Mister Default Here he is: our default profile picture. You may know him as “Generic Avatar”. He’s the picture you get when you create a new account and profile on Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. Mr. Default is a standard guy. He’s found everywhere on the web (in variations): message boards, comments, activity streams. He forces everyone to look like him regardless of gender, race, and physicality. He’s also very boring. Time for a change People don’t usually have a picture on hand  show all text

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It’s time to step it up a gear at Bonfire HQ. We brought ‘presence’ and IM to Twitter, but there’s a whole lot more to do, and it involves the rest of the web too. We’ll be working with the latest tech, that hardly anyone is using in a live environment yet. Things like Web Intents, Websockets and open webapp manifests, as well as oEmbed, localstorage, ‘augmented browsing’, and an authenticated social graph. These are the lines between the dots of the web, and they need drawing. We believe in op...  show all text

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It’s been awhile since our last major Tweetbot update, but today we are proud to announce Tweetbot 2.0 for the iPhone! We hope the wait was worth it. Tweetbot 2.0 is a free upgrade for current users. So What’s New? This version comes with many significant improvements to the Timeline and Direct Messages. Here are the major changes in more detail: Updated timeline view Image thumbnails in timeline Links now colored and single-tappable “Retweeted by” bar now integrated and tappable Cell colors ad...  show all text

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The Netty project team is proud to announce Netty 3.3.1. The JAR file is already on Maven central repository. You can also get the full tarball from the download page. This version introduces a couple exciting features. The most important one is the new SPDY package, which was contributed by Twitter. If you develop for Android, you will be happy to hear that this release fix the incompability with Android (which was a regression introduced in 3.3.0). Beside this we introduced the possibility to...  show all text

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If you use Gmail you may become frustrated when you click a mailto: link by accident and now your desktop client of Outlook or Mail starts up. Thanks to navigator.registerProtocolHandler() (which we've covered here before) you can wire up Gmail as your default mail client for all mailto: links in Chrome and Firefox. Here's how: First, open up a Gmail tab. You must do this from the Gmail tab, not your html5rocks one. :) Open your javascript console (cmd-opt-j on Mac, ctrl-shift-j on Windows) and  show all text

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Amidst flat and declining cable TV subscription numbers, Cable companies are lobbying the FCC to force every cable subscriber to rent cable boxes or cable cards even if they don’t want or need them now. Currently cable companies must deliver broadcast channels in a way that enables tuners like Boxee Live TV (and the ones in your TV) to display those channels without any extra hardware. Now the cable companies are asking the FCC to change the rules and turn access off. Their main excuse being th...  show all text

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Currently at version 0.1, Popcorn Maker is a little crufty. But Popcorn Maker 1.0 will hit hard in November of this year. Popcorn Maker 1.0 will empower you to make cool web-based media, whether you’re a beginner or pro. With over 20 plugins—ranging from Twitter to Google Maps to video processing—you’ll be able to stitch up a stylish video that’s “woven” into the web. And, of course, it’s 100% free and open source. Users will be able to publish and share their creations on their blog, Twitter, ...  show all text

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Path, the social networking app for smartphones, takes all the information in your phone's address book and store it on the company's servers. It was first discovered by developer Arun Thampi, who posted details of the privacy snafu to his blog. This means when you launch Path on your phone, it scans your address book and sends all your contacts' names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. and stores them on the company's private servers. Path has more than 2 million users. Path's CEO, Dave Mor...  show all text

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So yes, LinkedIn has bought contact management startup Rapportive, according to multiple sources we’ve contacted, as was first reported by Liz Gannes at AllThingsD. The startup — which aggregates and displays the social networking accounts of the people you contact through Gmail — was backed for $1 million by seed investors Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500  show all text

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Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting....  show all text

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. Anonymous broke into the ...  show all text

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You can follow someone on Twitter and friend them on Facebook, but real friends are people you break bread with.

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The story of the day is definitely about Path (a CrunchFund portfolio company). The company has been copying address book information to their servers without user knowledge. The company was apparently already aware of the issue and was taking steps to address it prior to this post coming out. The Android app has an opt-in, and a version of the apt with an opt-in is awaiting approval at Apple, says CEO Dave Morin in the comments to the original post. Morin has also flat out apologized. This is a  show all text

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Image courtesy of broodcast, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nielssienaert/4253272271/. Most of this report was researched and written by Weiping Li and Mera Szendro Bok, and edited by Sarah Myers. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed how Internet companies -  the sovereigns of cyberspace - struggle with the conflict between market demands for global expansion and the demands of their users for freedom of expression online. A mark of its rise in global prominence, Twitter announced a decisi...  show all text

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The minutes from yesterday's CSSWG face-to-face meeting are a very interesting read in all sorts of ways. I was somewhat struck by this part: tantek: I think if you're working on open standards, you should propose your features before you implement them and discuss that here. smfr: We can't do that. sylvaing: We can't do that either. Those are the Apple and Microsoft representatives replying to Tantek. Now I won't claim that Mozilla always does this, or that it's even always des...  show all text

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I swore I wasn’t going to write about Pinterest again for a while after finishing a six part series of blog posts, but major developments keeping coming and no major news organizations see to be covering them. If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t ha...  show all text

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It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper  show all text

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Dominik Homberger has been very busy over the last few months working on porting first, Google’s WebP image format to JS and today launching his WebM video decoder in JavaScript.  No, these are not Emscripten compiled versions - these are hand ports directly from the original C++ source code.  And yes, both of these ports work in all browsers, not just the latest Chrome and Firefox - all browsers.  The WebP port works in IE6+ with a flash fallback for the canvas element, as well as, of course, ...  show all text

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13 Signs Your UX Needs an Exorcism View more presentations from Crystal Beasley. Making simple, elegant solutions is HARD and often invisible. These are some of the most common things I hear when heading for a bad UX decision. And before any veteran designers go ripping me a new one, these are rules of thumb intended for a 101 audience. They do not apply in every circumstance. However, you must know the rules to know when to break them, and that requires varsity-level skills.   1. “I’ve got this  show all text

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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of the Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/a...  show all text

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Last week we pushed out a BrowserID feature that gets us closer to the decentralized identity system we envision for the Web. But more than that, it enables a truly awesome user experience—registration flows go from 8 screens to one simple sign-in. Seriously! See for yourself: Chicken or egg Some context: Building a distributed system is a chicken and egg problem - you have to design a system that can demonstrate the power of your idea and the advantages of a distributed architecture while you  show all text

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