The word "love" elicits reactions from everyone, and some of those feelings are not pretty. Except when they're absolutely beautiful.
On Valentine's Day, Internet users' emotions were plentiful and mixed. Twitter trends like #CandyHeartRejects and #FedValentines popped up, illuminating the thoughts of quite a few bitter birds. Facebook also celebrated Valentine's Day with some birdlike activity. News leaked last month that the Angry Birds would crash onto Facebook on Valentine's Day. It's the perfect game for pissed off single users to play on the heart of hearts day. But for all the love-related bitterness on social media, there are still moments of grace.
For better or worse, the digital revolution over the last 20 years has fundamentally changed the way people communicate. More precisely, the advent of the cellphone is one of the biggest changes in communication since the invention of the telegraph. People are now constantly connected wherever they go. It is easy to overlook that simple but profound fact.
Gone are the days where a husband and wife would go off to work and maybe talk once a day on the phone or when they arrive at home for dinner. Text messaging has change the very nature of relationships. A survey by mobile marketing app CheckPoints shows that 58% of people texted their significant other at least three times a day, while 25% texted 10 or more times a day. Talk about constant contact. Check out the infographic of CheckPoints' survey results below.
Microsoft demanded the takedown of a phony Twitter account purpoting to be that of Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky.
Over the weekend, Microsoft used its @BuildWindows8 account to send a message to the account owner, saying "@StevenSinofsky please see guidelines on parody and impersonation. Your account is not following them them and has been reported."
Sleep, sex and...Twitter?
A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.
This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.
Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.
According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."
To make his "musical," as he calls it, filmmaker/actor Chris Crutchfield's, took the ubiquitous dinging, pinging, almost-melodic alerts that pervade our digital lives and mashed them up into a surprisingly beautiful little song. "One day," he explains, "I got an email, an SMS, a phone call, a Facebook message and two tweets all within about five seconds of one another. This video is a re-manifestation of my brain's interpretation of that event."
If you're a glutton for punishment, you can download the musical as an iPhone ringtone.
Some people won't go anywhere without their smartphones. Not even the pot.
A new study from 11mark surveyed 1,000 Americans about their smartphone usage, and found that a whopping 75% of American smartphone owners have used their phones in the bathroom. More women have used their phones in the bathroom than men (76% vs. 74%), but men are actually more attached to their mobile devices than women. Thirty percent of men surveyed said they won't go to the bathroom without their phone versus 25% of women.
Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.
The golden age of mobile photography is upon us. Smartphones are now more capable at producing high-quality photos than digital cameras were just five years ago. Editing photos has been an evolving process but a lot of great services have been released to mobile users in the last year such as filters from Instagram or full-featured suites from Aviary and Skitch. Today, Aviary is making a dramatic update to its platform to gives users a set of powerful tools to edit photos on the go.
