We had a chance to step into MySpace HQ for a chat with new Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who preside over the News Corp.-owned social network from a shared desk in Beverly Hills. The joint office speaks to how closely Hirschhorn and Jones are working together to create a unified vision of the future for the lately struggling MySpace, whose former CEO Owen Van Natta exited the company after only 9 months in the hot seat. Hirschhorn describes MySpace as a site that “lacked focus” as he and Jones were getting up to speed and learning about the business. He sees the pair’s role as instilling that much-needed focus as well as driving a re-imagination of the site from both a user interface perspective and in the development of new products. All of what we saw today on the near near future of MySpace’s roadmap — into approximately Fall of this year — is in service of the networks’s new overarching goal of promoting user discovery and self-expression.
We had a very hotly contested matchup this week in our long-running Faceoff series , with Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE going up against Sony’s PlayStation Network for favorite online console gaming service. After an astounding 35,055 votes we’re ready to declare the winner… … and Xbox LIVE takes the win ! They’ll obviously get an achievement rather than a trophy for this victory. Just a day or so ago the polls were holding steadily even so it was definitely in the home stretch here that XBLA pulled ahead. The final tally reads 19,858 for Xbox LIVE (57%) and 14,258 for PSN (41%), with a surprisingly small tie vote of only 939 (3%). Thanks to everyone who voted this week! Were you disappointed with the results? Sound off in the comments! Who would win in a fight: Xbox LIVE or PlayStation Network? opinion Faceoff Series: Overall Results Week 1: - Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome - WINNER: Firefox , 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes) Week 2: - Tumblr vs.
Happy Friday, people! Along with the venerable tradition of Follow Friday , today also marks this week’s edition of the Friday Poll . Last week we wanted to know if location checkin services freak you out in terms of privacy concerns. Reactions were pretty mixed, although many of you felt like services gave you enough control over permissions and what to make public. Some were concerned about the “digital divide” between early adopters who probably have the experience to know how to use the tools wisely, and the more general public who may end up confronting more privacy issues due to unfamiliarity with these services.
Forget LCD, OLED, and AMOLED: the next trend in touchscreens could be your skin. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft’s Redmond research lab have developed a working prototype of a system called Skinput that effectively turns your body surface into both screen and input device. Skinput makes use of a microchip-sized pico projector embedded in an armband to beam an image onto a user’s forearm or hand. When the user taps a menu item or other control icon on the skin, an acoustic detector also in the armband analyzes the ultralow-frequency sound to determine which region of the display has been activated. You can check out more specifics on the technology behind Skinput in the paper the group will present [warning: PDF link] in April at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Atlanta. Another innovative muscle-based control scheme we profiled recently comes to mind as an example of where the intersection of biology and computing might be heading
It’s time once again to pit two contestants against each other in an all-out battle for the hearts and minds of Mashable readers. In this week’s Web Faceoff , we wanted to get a sense of which online console gaming service Mashable readers prefer: Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE, or Sony’s PlayStation Network? Last week we saw HTML5 take down Adobe Flash in our dynamic web faceoff, and we’ve previously looked at handheld gaming’s big three . But what about the two major online console services: does the totally free PSN hold sway, or does the freemium model of XBLA offer a service compelling enough to offset the optional cost many choose to pay?
File under “strange and delightful” — CodeOrgan is a Flash app that turns any web page into music. It analyses the text in the body of the supplied URL and follows an algorithm to render that site into a musical composition
The random videoconferencing sensation Chatroulette has been all the rage lately, but we can’t blame you if you haven’t actually given it a try just yet.
It’s been yet another exciting matchup here in our Web Faceoff series , with the newcomer Google Buzz going head to head with Facebook and Twitter for the heady title of Mashable readers’ favorite social network. Last week we saw free beat out premium in our online dating services head-to-head, and this week we wanted to check in on how you good readers were ranking Buzz in its still early days against popular contenders Facebook and Twitter. The results are now in… …and Facebook wins the day , with 47% of the vote out of a healthy 7130 votes cast. Twitter came in a respectable second place at 26% of the vote, with Google Buzz coming in not terribly far behind at 18% of the vote. A good 9% of you thought it was too close to call, with the tie vote snagging 651 votes. What do you think of the results? Check below for the results listing from the past editions of this series, and tune in next week for another edition of the Web Faceoff! Who would win in a fight: Google Buzz, Facebook, or Twitter? ( online surveys ) Faceoff Series: Overall Results Week 1: - Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome - WINNER: Firefox , 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes) Week 2: - Tumblr vs.
As the tweets pour in, Wordpress confirms that the Wordpress.com hosted service is down. The company is working on restoring the service as we speak. We’ll update this post with more news about the downtime as it comes in. Do you have any sites affected by today’s Wordpress.com outage? Tags: blogging , outage , Wordpress , wordpress down , WP
If you’re a fan of the mobile check-in service Foursquare , why not wear your proverbial badge on your sleeve? A company called Nerd Merit Badges plans on bringing your Foursquare exploits to real life with a series Foursquare Nerd Merit Badges . The patches pictured on the right are still only prototypes, and their production is still pending approval from Foursquare itself