Brilliant Construction


Image courtesy Joits Photography
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Halloween is coming up soon, and if you want to dress up like an Angry Bird, you’re running out of time. It’s too late to buy a costume online (and many of the best Angry Birds costumes are sold out anyway), so you might have to resort to making one yourself. Here are some ideas to get you started.

We found some of the best examples of Angry Birds costumes — many of them graced numerous Halloween parties last year, and then we added at the end of this gallery a quick peek at the commercial versions of Angry Birds costumes you might be able to find in local stores or use as a starting-off point for your own ideas.

So take a look, get out those arts and crafts tools and sewing machines (or see if you can find somebody who’s good at that sort of thing). Good luck, and stay angry (but with a smile on your face)!

Not pissed off enough to be an Angry Bird? Here are even more Halloween costumes.

More About: Angry Birds Costumes, Halloween
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The No. 2 free app on Apple’s app store is Cut the Birds by SolverLabs, which is a mashup of two really popular iOS games: Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Sure, they are not “exactly” the same, but play the game for a couple of minutes and you quickly realize why the app is getting angry reviews. I am just surprised it slipped past the Apple censors.

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve focused on three startups with innovative takes on social buying.

OpenSky is a Twitter-style personalized shopping site. LikeBids motivates users to distribute coupons for brands, and MyTab helps users fund trips through their social networks.

OpenSky: Twitter for Curated Shopping

Quick Pitch: OpenSky is a shopping site that is curated by the tastemakers that individual users “follow.”

Genius Idea: A customizable online shopping experience.

Mashable’s Take: OpenSky has cleverly blended recommendations, editorial endorsements and flash sales.

When users sign up, they can chose from a list of about 60 tastemakers to “follow,” including celebrities such as Molly Sims, Padma Lakshmi, Kristin Cavallari, Bobby Flay and Tom Colicchio. Each tastemaker chooses products to recommend to followers and writes a short explanation of why each item was chosen. He or she runs a special on about one item a week that gives followers a 20% to 60% discount on the item.

Since launching in April, OpenSky says that it has grown 50% month over month. The site has about 600,000 users, and its CEO John Caplan, the former president of About.com, seems to be thinking big.

The startup announced a $30 million round of funding this week, bringing its total amount to $49 million.

LikeBids: Group Buying Unlocked by Facebook “Likes”

Quick Pitch: LikeBids distributes coupons through Facebook.

Genius Idea: A built-in motivation for word-of-mouth marketing.

Mashable’s Take: LikeBids users win coupons by Liking them and encouraging others to do so. When a threshold number of Likes are reached, a coupon is emailed to everyone who clicked.

The advantage of distributing coupons this way is that even participants who aren’t particularly excited to spread the word about a discount end up doing so anyway. When they Like the coupon, it’s automatically posted on their wall and friends’ feeds.

LikeBids has also built in a motivation for users who are excited to spread the word. Each coupon has a price attached to it for the person who motivates the most people to Like it by sharing a unique URL.

Right now LikeBids’ offerings are pretty sparse (there are exactly three coupons available: Papa John’s, Kohl’s and Sephora), but the startup has set up a situation that encourages users to promote brands to their friends. If those users indeed appear, that’s an appealing proposition.

myTab: a Social Travel Gift Card

Quick Pitch: myTab aims to make group gifting travel easier.

Genius Idea: A travel search engine that automatically takes into account your budget.

Mashable’s Take: Let’s say you want to go on a trip and it’s your birthday. MyTab hopes you’ll set up an account on its site, and share a link that allows your friends to chip in to its cost by purchasing a virtual currency it refers to as “myCash.”

You can then use a Kayak-like interface to book a flight and hotel based on how much “myCash” you have. If there are leftovers, you can re-gift them to friends.

Although we understand where myTab is coming from — group gift buying is a problem pervasive enough that several startups (and eBay) have developed solutions that make it easier. We fear, however, that this travel-focused solution only makes the process more complicated.

Image courtesy of istockphoto, barisonal

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, bizspark weekend roundup, LikeBids, myTab, OpenSky
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Steve Martin’s not going to let his one-liners on Twitter go to waste. Instead, he’s going to recycle them for a for-charity book.

The actor/comedian announced the move on his Twitter feed on Thursday:

The title of the book: “The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten.” Grand Central Publishing, a unit of Hachette Book Group, will publish the book in 2012.

Martin joined Twitter in September 2010 and now has close to 1.8 million followers. Martin’s not the first to recycle tweets into a book. The forerunner for Twit Lit was Justin Halpern, who got a book deal and a short-lived TV show based on his Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed.

Some recent Martin tweets:

“Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gamboled.”
“Got the new iPhone and it keeps saying, ‘you’re a creep.’”
“I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?”
“I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period”
“I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ellasportfolio

BONUS: 10 Must-Follow Fake Twitter Celebs

Looking for other funny celebrities to follow on Twitter? These accounts aren’t the real deal … but they’re all the funnier because of it.


1. Not Burt Reynolds


Not Burt Reynolds has less followers then most accounts on this list, but with tweets like "When I lose a follower, I just assumed they died. Because let's face it, it's hard not to love me," and "You can call it a mustache, or a hairy set of angel wings," the account's sure to catch fire. Follow this account for tweets documenting what you imagine Mr Reynolds' life would be like.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: shit my dad says, Steve Martin, Twitter

Excited to see what’s next for Siri.

After taking over the world – in the form of an extremely popular multi-platform game, followed by toys and accessories, even baby clothes – Angry Birds will venture where no dissatisfied feathered creature has gone before: into space.

An Angry Birds plush toy, as well as two Apple iPads, will be sent to the International Space Station with two upcoming Russian space launches.

The iPads will be sent with the next unmanned resupply flight later this month. The toy doll of the red bird from the popular game will be sent with three crew members, which are due to fly to the ISS next month.

The cosmonauts will use the iPads for entertainment purposes, but the plush toy will actually have a mission – it will signal the escape from the clutches of Earth’s gravity field when it starts to float.

[via collectSPACE]

More About: angry birds, International Space Station, ipad

The sci-fi classic Star Wars: A New Hope features a famous scene in which Luke Skywalker practices Jedi Lightsaber skills on a small, flying sphere that can hover and move quickly in any direction. Now, Japan’s Ministry of Defense has developed what may be a precursor to the Jedi training ball, though they call it a “Spherical Flying Machine.”

Driven mostly by remote control, the 42-inch in diameter, 350 gram flying ball uses a combination of propellers and wings to hover, fly in all directions at up to 60 kph and even move along the ground and walls. Virtually nothing seems to stop the ball from “flying.”

According to Japanese ministry officials who demonstrated the flying ball this week at a DigiInfo Expo Conference in Japan, the sphere uses the propeller to lift off and land and the wings for lift as it flies forward. The secret sauce may by the sphere’s three gyroscopic sensors, which automatically right the ball when it’s on the ground or in the air. In the video, the ball lands and starts rolling around (thanks to the propeller). When it’s time to lift off, the gyroscopes help the ball position itself so the propeller is up top. There’s also a camera inside the sphere.

The Ministry of Defense built the robot to help them solve a problem. Apparently they’ve built aircrafts that can stand up vertically after flying horizontally, but take-offs and landings were difficult. Researchers then came up with the idea of a sphere as a potential solution. They then built this prototype with off-the-shelf parts for roughly $1,400. It’s unclear if the ministry plans on commercializing the flying sphere, but they do see some potential in the design. During the video, the demonstrator notes the flying sphere will be able to reach places that were previously hard to access by air.

For now, though, future Luke Skywalkers may have to wait awhile before they can start learning some Jedi tricks from a Japanese flying ball.

More About: ball, Flying, Gadgets, Robot

Today’s commercials are blurring the line between lies and really big lies.

Digital subscription and single-copy sales have spiked following the launch of Apple’s Newsstand app two weeks ago.

Magazine publisher Conde Nast has seen a 268% jump in digital subscriptions sales per week on average, Monica Ray, Conde Nast’s EVP of consumer marketing, announced Tuesday. Single copy sales across its titles have risen 142% compared to the previous eight weeks.

The app, which accompanied the release of iOS 5 earlier this month, offers publishers two things they have long been asking of Apple: greater discoverability within the App Store ecosystem, and the ability to automatically deliver new issues to subscribers’ devices.

Ray acknowledged that the growth in sales has been partly fueled by the attention the launch received — the launch of the Mac App Store had an even greater effect on app sales for some developers — but expressed confidence that the publisher would “see a consistently higher level of growth going forward than [it] did prior to the app’s introduction.”

Nine of the company’s titles — Allure, Brides, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, Self, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired — are currently available on the Newsstand. Vogue, Bon Appetit and Conde Nast Traveler are scheduled to join them by early 2012, Bob Sauerberg, president of Conde Nast, said earlier this month.



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Presenting Sponsor: AT&T

More About: apple, conde nast, iOS 5, Media, newsstand, trending
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Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the growing list of celebrities who are also startup investors. The first startup to benefit from both his following and pocketbook is visual social media platform Mobli, which announced Tuesday that DiCaprio was part of a $4 million seed round that it raised from “high profile investors.”

“Mobli allows people from all over the world to share moments,” says DiCaprio, who will take on an advisory position at Mobli.

Here’s how Mobli works: Users take photos and videos and the app automatically tags each image with a location (courtesy of Foursquare’s API) or major event in the vicinity. Users can also write tags like “sports” or “football” or “New York Giants.” This tagging system makes it possible to follow specific users, locations and topics. Images for any keyword or place can also be located through search.

Part of what separates Mobli from other visual social media platforms is the participation of “high-profile” folks like DiCaprio. Well-known users like Paris Hilton and David Arquette have helped user acquisition — and now that Mobli is being more specific about what kind of investors stand behind it, it’s easier to understand how the startup might have gained such influential users.

DiCaprio uses the platform, but sparingly. He’s posted seven times, but managed to collect more than 8,000 followers along the way. The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, an environmental organization, has posted 24 times.

With celebrities and social media platforms, however, a little seems to go a long way. For instance, Justin Bieber — who has been doing some startup shopping of his own — sent a single Instagram photo on Twitter and created a wave of traffic that resembled a pattern a site might experience if it were being hacked.

In DiCaprio’s case, his and his organization’s combined 31 Mobli posts have accounted for 163,244 “media views” on Mobli. There are non-celebrities using the platform — Mobli says that it is gaining 10,000 new users every day — and many of them have more media views than DiCaprio. Few, however, have earned them with so little effort.

Twitter itself benefited greatly from the influence of celebrity early adopters who it didn’t count among its investors.

When the next Twitter comes along, the celebrities whose influence help build it might very well have skin in the game.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lukas Haas, another investor, at Mobli’s offices.

More About: celebrity investors, Leonardo Dicaprio, Mobli, Startups
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Katya Andresen is chief strategy officer of Network for Good, author of Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes and blogs at nonprofitmarketingblog.com. You can find her on Twitter @katyaN4G.

So called “slacktivists” take easy, social actions in support of a cause – signing a petition, liking a Facebook Page or putting a pink ribbon on their avatar. But that’s pretty much where their involvement ends, right?

Slacktivists tend to get a bad rap: they lack real commitment, care only about self-satisfaction and don’t contribute to meaningful change. So, why waste time with these lightweight social activists?

Because new research shows just how valuable social actions (however easy) can be.

The Dynamics of Cause Engagement study by Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication and Ogilvy Worldwide shows slacktivists (whom I prefer to call “social champions”) are more likely to take meaningful actions.

In the 2010 national survey, people who frequently engaged in promotional social activity were:

As likely as non-social media promoters to donate
Twice as likely to volunteer their time
Twice as likely to take part in events like charity walks
More than twice as likely to buy products or services from companies that supported the cause
Three times as likely to solicit donations on behalf of their cause
More than four times as likely to encourage others to sign a petition or contact political representatives

The survey was conducted in late 2010 by TNS Global among a nationally representative sample of 2,000 American adults, ages 18 and over, with a margin of error of +/- 2.2%.

The bottom line? Just because people are doing something easy on social media doesn’t mean that’s all they are doing. In fact, so-called slacktivists participate in more than twice as many activities as people who don’t engage in slacktivism. Plus, the activities that slacktivists choose to undertake have a higher potential to influence others.

“This research shows good causes should focus like a laser beam on social champions because they will do more, spread more, and advance your cause more,” says Julie Dixon of Georgetown’s Center for Social Impact Communication.

Here are four important tips for people who care about advancing good causes.

Don’t stereotype slacktivists. Just because people are taking easy actions online doesn’t mean they aren’t willing – or already doing – more for a cause.
Social champions have real value, because they’re not only likely to undertake certain activities; they’re also more likely to spread the word. The same study found the second most common way people get involved in a cause after donating is by talking to others about it. Word of mouth is critically important, so focus on the people willing to spread it.
Slacktivists are like the rest of us. They exhibit varying degrees of commitment to different causes. The message here isn’t that all slacktivists are diehard activists. They may be willing to join a Facebook cause for one non-profit, but run a marathon and raise a fortune for another. It’s up to the non-profit to see slacktivist action as a sign of interest, and then to deepen that interest with strong engagement.
Measure your engagement with everyone, slacktivist or not, so you know your time is well spent. You really don’t know who is worth the most time until you pay attention to the actions people take. Make sure you have the systems in place to determine your return on investment.

Don’t slack off yourself when it comes to engaging with slacktivists. They may be far more energetic – and interested – than you think.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AnthiaCumming

More About: activism, causes, Social Good, Social Media
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Robots can do a lot. We’ve seen them compete in the Hawaii Ironman and play in an orchestra. But play video games?

The Bitbeambot does exactly that — play Angry Birds, Rovio’s far too addictive mobile game.

Scientists began innovating with robotics to help humans with necessary processes. Gaming, as fun and addictive as it may be, falls far from these initial aspirations. Playing Angry Birds is a stress reliever, an escape from real-world toils.

SEE ALSO: Meet the Newest Angry Bird [VIDEO]

Now that there’s a robot who can plan Angry Birds, what do you think is the wildest capability robots are yet to conquer? Let us know your ideas in the comments.

More About: angry birds, Robot, Video
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A few weeks ago, Mashable contacted some ad agencies and asked them to imagine how brand pages on could change in light of that platform’s planned redesign.

Just as Facebook was announcing its tweaks, though, Google was on track to add brand pages to Google Plus. Though it looks like that will happen any day now, the integration hasn’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, a handful of brands, including Ford, are already enjoying the possibilities.

There are several barriers to designing brand pages for Plus. For one thing, it’s hard to stand out the way Plus looks now. The somewhat rigid format has a leveling effect. But Colin Murphy, director of social for Skinny, one of the agencies that accepted our challenge, says there are potential advantages to Plus, too. “A primary gripe among Facebook and Twitter users is that brands bombard them with messages they don’t want or care to see,” said Murphy. “In its current form, Plus doesn’t solve that problem, but Plus Brand Pages might, if they implement Public Circles.”

Skinny outlined how this might work with a hypothetical example for Mini, the auto brand. In this case, a Mini Countryman fan could join the Countryman circle and see just Countryman updates in her feed. “This level of selectivity isn’t possible on Facebook or even Twitter, unless of course you are a fan or follow the specific product you’re interested in — but there’s a major drawback to that method because the user has to seek out content streams,” Murphy says. “With Google+ it’s all in one place, and the all the admin has to do is feed pertinent content to the appropriate circles.”

In addition to Skinny, Fantasy Interactive created some fictional Coca-Cola and Starbucks brand pages. Are these on the mark? We’ll know soon enough, but in the meantime, let us know what you think of these agencies’ vision of how Google+ can accommodate brands.


Mini, Part 1


Commentary from Skinny: "This is the brand page. Take notice of Public Circles on the left, the Locations and Translate buttons and the content.

This is what a user who visits MINI's page for the first time will see. It contains content pertaining to each Public Circle (each MINI product, in this case), giving a first time visitor a taste of everything MINI is doing with Plus, and an idea of who has joined which circle."
Click here to view this gallery.

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Rovio has introduced a Halloween treat for Angry Birds fans: A new Angry Bird.

The orange bird doesn’t have a name, but does have the ability to blow up several times his size. The bird, which is introduced in the video above, is part of Angry Birds Ham’O'Ween, a new collection of 30 Halloween-themed levels.

For those that have already downloaded Angry Birds Seasonsbut otherwise costs $.99. Click here for the iTunes and Android versions.

More About: angry birds, rovio
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I remember the day Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated quite well. There were framed photos of the man on street corners with garlands hanging from them. He was smiling in most of the photos and wearing a white kurta. Women were crying. Men were shell-shocked. It didn’t matter what your political inclinations were. It didn’t matter what you thought of the man. The sadness was palpable.

Frontline ran a story with graphic images of the dead in the aftermath of the explosion. Sriperumbudur, the place where Rajiv Gandhi died was a horrific sight. There were bodies strewn everywhere. There were bodies without legs. Torsos without heads. And there was a picture of the man, Rajiv Gandhi himself, or what remained of him – a rump covered by a tattered piece of cloth. Probably a piece of the white kurta he had been wearing. It was the most horrific photograph that I had ever seen in my life. What were the editors of Frontline thinking the day they published it?

Death and dismemberment are real. Vultures swoop down on corpses at Parsi dokhmas. Tibetans show their compassion towards animals by opting for sky-burials. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. That which is not cremated is returned to the mahabhuta. That is the order of things.

But there is solemnity in death. It is the end of the line for all of us. Is it, not natural therefore, that we, the living, show a modicum of respect for the dead?

Another day, another bomb blast. Bloody streets in some part of the world. Or perhaps, a dictator is dead? Where is the proof? He was killed. No, he was caught or killed. No, he was caught then killed. These questions are inconsequential. He was despicable. No one will miss him. How many ways did he spell his name in a language he did not speak?

Meanwhile, we boast about not flinching while watching movies in which humans are stitched together. About how we score headshots with a rocket-launcher on video game adversaries.

Every mirror hides a camera. Every wall hides thousands of microphones.

In Barrackpore, a housewife and her paramour were shot down by her husband in broad daylight. Then he shot himself. The photograph of the deceased lying in a pool of blood in a dirty bazaar on the front page of a newspaper is what I see in the morning. There are flies everywhere. The accompanying story mentions that the kids were not at home at the time. There were kids?

I plug my ears, but the screaming reverberates inside my head. I close my eyes, but the images are vivid. I cover my mouth, but the thoughts whisper to themselves.

Tagged: Graphs, Work

Facebook wants to help you find a job. The social network announced on Thursday that it has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Labor and three employment-related agencies in an attempt to decrease the country’s 9.1% unemployment rate using social media — a project that may eventually include a Facebook jobs posting system.

The new partnership brings formal job hunting content to Facebook — which some recruiters already prefer over LinkedIn — for the first time.

As part of the initiative, Facebook has launched a new “Social Jobs” portal that makes easily accessible educational content and tools from its partners at the Department of Labor, National Association of Colleges and Employers, DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies. It plans to promote this page in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates and Puerto Rico.

Facebook has also promised to conduct surveys about how job hunters, recruiters and college career departments use social media.

The most interesting aspect of the new partnership, however, is a plan to inch Facebook into job listings territory. Facebook’s statement announcing the partnership mentioned “systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.”

What shape such a job posting system would take, and whether Facebook has any solid plans beyond research to pursue one, are still not clear. A job board that lives on Facebook could put the social network in direct competition with sites like LinkedIn and Monster.com.

“We’re not going to limit ourselves to what’s possible today,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “Instead, we’re going to devote resources to develop the innovations that are going to help the job seekers of tomorrow. We’re going to invest in research in new technologies that will deliver jobs virally at no charge and expand opportunities for people to create social job searching experiences online.”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

More About: Facebook, jobs, trending, U.S. Department of labor

Google+ will soon support pseudonyms and other forms of identity, says a Google executive.

During a conversation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, SVP of Social Vic Gundotra revealed that Google will eventually support other forms of identity. While Google started with only allowing users to sign up if they used their real names, it will be adding features that will “support other forms of identity” in the next few months.

The revelation comes a few months after controversy erupted when Google suspended users utilizing pseudonyms and nicknames instead of their real names. At the time, Google made minor changes in response to criticism, but stood firm on its decision to suspend users that didn’t use their real names.

Apparently the issue is technology, resources and the atmosphere the company wanted to set with Google+. The company wanted to create a community focused on real names, but now it realizes that some people have legitimate reasons to use pseudonyms.

Gundotra didn’t go further into how Google+ will support pseudonyms.

More About: Google, Pseudonyms

Success of any kind is a function of many factors, individual talent is just one of them–ability to eat a whole box of Cheez-its in one sitting is another.

Google and Samsung launched the latest Android OS Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone Wednesday morning in Hong Kong.

We’ve broken down the long-awaited phone and OS’s new features, so that you can see exactly what is now brought to the table. Our pick for most impressive new feature is that glorious camera, which includes native features ranging from filters to panorama shooting.

Big, fast and powerful: The Nexus Prime has a 4.65-inch display and LTE, runs one of the fastest 4G networks in the world and has a dual core 1.2ghz processor.
Everything about this phone is smoother. There’s a new font optimized for HD, software buttons replace hardware buttons and the keyboard’s improved.
Your face unlocks the phone, as facial recognition replaces a traditional pass code.
The new and improved camera has zero shutter lag, autofocuses, takes low-light photos, stitches together images into seamless panoramas and shoots 1080p, time-lapsed video. You also have lots of instant editing options such as removing red eye, adding a “hipster” filter or cropping.
The phone gives you a detailed analysis of your data usage, down to the very app sucking up all your bytes.
Android Beam eases sharing between phones — simply bump your phone against another Android to transfer videos, maps or other content.
Gmail and Google calendar have slick new looks and are integrated into the OS.
The People app innovates your contacts list, linking individuals with all of their social profiles.
You can multitask and view your recent apps.
Developers can download the SDK starting immediately. The phone will ship to the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia in November.

SEE ALSO: Google Ice Cream Sandwich, Nexus Prime Launch [LIVE BLOG TRANSCRIPT]

What do you think of Ice Cream Sandwich? Is it a game changer from Gingerbread or does it merely add some new bells and whistles? Let us know what you think in the comments.

More About: android, Google, ice cream sandwich, nexus prime
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The old man recognized me although he has not seen me in over a decade. “When did you come back home?”

“Last week,” I said with a feeble smile. “Kaku, are you well?”

“I am fine, though my eyesight is not as good as it used to be. I could hardly recognize you. You look so different now. ”

“But you look the same, kaku.” I lied. No one looks the same after a decade.

I had been to this shop before. Many times. Here I bought reams of paper and tied them into neat notebooks with string and needle, using the colored Sunday pages of newspapers as covers. This is where I bought cheap pencils and tin geometry boxes with misshapen compasses and warped protractors. This is where I bought my first fountain pen.

Who uses a fountain pen anymore?

When I was in school, a fountain pen was the only incorruptible writing instrument for the bhadralok. Pencils were for babies and dot-pens were not used by studious boys and girls, who could be immediately identified through their superior penmanship. So, we practiced our assignments with cheap fountain pens.

There was a proper protocol to inaugurating fountain pens. We used messy plastic droppers to insert ink into the open barrels. We’d pull the ink to the nib by running the tips of fingers across the fine slit. Sometimes the ink would gush out. That was normal and not a cause for panic. The only acceptable procedure for taking care of inky fingers was to move them with one fine flourish through our hair: the wisdom handed down from generation to generation was that the ink added to the black luster.

The night before major examinations, we armed an arsenal of fountain pens. We also took little inkpots with us. More often than not, the ink ran out though, this was not completely out of necessity, for we measured our peers not only by how many pages they filled, but by how fast they exhausted the ink in their fountain pens.

Fountain pens projected an aura of prestige, but required a lot of maintenance. If you wanted to store a pen for a long period of time, you had to wash out the barrel with water and clean the nib. Because the angle and amount of pressure every person used to write was different, the nib of even the finest fountain pens would get bent over time (for which there were “pen hospitals”).

And the finest fountain pen of them all was the Wing Sung, which you got on a birthday, or if you did well on a test. The Wing Sung which sold for an exorbitant twenty rupees was not an Ambassador. It was the Mercedes of fountain pens. It exuded elegance. It had a squeeze-injection system for the ink. A fine porcelain finish with a golden cap. It wrote smoothly for many pages before needing a fill-up. Ownership was a point of pride for every schoolboy.

I got my first Wing Sung at this shop.

“Kaku, do you have any fountain pens?”

The old man nodded and slowly turned. He pulled a series of discolored cardboard boxes from under the counter. He wiped away the dust and looked at me. Twenty years ago, he would have asked the boy in front of him, his budget. He didn’t ask the grown-up man who sat in front of computers all day, his.

He opened a box and pulled out a small fountain pen wrapped in see-through plastic from the neatly arranged assortment. He took a pen from the plastic and reached for an inkpot. He put both in front of me and pulled out a small notepad with doodles scribbled all over it. I opened the pen and dipped the nib in the ink and scribbled over the pad. The patterns on the page created themselves. The writing was smooth. The lines were exquisite. Quite remarkably, all this happened without either of us uttering a word: this was a ritual that we had performed many times before.

When I was in high school the ball-point pen, or dot-pen as we called them, became ubiquitous. We all started using cheap-looking Reynolds ball-point pens because we could write more pages with them. They were convenient. They were mass-produced and sold in packs of ten. They didn’t need pen hospitals. Fountain pens as primary writing instruments died out.

The pen gave way to the keyboard. This much is certain. I will never regularly use a fountain pen again. I hardly use a pen for anything other than jotting down a quick note or a phone number. My handwriting, which I was once proud of, resembles the hysterical scratches of an underfed hen now.

The few times I pick up a pen these days, I use gel pens. They are fine instruments, no doubt…

But I wonder what they call the plastic balls you have to snap off the refills before you can start writing. I always forget that step before trying to write. Never mind.

Angry Birds isn’t slowing down. According to its creators, gamers are spending millions of hours per day engaging with the mobile gaming phenomenon.

Andrew Stalbow, Rovio‘s GM of North America, says that the various version of Angry Birds have been downloaded 400 million times. Thirty million people play the game on a daily basis, he announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. One hundred thirty million people play Angry Birds monthly.

The result? Gamers spend a whopping 300 million minutes playing Angry Birds daily. That’s 109.5 billion minutes per year, or 1.825 billion hours.

SEE ALSO: Addicted to Angry Birds? Here’s Help [INFOGRAPHIC]

Stalbow also revealed that China is the game’s second largest and fastest growing market. The company recently released an update for the Chinese Moon Festival in an attempt to appeal to Chinese players. Rovio will soon release an update for Halloween that will introduce a secret, new bird (we know that it’s yellow and looks a bit like a duck).

Several years ago, the company was working on games for publishers like EA. It was on the brink of collapse before it turned to social and mobile platform platforms. At one point, the company had nine employees, but now it has more than 170 employees worldwide.

More About: angry birds, Gaming, rovio

About 56% of Facebook users who are aware of changes to the social network dislike them, according to a new poll.

A telephone survey of 2,000 people conducted by USA Today and Gallup found that 26% of people who use the site daily are “very concerned” about privacy vs. 35% who use it once a week. Those figures are significant in light of Facebook’s new Timeline feature, which gives users the opportunity to share their histories on the site and gives Facebook more targeted information for advertisers. Facebook’s schedule to roll out Timeline is unclear.

Facebook’s changes, however, are apparent to daily users, but not as much to the general public. Only 34% of the people surveyed were aware of the changes, although 87% of daily users were. Of users who were aware of the changes, 56% didn’t like them; 36% liked them. Those figures track closely to Mashable‘s poll of 3,200 users on Sept. 30. In that poll, about 59% of users said they couldn’t be bothered to fill in their Timelines.

The survey shows that although Facebook may be a ubiquitous part of millions of people’s lives, for many it’s still merely a curiosity.

What do you think? Do you like Facebook’s new changes? Let us know in the comments.


The New Facebook Profile: Timeline


Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.
Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, Gallup, timelines

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Interactive Designer at Weber Shandwick / Powell Tate in Washington, DC
Digital Producer at Adkeeper in New York
Software Engineer — Front End at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of ResumeBear

More About: Facebook, features, Google, infographic, job search series, jobs, linkedin, mashable, Tech, trending, Twitter
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We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about adding a comments section. For now there’s no plans to add one, however, we’ll be posting each new comic to our facebook page and you can comment on them until the internet breaks.

Facebook’s gone through some profound changes lately, which is exciting to us, but leaves others in a profound state of anger and frustration. Like it or not, all is not perfect with the world’s largest social network, and here’s an infographic by a company that’s more than happy to point out Facebook’s shortcomings.

This “Facebook Wall of Shame” was created by WordStream, Inc., a provider of search marketing software and services. Apparently Facebook‘s release of its iPad app left the company cold. For instance, WordStream points out how some critics who reviewed the Facebook iPad app called it “too little, too late.”

SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg: “The iPad’s Not Mobile”

That iPad app’s release must have been the last straw for the company. The result? This hard-hitting infographic smackdown that reveals what WordStream calls “Facebook’s errors in judgment.” Take a look at this litany of complaints, and let us know in the comments which ones you think are justified or not.


Facebook for iPad Login Screen


The first step to Facebook for iPad is logging in.
Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, fail, infographics

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

More About: Business, contributor, Facebook, features, Google, itunes, Tech, tumblr
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The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

The only thing cooler than a million dollars is, well, a billion dollars.

Fortunately for social game creators, that’s just how much the industry is set to rake in this year. Indeed, it’s big business, and it’s not just for Internet nerds. In fact, one out of every five Americans over the age of six has played an online social game at least once — that’s 56 million people, all told.

Zynga alone has 232 million monthly players and nearly $600 million in revenue, and the industry is poised to keep on growing. Check out the infographic below to learn more about the economics of this booming industry.

Are you a social gamer? Let us know your favorite one in the comments below, and tell us whether you’ve shelled out some green for the love of the game.

Infographic design by Nick Sigler

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

More About: features, mashable, Mashable Infographics, social gaming, Social Media Infographics Series
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It’s a bit surprising that Google’s smartphone and tablet platform didn’t find a use for the @Android handle on Twitter until now, but that problem has now been rectified.

You won’t find much to read just yet, but if you want to follow the future adventures of iOS’ biggest nemesis, hop on over to @Android and hit the follow button.

The official account of the Android developer team is still over at @AndroidDev.

In one of its first tweets, the Android Twitter account posted a video of Google employees erecting a 10-foot tall Ice Cream Sandwich statue; check it out below.

More About: android, Google, Mobile, smartphone, social networking, Twitter
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Thanks to my friend Eric Horton for today’s comic idea (plus for the seven hours of rigorous coffee tasting needed to verify this comic).

My laptop folders were a mess so I decided to undertake the arduous task of organizing them. I started with my work folders and was stunned at the number of mangled powerpoints and excel files occupying prime real estate. The files had weird names. “<project name>_100112_edit1″, “share check”, “test markets”, “tools_v12″. Lots of head spinning happened. I thought I’d open some of them to figure out if they contained anything important to retain before I relegated the majority of this sad lot to the recycle bin.

As I opened a file, nostalgia hit me hard. In front of me was the vestige of what went on to become a solid piece of work, well appreciated by clients, responsible for a lot of revenue and goodwill. But two years ago it looked gawky and pitiful, making a sincere effort to be profound. Mean something to someone. It had meant well. It had been trashed and pissed on by the client. It had gathered the tatters of its and its creator’s self-respect before hobbling back to the drawing board for v56. Beaten up but never beaten. I had been around to help it develop into something worthy, learning a lot in the process. Others had stepped in when they saw I was getting overwhelmed and had provided valuable inputs. In the end v67 succeeded and passed on to a new stage of its life where it would be scrutinized for the next few months by a different group of people. Out of the eager hands of its creator and into a new world, at the whims and mercies of a powerful few who had commissioned it. Of course, v67 would change over time, as its new masters figured out new metrics to track, new analyses to add and we’d be there to help them with it.

As time went by, that WIP faded into oblivion. I didn’t really need it anymore. There were new things to be done and so life moved on as the file quietly hid away in a corner of an obscure folder.

Just like my past.

I’ve been a WIP for as long as I can remember. Each version getting better with time, and with the help of people. A lot of people who took the time and effort to shape me. This is about a few of them.

As an introvert, I’m averse to easily making friends. I thought I’d cherish close friendships over mere connections but even that seems to be sadly untrue. I’ve had close friends who taught me courage as I saw them dismiss personal tragedies with a smile and resilience on their faces. We learned much from each other and we couldn’t have been closer. Just like v67, we were sent our separate ways by education and then our careers. It turns out I’m also a cad apart from being an introvert. I let those people fade away as I allowed my appalling inertia to overpower my responsibility to stay in touch.

I emit pointless little whimpers from time to time in this great tapestry of bytes called the internet and they answer back with whimpers of their own. Not a single one of those communiques managing to capture the hours spent listening to a new album, discussing the merits of one song over the other, playing tennis in the evenings just so they could see me throw my racket in frustration, poring over books together to prevent exam disasters, cycling to our haunts to discuss girls and heartbreak. Or spending one such day making stupid jokes punctuated with nervous laughter as four suitcases lying in the corner of a room stared balefully at us. Trying hard to fight back tears as the hour approached when those suitcases would be loaded into a car and one of us would make his way to a better life on another continent, all the while trying not to interfere between the soft and tearful goodbyes between him and his parents.

Or holding hands as tragedy struck our little group. Trying hard to understand life’s vagaries and hiding our inability to say the right words of comfort. Watching one of us grow up too soon and marveling at the fact that he seemed to have no complaints. And here I find myself cursing the line at the coffee shop some mornings. Yes, I’m still a WIP.

Each of those experiences has made me what I am today. We were gawky, well-meaning and wanted to mean something to someone. It never occured to us that in this collective desire to evolve, we already meant something to each other.

Life’s hectic now, but there do appear moments of sunshine between ferocious cloudbursts. I need to use that time to go back to those gawky WIPs now hidden in an obscure memory somewhere, take a step in their direction and hope they’re doing the same somewhere in the distance. I curse the internet for reducing our friendship to meaningless chatter, but it is in the internet I’ve found catharsis and direction as I write this post.

For those precious few who saw me through the challenges of growing up and still tolerate this WIP, I’m going to leave this post unf

 

 

 

Update Sun Oct 16: So I did walk the talk. I dug up an old phone number, placed a call and it went to voicemail. He called me back shortly and after the first two minutes of cautious pleasantries, necessary to wipe away three-year old cobwebs, we spoke as if we had never lost touch. We discussed the songs we used to trip on. He reminded me of a few I’d totally forgotten.

He’s even driving down to meet us next week. I’m preparing a comprehensive 90s playlist in his honor.

Sometimes, simply writing down your problem leads to its solution.

Google‘s 3 year-old Chrome browser just hit the 200 million user mark, CEO Larry Page announced Thursday.

The fast-growing browser had about 160 million users in May, up from 120 million in December 2010, according to eWeek, which correctly predicted Chrome would hit 200 million users in October.

Chrome’s growth had been noted elsewhere. The browser has about 15% market share and in some markets, like the UK, it has surpassed Firefox’s share to become the second most popular browser after IE. Among Mashable readers, meanwhile, Chrome is the most popular.

The huge installed base for Chrome is good news for Google, which just started rolling out its first Chromebooks in June.

More About: chrome, Firefox, Google

Ari Meisel is co-founder at Less Doing, where he works on making every task in life and business more efficient. You can follow him on Twitter @liontex and read his blog at arimeisel.com.

People spend a lot of time on email — way too much for their own good and productivity. Email is a disruptive technology that can take you on a tangent you never intended, and eat up time faster than most other voluntary activities.

Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly.

To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques.

1. Optimize

To optimize email, you need less of it. Try using a service called Unsubscribe.com to get yourself removed from mailing lists, promotional emails, etc. It uses a Gmail plugin, or you can just forward emails to mail@unsubscribe.com.

Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don’t need to individually subscribe to Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast.

Next comes organization. I’m a huge fan of OtherInbox, which integrates with Gmail and automatically organizes your messages into folders like “Shopping” and “Business.” Imagine an inbox with 1,000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails — in one click. Furthermore, OtherInbox will learn from you, and therefore, get better over time. As an added benefit, OtherInbox has its own unsubscribe service. It will also automatically recognize tracking numbers in an email, then put the delivery date in your calendar alongside relevant shipment information.

Become a filtering ninja. Whether Gmail, Outlook or another service, most email systems allow for filtering. Any type of email you get with some regularity (and some you don’t) should have a filter assigned to it. Sometimes accounts forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or provide a specific automated response. Regardless, use filters often.

Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try including an FAQ section on your website, for example. Answer those mundane, repetitive questions ahead of time. Or, try putting relevant information in your signature. I use UnityFax to get faxes by email. I like Virtual Post Mail to get postal mail in my email inbox.

Finally, use WiseStamp to generate nice little icons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog. I also like to include a link to Tungle in my signature, which gives people access to an appointment book synced with my calendar in real time. That way, I never have to waste time or emails setting up meetings.

Include a sentence in your email signature stating that you only check your email once a day, but if the matter is urgent, the sender can use AwayFind. This service creates an emergency contact page that routes messages to you by voice or text.

Now that you’ve optimized your emails, you’ll need to get better at “processing” them. Check out The Email Game, which adds game dynamics to email processing. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later time, delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response. Depending on how well you do, the game rewards points, all the while training you to process email faster.

If you really want to geek out, go to Read Fast, which trains you, little by little, to speed read. I gained 30 words per minute after one article.

2. Automate

I use FollowUp.cc to keep track of deadlines within the email realm. It’s a simple concept: Whenever you send an email, you can set an email reminder for any time period. For instance, if you write an email to a potential client, you can choose to CC “3days@followup.cc.” Three days later, if that client hasn’t responded, he’ll get a reminder email, as will you. If you BCC “3days@followup.cc,” only you get the reminder. You’ll find that after a couple weeks of using FollowUp.cc, you’ll stop worrying about follow-ups. It’s out of sight, and out of mind — the way it should be.

Gmail plugin Canned Responses is indispensable. The plugin lets you create template emails. For example, if you frequently get requests for product information, you can create a template email with all the info. That way, it only takes two clicks to send, rather than five minutes spent writing the email. In combination with filters, you can set automatic template responses to certain keywords, completely removing the task from your plate.

Another great plugin is Boomerang. Among other things, the tool allows you to delay sending certain emails until a later date. Deferring emails makes you more productive by corralling people into your schedule. If you respond to an email immediately, you’ll likely just get more email. But, if you send at a more strategic time, you may be in a better position to deal with that message more efficiently.

The last tool in the automation process is an autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Tell them whom to contact for certain requests, and let them know where to get the information they want.

3. Outsource

Once you’ve worked up the email ladder of optimization and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with messages that require human interaction — but maybe not your own. That’s where virtual assistance comes into play. I use FancyHands to deal with nagging tasks I don’t have time for. Simply forward an email with one line of instructions. Then the service calls people to request information and organizes files into something more useful.

The most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. When you examine tasks within the framework above, you can get technology working for you, instead of the other way around

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

More About: contributor, email, features, How-To, productivity

Google and Samsung have announced an Android press event Oct. 19 in Hong Kong.

While the event doesn’t specifically mention the focus of the event will be “Ice Cream Sandwich,” the next version of Google’s mobile OS, the invite itself features the iconic Android character in the form of an ice cream sandwich. You do the math.

The event will also be the official debut of the Samsung Nexus Prime, which will be the first smartphone to run the new Google OS. The Nexus Prime reportedly contains a dual-core 1.2 to 1.5 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 4G LTE.

The Google-Samsung event was originally scheduled for Oct. 11 but was delayed out of respect follow Steve Jobs’s death.

The other big question you all may have is why are Google and Samsung showing off the new Android OS in Hong Kong? Why not do it in San Francisco, where most technology journalists live? The answer is that the event corresponds with the AllThingsD‘s AsiaD Conference, which kicks off not long after the Google-Samsung press conference. Andy Rubin and a Samsung executive will be speaking at the conference, presumably about Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime.

Bonus: Leaked Footage of the Samsung Nexus Prime

More About: android, Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Google, ice cream sandwich, nexus prime, samsung, Samsung Nexus Prime

Rest easy BlackBerry users, your service is back. So said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in yet another BlackBerry outage conference call update.

Lazaridis appeared with co-CEO Jim Balsillie and CTO David Yach. Lazaridis began by apologizing again and then announced, “We have now restored full services.”

RIM’s BlackBerry problem began four days ago when, Lazaridis explained, a “dual redundant, high-capacity core switch designed to protect the service failed.” This set in motion a cascading failure and when a backup switch did not operate as intended, it created a significant mail backup in Europe. The data queue backup also took longer than RIM expected and resulted in a mail backlog that triggered service disruptions in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and, eventually, the U.S.

As BlackBerry customers start accessing mail services again (there may still be delays as the company works through the email backlog), RIM continues to investigate the cause of “the largest [failure] we’ve experienced.” Part of that involves talking to the third-party vendors managing the failed switch. Rim’s CEOs refused to name the vendors.

When asked why it took Lazaridis until Thursday to speak publicly about the outage, Balsillie defended Lazaridis, “He was directly commanding teams. … No one has been home since Monday.” As for customer recompense, Balsillie said RIM is looking at it and it’s ““something we plan to come back to these customers on very, very soon.”

Has your faith been irreparably shaken by RIM’s failure or are you willing to forgive, forget and start consuming and creating mobile mail in mass quantities? Tell us in the comments below.


BlackBerry Bold 9900



Click here to view this gallery.

More About: blackberry, RIM, trending
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Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment may go public as soon as next year and is worth around $1 billion, according to Rovio’s chief marketing officer.

Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio CMO, told Bloomberg Television that the company will launch an IPO “maybe a year from now.”

Vesterbacka also said that Rovio’s market capitalization, which had been estimated at around $1 billion is actually “a bit north of that.”

Rovio earns its revenues from in-game purchases and Angry Birds merchandise, including plush toys and baby products. The company is also planning an Angry Birds movie and TV programming.

The company has expressed its intention to go public before but has never been clear on a timeframe. It would presumably join other social media companies, including Zynga, Groupon and Facebook, that plan to test the stock market with an IPO.


1. Smartphone Apps


Where the revolution began: Angry Birds first released the game onto Apple's iOS in December 2009.
Click here to view this gallery.

More About: angry birds, Facebook, groupon, IPOs, rovio, trending, Zynga
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Comic by Jason Pultz. Click to see it at full size.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

If you’re a BlackBerry owner, Research In Motion’s recent outage probably isn’t that funny, but if you’re anyone else, there’s a lot of good tweet material.

Many Twitter users took the outage as an opportunity to launch some zingers at the beleaguered RIM, which had the bad luck of experiencing a global outage at the same time positive reviews rolled in for the iPhone 4S and users rushed to download iOS5.

In a press conference on Wednesday, RIM CTO for Software David Yach blamed backlogged messages in Europe for the issue as Twitterers blamed RIM. Here are some of the funniest tweets so far:


@petridishes



Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Marich Terz

More About: blackberry, outages, RIM, Twitter
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: CircleMe

Quick Pitch: CircleMe is a new social platform to track, engage with and share all your true likes in one place.

Genius Idea: Helping web users get more out of their digital lives.

Who are you? It’s a metaphysical question with an ever-changing answer. But in the age of Facebook “Likes,” Foursquare checkins and continual social updates, perhaps the answer can be found in what we share.

CircleMe, a newly launched social site from UK-based startup Cascaad, is the inverse of the typical social network. Instead of focusing on connecting you with friends and family members, CircleMe connects you to you — for a deep dive into your sense of self, as defined by the various kinds of digital things you like.

“We wanted to provide a place for people to able to engage more than themselves,” Cascaad founder Erik Lumer says. “The idea is to provide a way to collect, in one place, all the things that you really like — whether that’s music, movies, famous people or things that you’re fond of.”

The CircleMe user can pull in a selection of favorite people, places, movies and things from their Facebook “likes,” Foursquare checkins and Netflix streaming activity. The end result, with a little tweaking, is you — or a digital rendering of your likes in a classy, customizable profile that can be shared with others.

CircleMe, explains Lumer, has three key functions: To help you collect your likes across a broad range of categories in one place, to give you a way to express your likes in a visually stimulating and emotional way, and to allow you to engage and cultivate interests through the discovery of new information.

And why might this be important? For the same reason that Facebook created Timeline — because much of what we share on the web is ephemeral.

“You’re collecting likes just as a byproduct of sharing with other people,” says Lumer, “but you’re not creating them with the idea that you’re collecting the most important things in your life.”

“The only value of having those likes is for advertisers,” he adds. “We really wanted to provide a way for users to get more out of their likes.”

For a still-maturing private beta product, CircleMe delivers on its promise rather well, and its first few thousand users, says Lumer, have responded positively to the product.

CircleMe launched into private beta last week. Mashable readers can sign up to get early access to the service.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, spark-of-genius
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has finally gotten the message and joined Google+.

The former Google CEO wrote his first public message on Google+ earlier today, a simple post with links to his thoughts on Steve Jobs (Schmidt served on Apple’s board of directors until 2009, when the competition between Android and iPhone became a major conflict of interest).

I recently criticized Google’s management for not eating its own dog food and using Google+. At the time, Schmidt didn’t even have a Google+ account. Only two Google executives — SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra — were active users of Google+ (at least in public — it’s important to note that additional Google executives may have been more active privately).

Since that article, several Google executives have started posting publicly to Google+. They include SVP of Search Alan Eustace and SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki, and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora.

To Arora’s credit, he directly addressed the points I made in my article. “Having worked closely with my friend Vic on this, I think I have lots of dog food in me,” he told a Google+ user. “I do prefer posting to circles and sharing with people who have expressed interest in following me. I intend to follow a lot of your advice. Perhaps if I have pearls of wisdom to share, I might do so publicly.”

Google+ has received additional scrutiny in recent weeks. Google+ traffic has fallen since the spike from its public launch and a Google engineer’s rant about how Google+ “is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).”

via TechCrunch

More About: eric schmidt, Google

Google is giving Google+ users two enhanced ways to find information disseminating across the social network, with real-time search and hashtags.

“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post on Google+ Wednesday. “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”

Also, should you opt to put a hashtag in any of your Google+ updates, that hashtag will automatically link to search results for the term.

The improvements will come as welcome additions for Google+ power users, journalists and media types interested in keeping up with breaking news on Google+. The search updates may do little to convince more casual social networkers to stick around on the social site or give it second chance.

They have some long-term significance, however. We expect this technology to become the foundation for a revamped real-time search experience on Google.com itself.

You may recall that Google Realtime Search went on hiatus in July — after Google failed to reach an agreement with Twitter for continued access to its firehose of data.

More About: Google, Google Realtime Search, Search

In a brief press conference Wednesday, Research in Motion CTO for Software David Yach said a backlog of messages to Europe has created a cascading outage effect around the world.

The company has determined the root cause of the initial European BlackBerry email service outage, which started three days ago, and said there’s no evidence that a hack or security breach was involved.

RIM customers in Europe have been suffering from major outages for days, but it wasn’t until today that the Americas caught the bug and BlackBerry customers started complaining on Twitter of mail delays and inaccessibly on their BlackBerry devices.

Yach described the initial outage as a failure of one of RIM’s core switches. However, the real trouble began when RIM’s redundant systems failed, as well. “The failover did not function as expected,” Yach said, “despite the fact that we regularly test failover systems.” This led to a significant backup of mail.

RIM responded by throttling service in the impacted area to stabilize service, which apparently resulted in backup of mail in other regions trying to reach RIM’s European customers. The Canadian-based company would not reveal the exact number of RIM customers affected, saying only that many customers are impacted in a variety of ways. “Some see delays, some service interruption,” Yach said.

For now, RIM says it is working “around the clock” and “globally” to try and restore service. It has not throttled service in regions outside Europe. RIM’s Yach said they’re focusing on clearing out the backlog of email, much of it in Europe and for anyone trying to deliver email to Europe.

When asked if RIM might try and wipe the slate clean and clear out the backlog without delivering messages, Yach answered swiftly: “All email will be delivered. We will not be dropping any email messages.”

While Yach said RIM knows the root cause of the initial failure, it wasn’t willing to share it — at least until it finishes its own thorough investigation. That won’t come until after all service is stabilized and restored.

Do you think RIM is doing enough? Share your thoughts in the comments.

More About: blackberry, RIM
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Across the board, early reviewers of the iPhone 4S have singled out Siri as a standout feature. And a number of them have tried to test it with silly questions as well.

For the uninitiated, Siri is the 4S’s voice-recognition technology. The feature is designed to let you pose questions like “Is there an Italian restaurant nearby?” or give commands like “Change my meeting to Monday at 11,” but mischievous Apple engineers have also loaded a few easter eggs in the feature — responses to anticipated, abstract questions.

Above you’ll find the top 10 Siri comebacks so far.

More About: apple, features, iPhone 4S, siri, trending
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Zynga's New Headquarters



There is a Zynga RV at the entrance.
Click here to view this gallery.

Zynga, the social gaming giant behind FarmVille, CityVille, Words With Friends and a plethora of other social games, has moved its 1,500+ employees to brand new offices in San Francisco.

The new digs are enormous; They span six floors and include a food court, snack bars on every floor, a laptop help center and whiteboard artwork in almost every corner. It’s impossible not to run into a Mafia Wars 2 or AdventureWorld character every five feet.

Zynga has invited us to tour the office as part of its Zynga Unleashed event, where the company will be launching 10 new products.

Check out the photos we took of the offices above.

SEE ALSO: Zynga Unleashes New Games | Zynga’s Project Z: A Facebook-Powered Social Network

More About: cityville, farmville, gallery, words with friends, Zynga, zynga poker

Updated. Amazon in late September launched new Kindle devices including Kindle Fire, a tablet that makes content a centerpiece of its tablet strategy. It also announced a new browser, Amazon Silk, that proposed to use cloud to offer a blazing fast experience. Silk’s hybrid browser architecture quickly triggered some privacy concerns. Amazon weighed in on my queries and clarified their position.

Nevertheless, I have continued to receive feedback, some private and some over various social networks. One that stands out is from MathewMatthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, a hosted proxy service provider based in San Diego San Francisco who shared his thoughts. Prince, (you can follow him on Twitter @eastdakota) who teaches cyber law at John Marshall where he serves on the Board of the Center for Information Technology & Privacy Law, believes Amazon will continue to face “technical, legal, and privacy concerns with Silk.” He points out that similar attempts in the past have not been very successful, even for Google.

Amazon’s Silk Browser may be a game changer, but the history of similar efforts shows the company may face significant headaches in getting it to work. The Silk Browser loads pages through a proxy which can have a number of benefits to end users. Depending on how aggressive the Silk proxy is, it could speed up browser performance, allow Kindle devices to get away with slower, less expensive processors, and potentially even increase the battery life by offloading web rendering.

The Silk Browser it isn’t really new technology and it’s not a slam dunk that it will work. The Opera Mini browser uses a proxy which has several of the same features as Amazon’s Silk. Google tried something similar back in 2005 with their Web Accelerator Plugin. While the plugin is no longer available, the support documents still are. Google discontinued support in early 2008 after a number of issues arose — similar issues that are likely to be faced by Amazon with Silk.

I predict that Amazon is likely to face technical, legal, and privacy concerns with Silk. Technically, the biggest challenge will likely be cache invalidation. If I visit my bank website and my account page is cached, Amazon needs to be 100 percent certain that when someone else visits the same bank they never see my account information. From the technical specifications, it appears that Amazon is only caching static resources such as images. While that will solve many of the cases, there will still be places that Silk could end up leaking private data (e.g., a stock photo or porn site that charges for access to its photos).

Unlike existing proxies (like CloudFlare) or traditional CDNs whose clients are the website owners, Amazon’s clients are the web browsers, so they are copying content without the content owners’ explicit permission. This could lead to copyright headaches. While there are safe harbors for service providers caching content, Amazon’s nebulous status between network provider, retailer, and even publisher could muddle their case in court and make them a tempting target. The more Amazon alters the content in order to increase performance, the more jeopardy they will put themselves in.

Finally, Silk potentially puts Amazon in the privacy crosshairs. It appears they are planning to subsidize some of the Kindle’s pricing with advertising, and that advertising will likely be most effective if it is targeted using browsing data gleaned from Silk. Users and regulators can react very strongly if they feel their information is being sold without their permission, and Silk has the potential to score high on the creepiness factor. These privacy concerns have a way of blowing up unexpectedly with regulators resulting in substantially burdensome regulation. In this case, Amazon has already made many government enemies as they’ve fought Internet sales tax initiatives. Going after them for privacy violations may prove a tempting target for lobbyists that [are] already trying to demonize them.

My hunch is that Amazon will find a way to pull it off, but it won’t entirely be smooth for Silk.

What do you think about Prince’s take?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shinesDisruptapalooza 2011: how Amazon’s Kindle is changing the portable media gameWhat Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Dungeon Masters, start your engines. Dungeons & Dragons, the original table-top role-playing game, is coming to Facebook.

Atari has created a new social game for Facebook called Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter.” Players can customize their own characters, find loot and fight ghastly, digital beasts.

The app looks much like a top-down strategy game — and somewhat similar to the actual style of the tabletop version.

While the game is known for long sessions and user-created narratives, Heroes of Neverwinter offers short bursts of gameplay and a largely standardized plot from the game’s creators. Fans of the slower, more complex original might decry this as breaking from the game’s roots, but it’s probably a smart move to appeal to social gamers who are, for the most part, casual users who play for shorter periods of time.

The game will feature more than 50 dungeons, 40 monsters, 30 skills and hundreds of items. Gamers can play solo, recruit friends or even become a sort of digital Dungeon Master and come up with their own mini-narratives as side quests.

Heroes of Neverwinter, which is currently in open-beta, joins a group of other games targeted to nostalgic players. Oregon Trail received a social gaming update for Facebook, and The Sims Social has been one of the top Facebook games since its launch at the end of summer.

It’s good to know Heroes of Neverwinter hasn’t foregone the traits that made its tabletop ancestor so popular. But will it be able to attract new users without alienating its base? If a sentence like: “Legions of Halflings, Dragonborn, and Eladrin will sharpen their blades and ready their spells as Facebook players around the world create their unique heroes and set forth for adventure!” appeals, this social game might just have some legs.

Will you gear up for Dungeons & Dragons as a social game? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Facebook, Gaming, social gaming
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Traffic to Google+ spiked 1,200% in the first few days following its public launch Sept. 20, but has since plummeted by 60%, according to a report from a data analytics company.

Chitika tracked Google+ traffic before and after the social networking service opened its gates to all users.

“The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google+ traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state,” Chitika says of its findings, as illustrated in the chart below.

Google+ hit 25 million unique visitors in its first month of operation, comScore found, making it one of the fastest growing social networks of all time. Google+ has since released a slew of updates and new features, and opened its doors to the public. It has even had public figures broadcast to fans via Google Hangouts.

But is Google+ a hit or miss? It’s hard to say. In mid July, Google CEO Larry Page revealed the Facebook-challenger had 10 million users who share 1 billion items each day. We haven’t heard from the company on how Google+ has grown in users, shares or traffic since. The most recent unofficial count pegged the number of Google+ users at 43 million.

Meanwhile, Chitika’s findings — likely a representation of traffic patterns and not a wholly accurate reflection — seem to suggest Google+ may not be convincing new users (or even Google executives) to stick around.

Mashable has reached out to Google for comment.

More About: Google, traffic

Despite the challenges social media presents for human resources professionals, it plays a growing role in talent recruitment. The big question, though, is where to find talent.

While employers continue to use professional networking site LinkedIn for recruiting, especially when hand-picking for executive positions, they prefer interacting with students and graduates via Facebook rather than LinkedIn, according to a study by online recruiting research lab Potentialpark.

For the study, Potentialpark surveyed more than 30,000 students and graduates worldwide and analyzed the online career presence of more than 500 companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Since the data has not yet been published online, Mashable spoke with Potentialpark about its findings.

Within the European survey respondents, 48% said they prefer to connect with recruiters via LinkedIn, while only 25% said they prefer connecting via Facebook. When asked to explain their reservations about Facebook, the majority of respondents said Facebook is “not the right place” to interact with employers or that they are “uncomfortable sharing private information.”

These findings aren’t shocking, as privacy seems to be a common theme when it comes to employment and Facebook. But these reservations aren’t keeping employers from getting active on Facebook. Potentialpark found that more than one-third of the top 100 employers in Europe have a Facebook Page for recruitment purposes, many of them with more than 1,000 fans.

So, why are employers so interested in connecting with recruits on the world’s largest social network if candidates seem creeped out by Facebooking with recruiters?

Potentialpark interviewed HR professionals about their motivation to be active on Facebook and found that they had multiple reasons for involvement. Here’s an overview of reasons why recruiters cited a preference for Facebook when dealing with young talent:

1. It’s more engaging. With Facebook, employers can follow a “let them come to us” strategy by setting up a business page for recruitment and career purposes. Recruiters noted that the interesting content on pages leads to comments, discussions and more personal interactions. With LinkedIn, the communication is very much one-way in the recruiting world, as employers proactively search for candidates and message them.
2. Facebook is where the action is. Recruiters perceive that few students and recent graduates actively update their LinkedIn profiles, whereas they are quite active on Facebook. Therefore, it just makes sense to connect with them where they already hang out online.
3. It’s free. Employers like that Facebook enables them to upload advanced recruitment content, such as testimonials, videos, pictures or a job search — and it’s all free of charge. This broad range of tools enables a company to showcase itself as an attractive employer.
4. It’s a bigger network. Facebook offers a larger audience, with more than 800 million active users worldwide, compared with LinkedIn’s user base of around 120 million members.
5. It’s more open. Facebook is free for all members and requires no premium accounts to use certain features. As a result, it’s a more open network than LinkedIn.
6. The Like button. When it comes to career website integration, Facebook takes the cake — Facebook feeds and the Like button are easier to integrate.
7. It’s better for branding. Recruiters report they tend toward LinkedIn and other business networks for networking, screening and recruiting. However, when it comes to employer branding activities and talent communication — especially with students, graduates and early career professionals — many prefer Facebook.

Having an active presence on Facebook is certainly a great start for employers looking to attract and communicate with young talent.

Do you think Facebook trumps LinkedIn when it comes to interacting with employers? Tell us in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Social Media Specialist at The Madison Square Garden Company in New York
Senior Vice President – Digital at Edelman PR in Los Angeles
Senior Social Media Manager at DocuSign in San Francisco

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

More About: Facebook, features, job search series, linkedin, mashable, Recruiting

The whirring hard drives that once occupied entire university labs held but a fraction of the data we carry in our pockets every day — and that’s only 50 years of progress.

Today, as we move further into the cloud, and witness the latest and greatest pocket media devices, we thought it fitting to take a look back at how far we’ve come on our quest to store as much information in as little space as possible.

Infographic research and design by Mike Vasilev.

More About: Gadgets, infographics, Mashable Infographics, Tech

The Dalai Lama has officially joined Google+ — and he’s already planning a Hangout with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The Hangout, announced Friday on the Dalai Lama’s Google+ profile, will take place Oct. 8 at 10:30 a.m. South African time (GMT+2.00). That’s 4:30 a.m. ET in the U.S. The live video conversation will be part of the Inaugural Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture in Cape Town, South Africa. The event coincides with the archbishop’s 80th birthday on Oct. 7. A link to the Hangout will be available approximately 20 to 30 minutes before it starts.

The Dalai Lama had originally planned on visiting South Africa in person this weekend, but visa woes prevented the holy leader from entering the country. However, that didn’t stop the Dalai Lama from posting a video (below) on Google+, wishing the archbishop — an activist who first rose to prominence opposing apartheid in the 1980s — a happy birthday.

This was all done on the same day the Dalai Lama joined Google+. Another post on the social network welcomes the Dalai Lama’s potential Google+ followers with a mission statement of sorts: “He frequently states that his life is guided by three major commitments: the promotion of basic human values or secular ethics in the interest of human happiness, the fostering of inter-religious harmony and the welfare of the Tibetan people, focusing on the survival of their identity, culture and religion.”

While the Dalai Lama may be new to Google+, this isn’t his first social media presence. He also has a Twitter account with more than 2.5 million followers, along with a Facebook page with more than 2 million fans.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jan Michael Ihl

More About: Dalai Lama, desmond tutu, Google, Social Media, social networking

They sing complaints about their city-state, here is one excerpt:

Stray cats get into noisy affairs

At night my neighbor makes weird animal sounds

People put on fake accents to sound posh

And queue up 3 hours for donuts

Will I ever live till eighty five to collect my CPF?

It sounds like a terrible place:

Old National Library was replaced by an ugly tunnel

Singaporean men can’t take independent women

People blow their nose into the swimming pool

And fall asleep on my shoulder in the train

Full lyrics and explanation are here.  Yet it is now legally banned for foreigners to sing the complaints.  Here is a video of the Choir, definitely recommended, best video I’ve seen this year and do watch it through to the end.

For the pointer I thank Chug Roberts.

Nuance has acquired Seattle-based startup Swype for something more than $100 million, says a source with knowledge of the deal.

I’m a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. Swype first launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008. It’s software for mobile devices, and helps people input text at far faster speeds than through normal methods. It will soon be on over a hundred million devices.

Nuance already has T9, a predictive text application first developed in the 90s, and T9 competes directly with Swype. Oddly enough, the cofounder of Swype, Cliff Kushler, also founded T9. Check out this CNN article earlier this year on Kushler.

I have no idea how this acquisition affects the existing Nuance T9 product. I assume we’ll hear more about that in the future from Nuance.

Sidenote – Swype didn’t win the launch competition at the TechCrunch event. They came in second to Yammer. I wrote an article last year on why the best company doesn’t always win, even when the judges jump out of their chairs to try it out. From that article:

And like UJAM, Swype stole everyone’s hearts. People wanted to try Swype themselves, and you can see all the judges getting up from their seats after the demo to try it themselves. People were jumping up and down in the audience. Etc. Watch it all here.

Swype also had amazing founders, and since TechCrunch50 has gone on to do amazing things. Their software is now being built into tens of millions of mobile handsets a year, and they collect a fee for every install.

But at the time they just weren’t far enough along to win the show. Their first big licensing deals were ahead of them, and the judges felt more comfortable with Yammer as the winner. And like UJAM, a lot of audience members were really angry that Swype didn’t win it all.

Congratulations to the founders and executives (Mike McSherry, Cliff Kushler, Aaron Sheedy, Loreen Milbrath and Mark Illing), employees and investors (the company has raised just $14 million). I loved this application from the first time I saw it. Hopefully this acquisition will let the team continue to create even better technology to help us with those damned tiny keyboards. If this was a company that I met today for the first time, I’d invest aggressively in it (yes, I know, hindsight, etc. But you know what I mean).

I know that this comic might not be consistent with various views, but please take it as it is intended—as a lighthearted tribute to a great man.

In Memoriam

[Print out the high-rez version from here etc.] [Buy the print here etc.]

I remember the first time I saw the TV Ad.

It changed my life.

It was the first commercial I’d ever seen in my life, that actually spoke to me, my true self, and not just to whatever short-term, trivial needs I had going on that day (i.e. like pretty much every single other commercial out there).

It was then I knew that I wasn’t just one of the crazy ones, but that it was also IMPERATIVE to actually be one of the crazy ones. That my life and soul demanded it.

It’s not what Steve Jobs created in his his brief but incandescent life- the computers, iPods, iPhones etc etc- that isn’t the big story.

And what we created with his products, that isn’t the big story, either.

The big story is what Steve helped us believe about ourselves. By putting his balls on the line, again and again, he made it easier for us to do the same.

And so we did.

Thank you, Steve. You will be missed. Of course you frickin’ will…

[UPDATE: Anita has already downloaded it, printed it out, put it up and posted the photo on the gallery website. Feel free to do the same. Very cool. Thanks, Anita!]

For many, the name Steve Jobs is synonymous with inspiration.

Throughout the years, he’s not only changed our lives with innovative products, but also with memorable words.

Among the ways people are commemorating Jobs’ passing is posting their favorite Jobs-isms. We took to Tumblr to track down what Jobs quotes have resonated most with the tech world. Check out the gallery below to be inspired.

Do you have a favorite Jobs quote? Share it in the comments below.





Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by livinglauren.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by heiids.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by mondobarbie.




Quote from 2008 interview with Fortune. Posted by snapshotdiaries.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by littleredheadgirl.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by marleytothe.




Quote from 2003 New York Times article about the iPod. Posted by idiazsosa.




Origin of Jobs quote is uncertain. Writer and critic Phil Patton has said Jobs told him this when they met in 1981. Posted by nickslog.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by blogsforjobs.




Jobs quote from 1993 Wall Street Journal interview. Posted by missambear.




Jobs quote from 1989 interview with Inc. magazine. Posted by mrborisduck.




Quote from 2008 60 Minutes interview. Posted by planetickets.




Quote from 1998 BusinessWeek interview. Posted by b-duarte.




Jobs quote from 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institute. Posted by theaccidentalexecutive.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by soupsoup.

More Coverage of Steve Jobs’s Death

NEWS:
Steve Jobs Has Died
Steve Jobs: 1955 – 2011
Steve Jobs Authorized Biography Release Date Bumped Up
Newspapers React to the Death of Steve Jobs [PICS]
Steve Jobs’s Other Amazing Companies: NeXT and Pixar
GALLERIES:

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011: The Web Remembers
15 Inspirational Steve Jobs Quotes
Mourners Create Impromptu Memorials for Steve Jobs at Apple Stores [PICS]
In Memoriam: Letters to Steve Jobs
VIDEOS:

Steve Jobs Remembered: 10 of His Most Magical Moments [VIDEO]
Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech [VIDEO]
Steve Wozniak on Steve Jobs [VIDEOS]
CONDOLENCES :

Apple’s Board of Directors on Steve Jobs
Apple Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
Jobs Family Statement: “Steve Died Peacefully”
Mark Zuckerberg Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
Google Founders: Steve Jobs Was an Inspiration
Disney CEO: “Jobs Was Such an Original”
Bill Gates: “I Will Miss Steve Immensely”
President Obama on Steve Jobs: “The World Has Lost a Visionary”
Google’s Homepage Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
OTHER:

RIP Steve Jobs: Share Your Condolences [OPEN THREAD]
Memories Of Steve Jobs: Interviews & Inspiration
Steve Jobs: Goodbye to an Icon

More About: apple, inspiration, quotes, steve jobs
For more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

We do this all the time.  We pluck words out of their natural habitat and toss them into an adjective zoo…

…then make them dance and wear silly hats for spectators.

One of the most important rules in software is to eat your own dog food. The concept is simple: If you have confidence in your product, you use it.

Perhaps somebody should tell that to Google’s senior management, because the people in it are not eating their own dog food when it comes to Google+.

During the madness that was the launch of the iPhone 4S, we stumbled across an interesting post by Michael DeGusta. DeGusta decided to analyze how often Google’s senior management uses Google+. He counted how many times the company’s senior management, SVPs and board members have publicly posted on Google+.

The results aren’t pretty. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have posted publicly on Google+ 22 times. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t even have a Google+ account, nothing short of an embarrassment when company bonuses are tied to social media success.

SEE ALSO: Google+: The Complete Guide

The rest of Google’s senior management isn’t any better. Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora has never posted on Google+ and Chief Legal Officer David C. Drummond doesn’t even have an account. CFO Patrick Pichette, to his credit, has posted several times publicly.

When you get to Google’s six SVPs, the story doesn’t change much. SVP of Video Salar Kamangar and SVP of Search Alan Eustace have never publicly posted. SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki has publicly posted once and SVP of Mobile Andy Rubin has posted eight times (neither have posted since August). The only two people on Google’s management team I’d consider “active” are SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai (58 posts) and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra (150+ posts).

Here’s another shocker: Not one of Google’s six independent board members have ever posted publicly on Google+.

Leading By Example

Let’s start out with addressing a few caveats. First, these senior Googlers could be posting a ton privately and we simply don’t know it. But it’s more likely that their lack of public engagement is indicative of their lack of engagement overall. This is especially true of Google’s management, which has an incentive to promote Google+ publicly.

You could also argue that the SVP of search or ads shouldn’t be expected to be heavily engaged on Google+, but given the fact that Google intends to integrate Google+ into everything it does, I don’t buy that argument either. When Google+ first launched, Gundotra told me personally that Google+ is an extension of Google itself, thus why the company chose the name.

It doesn’t matter how you slice it: If Google’s management truly believed in Google+ as the future of the company, they would be more engaged. Not being connected to a product that has such a direct correlation to the company’s future is dangerous. This is about leading by example. Why should Google employees be excited about Google+ if their managers aren’t excited?

The same rule applies to Google+’s million of users. The social network has more than 43 million users now and is being heavily promoted by Google. But if its creators aren’t interested enough in staying active, what’s to say its users won’t get bored just as fast?

Google’s management is a busy group, but having only three members of its management team post more than 10 times sends a terrible message. It makes people question the commitment Google has to social.

Our message to Google’s management is simple: Eat your own dog food.


Google+ Logo


This is the Google+ logo.

Google+ Icons


The Google+ icons. Starting top left and circling to the right: Circles, Hangouts, Home, Sparks, Profile, Photos.

New Google+ Navigation Bar


All Google sites will sport the new Google+ navigation bar. It includes notifications, profile information and content sharing options.

Google+ Stream


This is the Google+ Stream, where users share content and see what their friends are sharing. It is similar to the Facebook News Feed.

Google+ Circles


Google+ Circles is Google's version of the Facebook friend list or the Twitter List. Users can select multiple friends and drag-and-drop them into groups. This makes it easier to send stuff to friends, family or the entire world.

Google+ Circles Editor


This is the Google+ Circles editor in action. Google has created unique animations for adding and removing friends through HTML5.

Google+ Sparks


Google+ Sparks is Google's content recommendation and discovery engine. Users can search different topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos. Users can then share that content with their friends.

Google+ Hangouts


Google+ has a unique video chat feature called Hangouts, which lets you chat with up to 10 people at the ame time.

Google+ Photos


Google+ allows you to upload and share photos with your friends. It includes photo tagging and a simple browser-based image editor.

Google+ Profile


Google+ Profiles are like most profile pages -- it includes basic information about the user like interests, occupation and profile photos.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr, jremsikjr

More About: eric schmidt, features, Google, larry page, Opinion, Sergey Brin

Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker is appearing in our newsfeeds with increasing frequency these days.

First, there was the Forbes cover. Then there were the Facebook ads asking users to “Like” Sean Parker on Facebook, which Gawker discovered was part of an effort to build up buzz for an upcoming blog. On Monday, we learned Rhapsody had signed an agreement to acquire Napster, the music-sharing site he helped start (though there is some dispute about his exact role, and whether he was a co-founder of the business along with creator Shawn Fanning) at age 19.

Parker sent his first tweet Monday afternoon, apparently apologizing to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for joining a rival service. It reads: “Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)” Scooter Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager.

As The Next Web points out, Parker has been planning his Twitter debut for some time. His account already has verified status. He has amassed 3,600 followers and counting at the time of this writing.

The question is: Why now? Is he seriously invested in his forthcoming blog launch? Or is he suddenly interested in making himself better known? One possibility: It was revealed last week that Parker is working on a new live video startup called Airtime, so his social media presence may be all about promoting an eventual product launch.

In the meantime, we wonder how many followers he’ll have by the end of the day Monday. My bet: 60,000.

More About: Facebook, napster, sean parker, Twitter
For more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

A recent photograph in The New York Times — for a story about cooking with chicken skin — has spawned the latest popular parody account on Twitter: @NYTchicken a.k.a. “Sexy Chicken.”

After The Times published “Chicken’s Attraction Is Truly Skin Deep,” the somewhat provocative photo in the story immediately caught the attention of social media users. The next day, @NYTchicken popped up on the web.

Since Sept. 30, the account has attracted more than 1,600 followers with 19 humor-filled tweets. Sexy Chicken even caught the attention of KFC’s social media team, which tweeted, “@NYTChicken For goodness sake, cover yourself. I recommend something in a nice Original Recipe.” (See collection of tweets below.)

KFC jumped on the opportunity to have some fun with Sexy Chicken because the humor in the situation fit well with the company’s playful Twitter strategy. “Corresponding with the Twitter account of a famous photo of a chicken fits nicely at the intersection of engagement and fun,” KFC spokesman Rick Maynard told Mashable.

PETA, however, didn’t find anything funny about the picture created by NYT photographer Tony Cenicola or the subsequent parody. PETA tweeted, “@NYTChicken If pic was decapitated & amputated puppy corpse who’d laugh? If ur veg pls choose less offensive pic nxt time.”

Q&A With Sexy Chicken

With all this attention thrust on such a young Twitter account, we couldn’t help but wonder what was on Sexy Chicken’s mind. Luckily, we got a hold of @NYTchicken for a pluckin’ awesome Q&A.

Mashable: How did you get approached to pose for the NYT article? And did you feel comfortable on set?
“I’m a professional, so of course I’m comfortable on set. However, since I am kosher, one rule I have is that I won’t pose with pigs.”
Sexy Chicken: “I’m represented by the d’management group in Milan. The New York Times contacted d’management looking for ‘a busty chicken model with excellent skin.’ I’m a professional, so of course I’m comfortable on set. However, since I am kosher, one rule I have is that I won’t pose with pigs.”

Mashable: How are you dealing with your sudden rise to fame?

Sexy Chicken: “It’s been amazing! I’m thrilled with the response. I feel a little like Scarlett Johansson.”

Mashable: What do you hope to accomplish with your new Twitter account?

Sexy Chicken: “I’m hoping it leads to more modeling gigs. It’s hard out there for a chick.”

Mashable: I see that you’re following only two people, @Pete_Wells and @ErnieAnastos. Why them?

Sexy Chicken: “I have to thank Pete for giving me such an opportunity to model for the Times. He’s a God in the poultry world. Ernie Anastos is my biggest fan.”

SEE ALSO: Top Fictional Accounts | Top Fake Celebs | Top Social Media & Tech Spoofs

Mashable: What’s your reaction to @PETA’s latest tweet and link?

Sexy Chicken: “Oh, please. Puppies don’t do anything for me anyway. I’m only attracted to animals on two legs, like roosters and George Clooney.”

Mashable: How’s your relationship with @kfc_colonel after its Original Recipe tweet to you?

Sexy Chicken: “Do I look like a Perdue chicken? I’m free-range and organic, baby. I wouldn’t be caught dead (so to speak) in a KFC bucket.”

Mashable: Boxers or briefs?

Sexy Chicken: “Commando.”

View “@NYTchicken, Twitter’s Sexy Chicken” on Storify

More About: parody, Social Media, the new york times, Twitter

A sample Circulars ad for Macy’s.

Google is testing a new kind of ad unit called “Circulars,” designed to mimic the full-page inserts traditionally found in newspapers.

These large-format ads act like destination sites, where users can explore specials being promoted at nearby retail locations. The ad format is scheduled to be unveiled formally at an Advertising Week event in Manhattan later this week, a Google spokesperson tells Mashable.

The ads, which will be personalized based on a number of factors including location and query, will pop up when viewers click on search or display ads. The ad format is compatible with desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Nick Fox, VP of product management at Google, said Circulars were designed in response to retailers’ requests for advertising that would drive online visitors into offline stores.

“[Retailers are] trying to understand what the answer is in the digital age to the offline print circular,” Fox said. “They’re trying to understand how to get their online visitors into their stores. And this is our answer to that.”

More About: Advertising, Google, google circulars

Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: “People Talking About.”

That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of “Likes,” will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy.

People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn’t sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

The other metrics, which are designed for administrators of brand and media Pages, include “Likes,” “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” While “Likes” is self-explanatory, Friends of Fans is the actual number of friends your fans have, and weekly total reach is designed to be an accurate assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, how many news organizations (within Facebook) have referenced it and how much viral distribution elements of your Page has gotten.

David Baser, product manager for Pages Insights, says that despite a raft of new activities that Facebook will be introducing soon under the Facebook Gestures banner, those four metrics will remain and the “Like” will maintain its ranking as a top measurement. “Likes are an expression of identity,” Baser says. “It’s a user saying that I have a relationship with this brand.”

In addition to tracking the four metrics, Pages Insights will also offer a deeper dive into data around specific updates. Facebook will list your last 500 posts (the company began tracking them in July) and count the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and virality. The latter measures the percentage of users who commented on the post.

Sentiment, however, will not be part of the calculation. Whether a user is lauding a comment or trashing it, it will count the same.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca


Facebook Insights Main Page


Facebook's primary Insights Page will measure "Likes," Friends of Fans, Weekly Reach and "People Talking About" the Page.

Facebook Insights: Reach


Facebook will now offer a deeper dive into your Page's reach.

Facebook Insights: Post Analysis


Facebook will also offer more visibility into how your post performed, including its "virality," i.e., the percentage of people exposed to the update that commented on it, "Liked" it or had some other kind of interaction with it.

More About: Facebook, Pages Insights

When Klout announced in mid-September that Blogger and Tumblr would play a role in determining your Klout score, WordPress users immediately asked, “What about us?”

Klout responded by quietly adding WordPress.com to its scoring system, which already factors in 11 other services: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube. Unlike its integration with those services, Klout didn’t publicly reveal the WordPress.com addition, but we noticed the WordPress button on the Klout dashboard anyway.

Update: Only blogs hosted on WordPress.com were added to Klout, an Automattic rep told Mashable. Self-hosted blogs on WordPress.org aren’t included in Klout scores yet.

“People love WordPress and have put a ton of effort creating their blogs and building and influencing their audience,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. “Our goal is to measure influence everywhere it occurs. [Posterous, Quora, Yelp] and and many others are on our roadmap.”

Recently, the San Francisco-based startup also released a feature that lets users gain insights on top content influencers, as well as users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics.

“The big thing historically we have not done a good job on is helping people understand their scores,” Fernandez said. “Through the rest of the year, you will see us release a series of features that really address this.”

“I often think back to doing a Google search in 2000, the results were better than anything else out there, but they have had to constantly improve to be where they are today. That’s how I think of Klout. We are taking on a huge challenge and it’s very early in the game and we have a long journey ahead of us. The key difference is when you search Google and the result you wanted comes up third instead of first you generally don’t get personally offended. With Klout, we are putting a score next to your name and if a person feels like the data there about them isn’t correct it’s understandable that they get upset.”

BONUS: What Klout’s New Topic Pages Look Like

To populate a user’s Topic Pages (see screenshots below), Klout analyzes the user’s content created across the 12 networks it calculates.


Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard


On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page.

Social Media Topic Page


For example, here's the social media Topic Page, which displays top influencers and top +K recipients.

Journalism Topic Page


Here's the journalism Topic page.

Top +K Recipients


You can click on "Top +K Recipients" to get a closer look at which users are snagging the most +Ks.

Best Content Stream


The "Best Content" tab will show you popular content from the past 90 days.

More About: blogging, klout, News, Social Media, social networking, WordPress

“Facebook does not track users across the web,” – A Facebook spokesperson on September 25, 2011

and

“Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people.” – Facebook employee on September 25, 2011

v.

“A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain.” – Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011

Whoops

See: HowTo: Setup secure and private Facebook browsing

There are some people who think Facebook has become too complicated. There are other people who agree with those people.

Mashable Comics are illustrated every week by Kiersten Essenpreis, a New York-based artist who draws and blogs at YouFail.com.

More Mashable Comics:


1. The Earliest Social Network Ever Discovered




2. First-Generation GPS




3. There's a Badge for That




4. It Was All Just a Huge Misunderstanding




5. Stand-Up Web Developers




6. HOW TO: Survive Those Awkward Online Moments




7. Obi-Wan Kenobi: Mobile Sales Rep




8. The 19th Annual Internet Meme Convention




9. Online Predators




10. HOW TO: Parent a Digital Native




More About: comics, Facebook, humor, mashable comics

Google, Apple and Facebook are the tech trifecta, so we found facts that could help you land a job at one of these companies. No doubt, there will be stiff competition: Nearly one in four young professionals wants to work at Google, for instance, but there’s more room in the Googleplex for software developers. Facebook gets 250,000 applications a year and sifts through them to find the cream of the crop, preferring those who build things, whether they’re apps or organizations. And Apple wants, well, Apple fanboys to help create the next generation of gadgetry, but you ought to have a reference from an existing Appler.

The tech field is booming, and the industry needs bright young talent to keep innovating. Some facts:

An IT manager can make more than $110,000 a year
Android app developers are especially coveted
Data mining and statistical analysis are ideal collegiate specializations

So, if you’re like most other young professionals and are looking to nab a job at any of those three companies, take a gander at the infographic below. There are tips on how to optimize your resume, how to land an interview and how to impress the HR team. If you’ve landed a job at any of these companies, feel free to offer tips and insights in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Marketing Manager: New Product Development at The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Virginia
Lead Developer – Director of Technology at Attention in New York
Product Manager – Local Business Products at Yelp, Inc in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of MastersDegree.net

More About: apple, Facebook, Google, infographic, job search series, Tech
For more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

There are a lot of different kinds of people in this world. I’ve found that I get along best with the ones that are brutally honest.

Earlier this evening I interviewed Vinod Khosla at the jam-packed Startup Weekend Seattle event. We had a long talk – nearly an hour in total, which is a lot longer than most interviews I do and allowed us to take a deep dive on a number of issues important to Vinod. There’s good coverage of the event at Xconomy, GeekWire (again) and AndrewDumont.me.

What strikes me most about the man aren’t his views on technology or venture capital, but his communication style.

During the pre-interview prep I carefully brought up an issue that I’ve heard from a number of people – that Vinod is somewhat “difficult.” “I hear he can be a massive pain in the ass,” someone told me last week while asking if he’d be a good potential investor for their startup.

So I asked Vinod about it, and carefully watched his reaction. I did not want to ask him this on stage if it was going to make everything go sideways. He chuckled, said this was a fine topic to discuss on stage, and asked me if I’d read the quote on the Khosla Ventures site about brutal honesty. I hadn’t, but here’s what it says: “We prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness.”

He told me stories, and then repeated them on stage, about a variety of entrepreneurs he’s been “brutally honest” with. A startup that still had $50 million in the bank when he realized with certainty that they’d fail and suggested they shut down and liquidate. Two years later, he says, they had $3 million left in the bank and sold for $2 million. Yes, I double checked those numbers with him – the company sold for less than the cash they had in the bank (there are a variety of reasons why this can make sense for the sellers).

He talked about passing on investing in Joe Krause’ Jot because it wasn’t, in his opinion, a big enough idea. And he talked about how he gives his brutal, unvarnished opinion to entrepreneurs who seek his attention and money.

VC’s give lots of reasons for turning down a startup, he told me. Things like “it’s too early,” or “it’s too late,” or “I couldn’t get my partners comfortable with it.” Those are the easy ways out, he says. He prefers to give the exact reason. The one he seems to give most often is that the idea simply isn’t big enough to matter.

It’s tough to hear those kinds of things as an entrepreneur, and it’s no wonder some of them pass along their opinion that he’s a “pain in the ass.”

In my world I’ve had to learn about brutal honesty in a couple of different ways. The first is when you first hear a startup pitch and you know it’s not going to make it. I’ve tried the brutal honesty approach in the past, and some percentage of those entrepreneurs become enemies, sometimes lifelong enemies. I’ve tried a softer, more polite approach. In those cases the entrepreneur remains eagerly on the hook. If you don’t respond later, though, you get the same result.

After years of tinkering I’ve found two excellent ways of minimizing the damage from these people. If I’m at a tech event in public I put on my full (invisible) body armor. Smile, shake hands if I must and perform the right type of theatrical engagement. “Amazing. Love to hear more. Do you have a card? I’ll contact you.”

That contact never comes. And for some reason far fewer people ever become upset v. the other ways of handling things.

I really don’t like doing this, but it’s the one thing that keeps me sane and allows me to continue to engage with the community. And every once in a blue moon someone does manage to sneak in past the armor and make a lasting impression on me. Still, I’d rather be more like Vinod in this way, and I’m going to experiment to see if I can make it work.

Here’s the other way brutal honesty works for me – in chasing down a story or interviewing someone. I just ran across this story on VentureBeat this evening from September 16. I believe it gives a good overview of how I conduct myself in interviews. I ask a hard question. I get “bullshit, bullshit, polite nonsense bullshit” in response. I respond that my question wasn’t answered, and ask again. and again. and again. And then, finally, for example, Kevin Rose admits he sold much of his Twitter stock over the summer. Or Matt Cohler, after three tries, simply gives me that look that suggests I stop asking him if he’d invested in Dropbox. Or Carol Bartz gets so frustrated with my attempts to penetrate through the haze of bullshit that she yells “so fuck off!”

I’m not trying to make people uncomfortable on stage. I respect (eventually) their refusal to answer and simply move on. But what drives me crazy are the people who are so politicized and media trained that they can speak for hours about everything in particular but never answer the question I’m putting to them. I appreciate their art, but I don’t respect their unwillingness to engage in the truth.

Bad news, good news, no news, it should all be spread truthfully and succinctly. There are exceptions, but they can usually be dealt with by saying “I’m not going to answer that question,” and we can move on. That’s why I enjoy interviewing certain people more than others.

Doug Leone plays it straight and fears no question. Marissa Mayer is excellent at going deep on issues she likes, and skirting those that she doesn’t. But she doesn’t engage in idle bullshit. Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Josh Felser, Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure are all straight shooters. Reid Hoffman will talk about anything at all with the innocence of a newborn (he sleeps well at night, I think). Matt Cohler, who was whelped by Hoffman in a previous life at LinkedIn, is much the same way. His trademark move, though, is to simply stare you down silently when you ask something he doesn’t like. It’s direct, communicative and it works. I often simply move on. When I talk to John Doerr, on stage or off, I get the distinct feeling that the man can create matter from the swirls of his words. I don’t know if that’s bullshit or honesty, but it keeps me interested and, I admit, willing to imagine a better world is actually possible.

Sometimes people call me a jerk for the way I interview these people. I get why they think that. But I think I do a good job of showing off the shiny parts of a person’s achievements, and letting them get their words out to the world. When I cut them off, it’s only because I expect more from them. Better. These people keep coming back for interviews year after year, so I know they’re not entirely unpleased with the experience.

Back to Vinod…All this brutal honesty seems to be working out nicely for him. Entrepreneurs come back to him time and time again as they move from one startup to the next. They often take significantly lower valuations to be part of his family. Just this week, in fact, a startup I’ve invested in took a term sheet from Vinod valuing the company at $6 million. Another very good firm was offering $10 million. I asked him why he did that. “Because a startup with Vinod is a lot better than a startup without Vinod,” he said.

Which says it all. Direct, brutal, no frills, awesome, wonderful, honesty. Versus being smile fucked by someone who’s hypocritically polite. I’ll take the honesty any day for the win.

Disclosure: Khosla Ventures is an investor in CrunchFund. I think this is kinda rad.

Facebook’s new Timeline design gives users a large “cover photo” space at the top of the page. We think this revamp is a great opportunity to get creative with your profile presentation.

We recently asked the Mashable readership to share how they’ve played with the new design. Here are 10 examples of Facebook Timeline cover photo designs we think are particularly creative, and that offer a witty take on the new layout.

SEE ALSO: How to Enable the New Facebook Timeline NOW | HOW TO: Make the Most of the New Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

Take a look through the image gallery below. Share your new Timeline designs in the comments and don’t despair if yours didn’t get chosen this time around. Our coverage of the new Facebook continues, so keep your submissions coming!


1. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn



Playful and fun, we're big fans of Ekkapong's rainy creation.


2. Andrew Grojean


This is a cunning way to keep the old Facebook design.


3. Mathew Barker


Mathew makes us smile with a big photo / little photo visual gag.


4. Rodney Hess


This concept is simple, but very effective.


5. Victor Zapanta


A profile within a profile within a profile...and so on.


6. Mohammad L. Azzam


Here's some mini-me fun from Mohammad.


7. Vinh Nguyen


Vinh offers an imaginative take on the "Timeline" with a look into the future.


8. Lawson Hembree V


Lawson sees his profile pic as a snapshot, with more images spanning out across the cover photo.


9. Maggie Lin


Maggie is mixing up her social networks with a Facebook / Google+ profile.


10. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn


The low placement of the profile pic box doesn't necessarily lend itself to a full body shot, but Ekkapong found a good way to work around that.

More About: Facebook, features, gallery, photography, trending
For more Dev & Design coverage:Follow Mashable Dev & Design on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Dev & Design channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Since its launch in the summer of 2006, Twitter has become the leader in microblogging, limiting even its most famous users to a concise 140 characters. This infographic details Twitter’s most influential content creators, staggering adoption rates, and struggle to turn a profit.

Curious about The Biebs‘ first tweet? Wondering which event caused the latest tweets-per-second record? Scroll on down for a bird’s eye view (see what we did there?) of the world’s favorite real-time information network.

Infographic design by Emily Caufield

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

More About: features, infographics, mashable, Mashable Infographics, Social Media, Social Media Infographics Series, Twitter
For more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The Amazon Kindle Fire is not the only 7-inch Android tablet making its debut this week. The Samsung Galaxy Tab family of products is adding a mid-range, compact device called the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

It’s powered by a 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU paired with Android 3.2 Honeycomb and 1 GB of RAM. It sports a 7-inch, 1024×600 pixel screen and comes with 16 GB or 32 GB of storage space and a 3-megapixel camera (plus a 2-megapixel one on the front for video chats).

On the connectivity front, it supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0 as well as 3G/HSPA, and Samsung managed to squeeze all of the above into a case that’s 9.96 mm thin and weighs 345 g.

The device’s specifications are slightly weaker than those of its closest of kin, the Galaxy Tab 7.7, which Samsung officially unveiled a month ago at the IFA trade show in Berlin.

A key piece of information about the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is, however, still missing: its price.

The device is very interesting when compared to Amazon’s Wi-Fi-enabled Kindle Fire, which lacks a camera, but costs $199. If Samsung manages to keep the price of its latest tablet within $100 of the Fire, it could be an interesting contender in the increasingly crowded 7-inch tablet space.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus will arrive in Indonesia and Austria at the end of October, followed by a gradual rollout to the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world.

More About: galaxy tab, Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, samsung, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus
For more Mobile coverage:Follow Mashable Mobile on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Mobile channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Now you can complement your collection of Angry Birds games, cases, cookbooks, plush toys and baby clothes with these speaker docks, decked out as your favorite feathered friends — and particularly compatible with iPods, iPhones and iPads.

The Red Bird speaker lets you connect any audio device with an auxiliary cable while propping up that device in its own stand that looks like it’s already taken a couple of direct hits from those avian aggressors.

The helmeted pig can charge up an iPod or iPhone with its protective headgear while playing back its audio with two stereo speakers and a subwoofer, while our favorite Angry Birds character, the powerful and explosive Black Bird, charges up an iPad and plays audio in a similar fashion.

Can’t wait, Angry Birds addicts? All three are set to smash into Apple Stores and gear4.com later this fall.

Get pricing details and a close-up look at the trio here:


Red Angry Bird


Red Bird speaker ($79.99) works with any device with an auxiliary audio output.

Green Helmet Pig


This loathsome pig (sound effects not included) will cost you $99.99, and is compatible with iPhone and iPod for charging and playback.

Black Angry Bird


Of course the Black Angry Bird, also $99.99, is powerful enough to charge up an iPad, and you can park your tablet in its special halfway destructed holder.

More About: angry birds, ipad, iphone, iPod Docks

Nokia is significantly cutting its workforce, by closing and downsizing some of its manufacturing facilities in Europe and the U.S.

After huge losses in the second quarter, mostly due to the collapse of Nokia’s smartphone strategy, the Finnish mobile giant will close its manufacturing facility in Cluj, Romania — which employs some 2,200 people — by the end of 2011 and focus on its factories in Asia.

The company will also close its Location and Commerce operations in Bonn, Germany, and Malvern, Penn., in the U.S. It will “review the long-term role” of its manufacturing operations in Salo, Finland, Komarom, Hungary, and Reynosa, Mexico, which will affect personnel in 2012.

The final tally is brutal: 3,500 will lose their job by the end of 2012, in addition to the 7,000 job cuts (3,000 of which are outsourced) announced in April. Additionally, Nokia will announce the possible effect of the consolidation of its L&C operations on personnel in the first quarter of 2012.

The Cluj factory was mainly used for feature phone production, so this latest wave of layoffs won’t impact Nokia’s smartphone production and its deal with Microsoft.

Nokia employed 132,427 workers worldwide at the end of 2010.

More About: Business, job cuts, layoffs, Nokia
For more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

VentureBeat leveled quite an accusation at TechCrunch this evening, claiming that they had evidence that suggested TechCrunch was trading stories for ad buys. The evidence? An email sent by a startup CEO to VentureBeat that was meant for TechCrunch.

“AOL-owned tech blog TechCrunch is often accused of trading favors for exclusives,” says VentureBeat, adding “Now we have proof.”

Err, ok.

The company supposedly offering the payment apparently has an advisor that’s married to a VentureBeat reporter, which may explain how the mixup happened (or not, it’s a very confusing post). But the gist of the accusation is that the company spoke to a TechCrunch salesperson about an ad, and then emailed the TechCrunch editorial team with an expectation of a post. There’s now an update to the post with the company CEO trying to explain that the email was taken out of context and was really meant for VentureBeat anyway. In short, it’s a mess.

Despite the extremely hazy background facts, the accusations are clear. TechCrunch posts stories in exchange for advertising.

That’s absurd.

In a comment to the post I pointed out that if that email had been received by the TechCrunch team someone would almost certainly have posted it immediately and mocked it. Here’s a post I wrote last year when an ad agency threatened to pull business based on a post I wrote about American Express.

Here’s another interesting factoid. Valleywag tried for years (and years) to nail TechCrunch on some sort of ethics charge. They never succeeded because that stuff never happens at TechCrunch. The original post is gone but I quoted it here:

Arrington, for a reason no one has ever pinpointed, attracts haters at a level far beyond what you’d expect for what is basically an online trade magazine. I learned this firsthand when I wrote for gossip site Valleywag from 2006 to 2008. Despite Valleywag’s cruel, personal posts, we received almost no hate mail and were never accosted in public. Instead, we got mail, phone calls and in-person pleas from people who begged us to take down Mike Arrington. The most common accusation was that TechCrunch sold endorsements of startups, either in exchange for advertising buys on the site, or for outright cash payments.

This is important: None of these claims ever checked out. Sources would claim to know someone who knew something, but these mystery witnesses never showed up to tell their stories to a reporter. Arrington’s success, both as a blog-era publisher/writer and a startup businessman, inflames less successful entrepreneurs and journalists with off-the-scale envy. How does he do that?

In the one case where a TechCrunch writer had acted inappropriately by requesting compensation for a blog post he was terminated immediately and everything he’d ever written was deleted from the site. And I broke the news about that, we did not wait in the hope that it would never get out.

TechCrunch has been controversial because it has never played by the rules (see my post here about how I ran the joint). But they’ve never (NEVER) done the kind of shady shit that VentureBeat is accusing them of today, despite a ridiculous effort by competitors to show otherwise. Like I said in that post, “One thing I knew for sure was that I’d never trick readers, or lie to them, or otherwise be shady. It’s not me. And even if it was me, it’s too easy to get caught.” It’s just not the TechCrunch way, and if it was, they’d have been nailed for it by now.

If VentureBeat wants to fight it out with TechCrunch, I’ll be glad to watch. But they need to put on their big boy pants, or bow out gracefully with an apology.

Look for that apology shortly.

Update: The original title, “How TechCrunch’s back-room deals destroy its credibility” has now been considerably softened to “Start-up’s gaffe raises questions about blogs in Silicon Valley.”

Update 2: A representative from the company in question left this comment on the VentureBeat post: “Hi my name is Bill Briggs. I am part of the founding team of Own Point of Sale, board member, and VP of Business Development. I wanted to state that this article was taken very far out of context. A simple conversation was cut, pasted and filled to make it look like a direct blow to TechCrunch. This is not the case we like Tech Crunch very much. I spoke with the editor, Mike, and explained to him that he is pulling us into a battle which we want to no part in. This is directly hurting our reputation, especially with those we like (TechCrunch). I asked them to please take it down. He refused saying, “we don’t have to,” which might be and probably is true. However, know this, Venture Beat has falsely composed an article about our company and it is not true. The very fact that they chose not to take this down shows the caliber of this organization.”

Update 3: Apology issued:

Update 4: Here’s a copy of the original post.

If you didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcements last week — and of course the vast majority of Facebook users did not — you may be in for a surprise. Aside from the dramatically redesigned Facebook Timeline profile pages, which roll out in the coming weeks (and which I’ve grown to love), Facebook’s new system to auto-share what you do around the web may catch many Facebook addicts off guard.

In fact, even those people who know exactly how this new feature works may need to be on guard against sharing some seriously embarrassing updates.

For those not in the loop: Facebook is making sharing even easier by automatically sharing what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps. Instead of having to “Like” something to share it, you’ll just need to click “Add to Timeline” on any website or app, and that app will have permission to share your activity with your Facebook friends.

What activity, you ask? It could be the news articles you read online, the videos you watch, the photos you view, the music you listen to, or any other action within the site or app. Facebook calls this auto-sharing “Gestures.”

Can you see the possible issue here?

I’m pretty familiar with this auto-sharing function since it’s been a feature of The Huffington Post for a good while now. The way it works there: Once you join the site, every article you read is shared with your friends via an activity feed (unless you switch that feature off).

So right now I can see that someone I know professionally read “Scarlett Johansson Nude Photos” and a male colleague, who will remain anonymous, recently read the following:

1. “Conan O’Brien Stares At Nicole Scherzinger’s Cleavage”

2. “Heather Morris On Breast Implants”

3. “Perrey Reeves Shows Off Bikini Body (PHOTO)”

Now Facebook is bringing this functionality to every application out there.

I’m not saying this is a bad idea as such, but people need to be aware of what they’re signing up for when they add apps to the Timeline. Even my tech-savvy friends seem to set up these auto-share apps, completely forget about them, and return to doing things they wouldn’t necessarily want to share with all their friends.

Heck, I even find myself doing it.

Just a few days ago I added the Washington Post Social Reader app to my profile — this is one of many new news apps that auto-shares what you’re reading with your friends. Later, I returned to the app, forgot about that feature, read a ton of articles and realized they were all on my Facebook Timeline.

Now I didn’t read anything particularly saucy like my HuffPo friends did, but even that slight lapse was enough for me to uninstall the app completely.

So what can you do to avoid a Facebook privacy faux pas? Be aware that whenever you click a “Add to Timeline” button on a website or app from now on, you’re giving that app permission to post your activity to Facebook.

Most of the time you might be fine with this — like sharing the music you listen to on Spotify with friends (unless you like Rebecca Black) — but other times it might be worth disabling this function after you approve the app.

SEE ALSO: The New Facebook: How to Take Control of Your Privacy

Also note that when you add an app to your Timeline, you get the option to share your activity with “Public,” “Friends” or “Custom.” By clicking “Custom,” you get the option to hide your activity from everyone but yourself — see the steps below for more information on controlling your privacy with the new sharing features:


Adding an App to Your Facebook Timeline


Whenever an app wants to add updates to your Facebook Timeline, this box will appear.

Controlling Who Sees Your Activity


Clicking the people icon next to "This activity is visible to:" lets you control who will see your activity from the app. You can share your activity with the Public, Friends or specific Friend Lists.

Custom Privacy Settings for Gestures


If you click "Custom", you get more privacy options, including the ability to block certain people from seeing your activity.

Only Me Privacy


If you feel uncomfortable sharing your activity from the app, you can select "Only Me". This means that your will see your activity from the app on your Timeline, but no one else will.

Should you worry about Facebook’s new Gestures functionality? No, but even the most technical among us should be aware that sharing everything is not always wise, and that selecting the right privacy settings can protect you against any mistakes.

READ THIS NEXT: Facebook Privacy: 3 Fights to Expect When You Get the New Timeline

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.


The New Facebook Profile: Timeline


Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.

1987


In 1987, my sister was born. Facebook knows these life events and includes them in your timeline.

Being Born


You can even add a picture and context to your birth, which starts the Timeline.

Timeline Interface


The Timeline is a two-column interface with top photos, status updates, friends and more.

Map


Facebook has added a feature that lets you see where you have visited. This is powered by Facebook Places.

Photos in the Timeline


Here's how photos are displayed in the Timeline.

Friends in the New Timeline


Here's what the Friends page looks like.

Changing Settings


Some of the new Timeline's customization features.

2009


More of the new Timeline

Getting Married


You can add life events, such as getting married, to your profile through the Publisher Bar. You can also announce that you broke a bone, got a new job, etc.

More About: Facebook, facebook timeline, privacy

Mozilla’s rapid release schedule for Firefox continues with the arrival of Firefox 7 for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Firefox 7 comes less than six weeks after the release of Firefox 6. Mozilla moved to a more rapid release cycle with a more streamlined, frequent and incremental upgrade cycle a la Google’s Chrome browser, after Firefox 4 launched back in March.

As a result, most of the changes have taken place under the hood. Mozilla boasts that Firefox 7 uses less memory and performs faster.

Firefox 7 also improved its support for cutting-edge web technologies, including hardware-accelerated Canvas for HTML5 animations. That means that web apps and browser-based games should get better performance.

Memory Improvements: Your Mileage May Vary

The Firefox 7 team says that the latest version of the browser uses less memory, a reduction of anywhere between 20% and 50%. In a blog post at Mozilla Hacks, Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote details the memory improvements. He says the benefits will be most noticeable for users that:

Keep Firefox open for a long time
Have many tabs open at once
Use Firefox for Windows
View pages with lots of text
Use Firefox while also using other memory-intensive programs

In our tests, using a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM running OS X Lion, we were unable to ascertain just how much better Firefox 7 used memory as compared to Firefox 6. However, we did pit it against the most stable release of Google Chrome.

I opened up the same browser pages in Firefox 7 and in Chrome. They included Mashable, Variety.com, Google+, Facebook, Mashable‘s backend website and Hulu.com. On Hulu, I played a video in high definition.

To take Flash out of the equation, I then removed the Hulu tab from both browsers. These are the results.

As you can see, the main Firefox app uses the same amount of memory in both tests. The “plugin-container” process is actually what Firefox uses to sandbox some plugins, like Flash, so that even if that process crashes, the rest of the app stays in place.

Mozilla’s tests indicate that peak memory usage for Firefox 7 is lower than its predecessors and that sustained usage is more consistent. We haven’t had enough time to test whether memory usage continues to increase the more time a tab or window is left open, but we’ll assume this is true.

For Mac users, Firefox 7 is still no match for Google Chrome, at least when it comes to memory usage. To be fair, Apple’s own browser, Safari, has memory performance issues with OS X Lion, and Firefox 7 could perform better in Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier. Firefox has historically had better Windows performance, especially when it comes to memory usage, and we expect those are the users that will really see the benefits.

Is the Rapid Update Cycle Working?

I’m conflicted about Mozilla’s rapid-release approach to Firefox. As nice as it is not to have to go months or years between major updates — especially when it comes to support for newer HTML5 and JavaScript technologies — I have to wonder if this process isn’t too rapid.

Because Firefox has historically been such a version-number driven product, users are conditioned to expect major feature improvements every time a release is introduced. On the flip-side, Google doesn’t make a big deal about the version numbers of its Chrome browser. Users just know it as Chrome.

Part of the reason that a rapid update cycle works for Google Chrome is that the updates take place completely in the background. Because of how Chrome plugins are designed, most will continue to work with new versions. Firefox has a much larger and more complex add-on environment and as a result, there will always be add-ons that are incompatible with the latest release.

While I firmly believe that the move to more rapid, consistent improvements is good for the browser ecosystem as a whole, I’m not convinced that the Firefox team has figured out the best way to alert users about updates or that that the messaging behind how these updates work is on target.

What do you think of Firefox 7? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Browsers, chrome, Firefox, firefox 7, web browsers

After yesterday’s rather slow news day and a frustrating moment involving my iPhone 4 crashing and wiping my entire address book clean, I settled in for a bit of stress-relieving fun online. Fortunately for me, my “stress relief” involves goofing off on social networks like Google+, Facebook and so on, which, according to my friends who think I work too much, ties in with what I write about all day here on The Next Web.

When peeking at my Google+ notifications last night for, cough, research, I noticed one very different and perhaps overly exciting feature that impressed me then and there: Gaming notifications. Yes, games have been on Google+ for a while, but this was my first time actually seeing them pushed at me on the platform. And unlike the typical eye roll I usually react with to the spammy game notifications I frequently receive on Facebook, my first thought was, “This is surprisingly clean.”

When it comes to gaming, Google+ just does a much better job of getting the “social” part right. The current library is small, yes, but what little there is to actually play on the budding platform still has my notifications going off with invites and so-and-so has sent you a gift updates. This leads me to believe that Google+ gamers are already engaged and actively social.

But what makes Google+ Games better than Facebook?
There are a couple of reasons why Google+ Games don’t annoy me in quite the same teeth-gritting fashion that Facebook games do. For one, game invites don’t flood my notifications with individual spam-like messages like I’d normally find on Facebook. Instead, G+ Games come packaged neatly in one brief notification blurb where all of my invites have been conveniently grouped together, keeping me from being overwhelmed by the constant sharing.

Clicking on the Google+ Games notification category brings up an entirely separate group of notifications where I can browse through my various game invites, sent gifts, etc at my leisure. In the event that I may not actually want to receive game notifications, there is also the option to completely mute them altogether, preventing them from popping up to disturb me (though I can’t see why I’d want to mute them, as G+ has already made game notifications painless enough).

Then there’s the actual gaming experience on Google+ which is marginally more enjoyable than Facebook’s gaming experience. Reason being: Google+ dedicates an entire page just to the game itself. No advertisements lingering in the sidebar and cluttering the user experience, no annoying news ticker updates distracting me from the actual game, no sponsored stories etc — just pure and clean gaming fun.

Now, here’s what Facebook games look like when you pull them up:

Ah yes! Just what I wanted to see while playing Crime City — advertisements to check out the WSJ news app, clearly well-targeted ads leading to Canon’s Facebook Page, and what’s this? A Rocky Mountain Chair Massage? Gee, Facebook. It’s like it can read my mind or something!

For comparison, here’s what Google+’s gaming experience looks like:

See the difference?

Google+ has turned social games into an entirely separate feature on the platform. Google+ Games has its own large and impressive feature section where you can browse all of available titles, spam your own personal gaming stream with shares, updates and invites, and even check out the notifications and invites from those who have shared with you as well.

My predictions for Google+ Games
Assuming Google+ sticks to the same formula (though there are bound to be a few tweaks in the future as more games are added to its current library), my prediction is that G+ Games will become infinitely more popular than Facebook games. By this, I mean that users will be more likely to spend lengthier periods of time on one specific title since they have the ability to effectively “full-screen” a game without the added distraction of advertisements and useless clutter.

With gaming having its own dedicated section, Google+ can further iterate and add more robust features to the channel without worrying about how it will affect the overall user experience on G+. If it wanted to, it could even add a “news ticker” tab of sorts to its gaming section where G+ users will be quickly be able to find out what games their friends are currently playing.

Again, because games have their own dedicated section on the platform, those who come to Google+ specifically for gaming will be able to focus on what they want to see, versus what networks like Facebook predict for them. Games and game consumers alike get the very niche attention that they deserve on Google+, and because of this, games on the platform have nowhere to go but up from here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some games to play.

What do you think? Assuming Google+ adds more games to its current library, will you be playing more on G+ or Facebook? Which platform do you prefer for your social gaming, and what games are you playing now? Weigh in below.

The Google+ team has just announced that you can now share your favorite Circles with anyone you like, publicly.

Part of the allure of Google+ Circles was that they were hidden, so it will be interesting to see what kind of traction this gets.

Obviously if you’ve created a master circle of funny people or tech bloggers, they’re perfect to share with a friend. If you’ve created a circle of ex-girlfriends, perhaps you won’t want to share that. This is very similar to Twitter’s list feature, and of course Facebook’s latest list upgrades.

Here’s the video from the Google+ team explaining the Share a Circle feature:

Owen Prater, Google Engineer explains:

From your circles page… select the circle you want, add a comment, and then share it.

When your friends receive your circle, they can then pick and choose who to add to their own circles.

Note that when you share a circle, you’re only sharing its members at that time. The circle name is always private to you, and any changes you make to your circle afterwards are private as well.

Will you be sharing Circles with your friends?

UPDATE: Google says the new feature should be available to everyone within the next few hours.

Vulcanologist is the best job title ever.

The post contains links to disturbing content so if you’re having a good day or intend to have one, close the tab and move on to something else.

Troy Davis was executed this week in Georgia under bizarre circumstances. Details are here and here. The victim’s family claim he’s the killer, Troy maintained his innocence to his last breath. Witnesses recanted testimonies, courts stalled the execution thrice and the third time it went to the Supreme Court who then issued a unanimous verdict to disallow a stay of execution. And so Troy Davis breathed his last, with no one except the courts and Officer MacPhail’s family certain of his guilt.

On Twitter we lamented the fact that a case with ambiguity was allowed to result in the death penalty. Unavoidably, conversation drifted to the death penalty itself. I haven’t had to re-examine my views on capital punishment since “Dead Man Walking”. I’m a supporter of capital punishment and the movie made me question that point of view. My conversations on Twitter also compelled me to evaluate my stand and justify it. (That said, if arguments on the internet were capable of solving a problem, mankind would’ve ended itself out of boredom by now.)

I was swayed by graphic accounts of how capital punishments are conducted, the many ways they can go wrong, the suffering of the individual and the solemn, torturous ritual involved. But the only argument against capital punishment I found compelling enough to respond to is that it’s immoral. A violation of a person’s right to live. Regarding this moral absolute I completely agree that it is fundamentally wrong to take a life – whether it is the accused or the state responsible. However, if everyone followed moral absolutes, we would have no need for laws, much less capital punishment. So allow me to respectfully disagree with the morality argument because it only applies if everyone universally adheres to it. We don’t.

The reason we don’t (and I grossly oversimplify) is that the practice of absolute morality conflicts with reality where a living being has to compete for limited resources with other living beings. Only the self-actualized or the divinely ascetic may afford to live by a stringent moral code. The rest of us are fallible, selfish and those sentiments will eventually cause conflict. Conflict may be resolved peacefully or through violence. Laws help us formulate our response to such conflicts. Society, through laws, may impose minor punitive action, incarceration for a limited period of time in the hope of redemption or incarceration for life involving crimes of severity. In the rarest of rare cases, society may choose to rescind the right to live. I agree that the last statement smacks of high-handedness. But for me, there need to be three necessary conditions where state-sanctioned execution is understandable (never justified, only understandable)

1. Where the crime is of a brutal and unremorseful nature so as to set a precedent for the accused’s actions and intent

2. There is absolutely no ambiguity that the accused was responsible for the crime

3. There is a distinct possibility that freeing or keeping the accused alive carries significant threat to the citizens of that state

Point 3 is important because it carries with it the judgment of threat perception. During my discussion I brought up the example of Maulana Masood Azhar who was freed by the Indian Govt as a result of the IC814 hijacking. He reciprocated the government’s largesse by attacking its Parliament in 2001. I contend that the threat perception of Masood Azhar was high enough to warrant immediate execution by the government. He was high-profile, a planner for terrorist groups in Kashmir and hence directly or indirectly responsible for the loss of Indian lives. I also believe his death would have prevented IC814. Perhaps it would not have prevented any other retributive action but terrorism is about sentiment, not rationality. On the contrary a state’s policy should be to minimize immediate threat to its citizens, which is as rational as one can get when dealing with cowards who are unable to muster the courage to meet an army on open ground (yes, I know they fought the Soviets in Afghanistan but they certainly don’t seem to want to do the same anymore).

It has been argued that by the same yardstick a pickpocket should also be executed for fear of an attack by his associates. Theoretically, this is possible but so is an event involving an asteroid crashing to earth on my lawn containing evidence of extra-terrestrial life. The day I have to consider a pickpocket and a terrorist as equivalent threats is the day I pick up a weapon and go foraging for food because order would have ceased to exist.

So in effect, I argue for applying context to morality. Context matters, and that context is defined by an individual’s immediate circumstance or by a collective mandate, aka the law. If my neighbor stole my newspaper I’d probably want to have chat with him about it, not kill him. If my neighbor barged into my house with a gun and threatened my family I would be forced to retaliate appropriately. Similarly, if a person steals a wallet, society will tut-tut in disapproval and send him to jail. If a person kills in cold-blood, society is compelled to act accordingly because the lives of its citizens are at stake.

I consider the execution scene of Dead Man Walking a work of genius. I doubt Tim Robbins supports the death penalty but it takes courage to leave viewers questioning the righteous anger against capital punishment that has been built up throughout the movie.

As Matthew Poncelet is strapped to the table and prepared for receiving the lethal injection, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice gradually takes over the solemn build-up. The jailors are shown starting the process to administer the lethal cocktail of drugs to Poncelet and that is when the scene cuts to the crime that got him there. A horrifying rape and double murder executed with chilling disregard for the sanctity of life and limb. As the scene shifts between the crime and its consequence the viewer is forced to tear himself away from his morals and examine the role of context.

That’s all I intend to do when it’s a person’s life at stake.

Seriously. I think that would be the number one usage.

Also, Ray made a silly tech joke here.