Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Summer is in full swing as are the companies making moves that make Katherine Heigl movies look good.  This week: the world went nuts without twitter, the spammers are back, Google goes offline, and the future of television.

Twitter goes silent.

I see a future where just like Microsoft patch Tuesdays, we’ll have No Twitter Thursdays.  Would anyone care?  Don’t you love the smug media reports of how so many people were not able to tweet about their mundane lives? 

In the WSJ this morning, the column picked on a woman unable to tweet about her pants decision.  “Poor loser women” was the gist of the jab.  Now, in my world, a tweet about pants would be followed shortly by an “unfollow” but still, who are they to judge?  The media loves to point out how silly some tweets are, but can’t you say the same thing about what folks write on Facebook?  Check out Lamebook to catch my drift.

Economy is turning, spammers are back.

One of the great things about the last redesign here at Gadgetell is the ability to get notified when someone responds to your comments.  We, as writers, also get notified when someone comments on our pieces so we can continue the dialogue.  It is a fun tool that helps communication.  Except when the spam shows up.

It has been a bit since my posts have been hit with “buy gold” or crap like that.  But this week, the spammers are back hard.  I’ve got a lot of “nice words” and a link to some merchant.  It is almost comforting to know these folks are again being paid to get their spam in front of folks again.  Makes me have hope that we’ll get this bad economic mojo behind us someday.

Google looks to beat Microsoft with these?

MS Office is everywhere.  Ensconced in big business, Google’s got an uphill battle to unseat the king.  So how to get the word out?  Banner ads, email blasts, twitter campaigns, YouTube viral?  Nope.  Good ole’ billboards.

Sweet.  Nothing like a little offline commentary on how much Office costs, is complex and isn’t all Google-y fun.  Reminds me of the days when Google was a band of rebels.  Ah, the good Google years.

The future of TV.

While some companies are doing crazy things like mounting a Blu-ray player in an HDTV to help gain some traction in the US market, other companies like TiVo are going a bit beyond.  This week the company added RSS feed capability.  This will allow podcasts and the like to be streamed to the TiVo.  Hot.

Sharp is showing off a the Blu-ray HDTV and surely others will follow.  Wrong move.  The whole HD-DVD versus Blu-ray war produced only consumer boredom with the subject.  Coupled with limited free spending, access and instant is beating super high-high def.

In my humble opinion, we’ll bypass Blu-ray for instant streaming.  So far, I’ve been totally happy with my Netflix streaming over TiVo.  It works great, costs me nothing (assuming I’d get the DVD by mail anyway) and feels high techy.  Now just add in a way to search through the instant play movies from the TiVo and not a computer and you’ve got me for life.  TiVo, once thought to be just an evolutionary step that would be consumed by providers smarter DVRs manages to stay ahead.  Nicely done.