Friday, February 26, 2010

Geeky Round-Up: 2/20-2/26/10

Facebook Patents the News Feed
Facebook added the news feed a few years ago and everyone lost their minds threatening to ban Facebook because they hated the new look. Since then, Twitter and Google Buzz started up and began using the same concept. Today Facebook's patent for the news feed has been approved. What they will do with it is yet to be seen. They can potentially take Twitter to court and attempt to shut them down. Just because something has been patented doesn't mean that a court will agree that it is the same technology. But, it would have to be decided by a jury of people. It is a jury of people that also thought Microsoft Windows didn't rip off Apple's OS because the icons were on the other side of the screen. People, for the most part, are stupid so Twitter would be toast. Also, Twitter may not have the financial muscle to compete with Facebook. I don't know if Facebook would try this with Google seeing as Google owns the world (they are watching you right now and you don't even know it) and probably has the financial means to make this cost Facebook more than it would be worth just out of spite. Whether Facebook wants to anger the Twitter fanboys and girls will be interesting to see. It could be a potential PR nightmare if they go that route.

Yahoo! and Twitter Hook Up
Last week I talked about Yahoo! and Bing hooking up to make little cyberbabies and take on Google. Now, Yahoo! has worked out an agreement with Twitter so that Yahoo! will be able to display real-time Twitter updates as part of its search engine. So that means, if you ever query Yahoo! 'Yummy sushi goodness #foodporn' you will get the Twitter results you were hoping.

Twitter Phishing Schemes all over the Place
'haha. This you???? LINK' messages followed 'lol, this is funny LINK' message as direct messages from Twitter. Clicking the link would take them to a page that looks identical to Twitter and asks for the username and password. Once logged in, the schemers then direct message all of the friends of the person who just logged in. I got about fifty of these and they are rather annoying but easy to ignore. On the other hand, I wonder what super funny picture of me are they referring too, maybe I should log in just once to see...

Virtual Console Game of the Week - None...thanks Nintendo!
Since there are about 10,000 available titles that can be made into a Virtual Console game, there is not one this week.

Nintendo Unleashes DSi XL to Kick your Ass
Nintendo may have been too busy to worry about Virtual Console this week as they announced the DSi XL. Going for $190, the XL features a 93% larger screen than the DS Lite. In other words, if you look at it funny, it will beat you down.

[caption id="attachment_695" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="What you looking at punk?!?"][/caption]

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