Toluu

Profy.Com

Web 2.0 News & Commentary

Things You Can't Say About the Internet Episode 4Today

It's Thursday again, and time for Things You Can't Say About the Internet, my weekly podcast on Talkshoe with WinExtra's Steven Hodson and The Inquisitr's Duncan Riley. I was late getting our agenda together this week, so we are waiting for Duncan to wake up and approve it, but tentatively, our topics tonight will be:

• Twitter's latest fail, and should Twitter actually be renamed Fail to save us time?
• Weblebrity and delusions of grandeur
• Yahoo, Microsoft, and now Xobni losing execs, what gives?
• How many open standards and data portability organizations do we really need?

I'm going to do my very best to keep it to an hour this week so we aren't all blathering into the early morning hours. As usual, Things You Can't Say About the Internet is on at 11 PM Eastern, 8 PM Pacific on Thursday, 1 PM Friday Melbourne time on Talkshoe.

Tags: Cyndy Aleo Carreira, Duncan Riley,

Hasbro Wants To Wipe The Board Of FaceBook Favorite ScrabulousToday

I have to start with a confession: I am a die-hard Scrabble lover in real life, but a Scrabulous-only player online. Hasbro introduced a Scrabble FaceBook application after Scrabulous spent vast amounts of time wiping the floor with them by having theirs up first. Frankly, Hasbro, your application is too little, too late and not as much fun to play.

Scrabulous had to know this lawsuit was coming, though. Profy writer Cyndy Aleo-Carreria predicted this lawsuit as far back as January of this year. Of course, she was also on the side of Hasbro in the argument as a whole, and while she may be right legally, I fall onto the "fair use" and "customer satisfaction" side, from a consumer standpoint.

You see, I know how much loyal Scrabble users begged Hasbro for a decent, fun version of their game online. We were willing to pay, but not an arm and a leg. We wanted it to be social as well, something Hasbro had trouble delivering, even when they released the game on CD way back when - the multiuser features just never worked quite right.

Enter

Centrif -- like all Wikis, Strong Idea, Implausible in ExecutionToday

I'm always game for a new search platform that offers a unique perspective on delivering search results. Even if they aren't pulled off to perfection, good concepts are always worth a few laughs, at the very least. Centrif is a search platform that answers questions (reminiscent of Ask.com) with social bookmarks that users have submitted as fitting particular search queries.

Centrif is a small operation, created and maintained free of financial backing by Steve Wilson, a resident of the Philadelphia area. With the help of a few knowledgeable folks, Wilson has managed to create a pretty nifty social bookmark search engine that could be — those being the key words — very informative under the right circumstances, much like Wikia.

Though I have no particular desire to learn Japanese (right now at least), I took a cue from Venture Beat's Anthony Ha and searched "learn Japanese." Though those terms didn't yield perfect results, I was offered three alternatives, one of which seemed to be very informative for would-be learners of the Japanese language. Continuing that idea, I searched "learn Portuguese" (as I would like to learn that language), but the only result I was given was for the term "search." So much for Portuguese.

I really like

So You Thought Nothing Could Be Worse Than Fail Whale? Now Get Your Followers BackToday

You remember that only a week ago we were all betting if Twitter really recovered and we will see Fail Whale only when it really means maintenance, not some unexpected crash. Twitter users that left to FriendFeed or Identi.ca started to mention that they could still return to Twitter if it really proves to be back to stable again.

And to a certain extent our expectations were met - we had API requests lifted to 100 after 20 per hour and we really saw less of that fail whale for a while. So in general the glitches were reduced a lot. At least until earlier today when Twitter presented many of us a big surprise - when suddenly  lots of users lost huge numbers of followers on Twitter. The blogosphere is abuzz, Twitter itself is full of questions from people that start to notice it and wonder what happened (here is FriendFeed search for "twitter followers" and it really is very pathetic with so many users worried about it - even if it may

5 Free Useless iPhone Apps All the Cool Kids Are DownloadingYesterday

Downloading iPhone apps on a budget? Don't have money to invest in Super Monkey Ball and Texas Hold 'Em? Still want something fun on your iPhone that will let you keep from getting bored in meetings and entertain the kids in the checkout line? Fear not; here are five completely useless iPhone apps you can download for free that should entertain even the most jaded child or cube denizen.

1. Tap Tap Revenge

Tap Tap Revenge is a game that should be familiar to anyone who's ever played Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, or any other musical rhythm. game. Using three colored strings with dropping balls, the game lets you "play" along with the musical track by tapping the balls just before they strike the bottom. Four levels of play and additional songs you can download keep you from boredom, and you can challenge friends by sending your score.

 

2. Rotary Dialer

Are you finding the iPhone dialer too bori