Hasta La Gadget!

To share or not to share was never a question for the creation of the PS4 — it was always more about the how. Right from the start, Sony’s upcoming, next-gen console had been planned with a social networking bent, but as Shuhei Yoshida, the company’s head of Worldwide Studios, revealed to Edge, the decision to build a Share button into the DualShock 4 was the result of one first-party developer’s eureka moment, not a cross-SCEI compromise. All credit is due Nathan Gary, creative director at Santa Monica Studio (best known for its God of War series), who successfully pitched the concept of a dedicated controller button to the PS4 team; an idea that was not only quickly met with unanimous praise, but also immediately implemented into the final product. It’s yet further proof that Sony’s learned from its past PS3 fumbling and has crafted a machine for developers, by developers.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

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Source: Edge

At its Mobile DevCon in New York today, Facebook took the wraps off a new SDK for iOS. This marks version 3.5 of the development kit, with the biggest news being improvements to Open Graph. While devs have been able to leverage Facebook’s Open Graph for mobile products before, new APIs being released should simplify the act of tapping into the vast repository of social data. One of the big improvements is the creation of an Object API, which removes the need to host a website with Open Graph-specific tags. There’s also a new native dialog for sharing content to Facebook from any application. Perhaps less immediately important to users are the improvements to the login system, but it’s a major initiative for Facebook. As the network moves to become a single sign-on platform for the web, streamlining the act of logging in to other properties using your Facebook account becomes increasingly important. The company’s Douglas Purdy claims that the process is now 20-percent faster than the previous dialog. The biggest question still left hanging in the air is just when we can expect the SDK upgrades to be made available on Android. Purdy did promise that it would be coming “very quickly.”

Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Forget music halls — Twitter thinks morning TV talk shows are where it’s at for product announcements. It used The Today Show last year to unveil a profile page redesign, and we now know it will rely on Good Morning America this Thursday to unveil something… “big.” But what does that cryptic clue mean? While logic would suggest Twitter Music given its semi-official status, we could also see TV in expanded tweets or something entirely unexpected. We’ll keep our eyes (and possibly ears) open.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Good Morning America (Twitter)

For awhile, it looked like EA was ready to stake a large part of its gaming future on social networking, introducing Facebook-oriented ports like SimCity Social and The Sims Social as well as more original titles. The game publisher isn’t quite ready to be a social butterfly, it turns out: following an earlier cull that focused heavily on sports-themed web games, EA is axing SimCity Social, The Sims Social and Pet Society on June 14th. There’s no mystery to the shutdown, as EA explains that strong initial demand rapidly tapered off — name recognition got the company’s foot in the door, but didn’t keep it there. Gamers who feel jilted should soon get an incentive to switch to more popular games from EA’s PopCap studio. We’re all in favor of shifting resources to where they’ll be truly appreciated, although we can’t help but feel sorry for SimCity fans that have just been burned twice in a row.

Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Facebook

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Via: The Next Web

Source: The Beat (EA)

Now that the SEC has given companies its blessing to share business data over social media, Bloomberg has begun to pull live Twitter feeds into its market terminals, known as the Bloomberg Professional service. According to the firm, that makes it the first financial information platform to integrate real-time tweets into investment workflows. Within the service, tweets are classified by company, asset class, people and topics, and stock buffs can even search messages, create filters and set alerts to notify them when a certain subject gets a flurry of mentions. The outfit hopes the inclusion of 140-character missives will let financial-minded folks keep their fingers on the market’s pulse without switching to another system (read: being distracted by Tweetdeck) to get the big picture. Hit the jump for the full skinny in the press release.

[Image credit: Jared Keller, Twitter]

Filed under: Misc

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Via: AllThingsD

Source: Bloomberg