A lot of conversations having been going on since the email announcing that Pownce had been acquired by Six Apart. Of course the real news wasn’t the purchase so much but that the Pownce service was going to be shutdown in two weeks. As irritating as it might seem to have services that users invest time in building up get sold off that is part of the so-called social media user generated content world. It’s all part of the game we play. Someone gets a cutesy idea for some service and slaps the code together after which we come...
Gather your quaffles, capes and brooms — Quidditch could be a mere wand-stroke away from joining the NCAA, if the numbers of teams keep growing. College students have taken their intramural Quidditch hobby to a whole new level this year: Droves of wizards and witches gathered at the second Intercollegiate Quidditch World Cup to get dirty and bloody playing a game of Muggle Quidditch. Video of the entire game below. The Intercollegiate Quidditch Association or (IQA) held the competition at Middlebury College (where Muggle Quidditch originated in 2005). Right now over 150 colleges have Quidditch teams including Boston University, Vassar,...
Google was once invincible and unable to make a mistake. Well, although its share price is not what it used to be, one can argue they’re still invincible in most areas they’ve dabbled in, but the mistakes and flops are now piling up. Google Lively, a virtual world in which users can create their own environment and avatar and communicate with each other, is about to be shut down. True, this was one of Google’s 20% projects, meaning that it was created by one of Google’s engineers in their “spare” time, but still, time and money were invested in it...
After months of private beta testing in Portland, location-based social network Shizzow has launched in the tech-friendly Bay Area. Now the coffee shop working laptoperati can easily let their friends know whose WiFi they’re soaking up today. Like the location granddaddy Dodgeball, Shizzow is focused on connecting people in real life. To “shout” from a place, you first search for it by name. Shizzow does not let users broadcast an address or city as a location, in contrast to other services, like BrightKite. Your dashboard shows recent shouts from your friends–the users you’ve chosen to “listen” to, a feature similar...
Poor Anthony Michaels. When Classmates.com told him that long lost school friends were looking for him, he signed and paid … only to find out that no one was! Now, he’s suing Classmates.com for being a scam: When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked him up online. But once he’d parted with the $15, Michaels learned the...
This week on True Blood, we meet Eddie, played by the wonderful Stephen Root (Dodge Ball, News Radio). Eddie is the friendly old gay that likes strapping young men and 80s power ballads. While our boy Lafayette stops by for his weekly draining, we get a peek into the pretty hum-drum life of Eddie (besides his moments with Lafayette). Best line of the night, "I always look forward to Monday nights, first I watch Heroes, then I have you." Aw such a sweet old vamp. Fangbangers are getting it left and right, including that poor little boy from the funeral...
Back in May I wrote about Brightkite and asked whether or not Brightkite would be able to overcome the hurdles that Dodgeball wasn’t able to. While it’s debatable whether or not there were hurdles or Google just let the product die, the bottom line is that Dodgeball failed. Years later Brightkite was announced and initially I thought it would suffer the same fate. I think my opinion is beginning to change as I’ve begun using the iPhone application over the past few days and it’s pretty sweet. For instance, while sitting through a FIOS demo yesterday at Verizon, I was...
Location-based services (LBS) are becoming a dime-a-dozen in Apple’s App Store. Some, such as UrbanSpoon, Yelp and AroundMe are quite useful and popular. But those simply focus on finding places and activities (and mainly food) nearby your current location. More complex LBS social networks, which focus on tracking you and your friends, haven’t yet caught fire. Brightkite, which just launched its iPhone app, has the potential to change that. The LBS social networks like Loopt, Where and Whrrl are all somewhat popular and useful to varying degrees. The problem, as I see it, is that while people are fine with...
Image: Bobak Ha’Eri Human sacrifice may seem a barbaric idea today, but for some Mesoamerican cultures, in what is now Mexico and Central America, it was part of their way of life. And while it may not have been all fun and games, a game was in fact closely linked with this most macabre of rituals – the earliest recorded ballgame in history. As early as 3,500 years ago, these Mesoamerican dudes were playing a ballgame that was kind of like the granddaddy of modern sports such as racquetball and volleyball. The games took place in long narrow playing...
Ukulele covers of popular tunes aren’t a new phenomenon — but YouTube user crouts0’s KazooKeylele is no ordinary ukulele, and this is no ordinary song. Hipsters and sports fans don’t ordinarily mix — except when it comes to oddball sports like dodgeball and urban golf, a fact that the new web series Wild Frontier of Sports attempts to capitalize on. How does the Good Magazine-produced series fare in capturing the insane energy of these events? Find out at NewTeeVee Station....
So unless you are new to the wireless world or have just been living under a rock you know what next Wednesday is. So for those of you who chose not to do the pre-sale we got ourselves a nice little list of some things to be aware of for next Wednesday: Customers waiting in line will be handed out tickets according to desired color for purchase (Bronze/Brown and Black only) These tickets will correspond directly to store inventory. Tickets will contain 5 key features of the device. Maximum of 5 handsets per account. NO phones will be sold...
SPORTS BUZZ: Samantha-Jane Stacey weighs 280 pounds and is the youngest Australian to participate in the world wrestling sumo championships. Sumo wrestling seems like a pretty ideal alternative to dodgeball for overweigh teens. Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment » The Best Links: The 14-year-Old 20-Stone Sumo Girl Was Born to Wrestle (Photos!) Australian Girls Ready to Participate in World Sumo Wrestling Championship...
Christine Songco, a technical project manager at Google, invited me to visit Google’s San Francisco office today which opened just over year ago and is located on The Embarcadero with a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay. Several people who work out of that office, including some old friends, joined us for lunch, which of course at Google is always a great experience. Some of the projects that operate out of Google San Francisco are Google Code, Google App Engine and Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company. As with Google’s main headquarters in Mountain...
I’ve often chided google for trusting wikipedia so much when Wikipedia says we don’t care about accuracy or truth, just verifiability. It now looks like they’ve taken it a step further and pitched truth out the window with the dodgeball development team. Here’s a screen shot from Sunday afternoon where according to the Google SERP’s Paul Newman died in a plane crash … way to go big G … Increase search rankings with .EDU Links in content on hosted pages. EDU sites pass more trust than average links, learn why on our site. Edutextlink.com offers quality, under the radar links...
