The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘story’

It’s funny how and where you will see an innovation. While attending a super-fun event hosted by The Barbarian Group here at SXSW , I ran into a guy named Matt Paul who is the lead developer of an app/service called Stickybits . TechCrunch covered this story back in March , but it was interesting to hear the description of the service first hand from someone behind the scenes.

Here is the original: 
SXSWi 2010: Stickybits. Real world bookmarking.

What with tablets looming large on the horizon, one could be forgiven for thinking MIDs might be reaching the end of their usefulness. But when you put something like this in front of me, I can’t help but get excited. ABXY buttons and a real D-pad?

Original post:
If MIDs still matter, then get me one of these Moblic E7s pronto

I don’t get GPS in cameras.

See the original post here:
Casio’s GPS camera coming in October

Oh the Associated Press, our most favorite banned new source. It seems almost monthly they do something that defies logic and/or looks to be a suicidal act. And today brings another oddity.

The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason.

As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it?

Sure, maybe they think that by hosting the content on Facebook, they’re being impartial with the tweets. But again, why not just use their own site?

When I asked Sullivan to elaborate on this issue, he made a good point, “funny, they seem to get social (twitter & facebook) more than basic SEO (the core of their issues with Google).” Oh the AP; the amusement never ends.

Merging something designed for public broadcasting (Buzz) with something inherently private (Gmail) was just looking for trouble.

Google is -deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design.

They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends.

Some people think the complaints are unwarranted and the issues not all that bad, while some think it’s mostly annoying and others don’t even know there are issues yet (or that Google launched something new at all). And then there those whose lives are already being impacted by the privacy loopholes in Google Buzz – and not all in a good way.

See for example this story of an anonymous woman who writes a (self-proclaimed) feminist blog, which she started after leaving an abusive marriage. (found on Hacker News)

Hint: the title is ‘Fuck you, Google’.

An excerpt:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

You can read the rest of the story in the blog post, but needless to say this woman is justifiably very angry with the Mountain View company.

Now, I’m sure some of our readers will have an answer ready. That she should have changed this setting or not have touched that one, but that would be beside the point. Which is that even with the improvements that were made to the Buzz product, Google is confusing the hell out of people here – and make some lives hell for them to boot.

Expect more stories like this.

(Hat tip to Alex Kaminski, photo credit Flickr / sunside)

Finally an answer to the ages-old question: How much crossover is there between Resident Evil fans and Monopoly fans?

Read the original post: 
Monopoly: Resident Evil Edition

Fair warning to anyone trying to do evil in Odessa, Ukraine – they have a giant robot guarding the port.

Here is the original:
Holy crap – the Ukranians have robots

I’m prepared to forgive some hyperbole from someone who is very excited about a project he’s working on, but still, it’s probably a good sign that these guys are calling Windows 8 “mind-blowing” and not, say, “evolutionary.” Between the breathless praise of 7 and Microsoft’s quarterly results, you can actually sense people who are actually pumped about something. There’s not a lot of substance , but it’s kind of nice to have some positive noise around the project.

See the original post:
Windows 8 “will be mind-blowing”

When it comes to PR, there is damage control and then there is just plain cluelessness. Ten days ago, I found out that Aol’s chief technology officer Ted Cahall was planning to leave the company. Today, it became official. Even though our information was correct, Aol made repeated statements, on the record, that our story was wrong. To put it more bluntly, Aol lied to us, and also encouraged other news publications to say that our story was incorrect.

When we contact a company representative about a story that is accurate, they will usually either confirm the story on or off record, or simply not respond. Any of those responses is perfectly appropriate.

Here’s what Tricia Primrose Wallace, Aol’s executive vice president of communications, said to us in an email: “No, he is not leaving.”

She follow up with: “You should update your story.”

Ok, we updated the story. Even though Cahall was telling his team that he was leaving the company.

She later reiterated that Cahall was not leaving. I asked if he was still CTO. She replied, “Yes.” I asked if he “will he continue in his current position?” She never responded.

Today, she sent me another email informing me:

There’s been a change in a situation that you and I talked about a week or so ago and I wanted to immediately let you know. Ted Cahall has decided to leave AOL—we’re announcing a search for a new CTO this morning. Ted’s going to be transitioning with the company until we find a new global CTO.

In PR speak, the translation is this: “Your story a week ago is still wrong then, but it is no longer untrue now. Have a nice day.”

PR is not supposed to be fiction and spin. At least not all the time. Occasionally the communications professionals at companies, particularly publicly traded companies, are supposed to actually tell the truth. And perhaps help journalists and bloggers with a story instead of sending them off on a fake trail.

Since leaving Google last October, former product manager and Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström has moved his young family back to Helsinki and started rooting around for the next thing. Aside from working on his wife Ula’s long term project to create a hyperlink for any physical object, Thinglink, he’s also been seeking angel investments.

Today he joins the board of XIHA Life which is run out of Sunnyvale, California, Switzerland and Finland. At the same time the startup has announced a $1 million seed round. Veraventure led the round, joined by other angels and the company founders. Jani Penttinen, XIHA Life co-founder and CEO, says the money will be used to push the mobile platform and international growth.