opener

Love 'em or hate 'em, Facebook's timeline apps seem to be here to stay.

After news yesterday of Open Graph driving astounding amounts of traffic, Facebook announced today that 12 more media properties would be adding apps to Facebook's timeline.

"As media organizations build new timeline apps, initial results show significant increases in traffic and engagement, while allowing media sites to reach new--often younger--demographics," Facebook Director of Media Partnerships Justin Osofsky said in a statement.

The new apps include Buzzfeed, CBS Local: Los Angeles and New York, CMT, The Daily Show, GetGlue, Huffington Post, Mashable, MSNBC.… Read more

After less than a month in the wild, Open Graph is already a huge source of traffic and engagement for Facebook Timeline apps.

Facebook revealed last fall that it would be expanding its lexicon beyond the "like" with Open Graph, which helps third-party publishers link their content with the social network and allows users to see what friends are doing on other sites and join in. Although it's only been a few weeks since additional verbs like eating, buying, and listening to began appearing in earnest, the social network is pleased with the early results.

Facebook today … Read more

Forget the flowers this Valentine's Day. Go for a lightsaber-lit dinner, the open-source iNecklace, and the flirtatious Fingle app. Bridget Carey shows off tech to woo the nerd of your dreams.… Read more

The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that's even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.

Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) group overseeing the formatting and effects standard called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), said that programmers are overlooking other browsers when they use newer CSS features--even when those other browsers support the features.

The result is that those other browsers--Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera, chiefly--might have to essentially masquerade themselves as other browsers. When that happens, the "… Read more

There's been some chatter lately about Amazon opening its own stores out in the non-cyber world. Yes, we're talking physical, brick-and-mortar stores, the kind people can actually walk into.

This is all speculation, of course, but Jason Calacanis got the ball rolling with a post late last year entitled "Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction."

That was followed last week by a story in The New York Times Bits blog speculating (and citing that Calacanis story) that Amazon might just very well be exploring opening physical stores.

"For years, there has been speculation that Amazon will open its own outlets, presumably to sell Amazon-label products," David Streitfeld wrote. "The idea seems far-fetched, but before 2001 so was the idea of Apple operating its own stores." … Read more

You have a high-resolution wide-screen LCD monitor, good video card (or cards), and HD sources, yet you're using Windows to display images? Or maybe you've had to flip through huge batches of image files and wished there was an easier way. There is, in the form of Fullscreen Photo Viewer. This simple, free tool is optimized for displaying high-resolution images in full-screen mode. With keyboard, mouse, and command line options, it lets you move quickly through batches of images with minimal effort.

Fullscreen Photo Viewer opened with a black screen with basic instructions displayed DOS-style in the upper-left … Read more

Looking for a truly open-source tablet? A new Linux-based slate may just be it.

Dubbed the Spark, this tablet doesn't have the latest and greatest hardware--it comes with a 1GHz ARM processor with 512MB of memory and 4GB of internal storage. However, it includes an SD card slot, a capacitive, multitouch display, and Wi-Fi. And at $265, it won't break the bank if you decide to go the open-source route.

Its main draw will be the KDE Plasma Active user interface that's preloaded on top of its Linux roots (apparently it runs on Mer, a fork of … Read more

Hewlett-Packard kicked the first open source component to WebOS out the door today, along with a calendar for when its source code will be completely open.

The first part of WebOS to go open is Enyo, which also received a version bump to 2.0 today. Enyo is a developer's tool for writing a single app that will work across multiple mobile devices and PC browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, iOS, Android, and WebOS itself.

The company plans to release several components per month from now until September. February will get the intended project governance model, QT WebKit … Read more

Jeff almost didn't make it out of court this morning to be on the show, but he squirms out of Lady Justice's grasp just in time to join us, maybe with a few minutes in between to update his Facebook.

We'll talk today about Facebook's Timeline feature coming to a profile near you (whether you like it or not), last night's tech-heavy State of the Union Address, and who's responsible for the state of John Kerry's face.

Obama's made lots of promises in his speech this year, not the least of which is a pledge to give more technology training to Americans looking to expand their workforce skills.

He also mentioned an end to digital piracy and will host a Google+ video hangout on January 30 with questions accepted through the White House YouTube channel.… Read more