All Entries Tagged With: "networking"
iPhone 3GS With WiFi Capabilities Coming To China Unicom Monday
It’s a well-known fact that China has prevented the iPhone 3GS from sporting WiFi capabilities for a great while due to the fact that the country’s government was instead trying to promote the WAPI standard as opposed to the IEEE 802.11 standard.
Late last month, the government approved WiFi capabilities for the iPhone 3GS, and consumers will be able to purchase the WiFi-enabled device from China Unicom beginning on Monday, August 9th.
It would appear as if only the 8GB model of the iPhone 3GS will sport WiFi networking, though the 16GB and 32GB variations will still be for sale sans WiFi.
Twitter Makes it Possible to Sync Facebook Friends – Facebook Blocks Feature Shortly Afterward [Updated]
Earlier today, Twitter updated its Facebook and LinkedIn applications to make it possible for users to find which of their Facebook and LinkedIn friends are also on Twitter. The application also allows users to choose individuals to follow on Twitter, assuming they aren’t following each other yet. The feature, most notably on Facebook, seemed as a great new addition.
Unfortunately, just moments after the new Twitter feature was announced online by several blogs, the synchronization feature on Facebook was blocked by the social-networking giant. When users try to look up their friends, they are met with the following message:
Oops, couldn’t find anyone here…yet.
An error has occurred because Facebook has blocked your ability to allow this application to look up your friends. Twitter has requested that Facebook remove the block.
Foursquare Goes Down [Updated]
Via NetDowntime:
Location-based social networking service Foursquare is currently down. The service has apparently been down for approximately four hours now. Users have turned to Twitter to report the issues with the service. As a matter of fact, the website is currently displaying its equivalent of the Twitter fail whale — a sad princess.
Many assume the outage has been caused by the huge increase of users. However, the issue appears to be maintenance-related. The company is seemingly upgrading their servers.
LinkedIn Now Allows Users to Follow Companies
LinkedIn, which is often called the social networking site for professionals, has been releasing many new social features over the past few months that make it easier for its members to interact with each other and other social networking platforms. Today, the company announced on its official blog the introduction of yet another social feature called “Company Follow.” The feature, as the name suggests, allows members to follow companies within the network, similar to Twitter and/or Facebook.
Users will be able to receive real-time notifications from those companies they are following, thereby allowing them to be some of the first to know when a company is hiring or developing new products among other things. Notifications and alerts will be included in your personal stream of updates. Best part is that you can customize the kind of updates you want to receive, the frequency, and the format. Additionally, LinkedIn suggest which companies you should follow.
Foursquare Passes One Million User Mark
New York City-based Foursquare achieved a major milestone on Thursday. The company managed to pass the one million user mark, something that was originally expected to happen today. The location-based social networking service actually sent out a tweet on Wednesday advising its users that they were closing in on one million users.
The tweet read:
“We’re closing in on 1 million users! Current count is 969,775. Looks like that’s we may have something to toast during Friday Happy Hour :).”
According to TechCrunch‘s MG Siegler, QuakeHOLD I. of Escondido, California was the one millionth individual to join the service. The event was reached 1.1 years after the service was launched in March 11, 2009. However, Foursquare has yet to officially announce this great milestone.
Google Introduces Google Buzz
Earlier today, Google held a press conference at its Mountain View headquarters where a new social networking service called “Google Buzz” was introduced. Google Buzz is built right into Gmail, and it will focus on 5 key features inspired or based on different elements from various social networking websites like Twitter, Foursquare, FriendFeed, et cetera. It will basically stream updates, photos, videos, and links from your Gmail contacts. You can also integrate these updates with other social services like Twitter, Google Reader, Picasa, and Flickr.
The 5 key features Google Buzz focuses on are:
1- Auto-following: Since you already have a network built in your Gmail account, there won’t be a need to set up anything or build an entirely new network of friends. The moment you sign-into your account, you can start enjoying the new social features.
2- Rich, fast sharing experience:Google Buzz uses the same Gmail interface. It also users keyboard shortcuts, so you can share updates very easily and fast.
Breaking: Facebook is Down [Updated]
If you’ve tried to access Facebook recently, your browser might have greeted you with a little message that goes along the lines of “Webpage is not available” or “Webpage cannot be displayed.” The reason is because Facebook is currently having some issues loading. Sometimes it will eventually load after attempting to refresh the page many times.
As with any other outage, we’re not sure what’s happening or it’s affecting a few or everyone in the world. We’ll let you know as soon as we find out more.
Let us know what you’re doing while Facebook is down.
Update:Facebook has informed Mashable that they are looking into the problem and expect to give out more details soon.
Update: It seems to be back. Anyone else still experiencing some issues?
Give Bozeman, MT Your Passwords – They’ll Give You a Job
Job applicants in Bozeman, Montana were shocked to find that they wouldn’t only need their social security number and home address on their job application – they’d need to submit their passwords for popular social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and the likes. Applicants found the following request on a background-check form:
“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”
City offices in Bozeman have been overwhelmed with angry calls and complaints these past few days, amid the complaints of privacy invasion. Bozeman’s defense? They’re stating it’s better to know if someone is a child molester beforehand.
The fact that the town of Bozeman is requesting this information is the most rediculous thing I’ve ever heard. Are people not entitled to their own privacy anymore. Who’s going to publish on there social networking sites that they’re a child molester, anyway?
UPDATE: Looks like Bozeman has dropped their requests for potential employees’ passwords.
[ source: CNN ]
Apple’s possible $1 billion investment
Rumor has it that Apple is shopping around at this time for a location to implement a $1 Billion server farm on the East Coast of the United States. Specifically, the company is considering North Carolina as a possible location. According to Data Center Knowledge, officials in North Carolina “are rushing to pass enhanced tax breaks to woo Apple to their state rather than neighboring Virginia, which just passed its own incentives for data center projects”. For those of you who don’t know, a server farm is essentially a huge cluster of networked servers, used to provide various online services to users. Though there isn’t too much detail at this point in time, this might actually suggest that Apple is planning something incredible for the future. Of course, that’s purely speculation. It’s certainly possible that Apple is looking to set aside some more resources for its fast-growing iTunes and App stores.
Whatever this turns out to be, it’s quite the investment.
[ via Data Center Knowledge ]
