Nearby Friends is a new Facebook application which taps into the recently launched Facebook Places check-in service to locate all your Facebook friends plotted on a Google Maps interface. The app, a simple tool that places Facebook profile photos as a pin on the map, doesn't limit itself to where your friends are right now, it actually displays their entire Facebook check-in history, as lines traversing the map. With the app installed, you can actually track a friend's travels, easily identifying their favorite hangouts, daily treks, their workplace and more. Is this the first Facebook Places cyber-stalking tool? Or just a handy way to see what your friends are up to?
Reddit has taken over the front page of Digg. If Kevin Rose and the rest of the Digg team thought that a long weekend would be enough to calm the furor over the latest changes to the popular site, they were clearly mistaken. Not only did Digg's users declare today "quit Digg day," but in order to protest Digg's new auto-submission system, users are now upvoting every Reddit story on the site. These stories are being submitted to Digg by Reddit itself through the new auto-submission system that is a core part of Digg v4.
When the iPad was launched earlier this year, one of the big talking points was that the iPad might be the savior of magazines. By now many magazines are available on the iPad, either in their own standalone app or in a virtual magazine store. In this post we look at how magazines are using the iPad, what the user experience is like, and what iPad magazines still need to do to improve.
We'll analyze a standalone iPad magazine app (Wired) and a service that offers access to many different magazines (Zinio).
This coming Monday, application boxes will disappear from your Facebook profile or fan page and you'll be told to use application tabs instead. In a nutshell, this means that third party content - such as Flickr photos or YouTube videos - can only be displayed on a Facebook profile page or fan page (the equivalent of a profile for brands) as a tab. The content will no longer display as a 'box' in the sidebar of your profile.
We explored the implications of losing application boxes in an earlier post. We weren't happy about it, but in this post we face reality and look for useful tabs to add. We also explore why Facebook wants you to use tabs instead of boxes.
Facebook is integrating location data so that users can write location-specific updates, the company announced today. The new feature, Facebook Places, is already being rolled out in waves to users in the United States with international support to come, and an interface so that developers can start using location data in third-party applications is coming tomorrow.
Facebook may be moving fast, but Zuckerberg and co. are being careful to ease their 500 million users in - making nice with location pioneers Gowalla and Foursquare; emphasizing user benefits, not marketing possibilities; and sharing gooey anecdotes about how Facebook Places creates a living history of the world.
In a recent PC Pro article, Professor Steven Furber, developer of the ARM microprocessor, laments the sharp decline in interest in computer science classes in the UK. And although the U.S. hasn't seen that same drop in enrollment, a recent survey of some 14,000 U.S. high school teachers by the Computer Science Teachers Association found that only 65% of respondents taught in a school that offered some sort of introductory computer science course.
As our world becomes more tech-oriented, educators are faced with not just teaching children how to use computers, but how to build and program them as well.
Remember this day. Today was the day you read that non-human objects, internet connected devices like digital picture frames, web-connected GPS devices and broadband TVs, came online with AT&T and Verizon in greater numbers last quarter than new human subscribers did.
In the race to the mobile internet, the machines have quickened their pace beyond what we humans have, at least in the US. Dishwashers, refrigerators, home heating units and other objects are next in line, then perhaps very widespread tiny sensors - and that's a lot more exciting than it might sound.
Recently I began to buy eBooks for the Kindle application on my iPad. While I still love paper books, the digital wiles of eBooks are looking increasingly attractive to me. Below are five eBook features that may tempt you to buy electronic books too.
I should note that I wasn't a hold-out on eBooks for moral reasons. I simply couldn't access them until recently. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook have all been either unavailable to people outside the US, or the eBook stores to populate them have been inaccessible. However with the Kindle for iPad, I've finally been able to enjoy the forbidden fruit of eBooks.
An enterprising iPhone hacker has figured out how to get Adobe Flash working on the iPhone, despite Steve Jobs' banishment of the third-party plugin from all iDevices for reasons detailed in his long-winded "Thoughts on Flash" memo posted to Apple.com back in April.
Why do you need Flash on the iPhone? To see banner ads?
No, not really.
Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it's clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network. Take a second look and it's also clear that the feature isn't working very well yet - but it will be fixed and is going to be a very big deal.
A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership of Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser years ago and now an employee at Facebook. Questions may come closer than anything else has yet to founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a connector of people around the world, a force for empathy and world peace. I think it's going to be a very important and enjoyable part of the site.
