The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘larger’

Short Version: A bit of a twist on traditional induction chargers, Case-mate’s “Hug Wireless Charging Pad and Case” attempts to offset its $100 price tag by adhering to the Wireless Power Consortium’s universal charging standard, which promises interoperability with other charging pads and devices that are developed using the same technology. Full Review: One of the larger barriers to adopting new technology is the relatively high price tag pitted against the uncertainty of whether or not that technology will become widespread enough to spawn future devices.

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Review: Case-mate Hug Wireless Charging Pad and Case for iPhone 3G/3GS

This is a fun idea. Hip New York boutique and gallery Opening Ceremony has got some completely corduroyed-over furniture &mdsah; and not just cushions. The close-up pictures reveal it to be, well, not the most exacting upholstery job, but if you were making a chest of drawers with corduroy in mind from the first, you could probably do quite a good job of it.

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Corduroy: not just on your trousers any more

Orb, a small company in New York, makes odd-looking speakers with some great sound. They just announced a small speaker/amp combo for $299 which includes two speakers and an optional subwoofer. The handmade speakers come in multiple finishes (I have the copper here at the house, which I personally don’t think go with my rug) but the dark ones look nice

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Orb releases a mini Speaker/Amp combo

Long range over-the-air HDTV antennas can get mighty unsightly and expensive. Clixxun’s “Fancy Alpha” attempts to stem that tide with a $40 TV antenna that’s disguised as an unassuming picture frame

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TV antenna disguised as picture frame

View Larger Map This is the first known bird attack against a Google Street camera.

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Birds are tired of Google Street cameras and aren’t going to take it anymore

This weekend, a number of people had things to say about the decay and seemingly inevitable death of FriendFeed. That included us, twice. While this was going on, the FriendFeed team remained largely silent, even on their own product. But today, co-founder Paul Buchheit has responded.

Naturally, in a FriendFeed posted item, here’s what he had to say:

There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge

But, this still seems to speak to very much what I was talking about this weekend. FriendFeed, as we knew it, is over. “FriendFeed goodness to the larger world,” would seem to imply either some more open-sourcing like they did with Tornado by way of Facebook. Or, a bigger movement of the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook itself.

Further open-sourcing FriendFeed and/or its APIs is great and all, but I fear things will get messy for end-users without a single product to focus on. Certainly, that will be useful for some people, and undoubtedly some services, but I have a hard time believing it will be able to fully replace the way I used FriendFeed, as a crowd-sourced pusher of information in real-time.

Facebook obviously has the size to provide that, but I still worry that it’s too big for the rapid pace of innovation we were seeing with FriendFeed to continue. I do hope the team is able to improve some of the areas that Facebook is lacking in, such as sharing speed, filters, and content discovery. But it won’t be the same.

And that’s fine, as Buchheit notes, “transformation is not the end.” But it’s hard to watch a service you replied heavily upon change drastically. Maybe the result will be a butterfly, but I didn’t consider FriendFeed to be a caterpillar before.

[photo: flickr/kiwinz]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Oh, the wonders of our Internet.

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Full specs of new Sony Readers posted (and then pulled)

If you weren’t one of the lucky ones that happened to snag a Palm Pre for $99 at Best Buy the other weekend thanks to a pricing snafu, LetsTalk.com has a deal for you.

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CrunchDeals: $99 for a Palm Pre today only

We’ve been getting requests from various citizens to feature their respective cities in our new Geek Weekend feature on CrunchGear, so when a request came in for the Twin Cities, John asked me to write it up and I thought, “Oh, great. More work.” “Perfect! I’m from Minneapolis! I know where geeky stuff is located!”

Background Info: The Twin Cities denotes the capital city of St. Paul, MN and the larger, more cosmopolitan city of Minneapolis, MN. Together the two cities are home to roughly 2.5 million people.

There’s always been a friendly little rivalry going on between the two cities, with some people from Minneapolis viewing people from St. Paul as more blue-collar and rough-around-the-edges, while some from St. Paul think people from Minneapolis are yuppies. I’ve lived in both cities and they’re both nice places. Overall, the rivalry is pretty silly, but it’s there. Look hard enough in any city, though, and you’ll find both a-holes and nice people. No different in the Twin Cities. Everyone’s pretty nice, overall, though.

BuddyPress, the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.

Here’s what version 1.0 features: Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages.

And slated for release in 2009 are yet more features, including: Status updates and photo albums. Sound familiar?

While WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is quick to point out that BuddyPress is not meant to be yet another stand-alone social network in your life, his post about it seems to poke directly at the larger networks like Facebook and MySpace. “I mean all your friends are already on Myspace, but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use. Maybe even someday you’ll be able to connect your BuddyPresses to each other and to the existing monolithic social networks,” Mullenweg writes.

That reads a lot like, “hey a lot of people are pissed off by the big social networks terms of service issues, and their set ways of thinking, why not use BuddyPress?” And depending on how well this impressive feature set works, some people just might. It’s also worth noting that in an interview he did with us a couple weeks ago, Mullenweg described BuddyPress as “Facebook-in-a-box.”

But there’s also a catch to BuddyPress for the time being: To install it, you have to be using WordPress MU, the multiple-user variety of the blogging software that is a bit more complicated to set up and is used much less than traditional WordPress. But Mullenweg’s comment that BuddyPress “currently requires” WordPress MU, would seem to indicate that eventually it will roll out to the larger WordPress community as well.

BuddyPress has been in development for over a year, and was originally called “ChickSpeak.” This name is much better.

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