The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Facebook Updates to Correct Wrong Part of Privacy Concerns

    Matthew Shaer:

    According to Facebook’s Lev Popov, beginning today, Facebook fans can flag the devices they use to sign onto the site – an Apple iPhone, for instance, or your laptop – and then request a notification when someone logs on to their account using an unapproved device. A similar functionality has long been available on platforms such AIM, but until now, it was absent from Facebook.

    Don’t get me wrong this is a great move, but it is not what people are really concerned about. We want to control our privacy.

  • Dell Makes a Device to Fit Between Your Smartphone and iPad

    Priya Ganapati:

    The Sony PlayStation Portable-sized Streak isn’t directly an iPad competitor. The Streak has a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen, a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor.

    Just right for the times when my iPhone is too small and my iPad is too big.

  • Paying Homage to the Space Shuttle

    Boston.com’s “Big Picture” tribute to the Space Shuttle. If you want to see how technologically advanced we are, just look at this amazing engineering.

  • This is how Apple rolls

    John Gruber:

    They achieve spectacular results one year at a time. Rather than expanding the scope of a new product, hoping to impress, they pare it back, leaving a solid foundation upon which to build.

    This is a must read.

  • Twitter Search Now Parses Shortened Links for Keywords

    Sarah Perez:

    It’s now parsing shortened URLs in order to discover additional keywords to aid in searches. In other words, Twitter isn’t only returning tweets where your search term is found in the 140 characters of text contained in the tweet itself, but also when your search term appears in the URL behind the pre-shortened link, like those from Twitter’s default URL-shortening service, bit.ly, for example.

    Sweet.

  • Cellphone Users Don’t Use Their Minutes

    Jenna Wortham for The New York Times:

    The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.

    “I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.

    I use my phone for work and personal calls, rarely do I get personal calls.

  • iPhone to Work with Facebook Natively?

    Dan Frommer:

    We also anticipate — but don’t know — that Apple may build some sort of Facebook messaging features into the iPhone. Perhaps you’ll be able to send Facebook messages to contacts just as easily as text messages. This wouldn’t cost any money — it wouldn’t use up your text message allotment — and could be just as instantaneous. But again, this part is pure speculation.

    I could see Facebook and Apple integrating some contact syncing, much like they do with MobileMe. I however do not see these messaging features coming to the phone, though I may be made to look a fool shortly.

  • Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight

    MG Siegler (whom right now is probably one of the top 5 tech writers out there):

    You gave Jobs three years worth of solid data (massive iPhone sales) to prove he didn’t need you. And now he’s using that knowledge in the iPad, the device which may or may not be the first step in the future of computing. And now others are rallying to his side because he grabbed the position of power.

  • The iPad as Thought in 1988

    Very cool that a group of students in 1988 thought up a device so similar to what the iPad is today.

  • Google’s Chrome OS is Close

    MG Siegler for TechCrunch says that while the highly anticipated Google operating system is coming along very fast, it is still not ready. There have been reports of a possible Chrome device being launch by Acer in June, though previewed sounds like a better word to use.

    Siegler:

    That schedule originally stated that Chrome OS would launch in the 2nd half of 2010, with devices ready in time for the holiday season. The Computex Taipei show, where Acer will supposedly show off the first Chrome OS device, runs June 1 to 5, which is technically still the first half of 2010. So unless the Chrome OS project is ahead of schedule (which we’re hearing it isn’t), you can probably expect any devices shown to be running a still incomplete version of Chromium OS. And judging from the current state of the code, that seems to be the case as well.

    also of note:

    It seems there may only be limited trackpad gestures at launch. Google wants at least 2-finger scrolling to work, but it’s a bit buggy as of a couple months ago.

  • Recovery.gov Goes to the Cloud

    J. Nicholas Hoover:

    The recovery board expects to save about $750,000 over the next two years — $334,000 this year and $420,000 in 2011 — by running Recovery.gov on EC2. This represents about 10% of the total $7.5 million the board has spent overall on the site so far, including development costs. “Significantly” more savings are expected over the long term, according to the recovery board.

  • Two weeks of travel, Ten iPad lessons

    Michael Gartenberg:

    The iPads method for dealing with document management leaves much to be desired. Attempting to manage files from the increasingly ill named iTunes is a mess. Worse, there’s just flat file storage for iWork which makes it frustrating if you have more than a few documents.

    This quote is not representative of the article, as I think Gartenberg really likes traveling with the iPad. However this is one of the biggest holes for the iPad right now.

  • Android Tablet Review

    No where in the review do they mention the iPad, instead compare it repeatedly to a Kindle. That says it all.

  • Proof Zuckerberg Hates Facebook Users?

    Take this all with a grain of salt, but supposedly Zuckerberg responded to an IM regarding his users and why they would trust him. He allegedly said:

    Zuck: I don’t know why.

    Zuck: They “trust me”

    Zuck: Dumb fucks.

    Facebook has since issued this statement on the matter:

    The privacy and security of our users’ information is of paramount importance to us. We’re not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterize Mark’s and Facebook’s views towards privacy.

    Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people’s trust in the company and the service we provide. We are grateful people continue to place their trust in us. We strive to earn that trust by trying to be open and direct about the evolution of the service and sharing information on how the 400 million people on the service can use the available settings to control where their information appears.

  • Adobe Passive Aggressively Attacks Apple With New Ads

    Jacqui Chen:

    Adobe launched an ad campaign Thursday that pushes back against Apple’s decision to outlaw most third-party compilers from creating iPhone OS apps. The ad, spotted running on Ars as well as other sites, says “We [heart] Apple,” before flipping over to say that the company doesn’t support “taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”

    There is also an open letter from Adobe’s founders. Nothing to note worthy here, other than the way they are responding.

  • The Newspaper Industry Sucks So Much They Can’t Even Afford a Convention to Brainstorm Ways to Save Themselves

    Eric Pfanner:

    The conference and an accompanying forum for editors had intended to focus on new business models to help newspapers manage the difficult transition to digital publishing.

  • Leaving on a Jet Plane (aka I Quit Facebook)

    My reasoning for why I am deleting my Facebook account. I am doing it on June 13th, 2010 unless Facebook makes some serious privacy changes.

  • Meet the iPad

    Great new iPad ad from Apple.

  • Google Knows You Hate Facebook

    Joshua Brustein:

    The trend has even seeped into the consciousness of Google’s algorithms; if you began typing “how do I” into the search engine this morning, “how do I delete my facebook account” was the fifth result, right between “how do I love thee” and “how do I look.”

    We are reaching a critical mass here.

    On another note I am going to begin the process of letting everyone know I am deleting my account within the next couple of months.

  • Court Rules That LimeWire Infringed on Copyrights

    Joseph Plambeck:

    Professor Zittrain said that the ruling did not appear to consider the technology itself as illegal, only the promoting and encouraging of illegal uses of that technology, which is consistent with the precedent established by the Supreme Court’s Grokster opinion.

    Why you would be arrogant enough to promote illegal file sharing to begin with – well it is beyond me.