Sony teases a “fun, social and exciting” product launch for next week via its Facebook page. What could possibly be in store?

A Scottish holidaymaker was hit with a shocking £1,200 phone bill when he returned from Thailand, despite never making a call or sending a text whilst abroad…

The internet was a much “darker” place throughout most of Wednesday as a number of high profile websites voluntarily “blacked out” in protest at a new anti-piracy bill being put before Congress in the US…

In today’s digital age our smartphones are fast becoming the modern version of a love letter, letting you talk to your better half and whisper sweet nothings (quite literally) in their ear.

But does this mean that romance is dead? Or are our mobiles just letting us get smarter about the way we interact with the fairer sex? Here’s a look at the ways our mobile phones help us in the murky world of dating:

Texting

Think about how often you actually ring someone and you’ll soon realise the power of text. SMS reigns supreme because you can constantly be in contact with others but whether you’re asking someone out on a date or just letting them know you’re thinking of them — it’s a quick and easy way of showing your affection.

Just remember though, if you’re not a big texter, tell your new beau beforehand as they might get offended by your sporadic replies.

Online/Mobile Dating

Online dating used to be tainted with a slight whiff of desperation but these days, with the rise of the likes of eHarmony and Match Affinity, you can guarantee there’s an app for that and the whole shebang is in no way seedy. In fact, it’s a convenient way to keep track of your love interests on the move. You can read new messages, see who’s contacted you and find potential matches online.

Some apps are even incorporating location-based technology to help you find potential mates in your local area. Take Flirtomatic for example, where you can virtually ‘flirt’ with your matches, which are selected according to your personal preferences and location.

We know you lot are a sensible bunch, but if you do decide to meet up with someone, make sure it’s in a busy, well lit place. Tell someone else where you’re going as well just in case your date turns out to be a bit sinister1

Location, Location, Location

As Kirsty Allsopp would say it’s all about the location. And now app developers and social networks are getting in on the action too. Virtual check-ins let you find out whether the guy or girl you fancy is in town and is also quite useful in helping you avoid those people you don’t want to see. Facebook Places is always a good place to start but Foursquare and Gowalla are amongst our pick of the best location apps too.

Video Calling

Since FaceTime arrived last year, video calling has been all the rage. The technology that enables it has been around for a long time though and it’s a great way to see your other half when they can’t be with you. Skype instantly springs to mind for the job and most smartphones are now being kitted out with front-facing cameras for video calling purposes.

The modern world is truly an age of plenty: in ancient times entire villages had to share a single idiot, but thanks to the internet we can enjoy stupidity from around the world! Facebook is a font of the very crème de la cretin because it automatically filters out “Anyone who has something worthwhile to do instead” and “Anyone who knows not to advertise their failings.”

1. Facebook Founder Suffers From Stalker, Advanced Irony

Mark Zuckerburg has filed a restraining order against a 31-year-old psychopath who’s been harassing him online. In fairness Mark isn’t being hypocritical: Pradeep Manukonda is neither someone a hated bully from primary school nor a HORNY SINGLE IN HIS AREA, and is therefore probably forbidden from contacting you on facebook. And in real life. And with handwritten notes and bunches of flowers.

Honestly, if he wasn’t an insane nutball this would be one of the sweetest online relationships we’d ever seen.

Pradeep has chased Mark as far as the Facebook offices (where we imagine nothing ever, ever gets done) and even the Zuckerberg home. So we can see why Mark hates him: anyone who gets up and travels around trying that hard to meet a person in real life clearly isn’t a very good facebook customer, sorry, marketing target, no, user. User. To Mark’s credit he hasn’t whined once about lack of privacy, but that’s probably more because he understands the entire internet would mock him into oblivion.

(In case you’re wondering, Pradeep’s angle is a rather unoriginal “Please give me money please please please” crusade.)

2. Facebook Shoes

We might all be guilty of checking what our friends are doing when we were meant to be working, but at least we never claimed that was the actual work. Not so for Scottish designer Gerry McKay, who decided to see how many massively unfriendly lawyer-owners he could wind up at once when he “designed” the Facebook Adidas shoe.

We’ll admit it takes some balls to stare at your status message and think “I’ll just copy that”, but it’s the same sort of balls that leads you to ram-raiding an SUV through a hospital gift shop. Stupid balls. These are less useful than Douglas Bader’s basketball shoes. Even if Adidas were the sort of people who rewarded people ripping off their designs (and those guys don’t even reward the children who make the official ones), proving that the sum total of your inventiveness is copying a third party’s work makes you slightly less employable than a coughing typhoid vector.

3. Least Ambitious Researcher In The World Concludes That Facebook Feeds Narcissism

The old idea was that while not everyone who had a diary had a big head, everyone with a big head has a diary. And those were the good old days because it assumed people could write more than two sentences and had the dignity to at least wait until they were dead before expecting anyone to care about what they had for lunch. Facebook doesn’t have those advantages and everyone already knows this. Everyone but Soraya Mehdizadeh, the least ambitious researcher in the world, who claims to be a “Cyberpsychologist” and clearly spent her entire career coming up with that word. Because her research is about as insightful as Brian Sewell doing the SkySports score-forecast.

She asked 100 students about their habits and concluded that people who post every last detail about how great they are online may be narcissistic. You might recognise this as less data than you and everyone else in the modern world has on facebook users, and wimpy to boot because of the cowardly “may.” We can only hope Mehdizadeh funds her own research by working part time as a window cleaner so that:

1. No science-money which could have been used for lasers or the cure for cancer was wasted here
2. She’s useful at least some of the time.

We covered the official announcement of the INQ Cloud Touch elsewhere, but it wasn’t the only phone they launched today, as it was joined by the INQ Cloud Touch Q! Whereas the Cloud Touch is a candy bar touchscreen phone, the Touch Q is an unconventionally-styled QWERTY phone along the lines of a BlackBerry Curve.

However, it differs from the Curve by combining the QWERTY keyboard with a touchscreen, so you get the best of both worlds. Inside the phone, things are exactly the same as its full touchscreen brother, but we’ll give you a rundown anyway:

• 2.6″ touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard.
• Android 2.2.
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
• GPS.
• 3G with HSPDA.
• 600Mhz Qualcomm processor.
• 5 megapixel camera.

The Cloud Touch Q remains a servant of Facebook too, as the social network forms the basis of the primary homepage and keeps all your friend’s status updates, Places check-ins, photos and everything else up to date, at all times. Other homescreens can be customised with standard Android widgets, but to get the most from the Touch Q, you’re going to have to be true Facebook devotee.

Spotify has been added as the standard music application, so you can stream music directly to your phone, plus the Wi-Fi uses the phone’s GPS system to identify previously used networks and hotspots, logs you in, and saves you eating up your contract’s data allowance. Handy if you are on a tariff with a strict limit.

Like the Cloud Touch, the Q is expected in April and will be similarly priced, and despite those slightly gawky looks, the keyboard could make this a popular choice.

The INQ Cloud Touch, first seen last month when it was spotted on Bluetooth’s accreditation site, has been made official by the London-based company, and it’s as close to being a fully fledged Facebook phone as we’ve come so far.  What’s more, according to a conversation between INQ’s co-founder Ken Johnstone and The Guardian, Facebook themselves were ‘heavily involved with it and it’s been a collaborative process’.

So just how deeply ingrained is the social network? The answer is, very.  Basically, if you’re not an active Facebook user, you won’t get much out of the standard Cloud Touch, as it forms your homepage and it’s used to prepare calls and messages, plus all status updates, photos and Places check-ins are displayed front and centre. This means you don’t have to open an app or manually check for updates; it’s all live, all of the time.

However, as the Cloud Touch is based on Android 2.2, there are other homescreens to fill with other non-Facebook widgets and if you’re so desperate for the Cloud Touch but don’t want all the Facebook integration, then you can remove them, however, this defeats the object of the device. It’s also a shame, as so much effort has gone into making this a pure Facebook experience, right down to future new Facebook features magically appearing on your phone without the need for an update.

The INQ Cloud Touch also has the following features:

• 3.5″ capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 480 x 320.
• 600Mhz Qualcomm processor.
• 3G with HSDPA.
• 5 megapixel camera.
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
• GPS.
• Android 2.2.

To keep you connected, but with an eye on your data allowance, the Could Touch’s GPS and Wi-Fi work together to remember your home network or other wireless hotspots you’ve previously logged in to, and will connect automatically when they come within range. If you’re a Spotify user, you’ll be pleased to see the streaming music service has been set as the standard music app on the device.

It’s set to be a huge seller, and INQ say the Cloud Touch will be out in the UK this April at a competitive price.

They’ll call it a film that defines a generation, and it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s a good thing. With The Social Network, director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin turn some fairly dry, nerdy content about fairly dry, nerdy characters into one of the must-see films of the year, and they don’t waste any time getting right to it. The film opens with what will go down as one of the great break-up scenes of all time, and from there Fincher rides Sorkin’s hilariously addictive script like a wild bull at a rodeo. It moves fast like a manic internet surfer, and it never really lets you catch your breath. It’s a film about connecting, except you won’t really connect with anyone. After all, this is a generation that has more virtual friends than real-life friends. You know … on Facebook.

This is an emotionless generation; one taught that it’s much better to sue than get your cry on. It’s a generation that wants to make more money than its neighbor; to think with numbers rather than emotion. A generation that needs it all right now at their fingertips, and anything less just isn’t good enough. They’re spoiled and they’re hard to sympathize with, but they’re changing the world one megabyte at a time and it’s kinda fun to watch. So is The Social Network.

With a lot of help from Sorkin’s (potentially Oscar-worthy) script, David Fincher has crafted his most humorous film since Fight Club. It’s a lot more accessible and relatable than his 1999 wickedly dark dramedy, though, and during an awards season that may be packed with bizarre psychological head-trips and horrific, stomach-churning set pieces, The Social Network — with its built-in audience of 500 million-plus — may creep to the top of the pack as a certifiable fan favorite.

Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Theatrical Reviews

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Filed under: Video Games, Social Networking

In the biggest digital migration since folks moved down on the farm, millions of “pioneers” have hitched their covered wagons and moved West in search of new online lives. According to USA Today, since its June 9th launch, 20 million gamers have played ‘FrontierVille.’ Now, that number pales in comparison to Zynga‘s other most popular social-networking game — ‘FarmVille,’ with its 62 million users — but it does show that ‘FrontierVille‘ is (regretfully) here to stay. Just what are all these folks doing on their homesteads? Well, 6.3 million built log cabins, 3.3 million built general stores, 2.3 million married, 1.1 million birthed a kid, 10 million clobbered a snake and 3.6 million ran-off a bear. Oh, pioneers!

Unfortunately, there are no numbers showing how many real-life relationships have ended or how many boxes of snack cakes have been consumed from playing too much ‘FrontierVille.’ [From: USA Today]

‘FrontierVille’ Attracts 20 Million Digital Settlers originally appeared on Switched on Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to hear a lot more about “The Social Network,” director David Fincher’s examination of the development of Facebook. But you won’t be hearing about it on Facebook.

According to All Things Digital (via Slash Film), Sony executives reached out to Facebook to advertise “The Social Network” on the social networking site but ultimately decided not to pursue that form of promotion — which is hardly unsurprising, given the fact that “The Social Network” doesn’t exactly paint the most flattering portrait of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, played in the film by Jesse Eisenberg.

“Facebook’s advertising guidelines don’t allow ads to reference the company unless Facebook has cooperated with the object of the ad,” Sony’s senior vice president of Media Relations Steve Elzer told All Things Digital. “So, we won’t be advertising there given these parameters.”

A Facebook representative confirms that “The Social Network” won’t be advertised on the site, saying: “My understanding is that they asked us for our ad guidelines and decided not to advertise on us after receiving them … I don’t think they ever submitted ad copy for us to review.”

It seems bizarre that “The Social Network,” a film about Facebook, won’t be advertised on Facebook — bizarre, but not surprising, given the film’s unflattering portrayal of the social networking site’s founding. Still, as Slash Film astutely points out, “The Social Network” is likely to make the Facebook rounds regardless of official advertising thanks to the legions of Facebook users likely to link around the film’s trailers, posters and other promotional efforts.

Personally, I don’t expect that the lack of Facebook advertising for “The Social Network” will damage the film’s prospects in the end. If anything, it could generate some interesting buzz around the movie. We’ll see how big an impact it has once Fincher’s latest arrives in theaters in October.

Tell us what you think in the comments and on Twitter!