Sher Christopher
Charles Clary
People Too
Mabona
Bert Simons
Simon Schubert
Emma Van Leest
Andreas Kocks
Jen Stark
Peter Callesen
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
It’s Embrace Your Geekness Day!
It’s Embrace Your Geekness Day!:
It’s Embrace Your Geekness Day and clearly we’re celebrating too! Here’s a classic Geeky WIN and a few less than awesome Geek FAILS.
Trekkie Robbery WIN
Submitted through the FAIL Uploader
Geek Squad Fail
Picture by: guitarpeggio Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader
Nerd Fail
Picture by: TheBlackCat Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader
Music Lovers, Take Note: Rdio Debuts Android App (Bonus: 2,000 Invites)
Music Lovers, Take Note: Rdio Debuts Android App (Bonus: 2,000 Invites):
It’s only been a couple of weeks since Rdio launched in the US and I started using it, and I’m already pretty sure I’ll be hooked for a long, long time – and I’ve tested a bunch of online music buying, sharing and streaming services in the past few years so that’s saying something. Check out Erick’s review if you’re interested in learning more about the service.
Anyway, if you’re a music fan and a proud owner of an Android-powered smartphone, today’s a good day. The startup, which was founded and financially backed by Skype, Kazaa and Joost founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has just announced that its oft-requested Android application is now available, albeit in beta form.
If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you’re all set already. If you carry around an Android-powered handset, all you need is an invite for Rdio to get cracking. Were you too slow to take advantage when we offered you 1,000 trial accounts? We hear you: another 2,000 TechCrunch readers can sign up for an invite to Rdio right here.
The free Android app lets you do much of the same as its counterpart for the iPhone; it lets you browse and listen to the collection and playlists you’ve stored in the cloud using Rdio. You can also search for (and play) a couple millions of songs, and sync music – meaning full songs, full albums and playlists – to listen to when you’re offline.
Yet, as mentioned, the app is in beta, which Rdio warns about in its blog post:
Major functionality is available, and we’ve tested it on a variety of devices and versions of Android, but there’s still more to do — we wanted to get it in your hands as soon as possible. We’ll keep working on it so expect frequent updates, and don’t install it if you can’t live with the occasional quirk or even crash.
I’ve run into a bug or two with the iPhone app and Web service as well, so I indeed wouldn’t recommend to use Rdio as a 100% replacement for iTunes or whatever you currently use for buying and listening to music on your computer. I do think, however, that services like Rdio (and Spotify, Pandora, MOG, We7 and many others) will be shaping the future of digital music purchasing and listening in the next few years, so make sure to give it a whirl if you consider yourself an early adopter.
To download, just go to the Rdio website or click this link from your Android smartphone. The app should work fine on devices running Android 1.6 or higher, but the startup promises it will support phones running Android 1.5 soon, too.
Twitter Starts Name Dropping In Search Results — Huge For User Discovery
Twitter Starts Name Dropping In Search Results — Huge For User Discovery:
Admit it, 99% of your Twitter searches are for vanity purposes. You do it, I do it, we all do it. And such a search revealed a potentially very useful and powerful new feature today. Twitter is now injecting name results into searches on twitter.com when you do a regular search for a name.
To be clear, Twitter has had a name search option for some time, but this is the first time they’ve put it front and center in the main tweet stream when you do a search. As you can see, name results now appear just above regular realtime tweet results for name searches. These names are displayed horizontally rather than vertically (as regular tweets are).
This feature adds another user discovery layer to Twitter. And this is potentially the biggest one yet. For example, when I search for “LeBron James” now I can see his actual account on top of the results and follow it with one click (thanks to the hovercard). That’s very powerful.
Twitter recently updated its docs to reflex this new people discovery feature. A year ago, they tweaked their title tags to help with user discovery for SEO.
The feature also uncovers a number of false or fake accounts — so verified accounts are likely to be more important than ever. Twitter smartly added the little blue checkbox next to name in these results to show the verified one (and presumably puts those ones first).
Expect celebrities on Twitter to get a lot more followers with with new feature.
Information provided by CrunchBase
Connecting a Google account to your older YouTube account
Following YouTube’s acquisition by Google in 2006, new YouTube signups were given the choice between two different account systems to power their YouTube experience: the original YouTube account system (built in 2005) or the Google account system.
In May 2009, we started requiring all new YouTube usernames to be powered by Google accounts.
Now, we’re gradually asking all remaining pre-May 2009 users still using the older YouTube account system to connect a Google account to their YouTube username. For now, it’s an optional step, but eventually it’ll be required in order to continue using your YouTube username.
Before we go any further, we should clarify three important facts:
So what’s the point of asking people to connect a Google account to their older YouTube account? Here are the main reasons:
If you have an older YouTube account and you’d like to link to a new or existing Google account today, just visit this page and choose to link to an existing Google account or a brand new one. You can also visit our 'Linked YouTube/Google Accounts' topic in the Help Center for more information on common questions and problems.
And, as a reminder, if you’d like to review all of the services and data associated with your Google account at a glance, visit the Google Privacy Dashboard.
In May 2009, we started requiring all new YouTube usernames to be powered by Google accounts.
Now, we’re gradually asking all remaining pre-May 2009 users still using the older YouTube account system to connect a Google account to their YouTube username. For now, it’s an optional step, but eventually it’ll be required in order to continue using your YouTube username.
Before we go any further, we should clarify three important facts:
- YouTube usernames themselves aren’t going anywhere. No matter when you signed up for YouTube, or if you’re currently associated with a Google account, you’ll still be “LifeOfTheParty29” (aka “your username”) on YouTube.
- A Google account is not necessarily a Gmail account. You can create a Google account with any email address through many different Google products, just like you can create a Twitter or Facebook account with any email address. Of course, you can choose to use Gmail as the email address for your Google account.
- Connecting your existing YouTube username to an existing Google account doesn’t start sharing your YouTube activity to your Buzz followers; it’s only an account connection behind the scenes, and it’s still up to you to decide whether or not to bring YouTube into the rest of your Google life.
So what’s the point of asking people to connect a Google account to their older YouTube account? Here are the main reasons:
- Improved account security. The Google account system is robust and will help reduce spam across the site; users will get a slew of security and safety features that Google has spent the past decade developing.
- A single account system. This may not mean much to anyone outside of the YouTube engineering team, but behind the scenes it’s extremely complicated to support two different account systems. Having all users on the same account system not only simplifies matters, but more important, it makes it much easier to use Google technologies to keep the site running smoothly (over two billion views a day and counting), as well as introduce new functionality.
If you have an older YouTube account and you’d like to link to a new or existing Google account today, just visit this page and choose to link to an existing Google account or a brand new one. You can also visit our 'Linked YouTube/Google Accounts' topic in the Help Center for more information on common questions and problems.
And, as a reminder, if you’d like to review all of the services and data associated with your Google account at a glance, visit the Google Privacy Dashboard.
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