The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘own-controllers’

I recently sat down with the king of gadget modders, Benjamin J. Heckendorn.

Ben recently spoke at the Games for Health conference here in Boston, where he talked a bit about his Access Controller, which was born from a request for a controller that could be used with one hand by a soldier who had lost his arm in combat.

Heckendorn also brought up the idea that Microsoft ought to make a “Brain Box” available for the Xbox 360, which would enable people to make their own controllers without having to deal with licensing issues. Microsoft would still make money by licensing and selling the Brain Box, while hackers and modders would be free to create unique controllers like the Access Controller without having to go through the expense and legal trouble of getting the controllers approved for retail sale. Sort of a standardized peripheral concept, if you will.

Facebook vanity URLs may not be here just yet, but that isn’t preventing startups from readying offerings that aim to complement them (or you could say piggy-back on them).

Assetize, for one, is readying its account username marketplace for the highly-anticipated-in-some-circles unique addresses. Coinciding with the impending introduction of unique Facebook URLs for the masses (at 12:01 AM Eastern Time tonight), Assetize will enable users to buy and sell them much like you can with regular website addresses on so-called domain name after-markets. The startup already provides the same service for a variety of other accounts, such as Twitter, Gmail and Ning, and will now be adding Facebook to its roster.

As Facebook noted in its blog post announcing the upcoming availability of the unique addresses, it’s not possible to change or transfer vanity URLs. This doesn’t pose a problem, says Assetize, because you’re still able to buy and sell ‘access’ to the account, i.e. your login credentials.

In related news, SocialToo is jumping on the Facebook vanity URL bandwagon too, by offering its users a way to get a bunch of analytics on their Facebook profiles, like which browsers visitors to the account are using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from (if available). All a user would need to do is register for the service, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code along with a SocialToo username and password (the username will be what their vanity URLs will be based on), and click submit. Next time they log in, they’ll see a new “SocialStats” tab with statistics for their URL.

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