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Comcast Turns Your iPad Into a Remote Control and TV Guide. Comcast has just released its new Xfinity TV app for the iPhone and iPad. The app, which will be demoed Monday at the Web 2.0 Summit, acts as both a remote control and a TV guide for your compatible Comcast set-top box. Right now, the Xfinity TV app [iTunes link] doesn't let you watch video content on your device, but Xfinity TV content will be coming to the iPad next month. We took some time to play around with the app and we're really impressed with what the Comcast team has accomplished. The Xfinity TV app — which is free — works by connecting to your compatible DVR or cable set-top boxes. When you log in to the app, you're presented with what boxes you have that are compatible with that service (some boxes aren't compatible) and you can test and name the boxes and DVR units that you can control.

Once you enter in your zip code and choose your channel offerings, you are presented with an interactive, searchable TV guide. When you click on "watch on TV," your channel changes. The Scott Adams Blog: Facebook Killer. More Followers (scenario "golf") - Web, Twitter, Social Networking & Foursquare Thoughts. I was tweeting with @Caerleon_Golf (unsurprisingly a golf club located in Caerleon, South Wales), and they asked the very relevant question: Q. “How do we get more followers?!” This is a valid question – and one that is asked across all manner of sectors – so much so that I thought this might make a good series!. Anyway, my first reaction to this was: Q. “Hmmmm….who do you want to follow you?” More followers is easy. So, sarcasm aside, hopefully you can see why I felt it important to ask may previous question?

The revealing answer back was: A. Ok…(and I’ll concentrate on Twitter here) 1) Twitter is going through huge growth. 2) Check out the other local golf clubs. 3) Who plays golf? 4) Why not incentivise? 5) Above all take Twitter seriously. …and these are Friday night thoughts after a beer or two. Joel 15/Nov/2010 – udpated for minor typos Like this: Like Loading... Use the #Twitter Selective Status #Facebook app? This checkbo. A world of tweets. Facebook's rumoured email offering raises hopes of a spam-free future.. too high? | Technology. There's a lot of excitement about what Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is expected to launch later today (at around 6pm UK time).

The expectation is that it's going to be a Gmail killer which will introduce an email client only for its users - that is, only for the 500m-plus people who have signed up to the network. From one perspective, it seems odd: there's already email of sorts within Facebook, and instant messaging, so why would it want to let its brand start to spread soggily around the web by going free of the site? But Zuckerberg is not someone who thinks in terms of brands; he thinks in terms of permeating the entire web with his product. Some of the excitement is that "Project Titan", as it's rumoured to be named, could be used to filter out spam. After all, the thinking goes, because Facebook insists that you say who you are, and because you have to connect to people to be able to "email" them within the site, it's going to kill spam. Why would that put spammers off? X Factor 2010: Wagner Carrilho's past as a pet lion owner revealed.

By Jody Thompson Updated: 15:54 GMT, 13 October 2010 He's known on television as one of the x Factor 'wildcards' - but Brazilian Wagner Carrilho appears to be even more of a 'wildcard' in real life as it's emerged he used to have a pet LION. Wagner, who now lives near Dudley, West Midlands, owned the creature back in his native Brazil after a lady friend gave it him as a an eight-week-old cub. Sources close to the opera singer say the tame beast used to curl up at night with his best friend, a Samoyed dog. Grrreat posing: X-Factor hopeful Wagner Carrilho pictured with his pet lion on a beach in his native Brazil A picture of him in swimming trunks holding the big cat's tail on a beach was used to promote windows and conservatories firm he used to run in Netherton near Dudley in the 1990s.

Wagner - picked by judge Louis Walsh as the wildcard in his over-28s category - eventually closed Xpress Conservatories and opened The Martial Arts and Dance Gym in Cradley Heath, West Midlands. Who breaks a Twitterer upon a wheel? In recent days Britain has started to resemble an earlier era of intolerance. People are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to be themselves, but the Police, the judiciary and the Establishment are showing worrying signs of not understanding this shift in society.

Two recent cases, the “Twitter Joke Trial” and the “#welovebaskers” case currently exploding on Twitter serve to highlight this. And there is a direct comparison to an earlier era. In 1968 William Rees-Mogg, as editor of The Times newspaper, quoted Poet Alexander Pope, for an editorial about the “Redlands” court case brought against the Rolling Stones. The Stones had been partying at a house, whereupon they’d been busted by the Police for possessing a small amount of drugs.

The case resulted in prison sentences for Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Pass notes No 2,880: Spartacus | UK news. Mythbusting: Turning down work can boost your business. Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. The Firefox add-in Firesheep caused quite an uproar a few weeks ago, and justifiably so. Here's how it works: Connect to a public, unencrypted WiFi network.

In other words, a WiFi network that doesn't require a password before you can connect to it. Install Firefox and the Firesheep add-in. Crazy! Well, no. The web is kind of a primitive medium. GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: diy.stackexchange.com Connection: keep-alive User-Agent: Chrome/7.0.517.44 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Cookie: diyuser=t=ZlQOG4kege&s=8VO9gjG7tU12s If-Modified-Since: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:41:12 GMT These are the typical sort of HTTP headers your browser sends to a website on every click.

And guess what? Now that you know how cookies work (and I'm not saying it's rocket surgery or anything), you also know that what Firesheep does is relatively straightforward: Listen to all HTTP traffic. All Firesheep has to do, really, is listen. So why wasn't this a problem in, say, 2003? Pontypool Park :: Pontypool, Torfaen. Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #21. Singel-Minded: How Facebook Could Beat Google to Win the Net | Epicenter. ANALYSIS — In 1993, The New Yorker ran a famous cartoon with two dogs near a computer, with one mutt telling the other “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog.”

Oh, how times have changed. In the Facebook internet, everyone knows exactly what breed of dog you are. That was Facebook’s real trick — convincing the world to identify themselves online. They pulled that off by giving net users a place to share photos and pithy updates, when the real purpose of Facebook, it turns out, is to layer identity over the fabric of the web. Google slayed Microsoft and Yahoo in the battle for search supremacy but it has been slowly losing momentum in what may turn out to be the real war — the one for the display ad revenues — to an unlikely foe: the dorm-room-born Facebook. For years, Google’s natural enemies seemed to be Microsoft and Yahoo. We’ve seen a public pissing fight this week over who owns social network contact information, but that’s just the start. Continue reading …

iPAD SURVEY RESULTS: Everything You Need To Know About How People Use The iPad. Cheeky Monkeys :: Cwmbran, Torfaen. Making live events come alive online through Twitter. Support for Facebook Groups « Docs.com Blog. Since docs.com was released in April, many of you have asked for the ability to share a doc with a group of friends. Facebook recently released a new Groups capability designed to help you share and communicate with unique sets of friends. For example, I’ve recently created the group ‘Cosmos’ to discuss life and share interesting links with some of my closest friends from high school. Previously it wasn’t possible for 3rd party apps to add functionality to Groups. But by working with Facebook and by utilizing a set of new APIs, we’ve integrated Docs.com functionality into Facebook Groups. We believe this is a significant step forward for Facebook users who want to share documents with family, friends, classmates or co-workers. Docs.com extends Facebook Groups in many ways.

Easily share Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files with a Group.Collaborate together by inviting fellow group members to either view and/or edit your documents. -Pat Kinsel [docs] View this post on docs.com here. Facebook's Paul Buchheit talks about Facebook, Google and his new gig | Technology | Los Angeles Times. Earlier today we reported that Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and founded FriendFeed,was leaving Facebook to join Y Combinator.

We caught up with Buchheit on his last day at Facebook. Q: What was it like working for Facebook? A: Very interesting. It's a really remarkable company. For me, it was especially interesting. I spent quite a bit of time at Google. There’s a big risk when you are at some place as successful as Google, you start to think you do everything right. Q: How was Facebook different from Google? A: A lot of the differences are subtle. Q: Facebook is getting ready to launch an e-mail product. A: No, I did not. Q: What did you work on at Facebook? A: Miscellaneous different things. Q: Do you have any thoughts about the contacts sharing spatbetween Google and Facebook? A: It's entertaining. Q: How did the offer from Y Combinator come about? A: Paul Graham had mentioned it several years back but I was looking to start FriendFeed at the time.

A: Probably on the order of 40. 9 Ways To Elevate Your Speaking To Black Belt Level. Let's say you know the standard speaking tips, tricks and fare. You're good... you can get by. How do you elevate things to the next level? Over the past few years, I've spoken at a lot of events. Beyond just speaking (and getting better at it by practicing), I am sharing the stage with many different types of speakers and speaking styles. It's in the nuances that you learn how the masters do it. So, if you're just getting started with presenting to audiences or if you're looking to really up your game, here are some of the bigger nuances that will take you from being an everyday speaker to being star that people want to see.

Limit the technology. Now, it's your turn. By Mitch Joel. 4 SEO Tips to Instantly Take Advantage of Google Instant Preview. The verdict is still out on how Google Instant is going to affect SEO, but after playing around with Google Instant Preview for a while, I’ve come up with a list of SEO tips that will help you stay ahead of the game and take advantage of the ever-evolving search landscape. Fine Tune That Meta Description Even with Google Instant Preview the searcher still needs to click on the magnifying glass in order to see a preview of your site. Clicking on the preview button is less of a commitment than clicking on a link, but you are still going to need to convince the searcher that it is worth their time to preview your website. Having an interesting well defined value proposition that fits within the allotted 150 characters is going to give you the best shot at having someone preview your site and that is half the battle.

Get Rid of That Flash Fix Those Header Tags Don’t Forget That Alt Text One idea that most people seem to agree on is that now looks matter . Twitter at Events: 60% of Tweets are During the Event. The folks at Amiando did a cool study looking at the Twitter usage associated with event hashtags. There are a number of cool findings in the report, but the one that stood out to me was that the vast majority of the tweets took place during the event, with a long tail before and after the event. What does this mean for event marketers? I think it means that you should make sure to have an event hashtag that is very easy to find at all times during the event. post it in the event rooms and on the event agenda and other materials.

Make it easy for people tweeting to have the hashtag handy. The second tip would be to have some way for people not at the event to engage with your content - a lot of the tweets were from people not actually at the event, and a lot of the people reading the tweets will not be there either. Link to Full Study (registration required) London Calling - Tweet-Up - Meet-Up Next Week. Introduction to the Foursquare API. Location-based services like Foursquare are all the rage. If you haven't heard about them yet, you will. It seems that everywhere you turn, people are using Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and other tools to "check in" to their favorite locations, share tips with other users about favorite drinks or dishes, and share all of this activity on other services like Twitter and Facebook. As a developer, you have to know this stuff. Social, and specifically, location-based services that use social platforms, represent a huge growth area for web and mobile developers.

Most of these services use some kind of RESTful service you can use to request JavaScript Serialized Object Notation (JSON) or XML data. Some, such as Facebook, don't require much authentication, while others, like Foursquare, have some feeds that do require authentication and some that don't. For the purposes of this article, I assume that you know something about PHP, but that's about it. What is Foursquare? Figure 1. Back to top <! ? Fosters&#039;s Channel. Twitter 101: Experts Provide a Brief How-To Guide and Overview on Best Practices | Age of Engagement. Twitter 101 : What to Tweet? Twitter and Your Personal Brand. Auto DMs meet a resounding defeat: &quot;They are 31 times more likely to hurt relationships than help&quot; In a blog post a week ago, I stated that Auto Direct Messages (Auto DMs) on Twitter are unwelcome. Many agreed that these preprogrammed messages sent to all new followers are annoying, but others vehemently disagreed.

To bring clarity to the topic, we conducted a survey that was completed by 336 individuals. The results are unequivocal: People hate to receive Auto DMs, think less of those who send them, and are quite likely to unfollow the senders or even report them as spam. My recommendation based on the survey results is short and sweet: Don’t send Auto DMs. No matter how much you rationalize that your Auto DM is more welcome, personal, social, authentic, or helpful than everyone else’s, the data from this casual survey speaks for itself: By a margin of 40 to 1, survey respondents who have an opinion on Auto DMs indicate they find them unwelcome and usually do not get any information of value in the Auto DMs they receive. Paying for Social Media Followers. RT @markgammon: Sounds like Monday&#039;s Facebook event is tied to MS Office... &lt;-- agree groups is key to this. Capsule, Gemini 12 - Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Commanded by Jim Lovell and piloted by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Gemini XII was launched on November 11, 1966 for a 4-day, 59-orbit mission. Highlights included 3 extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) by Aldrin, 5 hours 30 minutes total, in which he evaluated improved EVA techniques to manage workload and overheating during EVA. Aldrin made extensive use of handholds and footholds to prevent unwanted movement during his tasks, and his techniques were an important milestone toward effective astronaut use of EVA. During one of the spacewalks, Aldrin attached a tether to the docked Agena 12.

The tether allowed the crew to create an artificial gravity by separating the Gemini from the tethered Agena and firing thrusters to induce a slow spin. NASA transferred the Gemini XII spacecraft to the Smithsonian in 1968. Transferred from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Country of Origin United States of America Astronaut Buzz Aldrin James A. Manufacturer McDonnell Aircraft Corp. Type Materials. Report: Facebook event Monday relates to Office | Microsoft. Webinar on Demand: Double Your PPC Leads at Half the Cost. Uncle Glyn and Great Grandfather Tom. Altimeter’s report on Social Media Strategists: Real numbers behind the marketing imbalance in social media management.

Worker Rights Extend to Facebook, Labor Board Says. Local SEO Primer: How To Rank Higher In Google Place Search. 6 innovative uses of Tumblr by newsrooms :: 10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet. 5 Twitter Annoyances - Web, Twitter, Social Networking &amp; Foursquare Thoughts. How to do Twitter in 15 minutes a day. Track HTML5 Elements in Google Analytics | Higher Ed Analytics. Jones Soda Co. and J&amp;D&#039;s Foods Bottle Up Bacon. Mobileways.de - home of fine mobile applications. 3 Tips for Maximizing Engagement With Facebook Likes and Shares. Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website.

Mockingbird’s Wireframe Tool Now Sings To The Tune Of Real-Time Collaboration.