At this past week’s Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the “Holodeck,” for event-goers to experience. Basically, it’s a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny Sullivan posted a bunch of pictures of the thing earlier in the week.
Unfortunately, Google only allows it to show the area at and around the actual Google campus in Mountain View, as I’m sure it doesn’t want any legal complaint from those caught sunbathing in their backyards. Also, while it does zoom past the area where the Google Goats were kept, it unfortunately failed to catch any of them on tape. Luckily, I did that for you a few weeks ago.
Google’s Holodeck isn’t quite as cool as the Star Trek Holodeck, but give them a few years, I’m sure they’ll figure out how to do that as well.
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Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account.
The twitter from May 20:
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One thing I love about Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg - she says exactly what she thinks, and she isn’t afraid to use the power of Facebook to back up her opinions.
Now she’s taking on the Republican party, and the Republican party is fighting back.
At a Startup2Startup event last week Zuckerberg talked about her experiences at the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions last year. The relevant clip (care of Ustream) is above.
“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.” Randi also recounts a conversation on a plane where a Berkeley professor calls Zuckerberg “you’re like the most powerful person in the world.”
The Republicans aren’t amused. Matt Burns, the Director of Communications for the 2008 Republican National Convention left a long comment, calling Zuckerber “full of sh*t”:
With all due respect, Randi Zuckerberg is totally full of sh*t on this one – at least as her comments relate to the Republican National Convention.
As the Director of Communications for the convention, I can tell you we worked closely with Google/YouTube, Ustream.tv, Microsoft, and countless other companies to create a comprehensive and successful online campaign. Those efforts were recently recognized with five "Pollie Awards" from The Association of Political and Public Affairs Professionals. And we utilized Facebook – even if it wasn't up to Ms. Zuckerberg's standards – as part of our overall strategy.
Is it possible Ms. Zuckerberg sat alone in her hotel room during the Republican National Convention because she never actually contacted anyone? Or maybe she forgot about the major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast on the eve of the Republican National Convention? Or maybe she didn't really want to be around a group of conservative Americans in the first place?
According to the Wall Street Journal: "'At the Democratic convention we were like rock stars,' Zuckerberg said Thursday to a conference crowd of what could safely be called Democratic-leaning entrepreneurs and investors."
Wait. Ms. Zuckerberg bashed Republicans while speaking to an audience of her liberal friends? Shocker!
In all seriousness, can Ms. Zuckerberg tell us what the Democratic National Convention did with Facebook – aside from pet their enlarged egos and take them to glitzy parties with the Hollywood elite – that Republican National Convention planners didn't?
I guess next time we won't make the mistake of letting the business of nominating our Presidential candidate get in the way of the folks at Facebook being treated like rock stars.
Apologies to Facebook. Our bad.
Whenever Randi speaks, point a camera at her. There’s almost certainly a story in there somewhere. All I hope is that Facebook never muzzles her. As the most powerful person in the world, we need to hear more from her, not less.
I’ve emailed Burns for confirmation that he left the comment, but the language is definitely his style.
Update: Burns has responded:
YES. I left it.
I LOVE Facebook as much as the next person, but think the criticism was a bit misdirected. I can’t speak for the McCain campaign because I wasn’t working on its new media efforts, but the convention itself made unprecedented efforts to incorporate new media into our campaign. Over the course of our convention, we attracted 1.7 million unique visitors, and strategically partnered with Google/YouTube and Ustream.TV to draw an additional 7 million unique viewers to our content. And the GOP convention had more Facebook “friends” than the Democratic National Convention. We had about 10,000, while the Dem Convention had about 3,300.
When Fotonauts debuted at last year’s TechCrunch50, I called it a “gorgeous photopedia” because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed, and is still in private beta. But you can see a glimpse of what the Web-facing version will look like at Fotopedia, which just soft-launched. A message at the top of the page states: “Fotopedia, a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress read-only preview of what we are going to launch in a few days.”
One of the features of Fotonauts which has yet to be turned on is the ability to turn any photo album into a Web page, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google map information where available. Fotopedia showcases some of the same public albums you can see in the Fotonauts client, plus it adds a few twists. Each photo can be voted up or down or flagged as inappropriate. There is an Encyclopedia tab, which shows albums by topic/tag. For instance, you can see albums about Volcanos, butterflies, or Venice.
There are nearly 150,000 high-quality photos already, organized into 4,289 “articles.” Each article is a Web slide show, along with the associated Wikipedia entry and Google Map. Each photo contains a lot of metadata making it search-engine friendly. Fotopedia is supposed to be a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, an= long-lasting archive of “images for humanity.” Fotonauts founder Jean-Marie Hullot explains in a note: “Flickr and other photo sites give you exposure for only a brief window in time, and adding photos to Wikipedia proved too complicated for the average user.”
In addition to the photos, there is also an active community. You can follow other people or follow specific albums. You can also see individual profiles when you are logged in. You can also share albums as widgets. (I’ve included ones for Volcano and butterfly albums below).
Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush will begin. Users will be able to grab a vanity URL of their choice.
The Landrush rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms. But for the most part, we hear, users will be able to grab a name that they like.
Facebook has been toying with vanity URLs for some time. URLs for user profiles are currently user id numbers - such as facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899 (that’s me). In March some Facebook pages started rolling out with vanity URLs, although you must have a business relationship with Facebook (or know someone there) to get one. Facebook.com/techcrunch, for example, links to our TechCrunch page.
The reason they need them - vanity URLs have proven to be a powerful tool on MySpace, Twitter and other services. It’s not just that users like them and it makes telling people your profile name easier. People have also long used MySpace URLs as their online identity. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. Even Google is getting in on the vanity URL game. Facebook doesn’t want to give that up.
Facebook has recently polled users to see if they’d pay for a vanity URL. We have no idea if they plan on charging for the landrush at this point.
Stay tuned, and in the meantime start thinking up that perfect Facebook name. I want facebook.com/mike myself. Oh wait, I guess Facebook employees get first pick. So you’re also out of luck if you’re name is Mark.
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Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, again. Yes, they’re looking into it. Yes, this is another Twitter post. But, I come bearing gifts. Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.
“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.
Update: And after about an hour of downtime, they’re back.
Update 2: Twitter has blamed the downtime on a “fatal software error.” Despite saying it’s now fixed, the service is down again.
We’re less than a week away from the launch of the supposed next “iPhone killer,” the Palm Pre. The iPhone has miraculously survived a few of these attempts on its life before — it somehow weathered the BlackBerry Storm, and before that, the G1 was going to be the device the did it in. The G1 was compelling because it was the first phone to run Google’s Android operating system. But as a piece of hardware (made by HTC), it sucked. You know it, I know, even Google employees will admit it. And that’s why I was at first less than thrilled when I heard Google would be giving away Android phones to everyone at the Google I/O event a few days ago. But it turns out, they weren’t giving away G1s, but rather that device’s successor, which they call the “Google Ion,” though some know it better as the HTC Magic, or even as the “G2.” And it was a brilliant move by Google, because this device is leaps and bounds better than the G1.
Mostly setting aside the software itself — the Ion runs the new “Cupcake” variety of Android, aka Android 1.5 — the hardware that HTC has built this time around is much, much better. First of all, the thing just looks a lot nicer. It’s fairly sleek, almost iPhone-like, compared to the G1, which looked like a dull black plastic brick with a protruding chin at the bottom. The Ion is smaller, it’s thinner, the camera is nicer, the buttons are nicer, hell, even that stupid trackball that HTC insists on including is nicer. Most importantly though, it’s much more usable as a device. And we can thank one thing for that, as well as for much of its much improved design: The removal of the physical keyboard.
Now, before all your business and power users jump on me, let me say this: I understand how much you love your physical keyboards on your phones. I admit that most BlackBerry’s have quite nice keyboards. That said, the G1’s absolutely sucked and physical keyboards overall will become extinct over the course of the next several years. While the Ion’s vast improvement over the G1 may not solely prove that, it goes a lot way towards making the case that I’ve been making for a long time now: The physical keyboard is just a waste of valuable space.
With the G1, not only did the keyboard make the device much thicker than it needed to be otherwise, the overall implementation was poor. The device’s chin made for an uneven typing experience, and the fact that the device had to be held in horizontal mode to use the keyboard was just silly beyond belief. And it actually caused some programs to fail when you would close the keyboard with device in typing mode and move it back to vertical mode. With the on-screen keyboard built into Android 1.5, you can now type while the device is vertical. And if you want to type horizontally, you just turn your device and you can do that too. This alone makes the device much better.
The on-screen keyboard itself is better than they G1’s physical keyboard too. I find that I can type much faster with it, and not having to turn the device to the side, makes it easier to do things like type and walk. One major complaint against these virtual keyboards is that you can’t orient your hands without looking down as you’re typing, but improvements in technology such as haptic feedback will help this. Another is that the virtual keyboards often have lag between hitting a key and it showing up on screen — faster devices, like the Ion, will fix this. The physical keyboard is dead — it’s only a matter of time.
All that said, the Ion’s on-screen keyboard is not as good as the iPhone’s. The Ion’s slightly smaller screen means the buttons are slightly more crammed together, which makes mistypes more common. But other Android devices with larger screens will undoubtedly help this.
Beyond the keyboard and the overall design, the other single biggest improvement in the Ion is in battery life. The G1’s battery life was an absolute joke with applications running the background. The Ion’s battery life is quite good — we hear it’s as much as four times as powerful, though I haven’t tested that extensively — so good that I can have background applications such as IM, current weather and Twitter notifications running all day without the device dying on me. Running just two of those apps on the G1 would result in power drain in just a few hours.
But the big question everyone wants to know is: Is the Ion better than the iPhone? No, it’s not.
Even all that I said above doesn’t do justice for how much better the Ion is than that G1, but it’s simply still not on par with the iPhone. While obviously, a lot of that has to do with which software you favor, the iPhone’s OS versus Android, the iPhone hardware is still nicer as well. The screen is slightly bigger, the one-button layout (or 4 if you count the side and top buttons) is simpler, and the thing just feels more sturdy. That said, the Ion has a big advantage in its camera, which is much nicer than the current iPhone’s — but that should change with the new iPhone hardware due shortly.
But I think that it’s fine that the Ion isn’t an “iPhone killer.” First of all, the mobile space is still evolving and growing rapidly, the idea that any one phone is going to kill any other phone is kind of silly — people have different tastes/desires and the market is big enough for a huge number of these types of devices.
Second, the Ion is really a nice phone — it’s easily the second best phone I’ve used behind only the iPhone, and if you want to do something like run background applications, I’d definitely recommend it (at least until Apple gets into that game). And the Ion is a better device if you care deeply about using Gmail, Google Calendar and Gtalk, as those are all obviously Google products built right into Android.
Third, the Ion is just one more of many Android devices due shortly. Google is on record as saying there will be 18 Android phones just this year, but we hear it may even be more than that, north of 25. Google’s goal isn’t creating an “iPhone killer,” it’s creating a vibrant mobile ecosystem that it can use to get more people using Google’s services. Plenty of people use Google on the iPhone, and you can be sure that the company is quite pleased with that.
As a platform, Android needs better applications if it’s going to compete (compete, not kill) with the iPhone in the consumer space. But with so many devices coming, developers are sure to pick up their game as demand increases. A major setback in Android development since the launch of the G1 was that the G1 was a junky piece of hardware. Devices of a higher caliber, like the Ion, will help change everyone’s (both consumers’ and as a result, developers’) mind about moving to the Android platform.
See how easy that was HTC? All you had to do was kill that awful physical keyboard. Nice work.
At this past week’s 
Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush will begin. Users will be able to grab a vanity URL of their choice.
We’re less than a week away from the launch of the supposed next “iPhone killer,” the Palm Pre. The iPhone has miraculously survived a few of these attempts on its life before — it somehow weathered the BlackBerry Storm, and before that, the G1 was going to be the device the did it in. The G1 was compelling because it was the first phone to run Google’s Android operating system. But as a piece of hardware (made by HTC), it sucked. You know it, I know, even Google employees will admit it. And that’s why I was at first less than thrilled when I heard 
