We've joined Google + in our millions - with a reported 20mill signing up to the service. Despite a blip last week when Google started deleting anonymous accounts, the reviews have been positive and techies have effusive.
But, news this week has been a little chiller with the service reporting a 3% fall in usage. It's not much, but at this stage you'd expect traffic to be only increasing.
No-one's writing it off, and of course, the site is still in beta, but we're interested to hear what you think about it..
Have you ever commented on a blog post under a different name to agree with yourself? - making it look like a whole bunch of people agree with you when actually, it's just you, with 5 different names, talking to yourself?
Sock-puppeting has shot up the news agenda today because Independent journalist Johann Hari has been suspended by the paper for doing just that - commenting under his own articles under different names to support himself.
He has also been accused of the slightly more serious matter of using misleading quotations from elsewhere and presenting them as material he has gained at interview.
Still - suspension seems a heavy punishment for what is more an etiquette question than a crime.
Gentle reader, have you ever sock-puppeted? I'll fess up straight away - I certainly have! Though not on this site, I promise.
After a rapid uptake in 2010, it seems that sales of 3D TVs have slowed right down. It's no longer a key selling point for consumers buying a TV - who prefer stuff like internet connectivity. But will people continue to shell out for the magic of 3D football, 3D games or uh 3D internet provided sexytime? Will you? Tell us.
I know we don't usually cover haircuts on here - being a serious technology site - but if anybody's hair is important to the internet, it's Justin Bieber's.
Hello, Twittter had to adjust their trending topics to stop him topping the list everyday. If you're wondering what happened to it... he has given it out to celebrities who are to auction it off for their favourite charity. Lovely.
We ask you Shiny readers - the new hair, or the old hair? OR NOTHING?
The escalators may not always work - but your mobile phone soon will. Travellers on the London Underground will get mobile phone signal by 2012 thanks to an initiative by Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.
Huawei are putting in a systyem worth £100 million which should be up and running by the time of the 2012 Olympics. They are offering the kit as a gift, running the system along the top of tube tunnels. They would make their money back from maintenance fees. The system would carry calls from all operators though might be restricted to certain tube lines (most likely the Jubilee and the Central) if the operation proves too complicated or expensive.
Previously there was no signal or 3G network on any of the underground trains.
Some commenters fear that the system will give Chinese company and possibly the Chinese government access to the phone calls and text messages of Londoners.
Others reckon that the Chinese government won't actually be that interested in millions of text messages from people explaining that they are 20 minutes late.
Despite Wikileaks leader Julian Assange winning the people's vote, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook has just been named Time's official man of the year. Zuckerberg is a genius, sure, but did he deserve this, this year?
As Wikipedia says - Time tends to shy away from people controversial in the United States. We quote:
"As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Ayatollah Khomeini Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States. Time's Person of the Year 2001--immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks--was New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although the stated rules of selection, the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news, made Osama bin Laden a more likely choice."
Judging from that background you can see why they went for clean-living nice guy nerd Zuckerberg. Don't get us wrong - he's a great guy - but did he do most to influence the world in 2010? Tell us who you think should have won:
After news that online discount deal site Groupon turned down a six million dollar offer from Google, I'm looking at online voucher sites in a new light. Maybe selling group deals on paint-balling weekends is the new money-spinner in tech world.
However, we've seen reports that a significant number of the deals offered on the site aren't up to scratch and can end up in refunds or sellers getting swamped and being unable to offer the service advertised. Personally, I find that skimming through lists of available discount sites just makes me want to buy stuff I really don't need because it seems like a bargain. It's like virtual TK Maxx syndrome.
Still - money off is always good right?
Tell us readers: do you use online vouchers and deals? are your experiences always good?
There are different types of vouchers of course - some are voucher codes you enter in at checkouts on online retailers, or print out and present at restaurants, other online deals include the group buying efforts that Groupon offers, where everyone gets a discount.
Lady Gaga has created headlines by quitting social media for charity. Along with a bunch of other celebrities, she is off Facebook and Twitter until $1 million has been raised for an HIV charity.
She will sign off of Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday (1 December) as part of Digital Life Sacrifice, which is raising money for Keep A Child Alive, a charity which helps families affected by HIV and Aids in Africa and India.
Of course, they're not just stopping updating, they're going out in style with videos of them all sitting in coffins.
How much would it take to get you off Facebook and Twitter?
With the boom in sexy touch screens and the arrival (finallly) of the tablet computer - the humble mouse is looking a bit outmoded.
Most standard laptops have touchpads and while you can always attach a USB mouse, I'm curious to know how many people do.
However office computers always have them.. and don't see public or shared computers getting touchscreens any time soon for the simple reason of hygiene.
So tell us Shiny reader, do you have a mouse? How often do you use it?
It's a time of upheaval for the music industry, and we doubt that even the arrival of the Beatles on iTunes is going to perk it up very much. But it's not all bad, and from a user's point of view, it makes it a lot easier to listen to music than ever before.
We were just interested to hear how you, the users are getting your music. My hunch is that most people stream for free.
Spotify is a UK-only service, but it has been so succesful that it has quite dramatically changed the shape of the country's music industry.
Apparently 1 in 10 Brits now use Google Streetview to check out holiday destinations before deciding where to go.
Of course, it's more of a useful guide for city breaks rather than beach holidays since the Google cameras only include street level photography as taken by the Google Car. And note that not all cities have Streetview either - Berlin doesn't for example, nor does St Petersburg, instead you just get a few geolocated pictures rather than a seamless view of a road.
The study by www.CouponCodes4U.com polled 6,286 Americans and 1,287 Brits and found out that 9% of Brits will streetview a holiday destination and that almost 50% of people will streetview an area before moving house there.
Streetviewing other cities something I do definitely, though I wouldn't say it was the make or break factor in my choice of booking a holiday. In fact, I'm more likely to do it with placs I want to go anyway, or if I'm at work and want to pretend I'm tootling around in the streets of Brooklyn.
While we're on the topic of street view, here's a picture of a seagull flying into the Google Car camera....
How about proposing to your better half on a movie screen with a short film that shows makes full use of the iPhone's apps to express your feelings? Well one young man did that, we just came across the video again. He filmed himself using various functions on the iPhone to express his feelings - slideshows, video, text....
Arguably it overuses the word "addicted" - but still aws all round. How would you respond to this..?
After Google snuck some new fonts into Google Documents, we thought today was a good day for tipping our blogging toes into the wild waters of font wars. Passions run high, torn-off serifs litter the ground and some of the most vitriol on the internet is expended in these battles of words and lettering [see for example: the helveticavstimes blog - strapline: "because Times New Roman should never ever be used and even then that's stretching it"]
We'll give you a quick run-down of the contestants then let you vote in our Font Battle poll.
HELVETICA AND THE ARIAL FAMILY Attributes: a very neutral typeface designed to have great clarity and no intrinsic meaning in its form so it could be used on a wide variety of signage Who uses it: a lot of corporate places use Helvetica or its variants, including American Apparel, Apple in its iPod and iPhone and the US government. The dissers say: a victim of its own success, people get fed up with it being overused. Then others say it's the Switzerland of typefaces - safe and boring, interesting blog here.
TIMES NEW ROMAN Attributes: With sharp serifs and a narrow base, it has a slightly literary feel. Who uses it: It's common in books, and in some newspapers (it was orginally designed for the Times newspaper), it was a default font on Microsoft Word up until 2007 making it one of the most used fonts in the world. The dissers say: "The lowercase letters in Times are too narrow, spaced poorly, and the serifs are too sharp" says this blogger. Funny fact: "Researchers in 2008 found that satirical readings of text printed in Times New Roman were perceived as more funny and angry than those printed in Arial."
CALIBRI Attributes: subtle rounded stems and corners that are visible at larger sizes and because it's sans serifs, it's easier to read on-screen than fonts like Times. Who uses it: Microsoft - it's their new default font on Word and now PowerPoint and Outlook. The dissers say: poor in print and too informal for academic work or legal documents "Calibri is for primary school student assignments or children story books only" says a commenter on this Facebook group
New York have just introduced a way to pay for subway fares with your phone. It's a contactless system based on Visa's payWave program that simply requires users to wave their phones at a sensor to make a payment.
Think of it - a queue of people waving their phones at passenger turnstiles. It's not light-years better than slapping a travel card down on a card reader, but it will be slightly faster because no contact is required and it is slightly less for passengers to carry: not their card, just their phone.
PayWave works by asking users to insert a memory card into their phone that can carrry all the information needed to do these transactions. Most smartphones have memory card slots, those that don't - like the iPhone for example, can get cases which have space for the little card to be fitted in.
Anyway, they like the sound of this over on ReadWriteWeb, but would you use it if this form of payment came to the UK - and to other places like supermarkets.
Visa claim that it's easy to deactive the chip if you lose your phone... and that it is password-protected and uses "advanced security technology," to uniquely identify each transaction.
I spent this morning getting all excited about the Emotiv Epoc.
It's headset which uses electrodes sitting on your skin to read your brain waves. Using data about the amount of activity in different parts of your mind, it can perform simple tasks like moving objects on a computer screen. In future they hope for more complex applications for the Epoc like answering the phone, making art or flipping through emails.
It is a first model and costs $299 from emotiv.com (though is only available in the US).
I've always had mixed feelings about the white iPhone. In some ways it's more special and looks like tool chiselled out of pearl or bone or something. In other ways it just looks more plastic and chavvy. Connundrum. How do you guys feel about it? Opinions welcome in the comments..
MySpace has been back in the news recently: taking advantage of Facebook's temporary troubles to vaunt their simple privacy controls and releasing a new home screen this morning, which, guess what, looks like a bit Facebook. They've also got handed out a new developer toolkit to get myspace embedded in apps for both iPhone and Android.
Well, inspired by all this I thought it was time to dust off the old account and have a look at MySpace again, so I logged in and what I discovered was a genuine slice of 2005, a moany blog from 2006 and the fact that I loved Belle and Sebastian. It's a bit like a time capsule.
Reasons to go back to MySpace
- Retro techno-chic "I'll send you a message on MySpace" you can say to your friends, baffling them and forcing them to remember their MySpace passwords.
- Nostalgia, reconnect with the early '00s
- It used to be cooler than Facebook, and though it is really shit, it still is a bit more fun feeling.
- Simple privacy controls
- Customising your page is quite fun - when it works
- Great selection of smileys.
Reasons not to go on MySpace
- Page components still don't load properly and some buttons just don't click
- Privacy controls may be simple but the rest of it ain't
- No one's there...
- Rupert Murdoch owns it
We've just seen the logo of new British uber-network Everything Everywhere - the product of the merged T-mobile and Orange networks, that's it on the left.
The company will be massive - with over 30 million customers - but the rebranding has hit a dud note with blogs saying it sounds a bit well, vague.
Paidcontent say it sounds more like a motto than a name.. Employees of Orange and T-Mobile are joking that they now have to work for everything everywhere (ramping up the job remit quite a bit), and someone on Twitter saying it's worse than "Telecom Italia Mobile Brazil' (and that's surely pretty bad).
It used to be the funny thing to do on Facebook. If you didn't have anything to say to your friends, you'd just poke them, perhaps you were being ironic, perhaps you were trying to initiate a carnal relationship, perhaps you were just saying hi - whatever, the poke was always fun because it was so ambiguous. The poke feature usually turned up in any media report of Facebook in the early days partly because of its dodgy sexual connotations, partly because it just sounded funny.
but now - does anyone poke anymore..?
There's obviously a lot of other ways to engage on Facebook: post on the wall, message, chat, comment, like, tag in a link, tag in a photo/video, share a link... the list goes on. We just wanted to know whether you all still poke?
So apparently, one in ten UK adults have discussed the election online, and one in four 18-25 year olds have, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Orange. Did they say anything more erudite than LOL? YouGov didn't say.
Orange says that the buzz around this Digital election has got nearly a quarter (24%) of online 18-24 year olds actively engaged and commenting on the general election. Well.
We've joined Google + in our millions - with a reported 20mill signing up to the service. Despite a blip last week when Google started deleting anonymous accounts, the reviews have been positive and techies have effusive. 
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From: CES 2012 - More fitness and health gadgets - Basis, Qualcomm and Striiv