What really makes television what it is? Is it the fact that it’s sitting in some dedicated space in your living room? Or is it the fact that it’s probably one of the larger monitors in your apartment or house? Maybe it’s not connected to a computer, and that’s what makes it a television (although they’ll all soon be computers). Whatever it is, Facebook is going head on with television not only through their new Brand Lift service but also through their numerous Ustream partnerships lately.

I’ve written numerous times about how social networks have rapidly become the new television…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Though not from scratch, [Avbrand] integrated a powerful set of tools into his Subaru station wagon. The system was compiled from off the shelf electronics, such as a Compaq notebook, 3G USB modem, touch screen, and an assortment of other peripherals. It is based around Windows XP, though most of the carputer-specific applications, such as backup camera integration, Google Maps – based car tracking, and automatic volume control had to be custom coded by [Avbrand] himself. Perhaps the single most impressive and useful feature of the system is synchronization with highway traffic cameras. The system streams video of segments of the highway before…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the ATTiny25v and the signal is split into high and low frequency streams. The center LED is low frequency, the sides are the high. They can run a full week on a battery. He’ll be handing out 350 of them at Burning Man, then releasing…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Facebook made a significant announcement this afternoon regarding updates to their stream API. The two most significant updates is that publishing information to the stream will now be much simpler for third-party websites and developers can now access Page streams without an active session. Over the past couple months I’ve been writing about the expansion of Facebook Pages to become true community platforms and these updates further support this shift.

The most significant update that developers will find to be extremely valuable is that accessing stream.get for Facebook Pages no longer requires an active session. That means desktop applications like…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

This afternoon Facebook made a small modification to the friends page which changed “All Friends” to “All Connections”, integrating Facebook Pages and friends. It’s a small change but it’s a step in the direction of decreasing the distinction between Pages and profiles. Mark Zuckerberg previously stated that the two products: profiles and Pages, would increasingly become similar. This is yet another step in that direction.

Another big component of this new feature is the ability to add Facebook Pages to friend lists. This means that users will be able to now create custom feeds that group friends and specific friend…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

According to new data published by Nielsen Online yesterday, Facebook is currently the largest social networking site in the United States based on the amount of time spent online. Over the past year, the time spent on Facebook has increased 700 percent in contrast to MySpace, Facebook’s largest competitor, where total time spent has decreased 31 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter managed to post impressive growth of 3,712 percent.

Twitter still represents a serious threat to Facebook but the company (Facebook) continues to post impressive growth statistics despite the presence of significant competitors. Yesterday there was also a bit of a…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Later today Facebook will officially become an OpenID relying party. What does that mean? It means that if you wish to register for Facebook using another OpenID provider, you can. Initially the service will not be completely open though. As Facebook will post later today, “To start, new users can now register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts, and existing users can link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider to connect with friends and eliminate the need for multiple sign-ins.”

A few weeks ago Facebook officially announced that their OpenID support would go live and today it has become…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Trapster, the virtual radar detector, has released the latest version of its application for the iPhone, touting support for both Facebook Connect and Twitter. With upgraded support, you can check for local speed traps, or add your own. When you add a speed trap, your activity will be shared on Facebook and/or Twitter, depending on your settings.

The Facebook integration is particularly useful, as a map of your recently added speed trap is displayed directly in your Facebook news feed, further enticing others to click through to Trapster’s site, where they’ll see details about the speed trap you’ve added to…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]