Happy Towel Day ! This universal holiday, which honors the life and work of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, is being celebrated by his fans the world over today. To show reverence for Adams and his extensive and delightful tomes on interstellar travel, fans carry around a towel, which, in the books, is described as the single most “massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” And of course, where there are silly, worldwide happenings, there are Flickr and YouTube uploads. Here’s a Köln, Germany, flashmob reenacting a bit of the literature: And here are some Swedes celebrating Towel Day at a pub: At an office in Amsterdam, a cubicle-dweller reminds us of the Guide ’s motto: There’s this charming after school special on the usefulness of a towel: And here’s a more thorough, canonical look at why a towel is the most useful item in the universe: Towel Day events are taking place all over the world today, from a flashmob in Columbia to a Vogon poetry slam in Portland. Let us know if you plan to celebrate Towel Day, and, for now… So long, and thanks for all the fish. [img credit: darkmere , maartenq ,
“Sexbesssen, unaufrichtig, autistisch” – so soll Facebook-Gr
Braucht es noch mehr Beweise, dass Apple in K
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Today at the Cannes Film Festival, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe announced that MUBI — formerly known as The Auteurs — will be coming to the PlayStation 3 this fall. Think of MUBI as Netflix programmed by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Martin Scorsese. Although the larger MUBI service remains available throughout the world, the PlayStation 3 partnership will only be available in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and the other countries where SCEE has dominion. The MUBI PS3 app will be very much like the Netflix app . Once downloaded, users will be able to browse available films and then watch them either à la carte or pay for an unlimited monthly subscription. Some films will also be available to watch for free. Individual rentals are available for seven days. The new MUBI blog has some pictures of what the interface will look like and promises that the service will have at least 300 films when it launches. The film selection will include classic films, independent gems, foreign films and film festival selections. In addition to viewing movies, users will also be able to interact on the MUBI network by making recommendations and connecting with other movie fans. As a longtime lover of The Auteurs, I’m excited to see the MUBI rebrand, though obviously sad that Europe gets the good stuff first. Hopefully MUBI will expand its PS3 option into other parts of the world. For more entertainment coverage, follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: criterion collection , Movies , mubi , playstation 3 , PS3 , the auteurs
Facebook has just launched a fast new mobile version in order to expand its international reach. The new site, 0.Facebook.com , will be available in 45 countries through 50+ mobile and wireless network operators. It is a trimmed-down version of Facebook with most of the features of m.Facebook.com , including status updates, a newsfeed, Likes, wall posts and comments. 0.Facebook.com has a killer feature: Using it is free , regardless of data plan. The world’s largest social network got its 50+ launch partners to make 0.facebook.com a costless experience, except for photos. Operators such as T-Mobile, Digicel, Vodafone, and MTN all support the new Facebook initiative. Because of its partnership with mobile carriers, there are a few caveats. First, 0.Facebook.com is only available to people on networks and countries that support it. You can find a full list of them here , but you won’t find the U.S., the UK, Japan, China, Germany or any other nations with strong wireless data networks on the list. This mobile site is built for nations where wireless data is far more expensive to acquire.
On the same day as it celebrates its five year anniversary , YouTube is expanding its reach into its sixth continent: Africa. While YouTube.com is available to almost anyone with an Internet connection, YouTube has localized content for 27 different countries on five different continents. However, while Germany, Australia, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico all have localized version of YouTube, no African country has had one, until today. On its blog, the Google-owned video site announced that South Africa now has its own version of YouTube . This isn’t just a technical launch, either: YouTube says that it is teaming up with South African broadcasters to fill the new version with locally produced content, as well as educational content from university such as the Rhodes Journalism School. South Africa, as one of Africa’s most developed nations, was a logical choice for YouTube. It doesn’t surprise us that it took the company five years to plant its African roots, but the expansion of new communication channels into the underdeveloped continent can only be a good thing. Where do you want YouTube to expand to next? Let us know in the comments. For more web video coverage, follow Mashable Web Video on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: Google , South Africa , youtube
Just days after Twitter made changes to its algorithm for determining what shows up on the sidebars of millions of users via trending topics (in what some might call the anti-Justin Bieber feature), the will of the users has once again taken over with no less than 3 Bieber-related terms trending as of Monday morning (it’s also worth noting that another 3 are trivial hashtags). Twitter told us that the goal of the new algorithm is “to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world … rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis.” And while we may indeed see breaking news trend more quickly as a result, the obvious broader goal of improving trending topics – to make the service both more useful to existing users and less ridiculous looking to outsiders — is unlikely to be reached. And that’s because as we’ve seen time and time again, users hold all the cards when it comes to anything on the Web that’s inherently a popularity contest. Some History It didn’t take long for spammers to start trying to game trending topics – a problem that Twitter has tried to address both in terms of which topics trend and which tweets show up within those trends. Legitimate marketers also started building campaigns that involved awarding users with prizes when they tweeted with a promotional hashtag – a strategy that we initially applauded but eventually became overdone to the point that it was also hurting the quality of trending topics. More recently, Twitter’s trending topics have become more like the house that Bieber (and a rotation of other teen pop stars) built, a problem that the microblogging site looked to address somewhat – at least to outsiders – with a new homepage that de-emphasized trending topics. This problem is far from isolated to Twitter though. Back in 2007 Digg experienced one of the most infamous revolts of all , when users of the site – a pioneer in the realm of letting users pick what’s popular – bombarded the homepage with stories mentioning an HD-DVD encryption key that Digg had removed over copyright concerns. Photo sharing site Flickr saw similar backlash when it rolled out content filters to international users in a number of countries without any warning. The response was thousands of anti-Flickr photos getting posted to the site. The lesson in both cases – and what we’re currently seeing with Twitter – is that the will of users can’t be suppressed. Are There Options? Twitter does occasionally moderate trending topics manually – usually when words that most everyone would consider vulgar find their way onto the list. Broader editorializing, however, like manually removing Bieber-related topics or more controversial ones (like with the Digg case), clearly wouldn’t be advisable, based on what we’ve seen happen on other sites that have tried to do so in the past. So what can Twitter do to improve trending topics? Continue to bury them in their design, at least to non-logged in users. Twitter’s previous homepage emphasized trending topics, often making the site look sophomoric to outsiders. The latest version made them a very small part of the homepage, and even seems to filter out hashtags. Speaking of filtering out hashtags, Twitter should consider an option to hide them from the trending topic list. While hashtags are still immensely useful for events, these rarely trend anymore because they are competing with huge mainstream topics. Add an expanded trending topics list. Why not let users see the top 50 or top 100 topics being discussed? That’s guaranteed to add value, even if half of the trending topics remain trivial. Is This Really a Problem? Of course, there are countless other ways to get insight into what Twitter users are talking about, by way of all of the third-party apps that have been developed for just that purpose. Thus, for users that want to explore more, it’s certainly out there. That said, Twitter’s trending topic list is important. Millions of people see it every day, and similar to how major news outlets set the agenda for what people are talking about, it’s a major piece of our media that’s here to stay so long as Twitter remains relevant. It’s also important that the Twitter discussion agenda continues to be set by users and not editors – it is, after all, what makes sites like Twitter and Digg so unique. And that means that trending topics as we know them – a list of 10 currently popular discussion items – will often be lacking the news value that many of us crave. But as a company that’s stated goal is to “[ask] what’s happening and [make] the answer spread across the globe to millions” and has the power to shape public discourse, Twitter needs to do more to balance what its diverse set of users want with what it should see as a responsibility to be a comprehensive guide to what the world’s talking about. For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: justin bieber , Opinion , trending topics , twitter
Lange bevor das eigentliche iPad von Apple offiziell in den L
