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werewolf

Your Netflix streaming Halloween playlist

Whether you're throwing a big Halloween party or just planning a simple night in pretending you're not home and hiding from trick-or-treaters, you'll need a little cinematic entertainment, even if it's just as background noise.

My go-to used to be the nonstop scary movies on AMC, but in recent years the quality has taken a steep dive, abandoning true genre classics such as "Night of the Demon" for pointless schlock (to wit, endless repeats of "Halloween 4-6").

Fortunately, a high-quality alternative has presented itself in the form of the Netflix streaming service, which continues to add great atmospheric fright films on a regular basis.… Read more

Why do young techies want to be werewolves?

SEBASTOPOL, Calif.--By day, Silicon Valley's young elite were scribbling frenetically on whiteboards in the conference rooms at O'Reilly Media's corporate complex here, with executives and engineers from normally competing companies working together to tackle problems from open-standard implementation to social-network privacy. But in the evening, their dark sides emerged.

The occasion was Social Web FooCamp held here last weekend, a relatively new offshoot of the annual invite-only "unconference" that Tim O'Reilly started throwing in 2003. And the after-hours activity was Werewolf, a strategy game that has been a craze among the Web 2.… Read more

Night of the living apps

SAN DIEGO-- At the side-by-side ETech and Graphing Social Patterns conferences, before the Monday Night Werewolf social event kicks off, there is the AppNite session, in which 10 developers showcase their new apps, in five minutes each. It's like a mini Demo. But the apps are rougher, and because of that, a bit more intriguing. The first six apps were made for Facebook, the last four were Open Social demos.

Facebook apps

Biggest Brain is a quiz game that challenges you with geeky brain speed tests such as counting blocks on-screen. Then you get to compare the "size of your brain" with your Facebook pal. Verdict: You Don't Know Jack it ain't, sorry.

Just Three Words is a group story-telling app for Facebook in which participants weave a story by entering three words at a time, in a giant text free-for-all. The presenter said, without a hint of irony, that these stories are helping "weave engagement at a level of depth." He also said a lot of the stories can't be run on a family site. What would you do with three words? Verdict: Fun parlor game, less likely to get the developers sued into oblivion than Scrabulous.

Puzzle Messages lets you enter a message for another person or to put on s site, but it scrambles it as a jigsaw puzzle, which your viewers have to reconstruct before they can read. Works in Facebook or you can put on a blog or other social site. Verdict: Someone please find this app on Facebook (I couldn't) and send me a press release as a puzzle message so I can mock it. Please.

Ski & Snowboard is a Facebook app that lets you find resorts that other users like. You can also collect "badges," like lift tickets, to show others where you're been. There's a bit more here, too: There's a mini wall for notes, a way to find ski buddies by level (it asks you to confirm double-black-diamond eligibility by having your friends to confirm it). And there's a trip planner sub-app within. Verdict: Impressive demo. A lot of functionality for a very focused, and very social, activity. See also Liftopia.

… Read more