Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.
At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.
Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.
Last year's Oxford word of the year was the decidedly less mainstream "hypermiling."
A correction was made at 9:25 a.m. PT on November 21. It was players of PackRat, not PackRat itself, that were threatened with account suspension.
Well, this hacker has quite the sense of humor.
Reports started spreading this weekend that iPhone users in Australia had been falling victim to "ikee," a worm that replaces default wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley, the British pop singer whose song "Never Gonna Give You Up" has gained eternal infamy thanks to the mainstreaming of the "Rickrolling" prank craze. The photo is accompanied by the message "ikee is never gonna give you up," and it's apparently quite difficult to remove. According to security firm Sophos, this is the first worm detected that targets the iPhone.
The vulnerability is pretty specific: the phones must be jailbroken in order to be affected, and it appears to spread by searching an infected phone's contacts to find other jailbroken-phone users who have installed the Unix software SSH (secure shell) but haven't yet changed their passwords from Apple's default root password, "alpine."
Sophos says that it has not heard of any occurrences of the worm outside Australia, and that while it doesn't appear to do anything worse than irritate and embarrass affected users, that it highlights the vulnerabilities that jailbroken phones face.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is a lightning rod for controversy, but a recent attempt to keep a low profile might just result in, well, more press. The onetime vice presidential hopeful Palin, who stepped down from the governorship this summer, will be speaking at a Right to Life event in Milwaukee, Wis., on Friday evening, and her team has mandated that there are no reporters allowed--or gadgets.
According to CNN, laptops, cell phones, cameras, and anything else that could potentially be used as a recording device will not be allowed into the auditorium. Tickets to the event were $30.
It's not an unprecedented move by any means. Advance screenings of movies, for instance, regularly have a no-cell-phones policy now that just about any phone can be used as a recording device. And Palin is hardly the only high-profile politician to put a no-press, no-recording rule in place for a speech: Former Vice President Al Gore did just that for a keynote address at the RSA security conference in early 2008.
But the funny part is that banning the press will generally do very little good, since anyone with a notebook or a good memory could easily post quotes or a synopsis to a blog or Twitter account within minutes of the event ending. In this case, as with Gore's press ban at RSA, it's likely that Palin's move will just end up stirring up more buzz.
Considering her book "Going Rogue: An American Life" is coming out in a matter of days, that might ultimately turn out well--or not.
Not only is this Super Mario costume homemade and hilarious, the guy sure can boogie.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)Really, America? Can we talk?
You see, I received this press release from Experian Hitwise in my in-box about the most-searched-for Halloween costumes in the U.S., based on searches in the month ending October 24 that ended in "costume." And the ranking was led by "Michael Jackson costume" and "Balloon Boy costume." OK, so those are timely, albeit a little bit more than unimaginative.
But it doesn't stop there. Following that were "Tinkerbell," "Catwoman," and "Poison Ivy," indicating that most costume searches are either on behalf of women or men who really want to make a fool of themselves. Among the top costume searches beginning with the word "sexy" were "sexy sailor costume," "sexy nurse costume," "sexy witch costume," and "sexy Queen of Hearts costume." (What would Lewis Carroll think?) And high-ranking costume searches beginning with "adult" include "adult cat costume," "adult Snow White costume," and "adult Care Bear costume."
I don't care what you dress up as for Halloween. Have fun with it. But just think about it. Adult Care Bear costume. Really. It's a costume that's probably itchy and uncomfortable, unflattering, and will embarrass the heck out of your kids if you have any. Not to mention that there's no obvious relevance to current events or pop culture that would negate the creepiness factor, considering the last time I checked the Care Bears have been around since 1981. Whatever happened to cowboys and pirates and disgraced politicians? Hitwise stats have officially weirded me out.
More depressing figures: Compared with the same time period last year, Hitwise found a 97 percent jump in searches for "pet costumes" this year. Those poor dogs.
CNET News' Caroline McCarthy gets to test out a Taser T3 device, but much to her chagrin, she wasn't allowed to shoot it at a live human.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
DUBLIN, Calif.--Don't tase me, bro. Really.
CNET News took a trip to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office Regional Training Center on Friday to have a look at some of the newest equipment from Taser, which was among the companies showing off weaponry at the UrbanShield 2009 training event. The electric-shock gadgets are controversial and have drummed up some bad press over the years for causing the occasional serious injury or even fatality. But the company has maintained its insistence that they are significantly safer than the alternative (i.e. guns).
We didn't get to tase anybody. But we did get to see the Shockwave, a big Taser device that can incapacitate five or six people at a time, which company representatives told us is designed for crowd-control situations and can be triggered remotely via a 100-foot firing wire.
There are also two recently released handheld Tasers: the X3, which unlike its single-shot predecessors can fire off a total of three shots at once; and the XREP, a Taser projectile that's fired out of a modified 12-gauge shotgun (the modifications ensure that regular cartridges can't be used instead). Both devices are bright yellow, which representatives told us means they're easily identified as non-lethal weapons.
You can't go to your local sporting goods store and buy these Tasers--unlike the smaller, consumer-grade C2 devices, the X3 and XREP lines are only sold to police, military, and sometimes animal-control professionals. Taser International's vice president of training, Rick Guilbault, told us that a Taser was once used to pry off a rogue python that had wrapped itself around a woman's arm and wouldn't let go.
Another time, a Taser was successfully used to safely deter an out-of-control alligator in Florida. "But then they tried it in Australia on those big salt-water crocodiles," Guilbault related, "and that didn't work. It just made them mad."
Look what just landed in the department of bad social media campaigns! Toilet paper brand Charmin has put out a casting call for five bloggers who will spend five weeks working as "Charmin Ambassadors" in a pop-up bathroom in New York's Times Square.
I'm going to say it right now: The Procter & Gamble-owned brand has creeped me out for a while with those commercials that feature cartoon bears gallivanting in a forest with rolls of soft and fluffy toilet paper and then sneaking behind trees to do their business. I don't want to think about pooping bears. Sorry. But this new campaign, detailed Tuesday in an article in the Business Courier of Cincinnati, really pushes it to a new level.
"Job requirements include interacting with hundreds of thousands of bathroom guests, maintaining their own blogs and content on Charmin-branded Web sites and popular social media sites, and sharing family-friendly video from the restroom space and surrounding areas," the Business Courier article explained. I'm afraid this is pretty much validating and encouraging those weirdos who like to post to Twitter about bathroom visits.
The new campaign tag line is "Enjoy the go." GROSS.
The bloggers will be paid $10,000 apiece, which I sincerely hope they will use to invest in a name change and a wardrobe of high-end disguises, because if I were one of them I'd be way too embarrassed to go on through life with my current identity.
But don't worry! Charmin has loads of experience so there's absolutely no way this will look stupid. According to the Business Courier of Cincinnati, "This is not the first year Charmin has hosted a temporary, or pop-up, bathroom in Times Square. In 2008, it kicked off a "Plush Potties for the People" tour that traveled from Santa Monica, Calif., to Times Square, where it settled for the holidays."
Plush Potties for the People. As one of my colleagues put it, "You've got to be s***ting me."
One blogger's take on how Twitter's error message could be turned into a microbrew.
(Credit: GorillaSushi.com)Eric Schmidt, I blame you.
Right as you announce that you're holding your third-quarter earnings call from atop a treasure chest made of sustainably-harvested teak filled with $22 billion in gold doubloons (okay, so maybe I'm being a bit imaginative there), a smattering of prominent folks in the dot-com industry start coming out of the woodwork with ideas that would've sounded absolutely ludicrous a few months ago. Namely, they're getting into the booze business.
Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are launching a wine label for charity, it was revealed on Thursday. Then, on Friday, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher posted the fruits of a discussion with former AOL exec and current Pilot Group venture capitalist Bob Pittman, whose latest venture is the $275-a-bottle Casa Dragones tequila. (We first reported on Pittman's tequila ambitions about a year and a half ago, but didn't have any further details.)
Have you seen the Twitter feed for Casa Dragones? It's awesome. "Sipping Casa Dragones with Alec Baldwin, Tory Burch, Andre Balazs, Bon Jovi and friends last night at East Hampton's Blue Parrot." Or, "Parthenon, new Acropolis museum, Cy Twombly's opening. Leaving Athens now after a night of sipping. Hot!"
One more entry in the space and this is officially an industry trend. Anybody else in the VC or entrepreneurship community want to fess up to launching a tangy new microbrew (Fail Whale Pale Ale?), a sleek new underground cocktail lounge (muddle those strawberries like you mean it!), or a high-end moonshine distillery nestled in the hills of Marin County? Or who're the real innovators readying their business plans for the chance that the Golden State opens the floodgates to marijuana?
Come on, you can tell me. I won't bite...but I might ask you to buy me a drink.
All joking aside, there have been some rather positive signs for the health of the industry, at least on the surface. There was Eric Schmidt's declaration this week of sunnier skies ahead (at least for Google). Facebook is rushing toward profitability faster than it expected. And next week, the annual Web 2.0 Summit rolls into San Francisco with its reliably impressive lineup of speakers: MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Some of their companies might not be in particularly terrific health right now, but I'm pretty sure they won't be talking about how much everything sucks.
Then you look at the party lineup. Microsoft has put together a Windows 7 launch party with a few edgy music acts on the bill. There's a start-up focused "After Dark" soiree at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel (from the invitation: "Explore the streets of the ever-changing Web 2.0 landscape. Whether you cruise the strip or creep down the alleys of the Web metropolis, meet us after dark for a night to remember." Ooh, scandal!) And MySpace, hastily trying to counter sputtering traffic with an ongoing executive shakeup that may or may not turn out well, is throwing one of its "Secret Shows" concerts and some folks are hearing they've booked alt-rock gods (and "Rock Band" staples) Weezer.
The open bars are crawling back onto my Google Calendar. The Dow has inched back into the five figures. And the Valley elite's wacky, expensive side projects are starting to make their way into the headlines.
It's great to see the tech industry's entrepreneurial spirit carrying over into well, spirits. But are we really seeing an end to our long, cold "nuclear winter," as Valley mainstay Marc Andreessen so eloquently put it back in April 2008 --or have we just been deceived by the calm, numbing, bloodstream-warming sensation of expensive sipping tequila?
Whatever. See you at happy hour.
(Credit:
Andrew Mager)
I smell a trend, and it smells like greasy pepperoni: Pizza chains Domino's and Pizza Hut both put out announcements on Thursday concerning their new social-media publicity strategies. In other words, there are new ways to bring the habit of stuffing one's face with mediocre pizza into one's ever-increasingly digital lifestyle.
Pizza Hut, for one, will be giving away free orders of "Stuffed Pizza Rolls" (Did you just hear that little cry? It was my arteries screaming for mercy at the mere thought of this) on July 4 to its Facebook fans and Twitter followers via a promotional code. This is, the pizza chain has said, to commemorate the milestone of one million Facebook fans as well as the hiring of its official "Twintern," an intern whose official job is to maintain the @pizzahut Twitter account.
Domino's, meanwhile, has revved up its online ordering system so that if you order a pizza you can track it on Facebook and Twitter, among other things.
Critics already say we're hooked up to Facebook and Twitter as though they were feeding tubes, so I guess it's appropriate. But all in all, neither campaign is as clever as that time that Burger King promised a free Whopper to people who could prove that they had deleted ten people from their Facebook friends list. (Facebook got mad and disbanded the campaign.)
Let me be clear about this. I live in New York, where we are very serious about the quality of our pizza. In fact, in this city if you make gross pizza you pretty much have to give it away for free, and not just as part of a one-day Twitter gimmick. Case in point: Crocodile Lounge, a bar on East 14th St. where if you buy a beer, they give you a voucher for free pizza. That is the truth, assuming you can elbow your way past the inebriated frat boys in order to reach the pizza pickup station in the back of the bar. Trust me, nobody would eat that pizza if it weren't free.
So what I mean to say is that I appreciate good pizza, and I don't give a hoot if the ordering process is spiced up with Twitter coupons, Facebook Connect tracking updates, a Ustream feed in the kitchen where it's made, or GPS chips to track it on Google Latitude. Social media does not make your food taste better, and as I recall from the last time I had some, both Domino's and Pizza Hut could use a leg up in the quality department.
It's sort of like toppings. Piling sausage, mushrooms, peppers, and bacon on top of a crappy slice of plain pizza does not make it a good slice of pizza. But a great slice of no-frills tomato pie? Absolutely priceless.
Geek humor abounds.
Parody singer "Weird Al" Yankovic poked fun at Segway riders three years ago with his rap song "White and Nerdy."
His latest single "Craigslist" skewers the people who can be found swapping wares and scoring dates on the classifieds ads site. (While there's a verse about the popular "missed connections" feature on Craigslist, there isn't otherwise mention of the current prostitution controversy that the site's been dealing with.)
The video and song are a professed homage to The Doors. Ray Manzarek, the former band's keyboardist, was enlisted to play on the track. And while the music itself will sound unmistakably familiar to Doors fans, Yankovic asserts it isn't a takeoff on a specific song,
The lyrics, by contrast, are unlike anything Jim Morrison would have dreamed up:
Got a trash can of Styrofoam peanuts, you can have em for free
You can drop by on the weekend and pick em up from me
But the trash can ain't part of the deal
Only givin' you the peanuts, get real
"Craigslist" is available for sale as a single now and will appear on an album that comes out next year.
The Doors parodying is spot-on. But the video and lyrics unfortunately aren't as funny as the over-the-top "White and Nerdy," which became a mild viral sensation on YouTube in 2006.
More importantly: I've e-mailed Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to gauge his reaction. He responded: "The thing's pretty funny!"
This post was updated at 11:48 a.m. PT with comment from Craig Newmark.
But did it Twitter?
Whenever Twitter's servers take a tumble--which, longtime users undoubtedly recall, used to be pretty frequently--the microblogging service brings up an image of a whale being lifted out of the water by a flock of birds. The creation of designer Yiying Lu, the "fail whale" has become pretty much iconic among Web geeks.
But the official blog of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., has informed us all that the word "twitter" was associated with whales long before Evan Williams and Biz Stone were dealing with customer complaints, sort of like how "muggles" was pothead slang decades before "Harry Potter" came along.
"Twitter," believe it or not, once referred to an obscure piece of sperm whale anatomy that was typically only encountered when whalers were chopping up one of the unfortunate creatures.
The Whaling Museum dug up an old document called "Report of the Commissioner for the year ending June 30, 1902: Aquatic products in arts and industries: fish oils, fats, and waxes. Fertilizer from aquatic products," which we assume must've been absolutely fascinating reading. On page 197, the term "twitter" is explained (in way more than 140 characters): it's a "thread-like or membranous substance ranging through the contents of the case...from 2 to 3 inches thick, glutinous, and extremely tough" in the head of a sperm whale. You know, like Moby Dick.
The document continues: "In decapitating the sperm whale, especially in severing near the bunch of the neck, a very sharp spade is required to cut through this tough and elastic formation. Although it is very difficult to manipulate, an economical whaleman never throws this substance away." Um, that sounds kind of horrible and gross. I'll take the more recent definition of "twitter" any day.
(NB: I stumbled upon this thanks to a link from a Twitter account that claims to be written by the massive whale hanging on the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.)
