Facebook’s Poke app, a copy of red-hot Snapchat rose almost to the top of the iTunes appstore on launch. A few days later it has tanked, making me wonder: can Facebook really invent any new Internet behavior or is it destined to be a copycat forever?
It seems to me that Zuck did great creating the concept of Facebook, but that’s where things stopped. The ability to invent or create beyond that initial concept has escaped everyone at Facebook.
Gerry Anderson, the man who along with his wife Sylvia created the cult-favorite TV series Thunderbirds in the 1960s, has died, the BBC reports. Anderson’s work was honored by a special set of moving-image stamps in Britain last year; he had suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, which he spoke out against this past summer.
Thunderbirds, the sci-fi TV show featuring “Supermarionation” puppets, was hugely popular in its day and remains a beloved favorite to generations of fans, along with other Anderson creations like Stingray and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. The shows were aimed at kids, but adults enjoyed them too, and those who grew up with them love them to this day.
I fully admit that the Thunderbirds craze really passed me by. But I was a huge fan of Anderson’s later work: My first exposure to Anderson was Space: 1999, his final collaboration with ITC.
Space: 1999 was a live-action SF show featuring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, set on base on the surface of the Moon, which had improbably left Earth’s orbit and gone wandering through the stars. I watched the show religiously as a young grade schooler when it was in first-run syndication on American TV. (It helped that my mom loved the show too.) Begged for the toys, too. Many an afternoon was spent flying my Eagle transporter around the back yard.
Being a member of the Facebook founder’s family won’t protect you from having your privacy breached on the social network. On Tuesday night, Randi Zuckerberg — older sister to Facebook’s CEO — posted a photo from a family gathering to Facebook (of course), showing her sisters using Facebook’s new Snapchat-esque ’Poke’ app on their phones, with Mark Zuckerberg watching with a confused look on his face. It popped up on the Facebook newsfeed of mediaite Callie Schweitzer who subscribes to Zuckerberg. Assuming the photo was a public one, Schweitzer tweeted it to her nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Zuckerberg was not pleased.
Facebook’s privacy settings make the most technically sophisticated of us scratch our heads. I’d like to think that this is a wakeup call for Zuckerberg to untie (or perhaps just cut through) this Gordian knot, but I doubt it will be.
Unfortunately, not every crowdfunded project lives up to expectations. Often, these projects ship later than expected (roughly 75%) and sometimes the actual product doesn’t quite match what you’re shown in the pitch video. Why is that?
The color scheme of the website is an indispensable part of ensuring a healthy and effective user experience. It is the color scheme of the website which determines its success or failure. You may have the best content possible on your website, may provide the most lucrative product deals and etc, but if the color scheme is not inviting and engrossing enough, you may better bid adieus to your aspirations for online business success.
I would argue that layout is equally important, but color choice is vital.
The lawsuit, filed by San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk, says customers who do not agree with Instagram’s terms can cancel their profile but then forfeit rights to photos they had previously shared on the service.
“In short, Instagram declares that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us,'” the lawsuit says.
I’m not sure that this is worthy of a lawsuit, but clearly Instagram did not think through these changes.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.
It’s amazing how often I find myself at GitHub these days. Whether it’s a WordPress plugin or a developer’s app, more people are using it all the time.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced the first plans for its retail strategy in 2013. The company says it opened 51 stores this year, and it’s already revealed where it will open the first six next year.
Microsoft stores are coming to Texas, Florida, Ohio, California, Utah and Missouri. They’ll be good places to chill out if the Apple Stores nearby are too crowded for you.
Building a central multi-user iTunes server that works consistently and well— that’s also easy to configure and maintain without needing remote administration tools or command line hackery—is annoyingly difficult. However, it is relatively easy to take your iTunes library and simply move it to a NAS. It’s not the house iTunes server we wish we had, but it does get your data off of your computer’s local hard disk drive.
It’s worth noting up front – as Hutchinson’s article does – that this isn’t about setting up an iTunes server for all the clients on your network. This is, instead, about offloading your iTunes library from your machine to a network attached storage device instead. There are some really good reasons for doing this.
My impetus for wanting to give this a try is my increasing reliance on my MacBook Air, which has a fairly skimpy Solid State Drive (SSD) that isn’t nearly large enough to hold my ever-growing collection of music and movies.
iExplorer makes a great gift this holiday season for any iPhone or iPad owner. The app’s one-touch music transfer seamlessly copies all your music and playlists from your device back into iTunes. Its messages feature allows you to search and export all your messages to PDF files or other formats. The app also offers access to your device’s voicemails, photos, and much more.
Fifteen years ago, Apple released its first and only touchscreen laptop (so far), the often forgotten eMate 300. This translucent clamshell portable, which ran Apple’s Newton PDA operating system, represented a bold experiment in educational computing and a drastic departure from Apple’s traditional hardware design.
I picked one of these up on eBay some years ago and still plug in from time to time to remind myself what a cool little machine it was (and is).
The first time I saw the eMate 300 was at Apple’s tent outside Boston’s World Trade Center expo hall, during a Macworld Expo. Apple had pitched a tent in a parking lot across the street from the venue for its show presence (the venue inside was far too small to accommodate everyone), and the Apple presenters were dropping the eMate onto the asphalt pavement of the parking lot to demonstrate its reliability and suitability for the rough conditions Apple expected it to receive in the hands of schoolkids.
It’s a shame the eMate didn’t have a bigger impact in its day. But in those days, Apple was a hot mess and truly a “beleaguered” company.
For 62 years, the North American Aerospace Defense Command has been tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, as he makes his way around the world delivering gifts to all the good boys and girls.
This year, the tradition will continue, and now there are even more ways that you and your little ones can follow Father Christmas’ progress. A stunning 25 million people from around the globe are predicted to follow Santa in real-time online, on mobile phones and tablets, by email and phone.
Apparently, NORAD has dropped Google Maps and is now working with Microsoft Bing to follow Santa’s worldwide progress. Insert your own Apple Maps joke here.
I’d like to thank iExplorer for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. From texts, to music, playlists, photos, and everything else — iExplorer lets you access, transfer, and copy everything from any iPhone or iPad. If you’re getting a new computer, iPhone, or iPad this holiday season, iExplorer is a must-have app to help you get everything backed up off the old device so you can get going with your new one.
Flickr is offering all users a free 3 month Pro account upgrade. Just go to the site and sign-in and the offer will be waiting for you. I haven’t used my Flickr account in years, but I decided to give it another try. My username is jdalrymple if you’re interested.
What Apple understands and its critics did not (and still do not) is that many people, from all walks of life, simply appreciate nice things. They accuse Apple of pretension and elitism, but it’s they, the critics, who hold that the mass market for phones and tablets is overwhelmingly comprised of tasteless, fickle shoppers who neither discern nor care about product quality.
I think Apple and the buying public have proven Gruber right. People do want nice things and they are willing to pay for quality.
The issue appears to be related to the NAND becoming corrupted and killing off the Galaxy S III’s mainboard, which causes the phone to essentially “brick” itself.
Well, there’s a feature the iPhone doesn’t have. Merry Christmas Samsung users.
The NFL announced the league, along with broadcast partner CBS, will livestream Super Bowl XLVII on Feb. 3.
The game will be available on both CBSSports.com and NFL.com. Tthe stream will have extra features, including additional camera angles, in-game highlights, live statistics and other interactive elements.
Last year’s game was most-streamed single game with over 2 million unique visitors…representing 6.2% of total downstream Internet traffic at 9 p.m. ET for NBCSports.com.
The Super Bowl is one of the few “Event TV” broadcasts left even if many tune in just for the commercials. It will be interesting to see how CBS leverages the internet to enhance the game on your “second screen”.
The European Commission confirmed on Thursday that it will be formally charging Samsung in its antitrust investigation related to the company abusing its market position by filing for Apple product sales injunctions over patent infringement claims. Samsung withdrew it injunction request earlier this week, but the EU is still moving forward with its case.
