You will, no doubt, be plagued this holiday season by real-time conversations from real-time annoyances who claim to be members of your family. You will, therefore, be tempted to indulge in some excessive real-time drinking that might, just might, affect your sense of, well, the real time, the real place, even the real country you are inhabiting.
However, you will, I hope, be delighted that some very enterprising people have considered your plight and decided to offer you the latest hangover cures in real time. All you need to do is to have your smartest phone about your person at all real times and refer to the updates at Twitter.com/hangover_cure.
There, you will find contributions from, no doubt, hardened drinkers, hardened family therapists or, who knows, maybe hardened altruistic specimens who would like you to hurt less, party more, and not let your children see you looking like the inside of a bull's nostril after a stampede.
The Twitter page, sponsored by video-on-demand provider Blinkbox Entertainment, (yes, it's releasing "The Hangover," get it?), will offer you such gems as: "Try whipping up a Carrot Comfort (200g carrots, 1 apple, 1cm fresh root ginger & ice) & let us know."
All right, some of the suggestions might walk the thin line between holistic and horrific. But who could really fault the dedication and spirit of Christmas engendered by a suggestion such as: "Try the Honey Bun: Half a ripe banana, 1 teaspoon clear honey, 2 teaspoons natural yogurt & water; then tweet us the results!"
I feel confident that the Hangover Cure Twitter page will be a repository for scientific discovery that has not been seen since, oh, the Facebook Beacon program.
Over the last few months, you may have noticed the Meebo Bar gracing the bottom of some Web sites, mostly large blogs, or other similar big content sites. That's because previously, the Meebo Bar was only available to select partners, so the little guys were mostly shut out. Now, Meebo is making the Meebo Bar available for all Web sites, with a specific focus on blogs.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Meebo Bar, it's a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social interaction and sharing features, such as displaying a specific stream of tweets, promoting a Facebook fan page, as well as Stumbling or Digging the page. The Meebo Bar also allows users to chat with their friends through the IM platform that made Meebo famous. Additionally, the Meebo Bar enables easy sharing of content on the page through its very slick Meebo Share Dock.
The bar is extremely easy to set up on blogs, especially TypePad, self-hosted Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, all of which have preconfigured solutions, built by Meebo. For those with other setups, the installation just consists of inserting a code snippit, something to which we have become very accustomed. Users can customize which features appear on their Meebo Bar all on Bar.meebo.com. The changes are then pushed out to the installation on your site in a matter of minutes.
Users can customize the Meebo Bar for their site with a variety of buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)This version of the Meebo Bar, for everyone, includes all of the same features that it offers to its partner sites, which is something that they were really shooting for with this release, Daniel Bernstein, Meebo's director of business development tells CNET. Meebo Bar users get all of the features of the bar, as well as detailed sharing analytics to see how people are using it, all for the low, low price of...free.
The Meebo Bar is a really great way of enabling a lot of different types of sharing and content interaction very quickly and easily. The sharing that results could, potentially, be a big driver of traffic back to sites. It's really great to see this rich functionality being adapted into to a "self-serve" type of system. With so many more possible installs out there, the Meebo Bar should see a huge explosion in growth.
Meebo's Share Dock pops out when you drag a piece of content on an enabled site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)
Google has often been seen as a competitor to traditional newspapers, but the search giant is now teaming up with two major papers for a new experiment in presenting news online.
Google announced on Wednesday "Living Stories," an experimental new feature designed to deliver news stories, updates, editorials, and multimedia focusing on specific topics, all on one single Web page.
Each Living Story, whether it's on health care, global warming, or the war in Afghanistan, has a permanent URL that you can follow. That page displays everything from headlines to summaries to in-depth articles on that subject. By clicking on the various links on each Living Story page, you can read the articles, view photos, watch videos, and access a time line for an historical view of the topic. As new stories and updates are posted, you can read them on the same page.
The Living Story keeps track of your activity, so it alerts you to updates you haven't yet seen and grays out or collapses older news that you may have already read. You can also subscribe to e-mail updates and RSS feeds of your favorite stories, so you don't need to return to the Living Story page to grab the latest news.
Since Living Stories is a new experiment in the Google Labs sandbox, the number of topics is limited. Google is working with just two media partners to start--The New York Times and The Washington Post. The newspapers decide which topics appear on their own Living Story pages. But Google has plans to develop open-source tools so other outlets can create their own Living Stories. If the concept takes off, it might prove a money maker for other publishers, according to the Times, as they could sell ads on their own pages.
Newspapers have been hit by declining business as more people have flocked to the Web to grab their daily or hourly news fix. In some corners, Google has been seen as the enemy to traditional print outlets. Media maven and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch has even accused the search giant of stealing his content and threatened to remove his sites from Google listings.
Responding to such concerns, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently wrote an editorial in the Journal in which he argued that his company could actually help newspapers boost their business. And in the face of lower revenues, many news outlets have started to embrace the Web rather than compete with it.
From its perspective, The New York Times seems optimistic that the Living Stories experiment could lead to bigger and better things.
"It's an experiment with a different way of telling stories," said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company, in a statement. "I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting."
MySpace's rumored adoption of Facebook Connect could be happening in the near future--as soon as early 2010, Inside Facebook reports.
MySpace and Facebook have historically been rivals, with Facebook having ousted MySpace from their spot as the top social network, but their relations have been of a friendlier nature as of late. It appears as though MySpace has effectively given up on winning the social-networking war and is instead focusing on its already strong entertainment business, which includes the market leader, MySpace Music.
The extent of MySpace's Facebook Connect integration isn't yet known, but it is expected initially to leverage MySpace's media content, like music. This news comes right on the heels of Yahoo announcing a massive Facebook Connect implementation across all of its sites. Facebook and Google are currently battling it out for the Web identity crown. With Yahoo and MySpace out of the race, 2010 should prove to be an interesting year as Facebook and Google both try to carve out pieces of the market.
Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.
The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.
While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.
This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.
You know that apocalypse thing we're always being told might be just around the corner? Well, do you feel the chilling breeze? Do you feel the troubled twittering in the trees?
For here is a tale that I know you will discuss with your loved ones, perhaps with other people's loved ones, even with your psychological professional, the minute you hear it.
It appears a man called Dana Hanna is standing at the altar on November 21. He utters those most solemn vows about how he will love and obey or whatever it is that married people claim to do these days.
The officiant pronounces that Dana and his lovely bride, Tracy, are now married. Does Dana weep? Does he kiss his bride?
Ah, no. For Dana's Twitter moniker is TheSoftwareJedi and his first loyalty is to his digital followers. So, much to his wife's surprise, he whips out his cell phone and updates his statuses on both Twitter and Facebook. Right there at the altar. He also hands his wife's cell phone over to her.
Now that he has uploaded the evidence (which we're assuming isn't staged), Dana insists that this was all done for fun.
Indeed, he explained on YouTube: "I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch. So when Tracy and I were engaged, most of my family found out via Facebook because we updated our statuses."
If you're wondering what it is he tweeted from the altar, here it is: "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"
However, another tweet sent on Monday night by Hanna, who is chief architect of NextDayPets.com and president of Torian Technologies, might perhaps offer an even greater insight into his complex and socially networked psyche: "Just changed over the laundry for @TracyPage and was thrown off by the fact a bra was in there. Not used to living with a woman again."
Oh, Tracy, are you sure about this? I only ask because I just tried to access the Tracy Page Twitter feed and received the message "this page doesn't exist."
Comcast on Tuesday announced the launch of a pilot program for its Internet customers to keep track of how much bandwidth they're using. The company is finally introducing a Web-based metering program, which will let users check these numbers from any browser.
This comes a little more than a year after Comcast began enforcing a strict 250GB cap on download bandwidth, exiling those who went over twice for an entire year before being able to get Internet service again. In the interim the company had offered no official tool for customers to see how close they were getting to that limit, outside of a free McAfee Security software program that needed to be installed on each computer sharing that connection.
The new online meter is coming first to customers in Portland, Ore., as part of a pilot project, which could be expanded to other parts of the country beginning next year. Those in the pilot will be able to track all activity that goes through the cable modem they have rented from the company or purchased on their own. The meter shows the past three months of data use, though to begin with, users will only be able to see what they've used in December. It tracks each gigabyte used, which the company says is rounded down to the nearest gigabyte instead of rounding up. That data is refreshed every three hours.
Comcast says that this new metering system is quite accurate. To prove that, it hired consulting company NetForecast to do a comparative analysis which put Comcast's meter at within plus or minus 0.5 percent of its own internal testing (PDF).
Comcast's new bandwidth meter will only be available to those in Portland, Ore., before the company rolls it out to other markets.
(Credit: Comcast/CNET)In an e-mail, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas wanted to reaffirm that most Comcast customers will never have a problem with going over. "The median customer consumes approximately 2 to 4GB of data in a month," he said. And even with the new bandwidth monitor, "almost 99 percent of our customers should not be concerned about their monthly data usage or even crossing our 250GB-per-month excessive-usage threshold."
Comcast says it needs to do more testing before branching off into the rest of the U.S. In the meantime, those Portland customers who have been chosen to be a part of it will find an invitation in their e-mail to test it out.
This won't come as a surprise to, well, anyone who has spent considerable time on the Web, but a new study found that people act much differently online than offline.
According to eMarketer, which published the report on Monday, "cyberdisinhibition" has caused many Web users to behave much differently online than they would in a typical offline setting. In fact, the market-research firm, which cites findings from Euro RSCG Worldwide, says 43 percent of U.S.-based Web users feel less inhibited online. It also found that "the effect is most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54."
Of course, being less inhibited online can lead to both positive and negative behaviors. The research firm found that the Web helps 55.6 percent of men and 51.4 percent of women feel more "able to to meet new people." Users are also using the Web to "be empowered to do something they wanted to." The study found that 33.9 percent of male respondents and 29.2 percent of female respondents do things on the Web that they might not otherwise feel able to do offline.
That said, Web users are also more likely to take a company or brand to task online than they would in person. The study found that 24.4 percent of male respondents have "lashed out" at companies on the Internet. Women did it a little less with about 15.8 percent of respondents saying that they had lashed out.
eMarketer's report also highlighted an interesting change in the way people prefer to communicate. A whopping 48.7 percent of respondents said they find electronic communication far more convenient than communicating with others in a face-to-face setting.
From a social perspective, 57.6 percent of respondents said they disagree with the assertion that "online socializing is for sad, antisocial types." Phew. That's how I communicate these days.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Sometimes ingenuity doesn't quite lead you to a comfortable place.
The enterprising folks at WPMI TV in Mobile, Ala., decided that they should reach out on a real-time basis to their viewers. They erected a billboard, adorned it with an image of three of its most photogenic anchors, and added a live Twitter feed.
The whole thing ran very smoothly, until a passing human took this photograph and sent it in to The Palmetto Scoop.
(Credit:
The Palmetto Scoop via Mashable)
Perhaps one's first reaction would be that this image might have enjoyed a little concoction.
However, Mashable has confirmed that not only is it real, but, citing the Lagniappe blog, it says WPMI-TV's general manager and news director have allegedly been suspended for a week because of this unfortunate conflagration.
This all seems just slightly odd. Television and radio has always been fond of slipping in a seven-second delay just in case untoward syllables slip through the mouths of guests or, indeed, hosts. It seems that no such delay was considered for this Twitter feed.
Yet who might have imagined such an unhappy coincidence might have occurred?
ComScore on Wednesday released October viewing statistics for online video. And although there weren't any surprises at the top, the figures did provide some interesting insight into how users are consuming video on the Web.
According to the research firm, more than 167 million U.S.-based Web users watched video online during October. All told, they watched 28 billion videos. Google easily led the pack, servicing a whopping 38 percent of all videos Americans viewed online, with 99 percent of those videos watched on YouTube.
In a distant second, Hulu delivered 856 million videos, accounting for 3.1 percent of the market and setting a new record for monthly views. Microsoft came in third, with 451 million videos viewed on its site, capturing 1.6 percent market share.
ComScore also took a look at the total number of viewers that consumed video content during October. The research firm found that the average viewer watched 167 videos during the month. Google sites attracted 126 million unique viewers. Fox Interactive Media followed Google, with 53 million unique viewers. Yahoo sites attracted 50 million viewers. Although Hulu didn't make the top three in unique viewers, the average user watched 20.1 videos on the site during October, representing another all-time high for the site.
Some interesting tidbits rounded out ComScore's report. According to the company, 84.4 percent of all United States.-based Web users viewed online video. The average viewer watched 10.8 hours of video in October, which is especially shocking, considering that the average online video was just 3.9 minutes long.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
