Just to follow up on our story from Friday, FriendFeed has now implemented the feature that will allow you to disable comments on individual threads.
This move is in response to ours and others’ concerns that while FriendFeed’s real-time commenting component is great for conversation, it also can fuel the mob mentality, and quickly get out of control. Previously, you could only go through and delete individual comments, which in huge threads was simply not workable.
The gap between Facebook and MySpace is growing wider in the U.S. In May, Facebook finally caught up to MySpace in unique U.S. visitors and surpassed its rival social network by a smidgeon. Last month, Facebook left MySpace in the dust, according to June data from comScore. Facebook reached 77 million unique visitors for the month of June, rising from 70.28 million unique visitors in May. MySpace had 68.4 million unique visitors in June, dropping from 70.25 million unique visitors in May.
Facebook is steadily growing in the U.S.; the network gained just under 7 million unique visitors in June compared to a gain of 2.8 million U.S. unique visitors in May. In comparison, MySpace lost nearly 4 million unique visitors in June, compared to 700,000 unique visitors lost in May. While Facebook is growing both in the U.S. and internationally, MySpace appears to be stagnating.
We can beat about the bush or we can just admit that Intel has AMD beat on pretty much all fronts right now. Cognizant of this, AMD sprung the Istanbul server chips months ahead of schedule, and is now seeking to maintain momentum by adding meat to the bone. Three new chips are being added to the server-focused HE (Highly Efficient) Opteron line — all clocked between 2GHz and 2.1GHz and dissipating 55 watts of heat — while pure performance considerations are addressed with the SE 2439 and SE 8439, both running at 2.8GHz with 6MB of L3 cache. If we were paranoid, we might think today’s leak of Intel’s mobile CPU schedule was a coordinated attempt by the market leader to steal some of the limelight from this announcement by Advanced Micro Devices. Those of you who actually need to buy processors in batches of 1,000 or more should hit the read link for a full price breakdown.
[Via Daily Tech]
Filed under: Desktops
AMD six-core Opterons get new ‘Highly Efficient’ and ‘Special Edition’ siblings originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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MG Siegler and I ran into Pandora CTO Tom Conrad on Saturday evening at dinner gathering in San Francisco. He was still glowing from all the good news at his once troubled startup: a reasonable settlement around online streaming royalty rates quickly followed by a healthy round of funding that should take the company to profitability sometime next year.
We waited patiently until Conrad was 3-4 cocktails in and then pounced, dragged him outside and stuck a camera in his face. The result is below.
Clearly Conrad was still too sober to tell us all the juicy details. But he did once again confirm the funding and he gave some updated Pandora user stats – 30 million registered users, 12 million monthly uniques and 7-8 million iPhone app installations (plus 2 million more on Blackberry).
Laptops bundled with mobile telephony contracts rarely arouse our penny-pinching passions, but UK carriers are getting pretty aggressive with pricing for the Samsung NC10. Vodafone takes the lead by offering the extraordinarily well-reviewed netbook for free with a £25 ($40) monthly tariff over two years, which makes for a total contract cost of £600 ($972), or just over twice the retail price of the device — that, dear friends, is a good deal. Packages from the other carriers are similarly stonking, coalescing around the £30 ($48) per month mark, with Three standing out by asking for only an 18-month commitment. We’d prefer even shorter contracts, but can’t quibble too much with the value on offer.
Read – O2 (£29.38/month for 24 months, 3GB limit)
Read – Three (£30/month for 18 months, 5GB limit)
Read – T-Mobile (£30/month for 24 months, 5GB limit)
Read – Vodafone (£25/month for 24 months, 1GB limit)
Filed under: Laptops
Samsung NC10 being offered by UK carriers, Vodafone’s pricing surprisingly good originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Readers are always asking us for more TMZ-style posts, so here’s one for you. The New York Post did yet another review of Ben Mezrich’s upcoming Facebook narrative, The Accidental Billionaires. That itself is not that interesting, but the Photoshopped picture the NYPost uses is fairly hilarious in its similarity to a picture from the August Capital party on Friday night after our CrunchUp event.
As you can see, NYPost wants to paint Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the kind of guy who wants to date socialite Paris Hilton. We’re not so sure. In the social networking circle, she’s old news. She’s practically Friendster. Does Mark really want to Poke former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s Top Friend?
Regardless, Mark can have Paris, because in the similar picture from our event, his sister Randi, gets the real prize: Michael.
[Via PC Launches]
Filed under: Peripherals
Miyoshi rolls out wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Twitter seems to be the hottest thing in tech recently — if you look at TechCrunch, it averages at least 3 posts a week about Twitter. But the bigger question is, who is really using Twitter? Many of you might think that, as with most of the latest gadgets and technologies, teenagers are using Twitter, but you’re wrong, and here’s why. Matthew Robson, a 15 year old intern, over at Morgan Stanley, wrote a report on how teenagers are consuming media, and why Twitter isn’t the hot topic in high school halls.
If you look at technologies trending with teens right now, it’s Apple devices (iPhone, iPod), smart phones (Blackberry, Palm), and then social networks (Facebook and MySpace). At least that’s what I see from hanging out with 1,500 other teenagers in high school every day (I am 16 years old). But why not Twitter? Well, because Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.
Panasonic approached us a few weeks ago offering a Toughbook CF-30 to test in any way we saw fit. Rather than a lot of fancy lab testing, we decided to run over the laptop with a Toyota RAV4.
The laptop, surprisingly, survived almost unscathed.
These laptops are huge. The model we received is built like a tank. All of the ports are protected by waterproof flaps and the case itself locks with an affirming click when you slap it shut. This is a touchscreen model and comes with a small pen but also works with a tap of your finger.
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio
7Digital to debut BlackBerry direct music downloads originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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