How to Make Time to Make Stuff [Creativity]

Thoughtful blogger Merlin Mann publishes a three-part series of posts on the constant battle creative people face between making things and making themselves available to others. Mann writes:

If the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you'd originally thought you were. [...] Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you're taking more meetings than photos these days?

Reading this, one suspects Mann is talking to himself as much as anyone; I for one am thrilled when he makes time to write about the topic of attention.

Tags: blogger, Lifehacker, screen, talk

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off

ISS Gets New Recycling Gear, Ready for Larger Crew

TnGoastiiaiu submitted a space.com story that expands on coverage we've had earlier about improvements being made to the ISS to increase crew capacity. He writes "ISS gets new recycling gear that transforms human waste to drinking water. Some of the water will be used to get Oxygene, too. This way it will soon be possible to host more crew members. " Also, someone needs to smack the webmaster over there for putting a background texture behind the text. It's pretty unreadable along the left hand side of the screen.

MeD’s Movie Manager Catalogs Your DVD Collection [Featured Download]

All platforms (with the Java runtime): Free software MeD's Movie Manager not as feature-rich as heavier weight media managers like Griffith, but it still makes tracking your movie collection on your computer desktop easy. Catalog the movies you own, pull film info from IMDB or TV.com to fill in missing media information, and retrieve cover art. The program comes with multiple skins to customize its appearance, too. Two strong features include support for television series via the TV.com database and the ability to to scan directories to retrieve movie file names, which saves you a lot of data entry hassle if you store movies in digital format. Here's a screenshot of MeD's in action.

MeD's Movie Manager a free download for any platform with the Java runtime 1.4.2 or later. Thanks pino227!

Tags: dvd, film, Lifehacker, screen, TV

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off

Make a bicycle ramp

Although this is a bit dangerous, it looks like a lot of fun. This instructable is very well documented and the final ramp looks nice and sturdy. It's a lot safer than my milk-crate version when I was a kid!

Learn how to make a Bicycle Ramp

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in make | | Comments Off

Retro-futuristic poster makes fun of futurism

David from Wondermark sez, "I thought you guys would appreciate this retro-futuristic poster I designed! It was painted by Carly Monardo, whom you might know from her work on the webcomic Dr. McNinja -- she dug into old Popular Science covers to really get the proper retro feel. " Futurism Print [preorder] (Thanks, David!)

Tags: Boing Boing, screen

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off

Sony introduces Cyber-shot DSC-T700 and DSC-T77 digicams

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Don't look now, but your point-and-shoot is about to get a whole lot smarter if it's rockin' a DSC-T700 or DSC-T77 label. Starting with the latter (which is Sony's thinnest model at less than 5/8 of an inch), you'll find a 10-megapixel sensor, ISO up to 3,200, eleven scene modes, in-camera image management, face detection and a 3-inch touchscreen to boot. Moving on, the brainy DSC-T700 does everything the T77 does but throws in 4GB of internal storage and a 3.5-inch LCD -- you know, so you can have a "photo album in your pocket." Both units sport a Carl Zeiss lens, 4x optical zoom, image stabilization and even an anti-blink function that snaps two successive shots if it notices anyone dozing during the capture. Also of note, the T700 packs a Picture Motion Browser application that "lets you downsize images from full-resolution to VGA and export them back to the camera's internal photo album." A bit gimmicky, sure, but a welcome addition nonetheless. Look for the T77 to land in brown, green, pink, black and silver in late September for about $300, while the T700 hits around the same time in red, champagne gold, pink, dark gray and silver for a Benjamin more.

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Tags: Engadget, megapix, optic, screen, sony

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off

Nikon’s Coolpix S60, S710, S610 and P6000 get outed

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Well, well. What have we here? A few new Nikon's in the run-up to Photokina, based on looks alone. Up first is the previously rumored Coolpix P6000 (£429; $835), a high-end point-and-shoot with a patently absurd 14-megapixel sensor, a 4x optical zoom, 2.7-inch touchscreen monitor, geotagging support, full manual mode and the ability to capture in RAW. If that's a bit much for you, you can check out the ultrathin Coolpix S60 (£299; $581), which packs a 3.5-inch 16:9 touchscreen that controls just about everything, a 10-megapixel sensor, 5x optical zoom and an HDMI output. Next up is the S710, which unfortunately gets the aforementioned 14-megapixel sensor, a 3-inch LCD and a 3.6x optical zoom. Bringing up the rear is the 10-megapixel S560 (£179; $348) and the S610 / S610c (£249; $484), the latter of which includes WiFi for instant uploading. Look for most, if not all, of these to show up on shelves next month.

Read - Nikon's Coolpix P6000
Read - The rest of Nikon's stable

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Tags: Engadget, megapix, nikon, optic, screen, TV, wifi

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off

Johns Hopkins seeks volunteers to take magic mushrooms

Martin says:

A research program designed to enhance spiritual awareness for persons with a cancer diagnosis is accepting volunteer participants at the Bayview Campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The program consists of a brief counseling intervention, including medical screening, rapport-building appointments, two all-day sessions that include psilocybin administration, and appointments to facilitate initial integration and application of insights gained. More detailed information is available at cancer-insight.org
Conducted by Drs. Roland Griffiths, William Richards and colleagues, this program is designed to help cancer patients who are suffering with some degree of psychological distress to become less anxious and depressed, and to become more fully engaged with life again. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the "sacred mushrooms" that have been used in religious ceremonies by indigenous people in Mesoamerica for approximately two thousand years, is employed to facilitate the resolution of personal conflicts and to occasion states of consciousness that for some may be indistinguishable from visions and mystical experiences recorded in the history of religions. Psilocybin has not been found to be toxic or addictive, and is considered reasonably safe for persons without a history of serious mental illness, when administered in accordance with the safety guidelines published by the Hopkins researchers. Additional information on safety and the unique contributions this intervention may make to human personal and spiritual well-being, may be found here.

The research is FDA approved and is open to persons between 21 and 70. Confidentiality is maintained for all applicants and participants.

Tags: Boing Boing, screen

August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off

Treasure Hunting with the iPhone 3G

the-goonies When you watched The Goonies for the first time, did you start digging under porches and searching hollowed out trees for buried treasure? What if Chunk truffle-shuffled his way to the treasure with a GPS and exact coordinates? Seriously. How much easier would that have been?

If you’re not familiar with Geocaching, it’s a treasure-hunting game based on the community over at Geocaching.com. Their website boasts that Geocaching is “the sport where you are the search engine.” According to Wikipedia, Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

To sum it up Twitter-style in 140 characters or less: Geocachers hide a cache somewhere in the world and log its GPS location. Others find the cache, log its find & replace it with something new.

A serious network of Geocachers over at Geocaching.com enables all of this. Some serious Geocachers also use geo-location video sites like Seero to post videos of their finds that sync with the trail from their GPS devices.

You can also use GeoGraffiti (available as an iPhone app) to leave shout-outs for other Geocachers when they get to the cache coordinates.

TomTom vs. iPhone 3G Apps

There are a variety of GeoCaching applications, but since there’s so much hype with the iPhone 3G and its supposed GPS, I wanted to test it against a more primal form of GPS: TomTom One.

The contenders in this 2-day Geocaching mission were: $1.99 GeopherLite App for iPhone 3G, the free Google Maps app for iPhone 3G, and a TomTom One GPS device.

#1: GeopherLite app for iPhone 3G

geopherlite-app

This nifty app costs $1.99 in the Apple app store. It gives you insanely easy access for finding caches. From the app, you can search for caches from your current GPS location on Geocaching.com. It lets you select a cache from the site and view all of the information about the cache. When you select a cache, it gives you the longitude and latitude needed to find the cache, which you can then enter at the top of the app.

With these coordinates, you can either then hit the “map” button and chart your course in Google Maps or use the application as a compass. The app shows you your current location as well as the cache location so that you can use your navigation skills to hone in on the target location.

Why the GeopherLite app was good:

- This app is fantastic for easy access to finding new caches if you don’t plan ahead and want to look them up on the go.

- Two options for navigation: walk around trying to match your current coordinates with your cache coordinates (like the TomTom One) or just use Google Maps.

Why the GeopherLite app was bad:

- Current location was consistently different from the TomTom One by at least 10 feet, and it never found a cache on its own.

- It gives you quick access to the Geocaching website, but there’s no back button, so actually surfing the site looking for caches is somewhat painful. Having the Geocaching website within the app is a great feature, but it doesn’t integrate enough to be that useful.

- The compass in the applications assumes that you know what direction North is, which you probably don’t.

#2: Google Maps app for iPhone 3G

google-maps

This painfully inaccurate app for the iPhone works with Google Maps to get directions from your current location. It offers satellite view, which shows you a satellite image of your location, or you can choose to view it normally. Your current location is mapped by a little blue ball on the map that moves as you move.

Why Google maps was bad:

- Consistently off target, I’m talking significantly off every single time. It would follow our location, then stop and say we weren’t there yet when we’d in fact reached the location minutes before.

- Incredibly frustrating to use for such a simple application. For start-up time, this app took the longest to get going.

Why Google Maps was good:

- Satellite view will show you terrain so that you know what’s coming up ahead and you can tell if your cache is in an open area, along the road, or in the woods (or water).

#3: TomTom One

tomtom-one

The TomTom One is a standard GPS device that goes for about $150 bucks.

Why TomTom One was bad:

- TomTom One doesn’t perform well in park areas. It literally has a brain fart of amnesia and has no idea where you are going or where you’re headed.

- You need to be moving at least 1mph in order for it to catch up to your location, so take turns sprinting to refresh your current location.

- You can’t plot exact coordinates and have it tell you where to go (like the iPhone 3G). The device will bring you as close as it can to the target, then you need to watch the screen and compare your current coordinates with the cache coordinates until you zero in on it.

Why TomTom One was good:

- It always found the cache. And what’s more important in Geocaching than actually finding the cache?

Afterthoughts

One thing to keep in mind is that this is an outdoor activity. So when it starts pouring out (like it did when I was doing this test), the TomTom One is a more viable answer for inclement weather. It also has a much longer battery life than the iPhone 3G which only lasted three hours before needing to be recharged as opposed to the TomTom One which lasted seven hours before waning down.

I was rooting for the iPhone, but the bottom line is that the GPS on the iPhone 3G just isn’t accurate enough to use as a Geocaching navigation tool by itself (yet). It was proven very resourceful for finding information, just not for applying that knowledge. If you want to get serious about Geocaching, I’d opt for a higher-end Geocaching-optimized device like the Garmin Colorado 400t which has Geocaching software right on it.

But If you decide to try out the iPhone 3G for yourself and it sends you on a wild Geocaching goose chase, just remember: Goonies never say die!

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

World’s Simplest iPhone App
iPhone to Launch in Germany on T-Mobile
3G iPhone Confirmed for 2008
Mundu Optimizes Multi-Client Chat Tool for the iPhone
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9 Great Games For The iPhone

Tags: 3g, apple, digg, google, gps, maps, Mashable!, Networking, screen, talk, tomtom, TV, twitter, video

August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off

Mozilla’s Snowl Lets You Surf the Web and Handle Messaging Simultaneously

snowl In a move that could have a major impact on the way you surf the Web, the Mozilla Foundation today announced Snowl, an experimental solution designed to bring messaging and Web surfing together in the browser.

According to the company, Snowl is designed to answer the question of whether or not a browser can “help you follow and participate in online discussions.” Mozilla believes that browsers are specially designed to address issues most users have in handling messages – weeding out the less important messages and navigating through the messages – and with Snowl, it aims to bring messaging platforms into one central location to let you surf the Web and handle messages at the same time.

Mozilla is still unsure of whether or not people will actually want to use the service and is opening up Snowl for us to figure that out. But if it does become a desired application, Mozilla expects to offer “support for additional message sources like Facebook, AIM, and Google Talk; create an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations; and develop an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.”

There’s no way to tell if Snowl will be a success or if most users will even want to use the program. But at first glance, it looks like a winner.

Let’s face it – it’s utterly annoying to switch back and forth between tasks to answer some messages and address other issues in AIM or Google Talk. But if messaging was built into the browser, productivity would certainly increase and the overall usefulness of a standard Mozilla browser would skyrocket.

I don’t know about you, but I’m behind Snowl.

You can download Snowl here.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Mozilla Messaging Spins Off To Develop Thunderbird 3
Mozilla Launching Open Source Email Project for Developer Community
Mozilla Names John Lilly as New CEO
Mozilla Prism: Bringing Web Apps to the Desktop
Mozilla Launces Desktop Integration Tool For Firefox
Mozilla Financial Report Shows its Increasing Importance to Google
Mozilla Adds Live Chat Support: Eroding Microsoft’s Stronghold?

Tags: facebook, firefox, google, labs, Mashable!, microsoft, Networking, screen, talk, TV

August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off

No Linux IdeaPad For Lenovo’s US Customers

narramissic writes "When Lenovo's new IdeaPad 'S' series netbooks hit stores in October, U.S. buyers will only be given one option: Windows XP on the IdeaPad S10 (making it not so much a series as a single offering). Meanwhile, people in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the U.K., will be offered both of the company's new IdeaPad netbooks (the S10, which has 10.2-inch screen, and the S9, which has an 8.9-inch screen), and the choice of either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS. Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, consider the price tag: the S10 will sell for £319 (US$629) in the U.K., but in the U.S. the starting price is $399." Liliputing (a cool site for anyone interested in sub-notebook computing) has posted a few bits on the IdeaPad, including some short videos.

Rejaw is Not Just Another Twitter Clone

Rejaw is not YATC (Yet another Twitter Clone). Sure, it has some similarities but it’s really more of a hybrid of twitter, Plurk, and Meebo. It’s a micro-blogging service with a hint of chat. Here’s the quick and dirty rundown of its best features.

The first thing you will notice is the different terminology they use. For example, a public message on Twitter is called a Shout and a private direct message is called a Whisper.

The other difference is the size limit of messages. Rejaw allows messages up to 1,000 characters instead of the 140 characters that Twitter allows.

One of the most refreshing (pun intended) things about this service is that it isn’t as static as twitter because the messages automatically appear on your screen in real-time. This adds a much needed instant messenger feel to the microblogging experience. The most unusual thing about Rejaw is that it has a Mac client called Rejaw Radar for the desktop, but not a windows version yet! That is in the works though.

The un-twitter-like ability to add audio, video and images within a message post via links is very nice. This means no files to upload as on services like Pownce and Utterz. Simply paste the URL in your message and the picture, song or video will be instantly embedded within your post.

Every Post is an Island?

Every shout or whisper has a Permalink (permanent URL) which makes it easy to link directly to a conversation. By the way, all conversations are locked after three days of inactivity.

No Account Necessary!

Something unique here is that you can invite friends to join your conversation by sending them the permalink to your shout and they can join the conversation even if they don’t have an account on Rejaw. No signing up required. Nice.

Third-Party Tools

There’s already a full API, which means you can expect many cool third-party apps and services like we’ve seen with Twitter. The question will be whether or not any developer will invest the time and effort to build anything for a new unproven service.

Conclusion

Do we really need yet another communication platform similar to the ones we’re already using? I think the answer will always be yes, as long as it brings something new and exciting to the table. Clearly, Rejaw does offer something unique and interesting to our online experience. The bigger questions will be how it will scale once they grow. Will they be able to avoid some of the headaches that Twitter continues to endure? We shall soon find out.

If you want to check it out then add Paisano. Give me a shout (or a whisper).

Tags: google, invite, Mashable!, screen, twitter, video

August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off

NYT on trolls

Mattathias Schwartz of GOOD Magazine has a much-linked-to feature in tomorrow's New York Times magazine about trollius dickwadius internetius maximus, a subhuman web-based species better known as the common internet troll.

The piece is a really good read, but here's my one beef with it: "disemvowelling" is mentioned, without a hat tip to its inventor and most masterful practitioner, BB's own mod Teresa Nielsen Hayden (boo ya), who crafted the technique in 2002 when her light saber batteries pooped out mid-battle. Snip from the NYT article's mention of this technique, which we use on BB:

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.

I'd insert a comment here about how the NYT editors' oversight of TNH's genius is akin to something Hitler might do, then maybe I'd insert a url in that that sneakily hijacks the browser for a full-screen technicolor goatse gotcha extravaganza -- but then TNH herself would disemvowel me, and I'd join the ranks of the article's subjects, and all would be moot.

So anyway, here is my favorite part of the piece, spoken by arch-douche and "Craigslist griefer" Jason Fortuny:

All that having been said, there are only two ways to deal with a troll:
1. Don't reply. Don't privately address him. Don't acknowledge his comments. Don't even make a passing reference in another blog post. Just pretend the troll doesn't exist. This gets rid of 90% of the trolls out there instantly. Then, if you're smart, shut up and quit blogging for a few days and logically re-evaluate the post that set the troll off. Chances are, there is a glaring flaw in your post that makes you look like an idiot or a nutjob, and that's why you got trolled. Don't post again until you're ready to amend it or defend it with better logic.

2. With the other 10% of trolls, you have to play the game. For every insult you receive from a troll, play along and join in the joke. If someone tells you're fat (because you probably are), don't get offended and rant. Just reply with a photo of a whale and say, "You mad skippy I'm fat! I would say this photo is me, but that wouldn't be fair. The whale isn't that big." If you can successfully take yourself and the insults less seriously, you will win the good graces of the troll and he'll either go away, or he'll chill out, knock off the insults, and you'll have made a new online friend. And trust me, it's good to have a troll for a friend.

Of course, now that I've revealed this, no troll is going to let up because you've all been warned and can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. So, your only recourse is to just not be stupid and/or batnuts crazy on the Internets. If you can do that, everything will be just fine. However, just so I can be absolutely clear about this: if you escalate a war of words with a troll, you WILL lose. We know all the tricks. We have access to all the resources. We know all the laws. We're all friends with each other. We have done this thousands of times.

The Trolls Among Us (NYT. Thanks, Andrea James)

Tags: Boing Boing, screen

August 3rd, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off

Attention Sitemeter Users: Your Site is Down

This just in from one of our regular tipsters here at Mashable - thousands of popular blogs are down tonight, from PerezHilton, ValleyWag, Consumerist all the way on down to LouisGray.com. Why? Because they use SiteMeter, a popular free traffic metrics utility.

As of this moment, there hasn’t been any official statement from SiteMeter via their blog nor by their support personell regarding the outage, but their main site still functions smoothly. Still, for all sites running the JavaScript based counter, when users come to the site using Internet Explorer 7, the page attempts to load, and then pops up a dialog box that says “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site <sitename>. Operation aborted.”

Clicking OK on the box will return the standard error screen in Internet Explorer when a site can’t be reached for connectivity issues.

Firefox users appear to be completely unaffected.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Sitemeter Relaunches
Best of 2007: Top 5 Upgrades
Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic
Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers

Tags: 3g, blogger, firefox, google, Mashable!, Networking, opera, screen

August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off

Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It's not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

Bellow, we discuss some of our favorite ways it's being done well. We hope you'll share your favorite strategies in comments so we can all learn about more ways to tackle this common problem.

LinkedIn = Boring but Effective

Picture 468.png One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.

It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.

What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?

Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.

It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.

We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.

Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.

Did You Know...?

Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.

Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.

How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."

Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.

Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.

Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."

You Look Like George Bush

Picture 466.png Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.

"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.

I Heard About You On Twitter

If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!

Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)

Still More Ways to Do It

OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.

MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!

If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.

Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore

There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.

What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!

The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.

Tags: bush, facebook, read write web, screen, server, talk, TV, twitter, video

August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off

AT&T iPhone exclusivity extended to 2010?

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

Apple's deal with AT&T obviously got re-done in order to get the iPhone 3G on the street for a subsidized $199, but it looks like Steve gave in on a little more than revenue-sharing when he re-upped with Ma Bell: USA Today says that AT&T's US exclusive on the iPhone has been extended for an additional year, until 2010. The extension isn't officially announced, but it's being cited in the context of a long interview with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, who's quoted as saying things like "The iPhone has repositioned AT&T as the premier wireless brand in the world." So yeah, dude's a fan -- and with iPhone customers spending almost double on rate plans than the average AT&T customer, it's not hard to see why. Looks like our dream of glorious data plan price wars will have to wait until Android makes a splash later this year.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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