• Who’s Afraid of Google Cover Stories? | BusinessWeek Tech Beat Blog
  Rob Hof of BusinessWeek asks, Hmm, haven’t I seen that Economist cover-story and headline before? Answer - It was on a story he wrote for the magazine.
  (tags: magazines)
• Twitter in the Funnies | BusinessWeek Tech Beat Blog
  I’m in the Rob Hof echo-chamber tonight. He wonders if Twitter is mainstream enough to get a pop-culture reference in a comic strip. My view: Kids don’t use Twitter — or read Sally Forth.
  (tags: twitter)

Google Earth, as it has since the first time I saw it, still gets my vote for the Best Program Ever. The new version is stunning. Really. Find where you are on the globe, then clilck a button and it converts to a view of the night sky above you. (Oops, I may miss that EVDO afterall, but fortunately, my wifi covers the backyard.) Not quite so significant, but really cool, the new version has a hidden feature, not publicized by Google: An F16 flight simulator, as described by a student in South Africa. It was discovered by someone who — and hats off to you people who do such things — held down the keys, Ctrl+Alt+A (or, if you’re running OS X it’s Command+Option+A). I’m sure, if you’ve grown up playing videogames or coding software, or whatever, you may think to click Ctrl+Alt+A when you’re trying out software, but I’m always impressed when I hear about the games developers play and the users who ask themselves, “I wonder what will happen if I do this…?”

Technorati Tags: google earth

Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org says the Apple-NBC Universal iTunes Store pricing negotiations are beginning to sound like a Jane Curtain-Dan Akroyd skit. However, to me, it sounds more like NBC Universal’s side in the negotiations are being handled by Jack Donaghy, GE VP of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming.

If you don’t use Twitter, skip this post. It will be even more gibberish than the gibberish found in typical posts. Other reasons to skip it: If you’re tired of hearing about Facebook, or are already tired of the buzzword, “lifestream,” even if you’ve never heard it before.

Twitter suggestion: I’m not a user of Jaiku.com, because, frankly, I’m far past the burn-out point on playing social-networking gypsy. However, I notice the service has a tab called “channels.” I’m a big fan of Twitter and one thing I like about it is the simplicity and ease-of-use, so I hesitate to suggest they start chasing features. However, as I was watching a football game last night, I thought it would be nice to have a means to join a “channel” or “group” of those posting “tweets” on the same subject. I can think of a 3rd-party API hack (see “update” below) that would come close, but it would be nice if there was a feature on Twitter that would allow that. Anyway, since they seem to be on a feature-adding binge, I thought I’d throw this one in.

Lifestream/Facebook App discovery/decision: Recently, I blogged about setting up a “lifestream,” an automated-page that catches all of the RSS feeds of things I blog, bookmark, or share online in other ways. That way, the disparate streams of information I add different places meet up in, what I call, the River of Rex (just before they flow into the Gulf of Rexico). That I now have such an aggregated (ego-grated) feed, I decided to import that feed into Facebook notes and do away with all those Facebook apps that do the same: the applications that merely import del.icio.us, twitter, flickr, etc. In doing do, I decided that nearly all the Apps I’ve added to Facebook are just there, as in, there’s no there there, so I deleted almost all of them. Except Dogface. Now that’s a mission-critical app.

General observation about how some people react to Twitter: I enjoy reading the comments whenever Techcrunch posts something about Twitter, because for some reason, Twitter really riles certain individuals in the geekosphere. For example, here’s a comment from the afore-linked Techcrunch article today: “Twitter is useless and annoying regardless of all the hype around it.” I love that, because it sounds just like some print-centric editor reacting to the Internet, starting about ten years ago. That it’s coming from the type of geeky-readers who hangout at Techcrunch is delightfully ironic. I agree, if you just “observe” Twitter for a few days, you will quickly write it off as useless and annoying. However, the site’s users are, through “playing” with it, innovating some creative, meaningful uses. I’ve blogged before about Twitter’s potential in emergency situations and how, for example, the LA Fire Department uses it. I have no idea where Twitter’s users will take it, but I have no doubt that it is far from “useless.”

Come to think of it, despite the fact I find most Facebook apps useless and annoying regardless of all of the hype around them, I have no doubt that some very useful things will come from all the hype-fueled developments.

Update: Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for pointing to such a third-party work-around. I look forward to trying it out.