The Good NET Guide

Archive for May, 2009

Could a new Roomba be hitting the streets?

Original post:
Square/new Roomba coming sooner than later?

At this past week’s Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the “Holodeck,” for event-goers to experience. Basically, it’s a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny Sullivan posted a bunch of pictures of the thing earlier in the week.

Unfortunately, Google only allows it to show the area at and around the actual Google campus in Mountain View, as I’m sure it doesn’t want any legal complaint from those caught sunbathing in their backyards. Also, while it does zoom past the area where the Google Goats were kept, it unfortunately failed to catch any of them on tape. Luckily, I did that for you a few weeks ago.

Google’s Holodeck isn’t quite as cool as the Star Trek Holodeck, but give them a few years, I’m sure they’ll figure out how to do that as well.

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Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account.

The twitter from May 20:

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Derrick Pitts, lead astronomer at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, talks about the telescope used in the Bloom Observatory. The 10-inch refractor telescope has been around since 1934, and was built by Carl Zeiss Jena and shipped over from Germany

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Video: Refractor telescope from 1934 still in use at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute

One thing I love about Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg - she says exactly what she thinks, and she isn’t afraid to use the power of Facebook to back up her opinions.

Mean bar bouncers can lose their Facebook pages (this was later retracted but remains funny). Meanwhile, Holocaust deniers are given a pass.

Now she’s taking on the Republican party, and the Republican party is fighting back.

At a Startup2Startup event last week Zuckerberg talked about her experiences at the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions last year. The relevant clip (care of Ustream) is above.

“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.” Randi also recounts a conversation on a plane where a Berkeley professor calls Zuckerberg “you’re like the most powerful person in the world.”

The Republicans aren’t amused. Matt Burns, the Director of Communications for the 2008 Republican National Convention left a long comment, calling Zuckerber “full of sh*t”:

With all due respect, Randi Zuckerberg is totally full of sh*t on this one – at least as her comments relate to the Republican National Convention.

As the Director of Communications for the convention, I can tell you we worked closely with Google/YouTube, Ustream.tv, Microsoft, and countless other companies to create a comprehensive and successful online campaign. Those efforts were recently recognized with five “Pollie Awards” from The Association of Political and Public Affairs Professionals. And we utilized Facebook – even if it wasn’t up to Ms. Zuckerberg’s standards – as part of our overall strategy.

Is it possible Ms. Zuckerberg sat alone in her hotel room during the Republican National Convention because she never actually contacted anyone? Or maybe she forgot about the major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast on the eve of the Republican National Convention? Or maybe she didn’t really want to be around a group of conservative Americans in the first place?

According to the Wall Street Journal: “’At the Democratic convention we were like rock stars,’ Zuckerberg said Thursday to a conference crowd of what could safely be called Democratic-leaning entrepreneurs and investors.”

Wait. Ms. Zuckerberg bashed Republicans while speaking to an audience of her liberal friends? Shocker!

In all seriousness, can Ms. Zuckerberg tell us what the Democratic National Convention did with Facebook – aside from pet their enlarged egos and take them to glitzy parties with the Hollywood elite – that Republican National Convention planners didn’t?

I guess next time we won’t make the mistake of letting the business of nominating our Presidential candidate get in the way of the folks at Facebook being treated like rock stars.

Apologies to Facebook. Our bad.

Whenever Randi speaks, point a camera at her. There’s almost certainly a story in there somewhere. All I hope is that Facebook never muzzles her. As the most powerful person in the world, we need to hear more from her, not less.

I’ve emailed Burns for confirmation that he left the comment, but the language is definitely his style.

Update: Burns has responded:

YES. I left it.

I LOVE Facebook as much as the next person, but think the criticism was a
bit misdirected. I can’t speak for the McCain campaign because I wasn’t
working on its new media efforts, but the convention itself made
unprecedented efforts to incorporate new media into our campaign. Over the
course of our convention, we attracted 1.7 million unique visitors, and
strategically partnered with Google/YouTube and Ustream.TV to draw an
additional 7 million unique viewers to our content. And the GOP convention
had more Facebook “friends” than the Democratic National Convention. We had
about 10,000, while the Dem Convention had about 3,300.

GOP facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/GOPconvention2008

Dem facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5209534425

Also encourage you to read the following news item:
http://www.gopconvention2008.com/news/read.aspx?id=557

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Dell’s got a $60 price break on its 19-inch S1909WX LCD monitor, which brings it to $89 with free shipping.

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CrunchDeals: 19-inch Dell LCD for $89

When Fotonauts debuted at last year’s TechCrunch50, I called it a “gorgeous photopedia” because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed, and is still in private beta. But you can see a glimpse of what the Web-facing version will look like at Fotopedia, which just soft-launched. A message at the top of the page states: “Fotopedia, a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress read-only preview of what we are going to launch in a few days.”

One of the features of Fotonauts which has yet to be turned on is the ability to turn any photo album into a Web page, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google map information where available. Fotopedia showcases some of the same public albums you can see in the Fotonauts client, plus it adds a few twists. Each photo can be voted up or down or flagged as inappropriate. There is an Encyclopedia tab, which shows albums by topic/tag. For instance, you can see albums about Volcanos, butterflies, or Venice.

There are nearly 150,000 high-quality photos already, organized into 4,289 “articles.” Each article is a Web slide show, along with the associated Wikipedia entry and Google Map. Each photo contains a lot of metadata making it search-engine friendly. Fotopedia is supposed to be a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, an= long-lasting archive of “images for humanity.” Fotonauts founder Jean-Marie Hullot explains in a note: “Flickr and other photo sites give you exposure for only a brief window in time, and adding photos to Wikipedia proved too complicated for the average user.”

In addition to the photos, there is also an active community. You can follow other people or follow specific albums. You can also see individual profiles when you are logged in. You can also share albums as widgets. (I’ve included ones for Volcano and butterfly albums below).

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The world woke this morning to the sight of some of screens from the iPhone 3.0 firmware, proving that we must remain vigilant every single day until WWDC next week. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll see images of the iPhone’s biomimetic skin? These pictures show the compass - in photorealistic color - and a few of the sub screens including video recording and MMS sending

See more here:
Shots of the new iPhone’s interface surface

A screen in a public bicycle lending site in Zamora, Spain was hacked to display porn for hours and hours, resulting in loads of Iberian titters and even more Iberian… well. It took the Spanish police a few hours to take down the porn and claimed that the security on the kiosk was a little bit weak, thus explaining why porn was playing for hours in old Espana

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Security is lax in Spanish metro areas

Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush will begin. Users will be able to grab a vanity URL of their choice.

The Landrush rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms. But for the most part, we hear, users will be able to grab a name that they like.

Facebook has been toying with vanity URLs for some time. URLs for user profiles are currently user id numbers - such as facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899 (that’s me). In March some Facebook pages started rolling out with vanity URLs, although you must have a business relationship with Facebook (or know someone there) to get one. Facebook.com/techcrunch, for example, links to our TechCrunch page.

The reason they need them - vanity URLs have proven to be a powerful tool on MySpace, Twitter and other services. It’s not just that users like them and it makes telling people your profile name easier. People have also long used MySpace URLs as their online identity. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. Even Google is getting in on the vanity URL game. Facebook doesn’t want to give that up.

Facebook has recently polled users to see if they’d pay for a vanity URL. We have no idea if they plan on charging for the landrush at this point.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime start thinking up that perfect Facebook name. I want facebook.com/mike myself. Oh wait, I guess Facebook employees get first pick. So you’re also out of luck if you’re name is Mark.

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