Dish Network unveiled today the "Blockbuster Movie Pass," a bundle of services that includes streaming video; DVDs; Blu-Rays and games by mail; and access to premium movie channels. The catch: you need to be a Dish Network customer.
The service will launch October 1. Existing Dish subscribers can sign up for the package for an additional $10 a month. New customers who sign up for Dish's America's Top 200 package for $39.99 a month get access to the service for a year.
"More Americans are demanding an easier way to view their video," … Read more
At the F8 conference yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off some of the most drastic changes ever made to the company's service. And though Zuckerberg is excited by those changes, many folks across the Web aren't so quick to celebrate.
The fear among some users relates to what some say could become a potentially worrisome privacy situation on the social network, led by Timeline and changes to Open Graph.
Timeline provides users with a way to view "the story of your life," according to Zuckerberg, including a collection of all the "stories" uses … Read more
About a year ago I wrote about Facebook's growing dominance of the social Web casting a huge shadow over the Internet of people. At that time the service had 500 million users. In his F8 keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg said that as many as 500 million people used Facebook in a single day, with the total Facebook tribe approaching 800 million.
According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook had a 10 percent share of Internet visits in the U.S. for the week ending Sept. 17, followed by Google at 7 percent. Among social networks, Facebook garnered more than 65 percent … Read more
We knew it was coming. There was no escape. The new Facebook look was unveiled yesterday at the F8 developers conference.
We saw sneak previews of the fresh Timeline and Ticker features that represent a radical departure from the spare white Facebook profiles of the soon-to-be past.
It's kind of like coming home and finding that your spouse has gotten Botox, a hair cut, a new wardrobe, and can't stop talking about the song he's listening to and which Paula Deen recipe is on the dinner menu. It all feels a little surreal.
Eventually, all profiles will go over to Timeline. It has a massive top photo and easy access to all your Facebook updates throughout the years so that you can wallow in that nostalgic moment four years ago when you ate a deep-fried Twinkie at the fair and posted about it.
Ticker will feed real-time updates about the minutiae of your friends' lives onto your profile. Now you'll know who's listening to Celine Dion at any given moment. There will also be more integration of social apps into your profile.
Change is hard. Not even the sight of Mark Zuckerberg's adorable puppy on his Timeline could soften the hearts of some critics. There has been a mixed reaction to the new look and features. Some folks like it, some folks are threatening to run back to the familiarity of MySpace or forward into the unknown of Google+.
Where do you fall on the scale of new Facebook love and hate? Vote in our poll and sound off below.… Read more
After just a week on store shelves, "Star Wars: The Complete Saga" on Blu-ray has already set global sales records.
Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox have so far sold one million units of the Blu-ray box set, which launched on September 16, including 515,000 units in North America alone. With that many unit sales, according to the film studios, "Star Wars" is now the "bestselling catalog Blu-ray Disc of all time."
In addition, the "Star Wars" Blu-ray set generated $84 million in worldwide revenue in the past week, including $38 million … Read more
CEO Reed Hastings issues an apology for the way the company handled recent pricing changes, but it's his other announcement--that Netflix is splitting off its DVD business--that surprises and dismays many.
Is Netflix even worth it anymore? (Ask Maggie) In her weekly advice column, CNET's Maggie Reardon helps one reader decide whether to ditch Netflix and helps another decipher Verizon Wireless' upgrade policy. (Posted in Signal Strength by Marguerite Reardon) September 23, 2011, 12:01 a.m. PDT
Facebook is angling to be the entertainment industry's next taste maker.
While CEO Mark Zuckerberg today wowed the crowd of its F8 developer conference with a nifty looking new Timeline feature, the company's latest vision of how much information others should see, and how it's being shared is the change that will affect users -- and Hollywood -- in the months to come.
For proof, look no further than Facebook's new slew of media partnerships, which include big entertainment names like Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, along with media outlets like USA Today, The Guardian, and The … Read more
That's how Google replaced Yahoo as the Web's best search engine in 1998. Google became the font of the online world's information by both finding more information online than any other search engine, and by figuring out what of it was the most important to the Web's users. Google algorithmically connected the Web to people.
Facebook, by contrast, has always been about connecting people to each other, but as the the latest version of the Facebook platform illustrates, the company is now about using that information to do what … Read more
Editor's note: This post was updated on September 23, 2011, to add more information about Timeline and how it can be customized.
1. Real-time updates with Ticker
Dubbed "the Facebook within a Facebook," Ticker shows you what your friends are doing in real time in a box to the right of the News Feed. You'll see minor updates like new friendships, likes, comments, and other lightweight activities, while more important activities are reserved for the News Feed.
With Facebook's new apps (see below), you'll also see app activity, exposing what songs your friends are … Read more
The upgrades and additions to Facebook are rolling out of the f8 developers' conference today, while other developers are working furiously to come up with ways to undo them.
Better Facebook is a Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera extension that's been around for a few years now and allows a comprehensive set of at least 75 customization options to Facebook's look, feel, and features.
Since Facebook revamped its news feed this week--much to the chagrin of many users--Better Facebook has seen a big bump in traffic and new users, as developer Matt Kruse posted on the Better Facebook fan page late yesterday:
Wow, it's been kind of a crazy day. Big FB changes, Dropbox stopped serving my images (and started again), the web site got over 100,000 hits, and this page acquired 5,000 new fans!
The changes--including the addition of a real-time scrolling "ticker" of Facebook friends' activity--originally caused Better Facebook to "disappear" from the interface for many users. Kruse went to work updating the extension and adding new capability to control and mitigate the new additions. The latest version includes the option to hide the ticker.
New suggestions from users for possible "fixes" to be integrated into Better Facebook have also started to roll in to Kruse at an accelerated clip.
Kruse says donations have continued to flow in to support his work, which is a good thing, because he's likely to have a whole lot of work ahead of him. The redesign announced today will give Facebook users the ability to integrate "Open Graph apps" into their experience, adding music, TV, movies, news, and a whole lot more to the feed. That ought to keep Kruse busy for a while.… Read more
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