Author Archive

Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers

Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers

Well that didn’t take long. Halfway into their big 15 importers in 15 days campaign, Posterous has managed to make one of their competitors very angry. Twitpic is so angry, in fact, that they’re blocking the service and threatening legal action.

This morning, Posterous introduced their new “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool — a one-click way to import your photos from Twitpic over to your Posterous blog. This is the same type of importer Posterous has already made for Ning, Vox, Tumblr and a host of other services — as I said, they’re about halfway through the 15 of these tools they intend to make.

Someone Has Finally Managed To Rob Amazon. No Products Anywhere To Be Found!

Someone Has Finally Managed To Rob Amazon. No Products Anywhere To Be Found!

You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues, but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years. But that’s very much the case today as for the past couple of hours the service has been switching back and forth between being totally down and being up, but showing no products.

Obviously, Twitter is abuzz about this — though there’s no word from Amazon on Twitter yet about the downtime. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, all seem to be a go, according to their dashboard. The mobile apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices are sort of working, but it doesn’t appear you can go to actual product pages.

Foursquare Requests Now Much More Useful With “Friends In Common”

Foursquare Requests Now Much More Useful With “Friends In Common”

Big news from Foursquare today. No, not that news (just yet). And okay, not really that big. Still, very useful.

Foursquare has given its friend request emails a nice upgrade today. Previously, all you would see is a text note that someone wanted to be your friend. If you wanted to learn anything about them, you had to click-through to their profile page on foursquare.com. But starting today, Foursquare has a new notification email system that includes the user’s profile picture and more importantly, an area noting what friends you have in common.

Google Taps The Buzz Keg For More Social Search Brew

Google Taps The Buzz Keg For More Social Search Brew

Google Social Search is a good idea. You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks. But there’s one big barrier to entry. In order for your contacts to automatically share elements, they have to link up their various social profiles to their Google Profile page. A lot of people are simply not going to do that. So Google is changing things up a bit and making it easier to get at social data.

Starting today and rolling out over the cource of this week, Google will begin looking at items you share on Buzz and crawling elements from those social networks to use in Social Search as well. For example, if you link up your Twitter feed to your Buzz page, even if you haven’t linked it to your Google Profile, you’ll now start seeing results from your Twitter social graph in the results.

iPhone 4 + Verizon + January = Boom?

iPhone 4 + Verizon + January = Boom?

This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Well, maybe.

A report today in Bloomberg citing two unnamed sources claims that Verizon Wireless will be getting the iPhone in January. Yes, Verizon, iPhone, January. Naturally, all the companies involved are declining to comment on the record, but Bloomberg sounds pretty confident in the report thanks to their two sources “familiar with the plans.”

This information is close to what the Wall Street Journal was reporting back in March which stated that a CDMA (the type of network Verizon uses) iPhone would be entering production later this year to be released at some point after that. There have been many earlier reports as well. Some dating back years — and some of those may have very well been negotiating tactics by Apple to score a better deal when re-upping with AT&T.

Twitter Slashes API Rate Limits In Half Across The Board To Deal With Capacity Issues

Twitter Slashes API Rate Limits In Half Across The Board To Deal With Capacity Issues

As you may have noticed, Twitter has been having a rough month. Due in part to traffic from the World Cup, Twitter has had its worst month in terms of uptime in a year. The Fail Whale has been out in full force, and it’s partially Twitter’s own fault as they’re trying to overhaul their internal network during this time of high traffic. And today they’ve announced another move to help deal with network strain: an API rate limit cut.

And this isn’t a minor rate limit cut either. Twitter is taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175. And they’re slashing the rates in half across the board. This means that everyone from the smallest Twitter sites to those whitelisted will be affected. Even Twitter’s own mobile properties (which use the same API) are being forced to deal with this cut.

New Verizon Commercial Is Foursquare Obsessed

New Verizon Commercial Is Foursquare Obsessed

Foursquare has gotten some pretty big publicity before — like in Vegas. But a new Verizon commercial appears to be completely predicated around the service. Well, provided you know what Foursquare is.

As you can see in the 30-second spot embedded below, a girl is walking around a city on her Verizon Droid phone. She pulls it out of her pocket, starts walking, and immediately begins using the device. So what’s she using on it? About 6 seconds in, you’ll see she’s checking-in to a venue on the Android version of Foursquare. She keeps using her phone as she’s walking, but we don’t see the screen until 11 seconds later. What’s she doing then? Again, she’s checking Foursquare.

The Rebuttal: An EVO 4G Owner Walks Into An Apple Store (NSFW)

The Rebuttal: An EVO 4G Owner Walks Into An Apple Store (NSFW)

Yesterday, we posted a video showing an iPhone shopper talking to an EVO 4G salesman. That video was a little one-sided, depicting the iPhone buyer as a mindless drone who wanted the iPhone no matter what features the EVO offered. Today comes a video from the other side.

In this video, also made by tinywatchproductions using Xtranormal text-to-speed software, an owner of an EVO 4G walks into an Apple Store to try and get his phone fixed. “But this has a 4th G, the iPhone 4 is missing a ‘G’.” Just as before, the language here gets a bit NSFW.

ADVERTISEMENT

Log in