Twitter’s #DickBar Debacle
Earlier this week, Twitter released an update to their official iPhone application which brought along a “feature” not well received by users of the application. It added a bar which overlaid your tweet stream, displaying trending topics and often Promoted Trends. While Twitter feels these trends add value for users, most users just don’t care about Justin Beiber’s hair or how much Charlie Sheen is #winning.
Those against the changes started tweeting with the hashtag #dickbar, which is a jab at Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo (get your minds out the gutter). John Gruber was so disgusted with the updates that he restored his iPhone to a previous backup to get the old version of the Twitter app. That’s deep. Twitter has since updated the app to make the bar less annoying, but this doesn’t actually solve the problem for most users, who just want the bar gone entirely.
via NewsGrange
Facebook Starts Renting Movies
Well, they made one movie available. The Dark Knight, which is about three years old and everyone interested in watching it has probably done so on numerous occasions, is available for rent on Facebook for $3, or 30 Facebook Credits. Of course, any time online video purchases are mentioned, Netflix is also mentioned. While Facebook does have about 600 million users and could probably compete in any online business, providing one movie on a single fan page run by one movie studio is just not compelling enough to trump Netflix’s subscription model. This has only been a test, but it will be interesting to see if Facebook continues down this path.
via NYT, AllThingsD
Kinect Grabs Guinness Record for Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device
via DRS
I was surprised too. You’d think the title would be taken by some fancy mobile device or at least an entire gaming system, but the Kinect has taken the crown. The Kinect for XBox 360 sold an average of 133,333 units per day, for a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days on sale from 4 November 2010 to 3 January 2011. These numbers knock the iPhone and iPad completely out of the box.
“The sales figures here speak for themselves. We can confirm that no other consumer electronics device sold faster within a 60-day time span, an incredible achievement considering the strength of the sector.” — Gaz Deaves, Editor of Guinness World Records 2011
Not only does this illustrate the popularity of the Kinect, which lets you play games my moving your body instead of manipulating a controller, but it also shows how popular the XBox 360 itself is. Can’t Kinect without the gaming system behind it.
Readability Goes HTML5 After Being Snubbed by Apple
Not long ago, Apple announced a new subscription layer for their Apps Store. It amounts to Apple getting a 30% cut of the action from users who use apps that require a subscription. One app, Readability, was booted from the App Store after they neglected to implement this new subscription layer. Understandably frustrated, the Readability folks posted an open letter on their blog.
About two weeks later, Readability was back in the ring with a shiny new mobile interface. While they’ve submitted their app to be reconsidered for the Apple App Store, they’ve launched a slick HTML5 version of Readability which should work on any mobile device with a browser. Kudos to the Readability team for putting in the hard work and getting the HTML5 version done so fast. Other developers should take note.