Latest Gear Live Videos
Gmail founder predicts Chrome OS is doomed
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Google, Software,
Last night Paul Buchheit, the former Google employee who created Gmail, tweeted his rather bold prediction that Chome OS was doomed:
"Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or "merged" with Android)"
He then added on the FriendFeed thread that Chrome OS has "no purpose that isn't better served by Android" and asking "is this too obvious to even state?" As Google started to ship CR-48 preview devices, with tech blogs reviewing them endlessly, people found themselves in front of a new type of system, one that provides much less than Android, or any other OS has provided before. Google is hoping that the web is all that many people need, and targeting Chrome OS at them. But as people started to plug in devices and finding that they don't work, being unable to do simple things like save photos from their digital cameras locally, or write a document without having to be online, it seems that the company still has a long way to go to convince people that Chrome OS is a good idea, for any market.
Read More 
| FriendFeed
Advertisement
Bleeding Edge TV 316: Yelp Monocle Hidden Feature Brings Augmented Reality to iPhone
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Full Episodes, Gizmatic, Apple, Cell Phones, Features, GPS, Handhelds, Podcasts, Videocasts, Videos,
My pal Robert Scoble announced that the Yelp iPhone and iPod touch app that was recently updated included a hidden Augmented Reality feature. Obviously, as soon as we saw, we had to give it a shot, and we figured we’d do it on video. Augmented Reality apps use the camera on the iPhone, along with overlaid information, to present location data while looking at the “real world” - it’s very cool, and you can expect a bunch more of these types of apps to make an appearance on the App Store very shortly upon the release of iPhone OS 3.1.
In this demo, we show you how to unlock the Monocle mode in the Yelp app, and also give you a look at what exactly it does. For now, our early opinion is that it’s a cool idea…it just needs to be refined a bit to be truly useful.
Facebook buys FriendFeed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Acquisitions, Social Media,
The social media Internets are all up in arms this afternoon with the news that FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook. The full details were announced on the FriendFeed blog, and according to the press release, “all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.”
A lot of the recent Facebook feature additions have been borrowed from, or inspired by, FriendFeed, so the move only makes sense. It brings Facebook directly into the real-time web scene, as they take aim for Twitter.
There is a lot of speculation right now as to what exactly will become of the FriendFeed product, since there is quite a bit of overlap between what FriendFeed does and what Facebook does. Fans of FriendFeed fear that all the features will be rolled into Facebook, while FriendFeed ceases to exist. All we know for now is that “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team.” Kind of ominous, I know.
Still, if handled right, Facebook may become the standard for both connecting and real-time sharable status updates. Full press release after the cut.
Click to continue reading Facebook buys FriendFeed
Advertisement
© Gear Live Inc. {year} – User-posted content, unless source is quoted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License. Gear Live graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, videos, articles, blogs, forums, scripts and other service names are the trademarks of Gear Live Inc.