Hasta La Gadget!

Twitter today announced that it has implemented a new age-screening system for users who are willing to follow alcohol brands. Seeing as it is a global social network, and the legal drinking age varies in different countries, Twitter will now ask users to confirm their date of birth when they follow such a brand. The microblogging network will then check if they’re of or over the legal drinking age in their country, if they are, their follow request will be approved and if they aren’t, the follow will be denied.

The age-screening feature has been rolled out on twitter.com, and on its iOS and Android apps. Users will be asked to punch in their date of birth once they tap or click on the follow button of an alcohol brand’s Twitter profile. Once age is provided, Twitter checks if the user is of the legal drinking age in their country. When the age-screening test is passed, Twitter confirms the follower status and also remembers that the user’s account met the age requirement without actually storing the date of birth. As previously mentioned, those who don’t meet the required age, will have their follow request denied. Twitter has initially partnered with brands like Bud Light, Jim Beam, Knob Creek, Bacardi and Heineken. Even if the addition of an age-gate is a nice step to ensure that users under the legal age of drinking in their country don’t follow these brands, its not like people almost always haven’t lied about their age on the internet.

Twitter Will Now Age-Screen Users Willing To Follow Alcohol Brands original content from Ubergizmo.

We reported back in July that Microsoft had settled with UK’s BSkyB which had sued it for infringing on its “Sky” brand by calling its cloud storage service SkyDrive. Microsoft has spent considerable resources in building up the SkyDrive brand in the particularly competitive cloud storage niche, however since it opted to settle the lawsuit, it meant that the company will have to rename SkyDrive. BSkyB had agreed to let Microsoft use the brand for a “reasonable” time so that the transition could be made easily. If latest reports are to be believed, Microsoft might be close to picking out a new name. SkyDrive might be renamed to “NewDrive,” according to a connected Windows blogger named Paul Thurrott.

A website called LiveSide recently reported that the www.newdrive.com URL has already been picked up and that it was redirecting visitors to SkyDrive, however as of this writing, the link appears to be dead. For all we know though, NewDrive could only be a placeholder until Microsoft stumbles upon a brand that it feels is right for its cloud storage service. The company has used this tactic before, its email service Hotmail was codenamed Newmail internally before it was rebranded to what we now know as Outlook.com.

Microsoft Might Rename SkyDrive To ‘NewDrive’ original content from Ubergizmo.

It was reported recently that Facebook use amongst teens was starting to decline. Quite a lot was written about this as people speculated that perhaps the world’s biggest social network was no longer “cool” enough for most teens to use. During Facebook’s last earnings call, CFO David Ebersman said that the company “did see a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens.” These few words sparked hundreds of articles about how Facebook might be becoming irrelevant for younger teens. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that the reaction to Ebersman’s comment “has been blown out of proportion” and that the overall teen usage of Facebook in the U.S. “remains stable.” To be fair to Ebersman, he did say prior to making the comment about declining teen usage that “youth usage among U.S. teens was stable overall from Q2 to Q3.”

Sandberg reiterates that the “majority of U.S. teens use Facebook almost every day,” and that the vast majority of them are on the social network. She made these comments in an interview with AllThingsD, where she added that Facebook’s challenge is not to be the newest, which it obviously can’t be seeing as how its almost a decade old. She says that “we’re not trying to be the coolest. And we’re not trying to be the newest.” Facebook is trying to be the most useful, and that’s something that CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg stands behind. When quizzed about a possible acquisition of Snapchat, for which it reportedly offered $3 billion in cash, Sandberg neither confirms that an offer was put on the table nor denies that one might be made in the future.

Facebook Isn’t Losing Teen Users, Says COO Sheryl Sandberg original content from Ubergizmo.

We’re sure everyone has the Monday blues, and that everyone also looks forward to Fridays as well, after all TGIF, right? Well if you were thinking about clocking out a tad early and want a valid excuse for doing so, how about simulating a computer problem? Dubbed the Happy Hour Virus, this is basically a website which you can use to simulate a variety of problems, ranging from “Kernel Panic”, to “Broken Monitor”, and the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death”. The former might not be overly convincing, but the Broken Monitor and Blue Screen of Death are pretty realistic.

Of course all it takes is for your boss or IT admin to press the ESC key to figure out that it’s a hoax and for you to lose your job, so perhaps using it might not be the best move for your career. Pranking your friends, however, would be perfect, especially if you know they have spent the last 10 hours working on that report or final thesis that they have yet to save! That should teach them a thing or two, right? In any case if you’d like to check it out for yourselves, be sure to hit up its website for the details!

Happy Hour Virus Fakes Computer Problems To Let You Get Off Work Early original content from Ubergizmo.

Kim Dotcom built his reputation on free services — much to the chagrin of some people — and he’s revisiting that turf with his upcoming music offering, Baboom. As he explains in an interview with Wired UK, the service will be an “iTunes-Spotify hybrid” that both sells music and offers it for free through ad deals. However, its approach to ad-supported tunes is bound to raise eyebrows — users will install a browser plugin that replaces web ads with those from Baboom, paying surfers with cash that they can spend on songs. Typical users could earn 10 free albums a year through their browsing habits, Dotcom claims. The tech luminary will demonstrate the concept by soft-launching Baboom with his own music in January, following up with full service a few months later. The business model is intriguing, although it may face stiff resistance; we can’t imagine that rival advertisers and website owners will enjoy losing revenue.

[Image credit: Thierry Ehrmann, Flickr]

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Via: MusicWeek

Source: Wired UK