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Zune HD gets Facebook app, finally

In what can only be described as the most anticlimactic app release known to mankind, the Facebook app for Zune HD is now available. Originally promised to arrive by the end of 2009, the fabled Zune HD Facebook app has maintained a Yeti-like elusiveness.

Was it worth the wait? Not hardly. An app would need to lay laser-shooting golden eggs to be worth six months of prolonged anticipation. Fortunately, just like Microsoft's Twitter app (which actually arrived in December), the Facebook app is free to download and contains no advertising.

Like any Facebook app worth its salt, the new … Read more

Heartless Web scam leaves brides at the altar

I have to fly to the hallowed depths of Texas in a couple of days in order to be at the marriage of the noted musician and Web designing guru Parker Todd Brooks to someone far smarter.

So I have immediate knowledge of how seriously people still take these wedding things. These are the occasions where hope triumphs over experience, if only for a day.

My neural ecosystem is, therefore, filled with a searing anguish on hearing about the Boston 411 Bridal & Home Show 2010. It's not that brides will be forced to mud-wrestle each other for a … Read more

Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1174: Pregnant robot drones

In and amongst our fights over Facebook patents, TV spectrum and the reasons for the decline of music, we find time to agree on one thing. Robot drones are cool. Robot drobnes that carry little baby drones with them are even cooler.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1174

Where virtual worlds once ruled, FarmVille dominates

Almost every week for the last few years, it seems, I've gotten a press release or a pitch touting some company's great new Facebook games network or kids' virtual world.

And why not? Companies like Zynga and Playfish are making money hand over fist with their collections of massively popular social games, and 2D Flash games aimed at children like Club Penguin, Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, and others have garnered vast amounts of virtual world investment dollars in recent years.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

To find the answer, one has only to do what investigative journalists were always trained to do: follow the money. But while Facebook games like FarmVille and Who Has the Biggest Brain, and social worlds for kids or teens like Gaia Online make financial sense, they aren't all that satisfying intellectually.

After all, while Second Life had no end of technical problems and was about as inviting to mainstream audiences as obscure European philosophy, it had a complex economy, a deep social structure, sophisticated politics and always seemed, to me, at least, as the jumping off point for truly groundbreaking technology.… Read more

Obscenity-laden e-mail leads to Facebook boycott

Some e-mails are not suitable for opening in the workplace, and then there are e-mails not suitable for sending from the workplace.

This must be the difficult lesson for Steven Payne, a vice president (at last word) of Evergreen Entertainment. Payne's company operates a chain of movie theaters, including the St. Croix Falls Cinema 8, in St. Croix Falls, Wis. Recently, a patron of the movie theater wrote a letter to the company complaining about the experience she and her husband and another couple had during a showing of "Shutter Island."

Sarah Kohl-Leaf of Taylors Falls, Minn., … Read more

Facebook to developers: Get ready for Credits

Facebook's virtual currency, "Facebook Credits," is getting very close to its full launch: a post on the Facebook developer blog explains some of the full terms of the system and what developers can expect as the currency continues to roll out slowly.

"Today more than 500,000 applications exist on Facebook, and the virtual goods within those applications (particularly games) have become an increasingly valuable part of the user experience," the post explained. "By providing a single, cross-application currency, our goal is to [make] transactions simpler for users, leading to a higher conversion rate … Read more

Bug causes Facebook messages to misfire

An unknown number of Facebook users had their messages sent to the wrong people for a while on Wednesday after a computer problem, the social-networking company said Thursday.

"During our regular code push yesterday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time," a Facebook spokesperson said in an e-mail statement. "Our engineers diagnosed the problem moments after it began and worked diligently to get everything back in its rightful place. While they fixed the issue, affected users were not be able to access the site."

The … Read more

Facebook eats up patents for the 'feed'

Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology, more specifically "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved.

The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent. Twitter, as AllFacebook points out, is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology.… Read more

Social networking belongs in school

A recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 73 percent of online teens use social-networking sites. Updating their Facebook or MySpace page has become a regular activity for teens as is using these services to catch up on what their peers are doing. But, for the most part, teens are using social networking while they are away from school. Many schools actually ban access to services like Facebook and Twitter and often configure filtering programs to block students from accessing them.

While I can understand why it might not be educationally relevant for schools to … Read more

Firefox extension simplifies e-mailing on Facebook

User e-mail addresses on Facebook have come a long way. For years, Facebook converted them into a static image to keep potential spammers and data thieves at bay. As a result, it made copying them a serious pain, as you'd need to have whatever e-mail tool you were using in one window, and that user's profile in another.

Earlier this month, Facebook changed it to plain text, which lets you copy and paste the address instead.

If you're too lazy to do that, or just find yourself doing it several times a week, you could save yourself … Read more