myspace
Music
Google Onebox Turns Search Pages Into Personal Radios
10:10AM Wilson Rothman | As rumoured, Onebox is a music search feature that appears inside Google search that will give you not a little 30-second clip, but a full song play. More »
Phones
12:31PM Nick Broughall | I don’t know what I was expecting from the INQ1, Three Mobile’s successor to the Skype phone and a tool for all almost all your social media needs on the go. But for some reason, the solidly built handset with its comfortable and intuitive interface actually surprised me. More »
Three’s INQ1 Social Media Phone Review
12:31PM Nick Broughall | I don’t know what I was expecting from the INQ1, Three Mobile’s successor to the Skype phone and a tool for all almost all your social media needs on the go. But for some reason, the solidly built handset with its comfortable and intuitive interface actually surprised me. More »
Entertainment
Internet Party 2: The MySpace Intervention
1:55AM Mark Wilson | The original Internet Party was a pretty funny video, but I’d say that the sequel is even tighter in its execution. Watch your favourite websites—almost scarily apt in their personification—tell MySpace that it’s time to stop. The actress playing IMDB is especially brilliant. More »
Online
1:48PM Nick Broughall | Our good old friend Angus Kidman is reporting over at APC that a new study has shown that companies who block social networking sites like Facebook at work are less likely to hang onto their staff than companies that support the online timewaster.
The study was carried out by the law firm Deacons, and found that of the 691 workers questioned, 16% said that having access to social networking sites would be a major influence in choosing a job. When you drop the age bracket to people under 24, that percentage rises to almost 25%.
Other nuggets included the 76% of people who believed that there were benefits to companies who allowed social networking, and the 68% who thought that having access to social networks showed they were trusted. Of course, how the figures reached so high when only 62% of the surveyed workers actually had internet access at work doesn’t quite add up.
So what do you think? Does being able to poke friends on Facebook during your working day play a part in your job decision making? Is Facebook blocked at your work? And do you see these sites as timewasters that are only going to hurt productivity? Post your thoughts in the comments!
[APC]
More »
Study Shows No Facebook Means No Staff (Kinda)
1:48PM Nick Broughall | Our good old friend Angus Kidman is reporting over at APC that a new study has shown that companies who block social networking sites like Facebook at work are less likely to hang onto their staff than companies that support the online timewaster.
The study was carried out by the law firm Deacons, and found that of the 691 workers questioned, 16% said that having access to social networking sites would be a major influence in choosing a job. When you drop the age bracket to people under 24, that percentage rises to almost 25%.
Other nuggets included the 76% of people who believed that there were benefits to companies who allowed social networking, and the 68% who thought that having access to social networks showed they were trusted. Of course, how the figures reached so high when only 62% of the surveyed workers actually had internet access at work doesn’t quite add up.
So what do you think? Does being able to poke friends on Facebook during your working day play a part in your job decision making? Is Facebook blocked at your work? And do you see these sites as timewasters that are only going to hurt productivity? Post your thoughts in the comments!
[APC]
More »
Online
Kid Breaks Vacuum to Play Xbox Instead of Doing Chores; Mum Sells Xbox, Pranks His MySpace
7:01AM Adam Frucci | A 13-year-old kid in Virginia has backtalked to his mum for the last time. When he was told to do his chores instead of play Xbox 360, he went and intentionally broke the vacuum cleaner to get out of it. What’d his mum do? Well, she’s selling his Xbox and all his games on eBay. And that was before she found out he was surfing porn sites by checking out his browser’s cookies. More »
Online
12:24PM Nathan Taylor | MySpace has launched a beta of MySpace Apps, which are embeddable widgets based on Google’s OpenSocial Platform. They’re analogous to Facebook applications, although unlike Facebook apps, they can technically be used on any social networking platform that supports OpenSocial.
Much as with Facebook apps, the programs range from the ingenious to the utter ridiculous, but most of them compare well to their Facebook counterparts. There are just under 300 applications available now — but still no port of Scrabulous (in case you were wondering). [Wired Compiler]
More »
MySpace Copies Facebook: New Apps are Online
12:24PM Nathan Taylor | MySpace has launched a beta of MySpace Apps, which are embeddable widgets based on Google’s OpenSocial Platform. They’re analogous to Facebook applications, although unlike Facebook apps, they can technically be used on any social networking platform that supports OpenSocial.
Much as with Facebook apps, the programs range from the ingenious to the utter ridiculous, but most of them compare well to their Facebook counterparts. There are just under 300 applications available now — but still no port of Scrabulous (in case you were wondering). [Wired Compiler]
More »
Gadgets
CBS, MTV and MySpace Get Chummy With Chumby Network
12:00AM Matt Buchanan | While chumby has been available in beta for a while and we had our hands on the final version last week, today is the official public launch of the little Wi-Fi beanbag, as well as the Chumby Network, with big media content partners CBS, MTV, The Weather Channel, AOL Shoutcast, Scripps and more. The network is ad-supported, but you’ll be able to watch Letterman Top 10, grab MTV news (the scrolling app I sorta complained about) and more. We’ll have a full review later this week of the new fully loaded chumby. More »
Online
Dumb Crooks Drop Clues In MySpace, Facebook, Second Life
11:18PM Wilson Rothman | Turns out, it’s a dumb idea to post “I just killed two cops” on your MySpace page. That’s what some idiot did, and learned the hard way that cops are rediscovering their home computers, and hitting MySpace, Facebook and even Second Life in search of clues. Sure, there have always been the badge-wearing nerds at the back of the forensics lab who knew how to “Google” things and check the “e-mail” of bigger, dumber cops. But now other officers are wising up, according to an AP story. Homicide detectives and beat cops are going online and just poking around, and the dumbasses who think they won’t get caught by blabbing on their public pages are, well, getting totally nailed. In one recent example, a detective in Newark, N.J., tracked the alleged killers of three college students by mining MySpace pages maintained by the suspects and their friends. In another, pictures and prose posted online by the killer of Taylor Behl, a 17-year-old Virginia college freshman, connected him to the victim and ended up revealing where her body was stashed. And yeah, I’m embarrassed to say that it was in my home state of Indiana that some dick actually did write “I just killed two cops” on his MySpace page. As it turns out, he was even wrong about that: one of the cops survived. I suppose he will soon think of the state prison as his “second life.” [AP] More »
