At least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook this past week, which I guess means the feature is a bit of a success. (You’ll recall that Microsoft launched Facebook and Twitter to so much enthusiasm last week.) Mysteriously, Microsoft didn’t reveal the number of people who logged into Twitter. Is this the end of Twitter?
As of next Tuesday, November 17, you’ll be able to access Twitter and Facebook on your Xbox 360. The software update is free, like previous updates, and also includes Last.fm and Zune video compatibility. “What are you doing?” “Losing to 12-year-olds in Modern Warfare 2 over and over again! Not fun.”
Some leaked screenshots from Sony show a PS3 interface with what looks like a native Facebook client configurable. There’s also a new photo browser and the ability to change the color of your gamercard, but at those features I make a dismissive gesture. A Facebook app would be handy, though a constant stream of status updates from heavy players might be lead to mutings by less gaming-orientated friends. “Devin found a new item!”
Sid Meier—yes, the Sid Meier—just posted a note to Facebook announcing Civilization Network, which “will allow you to join together with your friends to create the world’s most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization.” It will probably be huge, yes.
Now this is the type of radio a fancy gentleman would use. It’s the latest PURE Sensia, a touchscreen European radio that supports FM, DAB (and DAB+), and Internet radio. There’s also Wi-Fi and “widgets,” I guess, for sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing, but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you’re Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn’t exactly going to fly off the shelves. What will fly off the virtual shelves, though, is an iPhone App. You see where I’m headed. Adam Penenberg, who’s a contributing writer over at Fast Company magazine (and an old professor of mine from back in my NYU days), has developed an iPhone and Facebook App called “Viral Loop” to help raise awareness of his latest book, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. Let’s take a look.
It has come to our attention that someone is making a movie about Facebook, called The Social Network. It stars Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker and Jesse Eisberg as Mark Zuckerberg. (Note: I’ve never heard of 50 percent of those people. Guess which ones!) To that end, your CrunchGear morning crew—Doug, Matt, Scott, John, and myself—has taken it upon ourselves to come up with even more movies based on popular Internet destinations and general tech-related greatness. These are a few of our ideas.
Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt. You can download it now here. The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version.
The new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal. You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.
Just like last.fm, Xbox 360 owners looking to socialize with friends on Twitter and Facebook via Xbox Live must have a Gold Membership. Just a little nugget that popped up in the price cut announcement from earlier that we thought you might want to know about.
Xbox LIVE Gold Membership will be required for Twitter and Facebook when they are available, and is required for Netflix. Games, media content and Netflix membership are sold separately; a hard drive is required for storage.
Apple has been working overtime recently to right some of the App Store wrongs, led by none other than Senior VP Phil Schiller. And having exposed some App Store approval process secrets in its letter to the FCC, everything should be all hunky dory in the App Store now, right? Wrong.
It’s hard to remember an app in recent memory that has been anticipated more than Facebook’s new 3.0 version of its iPhone app. How do I know? You should see my Facebook inbox from people who have hunted me down knowing that I have it since I reviewed it. Unfortunately, I can’t give it to anyone because it’s a version tied specifically to my iPhone (so stop emailing!). It’s been a week and a half since Facebook engineer Joe Hewittsubmitted the app to the App Store, and the wait time frustration is not only getting to the users, but to Hewitt himself, as he made clear in a blog post tonight.
Simply put, Hewitt’s post is a must-read because he makes a range of excellent points in a fairly condensed space. We’ll simply highlight some of the larger ones.
A new poll, conducted by Common Sense Media, suggests that teens are complete idiots when it comes to comporting themselves online. A whopping 13 percent of teens have posted online nude or semi-nude photos of themselves or someone they know. And then some 25 percent of teens have posted something online that they later regretted. You know, drunk photos and the like.
Sorry, but social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. (I’m 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that’s more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else.) Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old?
Nintendo pushed out firmware v1.4 last week in Japan and it looks like NA will be getting the same treatment tonight. Sometime after 5PM PT today, Nintendo will be pushing out an update for DSi owners to be able to upload pictures to their Facebook profile page via the DSi. We first learned about this feature back at E3 and I’m still pretty lukewarm about it now as I was back then. But I’m a jaded jerk so don’t listen to me. And remember, kids, this update will bork flash carts so proceed with caution.
Just got this email. It’s a bit presumptuous considering the common expectation is that you don’t author your own Wikipedia entry.
Basically Jimmy is asking me to become a fan of his Facebook page but does Jimmy really need fans? And does he have to launch such a personal appeal? He’s a heck of a guy, I’m sure, but what’s in it for me?
Last week Conan poked fun at Twitter. Now Jon Stewart is taking his turn by stating that CNN using Twitter and Facebook constantly is desperation. Is it? Maybe, but it is funny how mainstream media is finally embracing this Social Networking thing and encouraging everyone to use the services – once or twice. Read More
Here it is, folks, at long last. Its been over a month and a half since details of Facebook v1.5 for BlackBerry spilled all over the place, but it’s now available for anyone and everyone with a compatible ‘Berry.
Movie recommendations have most often been through word of mouth, but Netflix wants you to work harder to talk about the movies you watched over the weekend. The Netflix Updates application for Facebook users allows you to share your movie ratings with friends and view friend’s ratings through your news feed.
I am expecting the common reactions: “But I don’t want everyone to see my ratings!”, “I hate Facebook!”, “I hate change!” As with any Facebook application, you can control what your friends see. You can have Facebook prompt you before publishing any stories from Netflix Updates, or you can have Facebook update automatically without prompting. There is also an option to have your stories posted in one-line, short, or full. I put mine to one-line because I don’t want to contribute to the clutter already on my friend’s news feeds.
He says that computers have largely been antisocial – it was only with the advent of the computer that we’ve been playing games with ourselves. Only in the last few years have computers really started to become social. The introduction of Facebook’s new real-time has offered a big boost to becoming more social. Facebook’s new Pages allows us to follow the actions of our favorite brands and celebrities throughout the day.
Gary Vaynerchuk has begun producing content on a new public profile, and is also offering some of his thoughts. “I wanted more than 5,000 friends, that’s really what this allows me to do”.
We’re right in the middle of Lent, a time for certain followers of certain religious beliefs to give something up for the greater good. And more power to ‘em, I say. What’s interesting to us here is: would you consider giving up something like Facebook (that’s for the TechCrunch crowd) or, say, Xbox 360 or your iPhone (for the CrunchGear guys)? Several Fordham University students have indeed chosen to give up Facebook, saying that if they’re going to give something up, they should give up something they use on a daily basis.