Category: Tech news

Tired of seeing every inane detail of yours friends lives pop up in that annoying Facebook sidebar ? Well apparently Facebook was too as the redesign announced yesterday eliminates Ticker for some, and banishes it to the bottom of the left Chat sidebar as a one-story tall blip for others. The real-time Ticker feed launched 2011 that’s best known for outing your friends as Britney Spears fans.

Facebook seemed well aware that many people disliked the “creeper feed”, as some called it. A while back it gave people the option to minimize the Ticker. Now that valuable screen real-estate can be filled with something people actually want — a little menu for opening up specially dedicated news feeds for photos, music, and more.

Those include Ticker’s replacement, the All Friends feed. It’s a quieter real-time feed of everything your friends share, which you can choose to view rather than be forced to have cluttering your home page. It doesn’t have the TMI over-sharing feel of Ticker, though, as it cuts out minor stories about status updates and photos your friends liked.

Update: Facebook didn’t kill the Ticker entirely, as we originally said. It’s testing different versions of the redesign. Some kill off Ticker entirely. Some show it as a tiny, one-story tall add-on to the bottom of the chat buddy list in the sidebar. Some viewport / screen resolution sizes have it, some don’t, and some people have it defaulted off, while some have it defaulted on.

If you really love Ticker, when you get the new design you can scroll to the very bottom of your left sidebar to check if you have it. If you do, you can even turn it off with an option inside the ‘gear’ button.

Ticker was designed to keep the news feed feeling fresh, and show you what friends were doing in apps like Spotify and the Wall Street Journal news reader. But it turns out those random tidbits don’t mean much. They’re much more interesting when combined to show “5 of your friends listened to this musician / read this article”. Facebook hopes aggregated stories about those trends and the option to view different streams will keep the news feed from getting boring

Facebook’s big redesign is rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks. Read more about it:

Facebook Launches Feeds For Photos, Music, Friends-Only, And More

Hands-On With The New Facebook And Its Boredom-Killing Feeds [Video]

Facebook’s Riskiest Bet Yet. Can It Uproot A Billion People’s Behavior?

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[Image Credit: Webeweaver]

Hubbl, the app discovery service built by former TechCrunch Disrupt finalists, has introduced an interesting new feature today for users of its iPhone version: Passbook integration. To get started, you simply visit a link (hubbl.io/passbook) from mobile Safari, in order to add a pass to Apple’s Passbook which will then send you a new app deal every day. The Passbook feature will also be added to a forthcoming iOS app update as well.

Co-founder Archana Patchirajan explains that the idea for Passbook integration is that it would offer users a new way to discover apps, without having to first install an app for searching apps. It’s meant to be a more lightweight solution, but more importantly, it’s also an adaptive one. Even if the user isn’t on the native Hubbl application, the system is able to figure out which apps to recommend based on those the user clicks on.

However, for users who do have the Hubbl app installed on their phones, and who have created an account, the recommendations will be even more personalized. Hubbl’s app can analyze which apps are on a user’s device, both at first install and then on an ongoing basis, after receiving the user’s permission. Once the apps are detected, the user is also prompted as to which apps they want to share with their network.

Patchirajan says Hubbl is currently able to detect over 60 percent of iOS applications in this way. And because Hubbl also uses this concept of hashtagging (assigning apps to category using # hashtags, like on Twitter), it’s also able to map users to various “personas” based on their app collection. This, in turn, improves the app recommendations both in the app itself and in the new Passbook feature.

Hubbl’s algorithms are also designed to learn from your activity in the app, and, if you so desire, you can choose to select your own interests in Hubbl to improve its suggestions.

In addition to app suggestions, Hubbl shows users the apps related to the ones they’re looking at, and it offers real-time search, plus “news channels” to follow for more app ideas. For example, the “TechCrunch Channel” in Hubbl shows a list of the apps which have been reviewed on this website.

Hubbl has come a long way since it first publicly debuted this past October – it’s far more stable now and the user interface has changed dramatically, too. The app now uses the popular one-screen user interface concept with navigation that’s tucked off to the left side, though it has placed the navigation button at the bottom left instead of top left, which is more common.

Patchirajan says that Hubbl is now moving forward with the company’s B2B offering known as “Spacebar,” which involves partnerships with publishers and other content distribution networks. This will allow publishers to distribute apps in a more “contextually relevant fashion” he says. For instance, if you were reading an article about fashion or sports, it would use that information alongside other demographic and location info, to make apps suggestions which could be embedded on the publishers’ site in widget format. (There’s an example of this here.)

Though the B2B platform isn’t yet live, Hubbl has signed up two large publishers already who, combined, have 100 million mobile pageviews via apps and mobile web.

In the meantime, users interested in getting personalized app deals can just click this link using mobile Safari to add the feature to Apple’s Passbook: hubbl.io/passbook.

There’s a new wrinkle in SideCar‘s ongoing battle with local authorities in Austin. Just a day after announcing that it’s offering free transportation to SXSW Interactive attendees, the ride-sharing startup has decided to take the city’s transportation department to court.

The suit is just the latest in a series of battles with the city since SideCar acquired Austin-based ride-sharing startup HeyRide a few weeks ago as part of its expansion into seven new markets. After launching in San Francisco last summer, the company is in the midst of a big nationwide expansion.

After getting rebuffed by local officials here, SideCar has fired back at the Austin Department of Transportation with a lawsuit that it hopes will legitimize ride sharing in the city. The filing hit today, just a few weeks after the Austin city council passed an ordinance that would effectively make it illegal for SideCar or others to operate there. The ordinance allows for local police to impound the vehicles of drivers who aren’t licensed to provide taxi or limo rides if they’re caught giving rides for pay.

In response, SideCar, which launched in Austin just ahead of SXSW Interactive, decided to give rides for free. Instead of getting paid “donations” by passengers after a ride, SideCar is paying its drivers an hourly rate as “brand ambassadors” during the conference.

Now it’s going on the offensive against the city, with a lawsuit filed in Austin City Court today that’s designed to reverse the ordinance. Not just that, but SideCar hopes that by taking Austin to court, it will make clear that its ride-sharing service and others like it are legal under local regulations.

In SideCar v. The City of Austin, Texas, the company makes the following claims:

• SideCar is not a transportation service. SideCar is a technology platform that enables peer-to-peer ridesharing.
• The City Code regulates “chauffeured vehicles”. We don’t own or operate vehicles, dispatch drivers or mandate shifts.
• The City Code regulates “chauffeured vehicles” for a fee. Members of the SideCar rideshare community pay what they want and it’s voluntary.
• SideCar is protected under federal law.

Austin isn’t the only place where SideCar has been under fire from local regulators and city officials. Like Uber before it, SideCar received a cease-and-desist order and fines from the California Public Utilities Commission for operating an unlicensed charter party (i.e. limo) service in San Francisco. It’s also come under fire in Philadelphia, where three of its drivers had their cars impounded by the local police there.

I had a conversation with SideCar co-founder Nick Allen this morning at SXSWi, where he talks about the company’s free rides in Austin during the conference, as well as the lawsuit. Check out the whole video above.

Two startups responsible for helping push the envelope on collaborative design and the democratization of building hardware are launching a competition today that could take open source 3D printing to the next level – and perhaps even into orbit.

DIYROCKETS, the global space company co-founded by Darlene Damm and Diego Favarolo in 2012 to lower the cost of space exploration, and Sunglass, the TC Disrupt finalist and cloud-based 3D design platform founded by Nintin Rao and Kaustuv DeBiswas in 2011, today announced the launch of a competition to see who can build the best open source rocket engines via 3D printing. The goal of the contest is to prove that not only can well-funded private company projects like SpaceX contribute to extraterrestrial exploration, but so can anyone, with the help of open source, collaborative design and tools that make building rigorously engineered 3D tech affordable and accessible, regardless of budget or available PC hardware.

“The goal of DIYROCKETS is to lower the cost of building space technology through crowdsourcing and opensourcing,” Damm said in an interview. “So this particular contest is tackling the challenge of transportation in the space industry, because it’s one of the most expensive things. It’s very costly to transfer things from earth up into space.”

To accomplish those goals, this contest is designed to get teams to think about the problem of designing rocket engines with three key components in mind. Damm explained that the idea is to rethink how the space industry thinks about sharing information and technological developments, as well as tackling cost and building a solid tech foundation.

“In the space industry everything’s been so fractured in the past few decades that you don’t have collaboration and the benefits of that,” she said. “The second piece is that we’re trying to lower the cost through crowdsourcing and opensourcing the technology, so we’re asking that people submit a business case so that they’re not building some super expensive technology that’s not going to have any practical purpose. Third, we’re evaluating the technical side of the design.”

Eventually, the aim is to build an entire marketplace of opensource rocket parts from which engineers can choose from to build their own projects, and ultimately send those projects into space.

The competition will include three prizes, including a grand prize for best overall submission worth $5,000 for best design based on technical criteria, collaboration and business case. The second prize follows the same criteria but is specifically for student teams and is worth $2,500, and the third-place prize is also worth $2,500 and focuses solely on collaboration. In addition to those prizes, provided by Sunglass, there’s also a bonus offer from Shapeways, which is supplying free printing credits to all winners. All three winners will also receive free consulting from the Silicon Valley Space Center.

Even though there’s a prize specifically for students, Sunglass founder Nitin Rao explained that both parties expect to see participants from a wide variety of fields enter the race. The whole point of the project is to source good design and worthwhile input from wherever it may reside, regardless of any class/professional/monetary barriers that may have prevented some from participating in the past.

Once a winner is crowned, we’ll be well on the way to seeing a 3D printed rocket actually take flight, since everyone knows the rocket engine is the hardest part. Okay that may not be exactly true (I’m no expert), but it could still be the beginning of an exciting era for space exploration.

Sonos is a wireless audio company that makes solid – albeit comparatively expensive – audio hardware. Setup is drop dead simple – to add a component you simply press one or two buttons on the new device and everything “just works” and the remote control UI, refined over most of the past decade, has a cult-like following. You can create different audio zones around your room and play different music in each one or enter party mode and turn your house into a massive disco. In short, Sonos makes whole-home audio easy.

So what of this new Playbar, a long sound bar that sits above or below your television and connects to your system via a single optical cable? This new device has nine speakers built-in, six midrange and three tweeters, and works with Sonos’ SUB subwoofer and Play:3 mini speakers that can act as satellite surround sound speakers.

To use the Playbar you need at least a Sonos Bridge – the central device that talks to all Sonos devices – and an iOS or Android device. Setup requires you to connect the Playbar to your TV (or receiver) via a single optical cable. You then plug in the power and you’re set. It also has an Ethernet port, but Sonos has excellent QOS control via wireless and I’ve never had a problem with streaming.

The $699 Playbar can be mounted above or below your TV – a built-in accelerometer senses the direction – or you can put it on a TV stand.

Unfortunately, this reliance on a single optical cable is both good and bad. If you don’t have a receiver and connect all of your devices directly to your TV, you’re golden. If you have a receiver, however, setup is a bit more difficult. I set my receiver to output HDMI audio as well as video and turned it down all the way. The TV, then, does all of the audio output via optical and your receiver becomes little more than a switch. You can control the Playbar’s volume with your TV remote or the Sonos app.

The app also bears some discussion. The Sonos app breaks your sound system into different rooms and nearly everything is managed through the app, including the addition of more speakers to the system. You can add music services and grab multiple songs from multiple services – an album from your own collection, a few songs from a shared drive on your network, and maybe a playlist from Rdio – and play it as a queue. You can save queues (playlists, really) and all of the audio manipulation, including control of bass and treble, are done in the app. With the addition of the the Playbar, the app adds a “TV” input that allows you to control the volume of the Playbar remotely.

How is the audio quality? A single Playbar will make your TV sound better (although that’s usually not hard). I was able to turn up the sound on action movies and get a few solid whomps out of the soundtrack as well as hear clear and distinct dialog, which was actually an improvement over my current 5.1 setup. Your results may vary, but I didn’t get much out of the “simulated” surround sound these speakers advertised but I was pleased with the sound overall.

Music playback over this speaker – because, using the Sonos app, you can beam services like Pandora and Rdio as well as your own collection through the Playbar – was clean and nuanced and these were an excellent replacement for the pair of stereo speakers I usually used to listen to music.

Current Sonos users will be pleased to note that this system does replace the Play:5 or Play:3 speakers, whether you have paired them in stereo or are simply using a single unit. You could, for example, remove a pair of Play speakers and simply use this to play TV audio as well as your music. The Playbar is that good. I saw no discernible difference in using this vs. the two Sonos speakers I already had in the room I was testing this gear in.

The Playbar also answers another home audio prayer – the promise of true wireless 5.1 sound. While the Playbar technically isn’t a center-front right-front left setup, by pairing this with two Play:3 satellites (Play:5 units don’t work) and a sub-woofer, you’ve got a very nice wireless 5.1 system.

The Playbar really shines in this setup, which, in the end, will cost you $1,996 to set up, including the Playbar. The Playbar paired with the sub-woofer, for example, really opens up the audio considerably while the satellite speakers – which require all of five minutes to setup – are almost magical in their simplicity. For folks who have pulled wire under or across walls and floors, this setup is a godsend. At the bare minimum I’d recommend the Playbar and the Sub. If you want to spring for the Play:3s in the back, you won’t be disappointed.

Better (or at least more bass-heavy) soundbars can be had for about as much as the Sonos system. However, if you’re already familiar with the Sonos system, this is probably your best bet. It completely replaces any Play speakers you already have (allowing you to stick them in another room) and paired with other Sonos gear it really sounds great.

If you’re new to Sonos, you may not want to start here. Sonos truly shines in music playback and there’s nothing like setting all of your speakers on party mode and creating a soundscape that would normally take you hours of setup and wire management to pull off. The Playbar, then, seems like a device for folks who want to Sonosify their whole home and it’s understandable why they created it. However, it’s not a good introductory device unless you’re in the market for a solid sound bar with a few very cool features. If you’re only looking for music playback, a few Play:5 speakers and maybe a SUB are a good place to start.

Can you get better sound out of equally or more expensive speakers? Potentially. However, the added value of complete control of your music and TV audio is a huge plus. The Sonos system shines when there are a few speakers going at once and if you’re looking for a true wireless surround sound system, look no further. If you’re simply trying to replace the wonky speakers built into your TV, however, the Playbar faces tougher competition but stands firm against similarly-priced soundbars. It is well worth a look when considering living room/TV audio systems.

Still listening to your college favorites? They’re no better than today’s hits — you’re just in a musical rut. These apps will help you break out of it.

For many, knife sharpening is akin to voodoo, perhaps even magic. But it’s no dark art. It’s a skill you can learn and, with practice, master.

There’s the consumer tablet gold rush, and then there’s the elusive “business tablet,” the mother lode every manufacturer is hoping is still out there.

I had a little bit of time to play with the Chromebook Pixel today and I’m a regular user of the Acer C7, a $199 machine that is wildly underpowered but good enough on a bad day. I really like the concept and I really like ChromeOS – it’s a solid way to get a little browsing done, say, in a cyber cafe or hotel bar. It isn’t, however, an OS.

As Linus Torvalds notes, the Pixel is an amazing piece of hardware and it makes you wonder just what other laptop manufacturers are thinking. It’s pricey, sure, but the touchscreen works well, the display is striking, and the styling is on par with the MacBook. Even MG (the G stands for Grumpy) liked it, and he doesn’t like anything.

But then there’s the problem of apps. Torvalds writes:

The creator of Linux, the paragon of pure computing, wants to install a “real distro.”

Ouch.

What the Chomebooks can’t yet do is run real applications. I’m currently dual-booting my C7 so I can install Skype on Ubuntu and you get this sense, once you’re in a real environment, that ChromeOS is like one of those “pre-OSes” that they used to stick on laptops so you could browse the web and watch movies without booting into Windows. It’s not all there.

That’s fairly easy to fix: allow vendors to create real apps for the platform. After all, Google is the “open” company, right? There should be a way for me to jackhammer Skype and Audacity into the ChromeOS environment. After all, a beautiful big screen is useless when all you open on it is Gmail.

Apps matter. As much as everyone clamors that Windows Phone and BB10 will thrive, they can’t do it without lots and lots and lots of apps. They can’t win without a dedicated developer base and groups of users who go out of their way to learn programming just to program for their favorite platform. While web-based apps are fun, in theory, we’re just not there yet in terms of real value. In the uncanny valley of application programming, HTML5 and attendant technologies are too stiff and jerky, like the humans in the first Toy Story movie. We need a few more years to bake them into real usability.

Until then, we’re stuck turning silk purses into sow’s ears (or, depending on your opinion of Linux, silk purses into penguins). I can’t, for example, recommend that my Mom pick up a Chromebook because she’ll immediately hit a brick wall when she wants to, say, Skype my in-laws. We can regress the argument down to “Well, they can use Google Hangouts” but that doesn’t solve the problem. In human-computer interaction, there should be more than one way to do something. That way, I’m sad to say, is through the introduction of a full SDK.

As it turns out, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gets awfully chatty when he attends award ceremonies. His appearance at the (generally awful) Spike TV Video Game Awards got him ruminating about the future of living room PCs, and ahead of today’s BAFTA Games Awards he confirmed to the BBC that Valve is working on Steam Box prototypes that will be released to testers “in the next three to four months”.

The BBC’s report is a rather brief one, but Newell was awfully candid. Beyond offering a rough timeframe for actual user testing, he also noted that the team working on the hardware was struggling with keeping the amount of heat and noise the console generated in check. It’s a common problem among the current slew of consoles, especially as gamers’ demands for pure pixel-pushing performance continue to grow — turning on the original Xbox 360 wasn’t unlike firing up a jet engine, and the fat PlayStation 3 had a tendency to make its surroundings just a bit toastier.

As always, Newell had nothing to say about what kind of hardware will be part of the Steam Box, but did allude once again to the prospect of adding a more personal dimension to how we play games. The Verge reported earlier this year that Valve was exploring ways to enhance the gaming experience by keeping tabs not only on a user’s direct inputs, but their biometric responses as well. Newell briefly revisited that notion again, this time noting that the company has yet to decide whether it will actually attempt to collect that sort of data using the controller — Valve is currently assessing multiple controller concepts, which appears to be one of the project’s major sticking points for the time being.

Nebulous though it may be, it could be that sort of deeply personal angle that ultimately sets Valve’s console apart from the likes of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft — players who have already spent years vying for control of our living rooms. Newell’s vision is of a reactive gaming experience, one that grows and changes depending on what players are going through at that moment. He uses the physiological effects that horror games like Left 4 Dead can produce as an example:

“You need to actually be able to directly measure how aroused the player is – what their heart rate is, things like that – in order to offer them a new experience each time they play.”

It’s far too early to tell whether or not Valve’s approach to living room gaming will pan out, but one thing seems clear — Valve is building up the Steam Box to be a gamer’s game console, and players like Sony and Nintendo would do well to stay on their toes.

A big part of what makes our Cribs series so fun to make is going behind closed doors to get a real glimpse at how a company works (and plays.) But it’s not every day that Cribs take us behind a second set of closed doors — ones that are completely hidden — and enter into top secret rooms.

So our tour of Weebly, the San Francisco-based startup that runs a web-hosting service and drag-and-drop website builder, was quite the treat. Weebly is based in the Jackson Square neighborhood of San Francisco bordering North Beach, both historical regions that factored big in the Barbary Coast days and later hosted lots of speakeasy activity during the Prohibition era. Weebly’s office is certainly very clean and modern, but it also has a few nifty features that fit into the more shadowy past of its surroundings.

Watch the video embedded above to see the underground tunnel portal that opens into Weebly HQ, the company’s top secret meeting room (complete with a sneaky bookshelf door), and Weebly’s non-official mascot Lucy, possibly the cutest English bulldog ever.

BlackBerry’s platform has seen some big-name additions in the past couple of days. Unfortunately both came via sideloaded Android apps, likely created by the community using BlackBerry developer tools and the APKs of the Android apps in question. BlackBerry has made it very easy for any developer to port their Android titles to BB10 in around five to 10 minutes, but that means it’s easy for anyone motivated enough to do so as well.

I spoke to BlackBerry’s VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders about the recent surfacing of both an Instagram BAR file for sideloading on BB10 devices (which Chris wrote about yesterday) and the Netflix app that BlackBerry OS demoed today. Saunders made clear that BlackBerry doesn’t officially sanction conversion efforts from anyone other than the official developer behind an app.

“We don’t condone piracy,” Saunders said. “If you don’t have a license to distribute that app, that’s effectively what it is. We think the best way for a developer to deal with that is to package the application themselves, turn it into a BAR file and put it into BlackBerry World, because users wouldn’t be tempted to do that if the applications were simply available in BlackBerry World.”

Saunders sees the eagerness of the community to get applications like Instagram and Netflix working on BB10 devices as a sign that there’s demand there, and he thinks it is beginning to sway companies around to BlackBerry’s side, too. WhatsApp is working on a BlackBerry port for its cross-platform messenger, for instance, and The New York Times is also working on a dedicated BB10 app. Saunders said both of those decisions have been made within the last six weeks, so clearly some minds are changing in terms of developer hold-outs.

“It is really, really easy to build a BAR file for an Android application and upload that to the store, so if it’s easy for a developer to do that, it’s easy for users to do that, too,” Saunders said, discussing what BlackBerry can do about user-created apps. Only when those try to come into BlackBerry World itself and masquerade as legitimate apps can the company take action.

I also asked Saunders whether or not BlackBerry expected or predicted users would take matters into their own hands, since it works nicely as a stopgap measure while companies build their own solutions and helps prove there’s a demand out there for those products. “I wouldn’t say we predicted it,” he said. “And certainly we haven’t made it easier for users to sideload applications on to our platform, but we’ve been aware of it for some time.”

The home port crowd is an interesting variable in RIM’s platform launch. It energizes the community, generates hype around apps that aren’t yet committed to the platform, and shows off the ease with which Android APKs can be ported. BlackBerry may not officially approve, but it’s hard not to see the value of this kind of guerrilla tactic in an admittedly uphill battle.

Google just announced that it has released a new feature for the Chrome Beta for Android that could speed up web browsing and save bandwidth for mobile Chrome users. With this proxy feature turned on, all your web requests will be routed through Google’s servers, where the company then uses its PageSpeed libraries to compress and optimize the content. The actual connection to the browser from Google’s servers is then handled by the SPDY protocol, which optimizes the content even more.

Overall, using this proxy can reduce data usage by about 50%. Just using the PageSpeed libraries to transcode images to the Google-backed WebP format instead of JPEG and PNG makes a significant difference because 60% of all transferred bytes on the average page are images. The proxy, Google software engineer and “mobile web performance gearhead” Matt Welsh writes in the announcement today, “performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page.” DNS lookups will also be handled by the proxy and turning this feature on, Google notes, also automatically enables the browser’s Safe Browsing mode.

To turn this feature on, visit chrome://flags in your browser and select “Enable Data Compression Proxy.”

Even when this feature is turned on, Google will still route all of the secure HTTPS connections from your browser directly to their destination. They won’t touch Google’s servers. The same goes for incognito tabs.

While all of this sounds a bit like the Turbo mode Opera offers on its mobile and desktop browsers, the difference here is that all of the page is still rendered by the user’s browser and all of the JavaScript is still executed locally.

Also new in this new beta version of Chrome is support for password and autofill entries syncing, which was previously only available for Chrome on the desktop, but the key feature is obviously support for the SPDY proxy service.

Earlier today, I wrote about VMware selling SlideRocket to Clearslide, a service that allows sales people to upload collateral and presentations, as well as edit and analyze results. Yesterday I spoke to one of the co-founders of Fileboard, which has changed its direction to offer a service quite similar to Clearslide.

Fileboard is an app that fits into a CRM ecosystem and provides immediate feedback to sales people. It’s the kind of service that, like Clearslide, is applicable to sales engagements across a wide spectrum of the market. Fileboard uses the cloud to provide a common platform for collaborating and tracking how customers are engaging with a presentation sent by a sales person. But, unlike Clearslide, Fileboard does not allow people to edit slide content.

But does that really matter? Co-Founder Khuram Hussain said they see themselves as more of a communications service than a sales-presentation provider and are focused on offering a simple way to upload files and start sharing presentations with customers.

That aside, Fileboard does offer an easy way to upload and rearrange slides, and send them directly from the console.

All the uploaded files are converted into data objects and made available as links. The links are easily tracked:

It also offers analytics to view the click-throughs that illustrate how often the presentation has been viewed, as well as how it then gets shared.

Fileboard also tells a story about how the team is performing:

The data from the customers can help Fileboard determine what works in a presentation and what does not. Managers can correlate the relationship between successful sales people and the analytics about success rates of presentations sent from the Fileboard service.

Fileboard supports screen sharing and integrates with Box and Dropbox so presentations may be automatically updated. Notes can be automatically added to a CRM system.

Twitter’s liberal bias is no shocker to anyone who saw “Binders Full Of Women” at a Halloween party last year. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s slip-of-the-tongue during a presidential debate instantly became a Twitter sensation, fueling discussion of conservative gender bias for weeks after the event. Now, delicious new survey data from Pew reveals just how liberal the Twitter universe is. And, perhaps more interestingly, when it’s also more conservative than national opinion polls.

When it comes to mainstream political issues, such as President Obama’s favorability or gay rights, Twitter is decidedly liberal. But, when issues are more wonky, like the nomination of former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, for Secretary of State, conservative opinion shines.

When Twitter Is More Liberal

Twitter users love President Obama and Gay Marriage. The average sentiment of Twitter updates was 25% more over-the-top with Obama’s re-election than a national-representative public opinion poll. More important, despite overwhelming disapproval of Obama’s first debate in the press and public opinion, Twitter uses came out in force to defend the president (20% of public vs. 59% Twitter).

On gay marriage, Twitter was slightly more favorable (33% vs. 46%) but there was virtually zero negative sentiment on Twitter (44% vs. 8%), perhaps because it’s easier to silently judge someone’s lifestyle than say it in public.

A Conservative Wonk

When it comes to insider Washington opinion, Twitter’s liberals are noticeably silent. Few Twitter uses had nice things to say about his second inaugural speech, compared to the public, (48% vs. 13%) and there was virtually no support for the nomination of John Kerry (39% vs. 6%).

In both cases, in the “neutral” sentiment of Twitter is higher than positive sentiment (i.e. people don’t care), conservatives have an easier time on social media.

Twitter Is Not A Representative Sample And That’s A Problem For Republicans

As I’ve written many times before, social media is a very biased sample of the U.S. At only 13% of population, if the highly-educated demographic of Twitter users had their way, Ron Paul would have been the Republican nominee and Chick-Fil-A would be out of business.

“The lack of consistent correspondence between Twitter reaction and public opinion is partly a reflection of the fact that those who get news on Twitter – and particularly those who tweet news – are very different demographically from the public,” writes Pew.

Even so, the overwhelming power of liberals on mainstream issues will make life difficult for Republicans. With a few clever tweets, Obama easily stole the social media thunder during Romney’s big Republican National Convention show. Even worse, from the “binders full of women” kerfuffle to Senator Marco Rubio’s water bottle gaffe, memes have a way of stubbornly sticking to conservatives. And, that is a big problem for the beleaguered Republican Party.