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| Hackers Temporarily Seize Control Of Google Morocco Domain Name Posted: 09 May 2009 07:30 AM PDT
You can find loads of screenshots here and here, but the main domain name pointed to the website shown on top of this post. There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again. PAKbugs.com leads to a forum where Pakistan hackers hang out, and the names on top of the web page above are all members of the message board. They’re being proud of it here. This website (in French) claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too. (Via ArabCrunch) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let’s End It. Posted: 09 May 2009 02:26 AM PDT
I’m not just talking about the sweaty palms handshake, which sends shudders down my back. I even take issue with the firm and dry handshakes that we engage in every day. I’d like to see the ritual ended. Hand shaking goes back a long, long way. Wikipedia says it was practiced as far back as the 2nd century BC. The story I’ve always heard is that shaking someone’s hand shows that you hold no weapon. Since most people are right handed and would hold a knife in that hand, we shake right hands. Whatever the reason for hand shaking, it isn’t needed. Like the Qwerty keyboard (which is designed to slow us down so that the typewriter doesn’t jam), it’s a relic of an older time that’s not only no longer needed but actually causes inefficiency. I can live with the keyboard. But I’d rather not have to catch another flu or cold from a hand shake. The fact is that hand shakes spread germs. You shake someone’s hand and then touch your nose or mouth and you can get sick. I don’t like getting sick. But to turn down a hand shake is such an insult that there’s little choice. The hand is out there, in front of me waiting, so like everyone else I grasp it. Whenever I do shake a hand I’m completely aware of it, can’t stop thinking about it, until I can wash my hands. Sometimes in a meeting I’ll shake hands all around, then excuse myself to the bathroom to wash my hands, then return. It draws attention, though, and people have pointed it out to me as odd. My response is that it’s nothing personal but I don’t want to get sick. If I get sick I have to take time off and it hurts my business. And there’s a good chance I’ll get other TechCrunchers sick, too, which is doubly bad. Anyone who pays attention knows that most people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom, which should be a criminal offense. Probably ten times a week I don’t shake hands with the excuse that I’m “coming down with something,” even though I’m not.
Thanks to Laura Boychenko for researching hand shakes for me. It’s a fascinatingly heathen practice. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Notify.me Brings Instant RSS Updates To Yet Another Browser Toolbar Posted: 09 May 2009 01:42 AM PDT
It’s not that Notify.me at its core isn’t useful, albeit not very unique. For a lot of people, instant updates for anything that has an RSS feed (not only blogs or news sites, but also classifieds listings, for example) with the ability to filter incoming by keyword makes sense, particularly if they need a lot of control over how the updates get delivered based on what the source is. Yet I can’t help thinking that the latest feature the startup is releasing, a browser toolbar, has ‘overkill’ written all over. What the toolbar does is bring Notify.me’s core functionalities to a persistent toolbar whenever you’re browsing the web. Users can set delivery methods and filter rules directly from the toolbar, and the company has also integrated Ping.fm (which it recently partnered with) and AddThis directly to the toolbar so you can easily share and bookmark websites you’re visiting on a wide variety of social networking services. Personally, I wouldn’t use this service as I would find it incredibly annoying to constantly have a toolbar on my screen that’s not only persistent but also pings me with new notifications every so often. There’s an abundance of new toolbars launching nowadays, and somehow I don’t think that’s what the next web is all about (quite the contrary, actually). I would love to get your thoughts on this as well. Similar services include Yotify and Notifixious.
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| TwitDoc: Proving That Every File Format Will Eventually Be Shareable Over Twitter Posted: 08 May 2009 08:33 PM PDT
Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video. Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible - it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started. To use the service, you enter your Twitter user name and password, choose the document or photo you’d like to send out, and add any text you’d like to include alongside the document’s link. Hit upload and you’re done. It’s a handy tool, but I doubt it will reach the same level of popularity as TwitPic and its ilk - most people simply don’t have as many documents that they’d like to share with all of their Twitter followers. Still, it will definitely be helpful for sharing reports you find interesting, or scanned images that wouldn’t be readable if they were shrunk and compressed (which some image services do).  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Nuts: Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel Posted: 08 May 2009 05:02 PM PDT
Though Dorsey declined to comment on what his new startup is right now, we hear from a source knowledgeable about the new company that it’s code-named Squirrel. Here’s what else we know so far: It’s a service that allows anyone with an iPhone to become a merchant. Just like the wireless credit card swipers you see at certain shops and restaurants, you can carry around your iPhone and take payments. Apparently, the idea is that this will allow any individual to take credit card payments on a mobile device, kind of like what PayPal does for the web. Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel. But Dorsey is not leaving Twitter. He told me just now, “I’ll never leave Twitter, it’s my life’s work and baby and I’ll always be a major part of the endeavor, strategically and operationally. But, I do have some other ideas I’m pursuing and yes, we’re going to launch soon.” Twitter was Dorsey’s idea when he was an engineer at the company Odeo, a podcasting company which current Twitter CEO Evan Williams ran at the time. Odeo ran Twitter as a side project for a while, before realizing that it had more potential than Odeo itself did. Twitter became the company, and Dorsey became the CEO. But there was always some question as to whether or not that role was a good fit for Dorsey, and so a few months ago, Williams and he swapped roles, with Dorsey taking the role of Chairman.
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| Update: Seeqpod Fire Sale To Microsoft Not A Done Deal. Posted: 08 May 2009 04:05 PM PDT
Earlier today, I wrote a post wondering whether music-search engine Seeqpod had finally sold itself to Microsoft because of a suggestive link on its homepage linking to Microsoft Search. Some other bloggers noticed also. Since then, I’ve been able to confirm that no acquisition has closed and that talks continue. Seeqpod is indeed speaking with Microsoft, but not about an outright acquisition. Rather, it is trying to negotiate a piecemeal sale of its technology assets and find new jobs for its core technology team. And while Microsoft seems to be interested in the largest chunk of Seeqpod’s assets, the company is speaking with other large search companies in hopes of finding a home for the other pieces. These assets include its targeted crawling system for finding playable media on the Web, its search index of 14 million playable search results and 500 million associated text pages, its recommendation and discovery system, five related patents, and the teams associated with each of these technologies. The fact that Seeqpod is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy makes this sort of fire sale easier to pull off. As far as the pending lawsuit with the music industry which forced it to seek protection under bankruptcy in the first place, there is no plan to settle at this point in time and “become an ATM machine” for the dying music industry, says my source. So why would Microsoft want to touch Seeqpod, even with a ten-foot pole? It’s underlying search technology can be applied to many other areas besides music search. Seeqpod actually got its start at Lawrence Livermore Lab and genomic search (matching genomic sequences to diseases, symptoms, and even foods), so there are health search applications. But more broadly Seeqpod’s technology is around “playable search.” It can bring back playable media results (audio and video, primarily) for practically any search term. That is the kind of technology and team that could help Microsoft’s general search engine. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Twitter And FriendFeed Battle For Downtime. Scoble’s Head Explodes. Posted: 08 May 2009 03:55 PM PDT
FriendFeed, aka, the first alternative to talk about Twitter when Twitter is down, has completely lost contact with its data center, co-founder Bret Taylor tells me (hey, Twitter once lost a database, so this is nothing new). They’re investigating the problem right now. But where are we supposed to turn? Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Scoble must being going crazy right now.
Update: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit lets everyone know (appropriately on Twitter), “The entire svcolo datacenter lost power. They expect to have it restored in 10min, but it will take at bit to bring up all systems.” Update 2: The downtime has now surpassed an hour. Here’s what Buchheit tells me, “Our entire datacenter lost power, and unfortunately it’s taking them a while to restore it.” He also noted that FriendFeed isn’t the only one affected, check out more of the carnage via this Twitter search. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Show Your Mom You Care On Facebook On Mother’s Day — Then Unfriend Her Posted: 08 May 2009 03:41 PM PDT
In celebration of Mother’s Day, Facebook now lets you list and connect to your family members in the “Basic Information” part of your profile. Starting later today and through this weekend, you will see a new “Family Members” section within the Information tab on your profile. You can enter your parents, children, sisters and brothers and can list family members even if they aren’t Facebook users. If you include their birthdays, Facebook will show their ages too. This is a good idea in theory and I think many users would have no problem listing and connecting siblings on their profiles. But I feel that a lot of people may not use this feature because they don’t want to list their parents on their profiles. I can see parents wanting to list their children but I’m not so sure that the feeling would be mutual, especially amongst younger users who may not want their parents to be connected to their lives via Facebook. Facebook also said it is considering an extended family section for the future. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Joking Or Not, Official Or Not, Facebook Needs To Grow Up Posted: 08 May 2009 03:38 PM PDT
It’s sort of funny when Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg takes her frustration out on a club bouncer by saying (it has now been removed) it would be “a huge bummer if their facebook pages “accidentally” went down.” But it’s also terrible messaging for the fast growing company. Randi is founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, an executive of the company and also their unofficial spokesperson. Her statements carry weight, can be intimidating and considered an abuse of power. It’s also a recurring theme with Zuckerberg, who was in the news a couple of weeks ago for facilitating a minor but annoying violation of the Facebook terms of service to help out a friend. I’m not trying to paint this picture as something that it isn’t. Randi was clearly joking around and venting frustration. But it illustrates an underlying way of thinking that needs to be nipped in the bud. Facebook has long referred to user data as “our data,” ignoring the fact that in reality it’s the users’ data, not theirs to do with as they please. Likewise, Facebook is a community of people. This community will accept a benign dictatorship. Even a police state, perhaps, if the benefits are clear. But too many vendettas and shows of favoritism and that community could turn. I don’t believe that Randi would actually take action at Facebook to get back at this bouncer. But the message this sends is terrible, and it shows that she may not fully understand the weight of her words. It’s time for Facebook’s executive team to step things up a notch and realize that as fun as Facebook is, this isn’t a game. We’ve reached out to both Randi and Facebook for comment. Update: Facebook’s official statement is “This comment was clearly intended as a light-hearted joke. It goes without saying that there is no intended consequence beyond voicing a personal opinion." The twitter message has been removed. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Tech Jobs Still Scarce But Layoffs May Be Slowing Down Posted: 08 May 2009 02:49 PM PDT
April proved to be a dismal month for technology sector jobs and overall employment, but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Granted, this morning brought sobering news of the U.S. unemployment rate hitting its highest mark since 1983: 8.9%. In the past month, 700,000 jobs were lost in the U.S., bringing the total number of U.S. jobs lost since December, 2007 to 5.7 million in April, 2009. However, while the economy continued to suffer from recessionary conditions over the past month, the pace of layoffs, at least in the tech sector may be decelerating. According to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker, tech layoffs reached 330,000 in April, due to layoffs announced by Yahoo (675), Sony Ericsson (2,000), Toshiba (3,900), and Nokia (450) over the past month. Media companies were also hit with layoffs this month with NPR, The Tribune Company, and Conde Nast Digital all forced to implement job cuts. However, according to the numbers, job losses may be slowing down. It only took three weeks for tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to hit the 200,000 mark before that in January. Yet it has taken 11 weeks for layoffs to rise by 30,000, with the layoff tracker hitting 330,515 layoffs today. We are not completely out of the water yet. Last month, we reported the effects of the recession as measured by tech jobs site Dice.com, and it appears that available tech job listings have dropped even further in April. Dice.com is reporting a 47% year-over-year drop in available technology jobs for April, increasing slightly from a 45% year-over-year drop in March. April’s drop, as reported by Thomas Weisel Partners, is the highest annual drop Dice has seen so far this year, with February's listings down 40.4% and January's jobs down 39.3% (all year-over-year). Once again, Dice said that of the ten reported metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley was hit worst, with available tech jobs in the Valley down 54.2% year over year. Chicago (down 54.2%) and Boston (down 52.6%) also posted large declines. Our own smaller jobs site, CrunchBoard, has also seen a sharp decline in available tech jobs in the past month. A little over year ago 100 - 120 job listings were added to CrunchBoard each month. The number of new listings gradually declined with the onset of the recession and then fell significantly in November 2008, dropping from 68 to 37 listings from the month before. The listings rose slightly over the next few months, with February's listings hovering around 60. In April, the listings dropped to a low of 35 job postings. But the Conference Board’s Online Help-wanted Index may show signs of hope in the economy, reporting that monthly job demand dropped 131,000 in April, down 28% year over year, compared to the 31% year over year decline in March. And Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report yesterday that planned layoff announcements eased in April to 133,000, from 150,000 in March. Strangely enough, it looks like the fishing, farming and hunting industry has been able to weather the storm better than any other area. According to analyst Christa Quarles from Thomas Weisel, the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry was the only industry that showed an increase in job vacancies in April. Maybe we are in the wrong industry. We’ve consistently believed in the resilience of the tech industry, especially given the industry’s past experience with economic downturns. Hopefully, the ease in layoffs is a sign that the tech industry is slowly but surely rebounding in the wake of the economic crisis. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To Do Posted: 08 May 2009 02:25 PM PDT
And here are some other alternatives inspired by commenters:
Update: And Twitter is back. But save the list for Monday! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| So Long Federated Media, And Thanks For All The Fish Posted: 08 May 2009 01:43 PM PDT
We’ve had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I’m somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end (see Federated’s announcement here). We’ll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We’ve long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we’ll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory. In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we're finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies. I'm personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde, our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She’s got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything. One of the things we're going to pilot with our expanded go-to-market sales strategy is a self-serve platform hosted by isocket. As the largest independent media property covering technology, TechCrunch is in the fortunate position to have a lot of advertising prospects reach out to us with interest in running on our network. Offering a self-serve platform will enable us to sell smaller units of TechCrunch inventory to be more timely and affordable to marketers and start-ups. For example, we used to sell month-long sponsorships exclusively, and now have weekly, and in some cases, daily buyout opportunities. Inventory on all TechCrunch properties is available, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunchIT, CrunchBase, TechCrunchEurope, TechCrunchFrance and TechCrunchJapan. The isocket service is brand new. One of the things that makes working at TechCrunch so much fun is discovering new start-ups and getting to test them out first. TechCrunch is the first pilot client for isocket, a new, yet-to-be-funded startup by John Ramey and Zak Hassanein. The isocket self-serve ad platform sits on top of OpenAds, our ad-serving partner, and will help us offer more transparent and flexible pricing options to advertisers. We're launching with a modest set of variables, all time-based buyout by the day, week or month. In the coming weeks, we'll add the ability to purchase CPM-based advertising. We'll also be launching new targeting channels. For example, marketers who want to reach a mobile audience, can focus a package that includes MobileCrunch, as well as the relevant pages of CrunchGear and TechCrunch and on matching company profiles on CrunchBase. One of the practices that we will discontinue, at least for the short time, is running ad inventory from multiple third-party networks. Since we haven't been selling all our own inventory, we need time to get a clean read of the demand for premium advertising on our network. Google AdSense will provide backfill for remnant impressions for the immediate future. We'd like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they've played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we're not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we're just leaving to chart our own course. John, Neil and Chas have contributed to the TechCrunch business in important ways over the last three years. Federated's commitment to represent aspiring authors is still an important role in the publishing ecosystem. As part of our kick-off, we're offering a 20% discount on all advertising purchased directly online through isocket during the month of May (discounted inventory based on availability through 12/31/09.) Our traditional rates resume June 1, so please use this opportunity to test us out and save. Of course, we welcome advertisers to contact us directly to purchase advertising on either a sponsorship or CPM basis. Please email heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com or visit techcrunch.com/advertise. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| DocuSign Raises $5 Million For E-Signature Software Posted: 08 May 2009 01:40 PM PDT
DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the same investors. DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Ex-Googlers Try To Create A Better Travel Guide With Nextstop Posted: 08 May 2009 01:10 PM PDT Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide. The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don't know what to look for,” says Sjogreen. Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing. But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends. The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets. The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation.
Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture. There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Google Makes A Great TV Commercial For Chrome, Assuming You Already Know What It Is Posted: 08 May 2009 01:09 PM PDT Google really wants you to use Chrome. So much so, in fact, that they’ve decided to broadcast commercials for the browser on TV - an extreme rarity for the online giant, which typically relies on web-based advertising and integration with other products to increase exposure. The spot was created by Google’s Japan team a few months ago as a way to “demonstrate how clean and simple” Chrome is. And beginning this weekend, Google will be using its TV Ads program to run the clip on TV. Now, I’m not a marketing person, and given Google’s vast resources I’m sure they’ve thought this through, but to me the commercial doesn’t do an especially good job at explaining what Chrome even is. I mean, for the vast majority of TechCrunch readers it’s a given that Chrome is a browser, but for the massive audience needed to turn Chrome into a contender against the likes of Internet Explorer? Not so much. It might pique the viewer’s curiosity, but I suspect many people will see the commercial and just go, “huh?”, especially given how rare commercials for web browsers are. If this ad doesn’t turn out to be a hit, Google has quite a few online-only commercials up its sleeve for Chrome, but it apparently isn’t planning to run them on TV any time soon. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Twitterrific Comes Roaring Back Into The iPhone Twitter App Wars Posted: 08 May 2009 12:47 PM PDT
Twitterrific was one of the original iPhone Twitter apps. And for a while it was the most popular one. But when newer apps like the Twinkle, Tweetsville and then Twitterfon and Tweetie came along, they just blew it out of the water with either features, speed, or both. And so I was very skeptical when trying out this latest version, thinking there was no way it could replace the two newest gold standards. But after using it for a day, I have to say, I’ve for the most part been won over. The new Twitterrific is great. It adds all the key features that it lacked before: Multiple account support, search and trends, while doing so with a completely redesigned user interface. Previously, I didn’t like how big and clunky tweets looked in Twitterific, but the new version allows you to easily change the size of your tweet stream depending on how many tweets you want to see on one screen. It also allows you to change the theme from dark to medium to light. The new Twitterrific also adds an amazing amount of features, while being able to keep the core functionality of the app simple. This is largely thanks to the filter icon which tucks away @ replies, direct messages and the like. Also in that area, you’ll find what I think is one of the key advantages the app has over its rivals: The ability to bookmark tweets to look at later (which is separate from favoriting tweets). You also take and save notes on various users.
There are also a ton of options that can be set in the settings menu, such as which photo service to upload pictures to. And the ability to add Instapaper bookmarking support, just like Tweetie offers. You can also set the app to be better suited for left-handed people, set what tapping on an avatar does (as well as set what double and triple tapping does), and a whole host of other things. But the most important element to me for any of these Twitter apps, is speed. Previously, Twitterrific seemed downright slow when compared to some of its newer rivals. But the new version is much faster — but it’s still not quite as fast as Tweetie. But it has some nice options to make this less of an issue, including the ability to set auto-refresh intervals for your tweet stream. Unfortunately, I have gotten a number of API timeouts when trying to refresh my stream too often, but that’s likely at least as much of Twitter’s own fault. After initially taking the Twitterfon side, for the past few months I’ve been a Tweetie convert. It is simply a hard app to beat in terms of features, ease of use and design. The main downside is that it is a paid app (while Twitterfon is free). Because of this, Tweetie started as more of a Twitter power user tool. But by word of mouth it has spread quickly and grown into a huge app. So big that the developer even made a desktop version for the Mac. But this new version of Twitterific (which also has a desktop app too), is a worthy challenger to the throne. Smartly, it’s creators, The Iconfactory, offer it in either free or paid versions (the premium $3.99 one takes away the in-stream ads). If you want a Twitter client for the iPhone with the most features, Twitterrific is probably for you. For me, it remains to be seen which one I’ll continue to use on a daily basis. Twitterrific’s slightly slower speed may ultimately be the deal-breaker. But if I start bookmarking a lot of tweets, or using some of the other features, I may continue using Twitterrific — even instead of Tweetie. Check out a quick run through of the app in the video below:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Tweets From Space: NASA Turns To Twitter And YouTube To Reconnect With The Public Posted: 08 May 2009 12:03 PM PDT
“I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.” NASA astronaut Mark Polansky, who will be commanding the next mission to the International Space Station, has just posted a video to NASA’s official YouTube channel inviting YouTubers and Twitter fans to take part in his next mission, submitting video questions via YouTube and following mission updates over Twitter. To ask a question, Polansky says to create a video of around thirty seconds and post it to YouTube, then send it to his Twitter account using an @reply. He’ll respond to the questions on NASA TV, which is broadcast nation-wide. Polansky won’t actually be the first person to Tweet from space - that title will likely belong to Mike Massimino, who plans to Tweet from Space Shuttle Atlantis, which embarks on mission STS-125 in less than three days. NASA has recently been making a big push in using modern consumer technology, the web, and social sites to reach a broader audience. Yesterday it launched a collection of very impressive Photosynth galleries of the ISS and Mars Rover. And they have more exciting releases in the works. This is something that is long overdue - the public may not be as enamored of space missions as it was a few decades ago, but the feats these astronauts are undertaking are no less impressive. And frankly I’d much rather follow the updates of true heroes than yet another celebrity on Twitter. Still, I can’t help but wonder if alien races will stumble across the tweets and conclude that our brains are only capable of interpreting 140 characters at a time.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Konami Code Strikes Again: Facebook Adds Some Flare Posted: 08 May 2009 11:31 AM PDT
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. There are few codes more sacred to old school gamers than the Konami code - a cheat code that originated on the original NES and has since made its way into many other games. More recently, some popular websites have been getting in on the action, with mischievous easter eggs from sites including Digg and Google Reader. Today, Facebook is joining the club. Entering the code will enable what I’m going to call ‘lens-flare‘ mode, adding the over-used Photoshop effect to a Facebook page whenever you click your mouse. Just enter the above code using your keyboard’s arrow keys (substitute ‘Enter’ for Start), and click anywhere on the page. It is totally useless, but looks sort of nifty and is guaranteed to impress your friends. For at least ten seconds. Last summer, Google Reader implemented the code, which introduced a Ninja to the site’s interface. And entering it on some game-related sites, like GiantBomb and GameSpot, will take you to a page about Contra (the game that popularized the code, because it was nearly impossible to play without it). But of all these, the one that takes cake was ESPN, which began showing dazzling unicorns and rainbows when you entered the code. Seriously. It has since been taken down, but you can watch a video of it here. For more Konami code Easter Eggs, check out our post on CrunchGear. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Did SeeqPod Find A Savior In Redmond? Posted: 08 May 2009 10:46 AM PDT
We’ve covered SeeqPod quite a bit here on TechCrunch. The San Francisco startup has been hard at work to develop a way to intelligently index media files on the Web to make them searchable online, and introduced an API which many other startups and projects made use of to power their own music, video and audio search engines. But despite the fact that its technology has always been pretty unique, the startup has had a rocky road up until now. SeeqPod has always tried to avoid getting sued by pointing to the DMCA, and arguing that it merely indexes media from across the Internet (much of it not copyright-cleared) but does not effectively host any files and thus should be protected from litigation. Regardless, music labels in particular were not pleased with how SeeqPod and many of the web services using its technology as an underlying foundation were discovering and streaming songs on the net. The record labels sued, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy, and then put itself up for sale. Did anyone bite? Right now the site is down, with a message saying it is “cocooned for metamorphosis…” The word “metamorphosis” links to Microsoft Search, which could mean that it is in talks with Microsoft to sell the company, its technology assets or the link could just reflect wishful thinking on Seeqpod’s part. Microsoft would most likely be interested in Seeqpod’s underlying technology and could deploy it in a much different manner than Seeqpod. It would also be in a better position to settle the lawsuits with the music industry quickly. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Captain’s Log: Google Calendar Now Knows That It’s Stardate [-28]01210.00 Posted: 08 May 2009 09:52 AM PDT
It’s no surprise that Google has its fair share of Trekkies, and they’re as excited about the new Star Trek film as anyone. So excited, in fact, that the Google Calendar team has put together a new ‘Stardate’ calendar that will tell you exactly today’s date in the Star Trek universe. There are a few ways to go about adding this to your Google Calendar. The easy (and lame) way is to add “[ stardate: ] ” as a friend’s calendar. You can also just look at it on the Google Calendar homepage. But for those of you with a more adventurous streak, try figuring out the secret to unlocking it the cool way. Here’s a hint: add an event that contains the name of your favorite new movie. And it isn’t ‘Wolverine’. You can learn about how Google calculated these Stardates here. Of course, Stardates are known to have been more than a little inconsistent over the years, so you may want to keep those Communicators handy in case there’s a mixup with friends. Also, thanks to all those who came out to our TechCrunch Star Trek screening last night!  Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Every once in a while we go on a little rant here about something that bugs us. In the past we’ve done hit jobs on 
So let’s start a new trend - not shaking hands. You can do a 
Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman 
We all know about Twitter’s downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back — but only partially. Over the past hour since it’s been back, it’s been up and down, but mostly down. And now there’s another problem, 
It was probably only a matter of time before Twitter, which has a long history of downtime, was down on the same day as another site that houses people’s social graphs. When one of these sites goes down, people can usually deal with it. But two? I think I hear people screaming outside of my window. If Gmail goes down right now, I’m packing up some bottled water and heading for the hills. (With my iPhone just in case they all come back up in time.)
Twitter just went down. Don’t worry, it was 
During the past several months, a war has been brewing between Twitter apps for the iPhone. But it’s been largely two-sided. You were either in the Twitterfon camp or the Tweetie camp. And if you were using any other app, it was only because you didn’t know any better. But with the release of Twitterrific 2.0 [
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