user

Imagine seeing an ad on Facebook for a retailer like American Apparel or Target, and clicking a button to pass a 15-percent-off discount code to someone on your friends list. For advertisers looking to tap into the power of social networks, it sounds tantalizing.

That's the thinking behind "Engagement Ads," the new "experimental" advertising technology that social network Facebook unveiled last week. With the new program, members of Facebook can leave comments on participating ads, add the brands to their list of "fan pages," and use them to send friends virtual gifts. For … Read more

Microsoft offered up a few more details on Tuesday about its upcoming online video game marketplace for aspiring game developers.

Originally announced in February, Microsoft will allow user-generated games to be sold on its Xbox Live service this fall. On Tuesday, the company said it will let the developers keep up to 70 percent of the revenue generated by their games.

The scenario is similar to Apple's App Store, which sells applications for the iPhone created by developers that pay a fee to put their creations for sale in the online store.

Game developers will have to pay $99 … Read more

Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights … Read more

Microsoft's fourth annual Next-Gen PC Design Competition put entrants to the task of dreaming up concepts that not only offer eye-catching aesthetics, but also cater to people's passions.

Check out News.com's gallery on the competition, featuring designs that tap into niches like travel, sports, fitness, cooking, and children. Winning concepts were inspired by everything from napkins to building blocks to the everyday book.

Who would have believed Google's geographic Web services could actually get your adrenaline going?

Granted, these aren't real video games, but two Web sites are pushing what can be done with interactive interfaces to Google Maps and Google Earth.

The first, taking advantage of Google Maps' new ability to work with Flash applications, lets you drive a car, bus, or truck around Google Maps. It won't bat an eye if you drive through a building or into the ocean, but Katsuomi Kobayashi, the programmer from Osaka, Japan, who wrote it, was happy to note that the software … Read more

Creating good User Experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good Employee Experiences (EX - I'm trademarking that!). That's the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest's success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. "You have to treat your employees like customers," he told Fortune in 2001. "When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us."...

[W]hen … Read more

Kwiry, the memory-saving tool I wrote about back in December, has just put out a useful update for people who don't like to type. Users can now send photos to their Kwiry stream in hopes of digging up a search for it later. The company is hoping people will use this to catalog things they come across in everyday life, and bookmark them for later like people do with links on services like Delicious and Magnolia.

Kwiry's creators insist this isn't a photo-hosting service--just a tool to help people dig up more information about something they've … Read more

Social news site Digg is launching a new version of its comment system soon. The current iteration, which has received both ire and admiration from users, is changing for the better with several tweaks that will be the most noticeable for power users who troll the site for hours each day.

Of the advancements, the most noticeable is in load times, which have been tweaked by having comments load as users scroll down the page instead of all at once. Users can also now change their votes on other user's comments, and even delete something they've said at … Read more

Well, Microsoft has finally come clean about the real motivation behind Vista's User Account Control feature. As Tom Espiner's reports from the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft UAC Program Manager David Cross admits that UAC was designed to annoy users.

Espiner quotes Cross telling the security-conference audience that negative user reaction was the only way to coax independent software vendors to update their applications for Vista. As fewer programs violated Vista's rules, users would have to click through fewer UAC prompts.

I'd feel worse about being manipulated by the biggest corporation in the world … Read more