Looking for a quick pick-me-up in those late afternoon hours, I've found myself heading over to my Spotify account to check out what Facebook friends are listening to. While this has been a neat way to notice shared music tastes, there's still something awkward about it. Unless I've already had some sort of communication about music with a friend on Spotify, or at least some recent contact on Facebook or otherwise, I feel weird scrolling through their playlists.
Facebook must have foreseen this problem because today it announced yet another way to listen to music through your account. The catch here is that you're actually listening with your friends rather than voyeuristically peering into their playlists and, unbeknownst to them, clicking on their songs.
In an age of smartphone addiction, you'll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?
Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have "liked" on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.
A new report out from Sitel on social media and consumer trends implies that social media is key to reaching Gen Y (those born between 1980 and 2000), but the numbers don't add up. While the Gen Y, or people born between 1980-2000, are in fact "digital natives," that doesn't mean they are actually most reachable via social media marketing.
Despite all of the technology available to teenagers today, they still prefer meeting IRL to texting and "liking" each others' Facebook statuses.
A new study out from Ericsson surveyed 2000 U.S. teenagers ages 13-17 to understand more about how they socialize through technology.
Texting and Facebook in particular have changed the way that teenagers date, particularly in the "courting" process which concludes with an actual date. The initial first interaction still takes place offline. In fact, when asked the question what type of communication would they miss most if it were taken away, teens responded with "face-to-face."
At this point there's probably nothing in geekdom, no matter how arcane, that hasn't ended up on someone's skin. "In" someone's skin, to be precise. From ASCII art, to xkcd comics, to video games, to binary, to parts of your childhood you just can't leave behind, there are entire sites like Geeky Tattoos now devoted to nerd ink.
Back in 2010 we put together our first list of the 30 best and worst Web tech tattoos. Here's our latest compilation, including an augmented reality tattoo, HTML tags, Javascript and C++, Debian, Wordpress, Google, Microsoft, RFID, QR codes, even Bill Gates' face. If you have work that's better, or worse, show it off in the comments.
Along with Sunday morning's secrets, PostSecret founder Frank Warren announced that the $2 PostSecret iPhone app is now closed. Warren received complaints from users, Apple and the FBI about bad content on the anonymous art app. He says that users, moderators and his own family were threatened, citing two specific incidents he can't discuss further. Launching the app now displays only one secret announcing the closing.
Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that "99%" of them "were in the spirit of PostSecret." The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.
Evernote has expanded its read-later browser extension, Clearly, to Firefox. The extension first launched on Chrome in November. Clearly slides in a cleaned-up view of Web articles without ads or navigation, making content more pleasant to read. It automatically turns multi-page articles to single pages.
It's also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.
Evernote has announced two new apps to help you remember what you ate and the names of the people you are eating with, dubbed Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. The two new apps were released at LeWeb in Paris Wednesday morning. While neither of these new apps are incredibly original, both go to show that Evernote wants to become the destination for all the notes you ever want to take in your life, from a memorable meal to an interesting person. We explore Evernote Food and Hello below.
Are you curious about some family member or friend who served in the US military during World War II? If so, go to Ancestry.com during the next several days and you can search a variety of their records for free. Normally, this is a paid site starting at $13 a month, but in honor of the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor day they have opened up their various archives temporarily to help researchers.
Here's our nominee for most evil Web service of the week: FindHisPorn.com. For a one-time low price of $49.99 only $19.95! Limited time offer!, you can allow a dubious piece of Java voodoo onto your PC (Windows only) and let it scrape the contents of your hard drive and show you all the porn it finds. It's just perfect for spying on that special someone in your life.
Find His Porn is cynically exploiting the paranoid and freaked-out, violating privacy, jeopardizing security and taking people's money. It has been created under a total veil of secrecy. Oh, it's also "perfect for ✓ Boyfriends, ✓ Husbands and ✓ Kids" with the "goal of empowering women everywhere." With its marketing finely tuned, Find His Porn profits off of people's engrained norms, broken trust and technical ignorance.
