Time waits for no infotainment system and GM’s OnStar seems to be well aware of that fact. Plunging headfirst into the social world, the driver assistance service is said to be planning to start conveying Facebook status updates and text messages in an upcoming update, reputedly landing later this month. Text-to-speech translation will be done on incoming notes and voice-to-text is said to be undergoing testing for outgoing updates. So you can tell your friends you’re free as a bird, born to run, rocking the highway, or whatever else, without ever having to speak to them directly or going to the effort of typing anything. The future sure is awesome. Oh, and it might not be all that expensive either, as we’re also hearing that OnStar might make some services completely free to better compete with Ford’s Sync.
We’d already heard whispers that Apple had to yank Facebook Connect integration from its new Ping music network because the connection was being denied by Facebook, and now Kara Swisher at All Things D is confirming it — and she’s saying Facebook shut down access on purpose after Apple used the find-your-friends API without permission. Juicy! Here’s the deal: Facebook’s friend-finding API is generally open access, but anyone that wants to hit it an extreme number of times has to sign a deal agreeing to protect Facebook user data and limit network impact. Given the sheer size of the iTunes customer base, it’s no surprise that Facebook wanted such a deal, but apparently negotiations broke down — possibly over what Steve Jobs referred to as “onerous terms” — and Apple decided to just go ahead and use the API anyway. (Which, truth be told, is pretty in character for Apple.) Facebook then blocked access, Apple had to scramble to clean up all the Facebook references, and here we are. Only possibly not for long: Swisher also says Apple and Facebook are still negotiating, and Facebook Connect might eventually reappear in Ping. There is no word when Ping might actually be useful or interesting, however.
Apple certainly took its sweet time releasing iTunes 10 yesterday, and we’re beginning to think it’s because the company was making a last-second change to its new Ping social-network-for-music: the removal of Facebook Connect for finding friends. Seriously — although an option to find friends via Facebook was conspicuously present during Steve’s keynote demos, it’s not there anymore. Oddly, the option was there at the very beginning — several Engadget staffers definitely saw a Facebook button when they signed up for Ping last night, and there’s a whole thread on Apple’s support site of people who also saw it and are now wondering where it’s gone.
Just to make things even more confusing, Kara Swisher at All Things D got two very different statements from Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller at the event yesterday: Schiller was enthusiastic about finding friends via Facebook, while Jobs said Zuckerberg and co. were demanding “onerous terms” that Apple refused. We’re assuming Jobs was talking about something deeper than just finding friends via Connect, but it’s still all very strange — and as it stands, finding friends on Ping right now requires a fair bit of guesswork and searching, so we’re hoping this all gets sorted soon. Check the video of Phil Schiller talking about Facebook and Ping after the break, as well as a snap of it (sort of) working from last night.
Update: We can’t confirm this, but we’ve just gotten a tip saying the problem is primarily on Facebook’s end — the service is currently denying requests from Ping, and the resulting errors apparently caused enough other problems for Apple to pull the plug on the connection entirely until it’s fixed. That certainly would explain why Ping has seemed buggy and slow from the outset, but we’re still waiting for some official explanation of what’s going on.
Nokia is being coy this morning by revealing a trio of pictures of what it only describes as its “new device.” Of course, being a devoted Engadget reader, you’ll instantly recognize the visage above as that of the Nokia 5250 — the already leaked successor to the 5230 ( aka the Nuron). Specs are promised for later today, so contain your excitement until a more civilized hour. For now, you’ll find one more pic — of the bodacious, camera-adorned back — after the break.
[Thanks, Adam B.]
Update: That wasn’t a long wait. Nokia Conversations has the scoop on the 5250, including confirmation of the name. The real headline here is the eminently frugal price of €115 ($146) before taxes and subsidies. For that handful of change, you’ll get your old favorite S60 5th OS with a mobile version of Guitar Hero 5 pre-installed, along with an FM radio and a media player slap bang in the middle of your 2.8-inch homescreen, all to underline this new phone’s musical inclinations. The touchscreen panel fits 640 x 360 pixels (16:9 display ratio), and battery life is rated for 18 days of standby, seven hours of talktime, or 24 hours of music playback. Not bad at all. Shipping in Q4 [Thanks, Keith!].
This article was written on April 27, 2009 by CyberNet.
Do you remember when Twitter was a word that only the tech-savvy crowd might have heard of? It was back in March of 2007 that I finally started paying attention to what Twitter was, only because there was so much buzz about it on the blogs I was reading. Between then and now, Twitter has experienced all kinds of growing pains, including outages from traffic overload. Some start-ups don’t survive the pains of growing, but amazingly enough, they managed to overcome them.
About two years after the early adopters really started getting into micro-blogging via Twitter and telling the world in 140 characters or less, what was going on in their lives, “Twitter” and “Tweets” are now common household words. Twittering is even becoming popular among stay-at-home moms, in part thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s recent decision to join in on all of the Twittering fun. She’s one of many celebs who Twitter (or have someone Twitter for them), including:
Stephen Fry
Ashton Kutcher
Britney Spears
and the list goes on…
Even the radio station I listen to in the morning is all about Twittering, with all of their big DJs detailing their lives in those 140 characters. Two years ago I could guarantee that 99% percent of my friends hadn’t heard of Twitter, and now they’re all about Twittering all day long. Despite this, I still haven’t felt the urge to join them. Yes, I do have a Twitter account, but the last time I updated was way back on July 15th last year. Yikes!
While I’m reminiscing about social networking, do you remember when Facebook was only for college students and it was plain and simple? Now it’s open to anybody in any age demographic, and it’s being cluttered with countless applications. Case in point…. my 60 year old mother is on Facebook and prides herself on how well her virtual Facebook Farm is doing. All of her friends are doing the same thing…
Flickpad is a Flickr (and Facebook) client for the iPad. There are seemingly endless Flickr clients for the iPad, but this is the one I use most. Why? Because it is the first one that actually makes it feel like you are browsing real printed photographs.
The app, which comes in paid and lite versions, uses a wooden table as a presentation metaphor, and pulls photos in from your Flickr and Facebook contacts. These photos are scattered over the table, overlapping just as if you had emptied a shoe-box of pictures. Flickpad isn’t designed to be a full-on Flickr browser. It does one thing: let you keep up with your friends’ photos.
The interface makes heavy use of touch, to the extent that when you have to actually tap a button, it is jarring (but necessary, like editing settings, for example). Instructions can be called up in a popover at any time, but the basic controls consist of tapping and swiping to move the stacks around: Rearrange photos by dragging with one finger. A two-finger drag magically pulls together all the photos in a set into on pile. Pinching or double-tapping lets you zoom fullscreen, and long and triple-taps offer extra functions.
If you flick a picture off to the side it scoots off the table and is marked seen. You can also view all photos from a friend, add to favorites and even take a look at the “Interesting” photos from Flickr.
The deeper controls take some getting used to, but the fingers-on manipulation is so perfect for the content that it is worth a little effort.
Currently, no photos are cached, so you’ll need to reload everything on launch. Some of the settings are a little tricky to find, too, so deep are they hidden, but one you know about them it seems obvious.
For instance, hit the little settings cog and you can drill down to choose which friends’ photos you want to pull down. This last is essential if you use the app to show your mother your baby-photos, but also have contacts who share more erotic images. You can switch them off easily.
The addition of an offline mode would make this app truly killer. As it is, you’ll find big chunks of the day disappearing as you flick through Flickpad. Remember when you’d be looking in the closet for something and you’d come across a shoe-box of old photos and lose the rest of the afternoon going through them? Flickpad is just like that.
Flickpad is free (with limitations) or $7 (adds multiple user accounts and more). And yes, I know the video at the top of the post comes off like a commercial, but it’s a great way to see the features in action.
SNAP (Social Network Analyzer for Privacy) by BIT Systems does one thing, and one thing only: it looks at your Facebook profile and then “grades you on how visible you are to the outside world.” Of course, you can always just go into Facebook itself and look at your privacy settings, which would save you the steps of downloading an app and using it to login to your account, but at least the thing is free. And it does provide a handy and thorough tutorial on Facebook privacy in general. Hit the source link to take it for a spin.
Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn’t sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested. More »
This article was written on August 02, 2008 by CyberNet.
Back in May we wrote about a website called Scrabulous where you could go to play the classic game of Scrabble. We mentioend at the time that there was also a version of it available on Facebook as a Facebook App, but we weren’t sure how long they were going to be around. The reason we said that was because Hasbro and Mattel had asked Facebook to remove it. The makers of Scrabble would have been smart to just acquire Scrabulous, but they didn’t. Instead they decided to take the time to build their own version which was recently released on Facebook.
Shortly after Hasbro and Mattel launched their own Facebook app, the Scrabulous app went unavailable to those in the United States and Canada this past week. Lots of their users were upset until Scrabulous came back under a new name with a new look and new rules. The game is being called Wordscraper and rumor has it that they changed the name of the game and the rules to help avoid brand confusion, something Hasbro and Mattel could go after them for.
I decided to install the new Wordscaper app on Facebook which consists of two games, Wordscaper Blitz (a fast paced word building competition in real-time) and Wordscaper regular which they describe as “a fantastic tool to build and play your own word game within seconds. Simply click on new game, build board/rules, and start playing. You can save your creations for future use, or share them with friends. Games are turn based and awesome fun.”
Some Scrabulous fans have already expressed some disappointment in the new Wordscraper offering saying it’s just not the same, which it isn’t. The good thing though, is because users can create their own boards, they do have the option of making one that resembles Scrabble. At this point there are several thousand Wordscraper users which is far behind the half million users Scrabulous had.
To those going through Scrabulous withdrawals, remember that you do not need Facebook to play it, you just need to visit www.scrabulous.com where the game is still available to play.
Stop. Put down this computer, go pick up your iPad and come back here. Now go get this app: Flipboard. Why? It’s pretty awesome.
Flipboard is one of a growing category of iPad apps that build you a personal newspaper by grabbing content from your social networks. The difference with Flipboard is that it actually feels like picking up a magazine and flipping through it, but the supersimple interface hides some powerful features.
Is it installed on your iPad yet? Good. Go ahead and sign in to your Twitter and Facebook accounts (if you like, visit the settings and add your Instapaper ID, too). Now, go ahead and tap one of the big squares and you’re in the Flipboard. From there you’ll see any articles tweeted by friends, photos and updates from Facebook alongside the actual tweets. So far, so much like every other aggregator.
The difference comes with the interface, which is similar in feel to the Wired app. Turning the iPad makes the page reformat in such as way that you’ll keep turning it, trying to work out how it is done. Flipping to more content is done by swiping to a new page, and to read an article, just tap it. If it is a long article, you can either Instapaper it, or tap to read it on the web.
But the next part is really, really neat. Under (or alongside, depending on how you are holding things) the article you get a panel showing any tweets linking that article. Think of it as being like blog comments, only interesting. You can even tweet a response right there.
Once you’re in an article, you can just swipe to go to the next or hit the little “x” to go back to the main page for that feed. But that’s not all.
Aside from Facebook and Twitter, you can add content from a small range of pre-selected sources. Some of these are actually curated by the Flipboard people (FlipTech, FlipPhotos, etc.) but you can also grab feeds from The Onion and other sites, or search for Twitter feeds.
Even better, Twitter lists finally get a purpose. I searched for “Wired” and one of the results was the Wired Staffers list maintained by @wired. I added that and instantly got a section of news curated by over 200 smart and connected people.
Because Flipboard uses your networks like this, the news is pre-filtered and it’s likely you’ll find far too much interesting stuff to read. I have one more piece of good news to pass along. Flipboard is free, and in the App Store right now. Actually, there is yet another thing to like: The promo video (above) is by Adam Lisagor, aka Lonely Sandwich (aka the guy from the Square ads). If that doesn’t sell you, nothing will.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
CrunchGear | 
Businessweek, Detroit Free Press | Email this | Comments
Back in May we wrote about a website called 
