Thursday: January 7, 2010
- You'll soon be able to tweet from your automobile thanks to the Ford Sync system.
Yet another way that technology is going to make the roads safer. As if cell phones, smart phones, app phones, GPS, XM weren't enough to distract from you from you know, actually driving.
Tuesday: May 18, 2010
- Brand new computer algorithm actually capable of detecting sarcasm.
...the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
- Microsoft to give Hotmail service a makeover at some point this summer.
...users will encounter a first screen that’s on overview of new messages, sorted into categories, with e-mails from known contacts in the top heap, updates from services like Facebook and Twitter at the bottom, and a bar up top that lets you send a status message.
Tuesday: May 11, 2010
- Have a peek at some near-final screenshots of the Windows Phone 7 interface.
I find parts of this user interface to be very depressing (granted it's not final but near-final sounds like their pretty close). The data entry screens are bland, colorless, and lifeless. Almost as if you're signing a death warrant on someone when you want to add them as a contact. Not very inviting.
- Microsoft would like you know that Natal will launch this October.
Get your imaginary baseballs and soccer balls (anything imaginary will do really) ready because Project Natal will be available for your beloved Xbox 360 this October. Microsoft hasn't nailed down an exact date that month but they think they'll have that ironed out by the time E3 rolls around.
- Rumors swirling that Apple might make their MobileMe service free for all.
This is an interesting rumor and would certainly make a lot of sense given that most, if not all, of the current functionality of MobileMe can be done elsewhere - for free. If this happened, I'd drop some of current Google services I currently use in less than a minute.
- Twitter glitch that allowed anyone to follow anybody quickly resolved. Phew.
For a brief couple of moments yesterday it was possible to have anyone follow you on the micro-blogging service. That wondrous feeling was countered by Twitter setting all accounts to zero followers - to which a collective gasp across the Interwebs could be heard miles around.
Monday: April 26, 2010
- Sony ceases production of floppy disks. In other news, Sony was still making floppy disks.
Most other floppy disk manufacturers had long since pulled out of the market, and Sony itself has already ceased sales to most of its overseas markets. With the release of the iMac in 1998, Apple was the first computer maker to take the plunge and eliminate the floppy completely.
Tuesday: April 20, 2010
- Facebook now accounts for 41% of all social media traffic according to comScore stats.
As of March 2010, Facebook traffic made up 41% of all traffic on a list of popular social destinations. MySpace was in second place, capturing around 24% of traffic. Gmail had 15%, and Twitter had 8%.
Thursday: April 15, 2010
- Entire Twitter archive to be included in Library of Congress digital assets collection.
The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.
- Choose two celebrity Twitterers and see whose fans are dumber with one handy site.
Stupid Fight can't go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that's sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation 'OMG'?