud services like Facebook and Gmail might be “free,” but they carry an immense social cost, threatening the privacy and freedom of people who are too willing to trade it away for a perceived convenience, according to Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.
On Friday, Moglen was the guest speaker at a seminar at New York University that was sponsored by local technology organizations. Moglen criticized the hierarchical nature of the Web today, and called for a return to peer-to-peer communications.
“The underlying architecture of the Net is meant to be about peerage,” Moglen said. “…There was nothing on the technical side to prevent it, but there was a software problem.”
The client/server architecture has been locked in over the past two decades by Microsoft Windows, Moglen claimed. “Servers were given a lot of power, and clients had very little.”
Control has been moved even further away from the client (people) by cloud services, which can be physically located anywhere in the world where the provider chooses to operate, Moglen said. Privacy laws vary widely from country to country.
There was no discussion of social consequences on the part of computer sciences as they created technologies that comprise the Web, Moglen said. “The architecture is begging to be misused.” Cloud providers are the biggest offenders, in Moglen’s view.
Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington is reporting that a source has told him that Facebook is working on a full-blown e-mail service. It’s supposedly known internally as Project Titan, or “Gmail Killer.”
The only details Arrington mentions are that the new version is said to offer POP3/IMAP access (so you can get into your Facebook messages from anywhere) and that your e-mail address will be in the format harrymccracken@facebook.com.
Sounds good–but one of the things I like about my Facebook inbox is that it’s a spam-free island unto itself, populated only by people who I’ve granted permission to contact me. Whatever Project Titan is, I hope it doesn’t turn Facebook messaging into…well, e-mail as we know it.
This past weekend, a trojan mimicked Facebook’s native functionality and sent notifications on the user’s behalf. While Facebook says that the application was harmless, its ability to break through a boundary of trust on the platform alarmed me.
Those Facebook status update notifications that we’ve all received at one time or another from the service just got more useful. The social networking site has apparently flipped the switch on allowing replies from e-mail rather than having to log in to the service. All that is needed to do this is replying back to the message itself.
It appears not to be live across everyone yet. I just checked the alert e-mails I’ve received recently as late as the wee hours of this morning East Coast time, and I am not seeing the functionality as its being shown by sites such as Download Squad. However it will be rolling out systemwide shortly, reports seem to indicate.
While statuses are now enabled with this feature, Facebook mails — which you’ll also receive alerts for — are not. No word from the company on when we could expect that functionality, but I’d venture to guess that’s a logical progression for where this feature is headed.
My friend (and blogging hero) Dan Gillmor doesn’t like last week’s changes at Facebook to privacy settings and the default state thereof. So he took a drastic, fascinating step: He decided to delete his account and start over.
Google announced several interesting things at its press event today, including Google Goggles, a vision-assisted search app for Android phones that lets you snap a photo of a real-world item, then get information about it. But the big news turned out to be Google Real-Time Search, a new search feature that gives you the very latest results for your search queries. As in ones that are seconds old.
It’s not a replacement for Google search as we know it–in fact, it’ll be embedded within standard Google search results, in a scrolling window that updates automatically and lets you backtrack to see what you might have missed. You’ll also be able to view real-time results all by themselves, via a new “Latest” option in Google’s Search Options menu. That gets you a page that mashes up items from Twitter, news sites, blogs, and other sources–and Google announced today that it’s struck deals with Facebook and MySpace to bring public information from their users into Google Real-Time Search.
I consider this very good news: Yahoo and Facebook have announced plans to integrate Facebook Connect into Yahoo during the first half of next year.
Yahoo’s blog post about the news doesn’t provide a whole lot of detail, but it says that you’ll be able to (A) share Yahoo features such as photos, article comments, ratings, and more via your Facebook activity stream; (B) benefit from “richer experiences” on services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo Sports; and (C) update your status message on Facebook or on various Yahoo services. I’m assuming/hoping that you’ll also be able to log into any Yahoo service with your Facebook credentials, although the post doesn’t explicitly say so.
It’s a pleasant surprise to see a Web player as big as Yahoo turn on Facebook Connect. Even if the decision stems in part from Yahoo’s somewhat fragile condition and resulting willingness to behave in ways that a super-ambitious, Web-dominating monolith would not. (What do you think the chances are that Google will turn on Facebook Connect anytime soon?)
The more time I spend online, the more I realize that I don’t want multiple, fractured collections of friends, family, and acquaintances stored at various destinations around the Web. I want one well-organized, close-to-comprehensive database of people I care about. For a lot of us, that data lives on Facebook. The more places we can get to it, the better. And a Facebook-enabled Yahoo gives me a pretty tantalizing reason to consider using Yahoo services instead of comparable ones from Google, Microsoft, and other Yahoo rivals.
Last week, Microsoft brought Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and the Zune Marketplace to Xbox Live. And it’s been a rousing success! According to Microsoft, at least.
The company says nearly two million people signed into Facebook from Xbox Live in less than a week since the feature launched on November 17. Almost one million people created Last.fm Internet radio profiles, and 1.7 million people checked out the Zune Marketplace, which is the Xbox 360’s new digital storefront for 1080p video. Microsoft suspiciously left out usage numbers for Twitter, saying only that the service “was abuzz” with Xbox-based tweets.
There is, of course, reason to be skeptical about these numbers and what they mean. Usually, Facebook and Twitter are only open to paid Xbox Live Gold subscribers, but from November 20 until yesterday, those services along with the rest of Xbox Live Gold were open to everyone in the United States, including non-paid Silver members. That means more of Xbox Live’s 20 million total active users may have tried the new services than usual.
And besides, trying doesn’t mean liking. I signed in to Facebook and sent a Tweet from Twitter, but didn’t particularly enjoy either experience. I fired up the Zune Marketplace but didn’t buy anything (and actually, I was sort of offended that music videos cost $1 to $2, when you can easily find them for free on YouTube). The only service I used in earnest was Last.fm, which came in handy for a party I happened be throwing over the weekend.
There was one statistic from Microsoft that was truly impressive: On November 10, launch day for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, more than 2.2 million people logged in to play. It’s proof that no matter how hard Microsoft tries to show the value in all of Xbox Live’s extra services, it’s still all about the games.
