You guys have no idea how guilty I felt when I neglected to post an FNU both on the blog and YouTube. Although technically, I had a special “Black Friday” edition of FNU on the YouTube channel. Did you see it?
Now, enough delay. Here’s your FNU chock full of tech news goodness.
Facebook Redesign…Again: The social networking site will be making some more changes to its look and feel. This time, instead of random changes that didn’t seem to make sense when they first debuted (like the Live Feed vs. the News Feed…seriously, is this Twitter?), Facebook will be making changes to make the interface simpler and easier to use.
One major change will be where notifications appear. New notifications, messages, and friend requests will now appear on the left hand side of the page, next to the Facebook logo. You will also be able to see your current profile picture along with your most recent status update.
The search box will be moved to the center of the site. Facebook hopes that users will be doing more searching as the site begins to use real time searching more often. (Most likely to compete with Twitter.)
Another major change is the ability to see messages in your inbox without having to leave the homepage. Currently, when you compose a new message, a dialogue box pops up without users having to leave the current page they are on. The new inbox will work the same way, and this change will make sending/viewing messages quicker and easier. In a sense, Facebook wants to make us more productive on their site.
As for the issue of the Live Feed & News Feed, both will still be on the homepage, and users will be given their choice of which one they want to see. Personally, I prefer the Live Feed more because I like keeping up to date with all my friends, but honestly, do we really need to know EVERYTHING that goes on?
The News Feed is great because you only see things from people you interact with the most, and you don’t see every little detail, but I wish that it would stay up to date. Guess I have to deal with the Live Feed for now.
No word yet on when the new redesign will launch for all users. Let’s just hope this time, people won’t complain…as much.
Cyber Monday = Fail Whale?: Not only did many online stores have increased traffic this past Monday, but Twitter did as well. A high rate of errors occured, and numerous users were seeing the lovely Fail Whale more often then they should have.
The culprit turned out to be the Lists feature, and the site had removed the feature temporarily until the problem was fixed. Twitter Lists returned at around 6:30 Eastern Time.
As for other websites, they seemed to handle the mass amount of traffic well. My question is, what exactly were people tweeting about to cause the site problems? I can understand if Twitter was overflowing with tweets on Black Friday, since most people would have probably tweeted that they were waiting in line or angry that something was sold out in the first 20 minutes of a store’s opening. But Cyber Monday? Just because you’re on the Internet doesn’t mean you need to tweet that you’re online…then again, that would defeat the whole purpose of Twitter.
Google Wave Catches Crooks: I recently got invited to Google Wave, and after watching videos and reading articles about it, I finally sat down at my desk, stared at my screen, and asked a question I’m sure many other Google Wave users have asked:
“What the hell am I suppose to do with this?”
Google Wave is like an email and instant messaging client mashed into one application. You can chat with others while sharing pictures, movies, and even maps with them. While Wave seems like another Twitter competitor (for some reason it seems like everyone is trying to take Twitter down…), the Seattle Times has found a new purpose for Wave: Catching a Killer.
Anyone with information about a man suspected for killing four Seattle Police officers is encouraged to share that information on the public wave. The wave started with a few participants, but as of now, it is currently flowing with information from hundreds of participants. Suspect descriptions to maps of his possible whereabouts have already been shared on the wave. It’s amazing to see all the information circulating.
If police do decide to look through the wave, they are going to have a bit of a task separating credible sources and useful information from junk. Nonetheless, this is just another great example of how information is becoming more and more accessible to us everyday.
Sports Illustrated Virtual Magazine Demo Using Apple Tablet Prototype?: The world of print media is slowly transitioning to the digital world, and Sports Illustrated is the next in line. The magazine is preparing to make a digital version of Sports Illustrated that can be viewed on Tablet PCs. Some advantages to using a Tablet include the ability to view video clips, so instead of just reading and seeing pictures of your favorite teams, you can see sports highlights as well. Advertisements will also be in video, along with its text and print counterparts.
On a side note, fans of the SI: Swimsuit edition will be glad to know that the digital tablet version will also have video clips. Moving on.
A YouTube video demos the SI Digital Edition with a tablet. What’s interesting is that there a few…”familiar” elements to it. One button to return to the home screen, two fingers to zoom in…You might even argue that the tablet was a complete iPhone ripoff.
But if you watch the demo video, you can notice some little things from Mac OS X, such as the distinct scroll bar. I’ll let you guys be the judge of it. Link to the video is down at the bottom of the post.
Want a Mac? Don’t Have the Money? Buy a Generic Mac: You’ve probably never heard of a company called Psyster. If you have, then you probably know that the company has been sued by Apple due to the Macintosh clones they have created and sold. Apple’s lawsuit seemed to have put an end to the Mac clone company’s ways.
But they didn’t. Psyster is still making Mac clones, but the catch is that the computers don’t come with Mac OS X preinstalled on the system. If you are looking into a generic Mac, you could easily buy an OS X using machine for more than half the price of an iMac. The only catch is that you’d need to shell out money for the operating system.
For now, these Mac clones seem legal since Psystar is no longer installing Mac OS X on the machines to violate any of Apple’s terms. I won’t have any links to the Psystar site to avoid any legal trouble I could get into, but there’s always Google (or Bing).
Links to Above Stories:
Facebook Changes Its Look…Again.
RJ Roxas