Category: Tech news

Just in case you’re unaware of our affection for singer/songwriter Jonathan Mann, see here, here, here, here, or here. But the relationship didn’t start out so friendly. Initially, we ripped him for the Bing jingle song he wrote to win a competition. And Mann responded by writing a song about me. But it’s all good. We’re BFF now. And Mann keeps cranking out the hits. Now he’s trying to see if his song-a-day success can transfer to an iPhone app.

Songatron is an app that Mann and developer Iliya Yordanov dreamed up so that anyone could have fun with the songs Mann writes on a daily basis. Essentially, it’s a lot like Mab Libs, but for music. You load up the app, say a word, and pick a song you want to apply it to. The song then plays (complete with Mann singing and playing the music) with your word inserted in key points.

Sure, it sounds a bit simple. Maybe even dumb. But it’s actually pretty funny. And as Mann notes, it’s great if you want to let someone know that you admire them — or if you want to mock them. I mean, just listen to this and this and especially this. Yep, awesome.

Once you pick the version of the song you like you can easily share it via email, Twitter, Facebook for all to enjoy.

And while the app costs $1.99, Mann has included 10 different songs, and promises to add 5 new songs a month from his collection (many for free, but some via in-app purchase). Plus, as a Thanksgiving Special, the app is 50 percent off, so it’s only $0.99 now. Good fun for the holiday times.

Meanwhile, the regular music career keeps progressing for Mann. Besides the Bing jingle, he got quite a bit of publicity when Apple played his iPhone 4 Antenna song before their “Antennagate” press conference over the Summer. Likely as a result, Mann will now be speaking and performing at MacWorld 2011 in January. He’s promised me that “I’m MG Siegler” will be played on stage. And he sent me along a clip of him and his band performing the song live recently. They’ve converted it into more of a punk rock song. It’s actually pretty awesome.

Watch Mann describe his new app below. The app works on the iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad. Find it here.

It’s been less than one month since Facebook launched its new deals service on top of its still-nascent Places platform. But that hasn’t stopped it from lining up some of the US’s biggest brands in time for the holiday season. A few minutes ago, the social network posted a note that shows just how many companies have already climbed on board to offer deals over the holidays. Note that some of these have already been announced (including the charitable Southwest Deal that donates $1 per check-in to the Make-a-Wish Foundation), but seeing them in one place makes it easier to gauge how much traction the feature is getting.

So why is this important? As we’ve discussed before, these location services are in a race to snap up deals with as many national brands as possible, in addition to the longtail of local businesses. Some of these brands want exclusivity (they don’t want to be on the same location service as a competitor), and brands will probably work with one or two location services instead of taking a shotgun approach so as to minimize shopper confusion. And many people are just trying out location apps for the first time — if they start associating deals with Facebook (or Foursquare or SCVNGR or Gowalla) then that might the app they turn to first in the future.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only service with big brands on board. Foursquare is currently doing some very interesting things, with Safeway and Pepsi, and had plenty of deals lined up with national brands for Black Friday today, with offers from the likes of Toys R Us and RadioShack. And SCVNGR recently signed up Coca Cola for a big holiday promotion.

Here’s the Facebook overview, via the note posted to Facebook’s Places page:

Southwest Airlines: Donating $1 per check in towards air travel to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Hard Rock Café: Donating $1 to WhyHunger to fight childhood hunger and poverty worldwide. Through December 31 (or up to $100,000).

JC Penney: Check in to receive $10.00 off $50.00 purchase towards an assortment of merchandise and services.

H&M: The first 2000 check-ins will receive 20% off any item of your choice.

Starbucks: Donating $1.00 per check in to Conservation Intl to help protect 5,000 acres of forest.

24 Hour Fitness: Donating $1.00 to KaBOOM! for every person who checks in using Facebook Places.

The North Face: Donate $1.00 to the National Park Foundation for every individual who checks in at one of America’s nearly 400 national parks or visits a The North Face retail location.

REI: Supporting local conservation efforts, each time you check in at an REI store, REI will donate $1 to a local nonprofit.

The Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas: Check in to receive an offer to extend your stay for one extra night at no cost. If you can’t stay the extra night, receive a room upgrade.

TAO and LAVO, Las Vegas: Check in at TAO Las Vegas or LAVO Las Vegas and receive complimentary admission for you and one guest on your next visit.

Harrah’s: Offering a number of Deals at its various properties for people who check in at each location.
Bally’s: buy one Jubilee! ticket and get one free.
Paris Las Vegas: buy one Eiffel Tower Ride pass and get one free.
Rio: get free admission to the VooDoo Lounge.
The Flamingo Las Vegas: buy one Paradise Garden Buffet and get one free.
O’Sheas Las Vegas: buy one drink at the Dublin Up Bar and get one free.
Harrah’s Las Vegas: buy one Flavors Buffet and get one free.
The Imperial Palace: buy one Emperor’s Buffet and get one free.
Caesars Palace: buy one Lago Buffet and get one free.
Planet Hollywood: buy one Spice Market Buffet and get one free.

Well there’s at least one former Digg engineer out there that had a happier Thanksgiving. We’ve gotten word that John Quinn, former Digg VP of Engineering, will be joining luxury discount marketplace Gilt Groupe as VP of Engineering come next Monday. Quinn will be working out of the Gilt Groupe New York office under CIO Steve Jacobs.

Prior to Gilt Groupe, Quinn had spent three years at Digg and before that was VP of Engineering at Squaretrade. According to our sources, Quinn was instrumental in the problematic Digg v4 redesign and its bumpy move over to a Cassandra versus MySQL database. Judging by the Digg team page Digg has not yet replaced Quinn as VP.

Gilt Groupe CIO Steve Jacobs tells TechCrunch that the new hire will be focusing on scaling and that the company is growing rapidly, “Gilt is expanding into new businesses all the time and we’re making sure that we have the right people in place. People do not think of Gilt as a technology company and we are a technology company.” When asked about concerns that Quinn bore responsibility for some of Digg’s infrastructure stumbles, Jacobs said, “I’m not worried about that for Gilt.”

Gilt Groupe, which has $83 million in funding led by Matrix Partners, recently launched Gilt City, a local deals network that aims to be a more high-end niche Groupon.

Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear.

The only magic I’ve found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people’s time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles.

1. Design your product to matter in a world of infinite supply. In 2010, people are inundated with an overwhelming number of people, applications, requests, alerts, relationships, and demands on their time. You love your product. The benefits of it are totally obvious to you. However, if you and every member of your team can’t crisply articulate what emotional benefit someone will get from spending 15 minutes on your social product that they can’t get on Facebook, LinkedIN, or Twitter, you’ve got work to do.

This isn’t touchy feely stuff. Neither I nor the prospective people who may use your social product care about your features, your game mechanics, or how amazing your application will be when there are millions of people on it. I’m selfish with my time and you’ve got seconds to hook me in with something new. And I’m not alone.

To successfully use the fleeting moments you have, you need to orchestrate everything under your control to work together seamlessly under a single brand with a single reason for existence. Make it emotional. If your team can’t tie back every decision they are making to the emotion you want people to feel when they are using your social product, then your reason for existence isn’t strong enough to serve its role, which is to guide your team and the product decisions you are making.

2. Be the best in the world at one thing. To put an even finer point on the focus required of any social upstart, you need to be best in the world at one thing. For Lululemon, they’ve built a $450 million annual revenue business by focusing on the black yoga pant. For Twitter, it’s the 140 character message. For Facebook, it is connecting you to the people you already know. Everything these companies do ties back to a specific thing they are going to be best in the world at doing.

It’s not always obvious upfront what should be your best in the world focus and enshrining the wrong thing can be a problem. However, it is much worse to build a social product without guiding principles. When you are focused on the one thing your social product is going to do better than everyone else, all you need to launch is your one thing and no more.

Ask yourself and every member of your team what you are best in the world at every week. Even better, define it, agree on it, print it out, blow it up, and put it on the wall. This should be the filter by which everyone is making product decisions.

3. Seek out uniqueness. Today’s social platforms and applications are fantastic at meeting people’s need to belong. But equally important – especially in a world of infinite supply – is what makes us feel different and special. People want scarcity. People want exclusivity. This doesn’t mean your social product should be limited to a niche. Frontierville was built for mass appeal – so that I could play with ALL of my friends – but it still finds ways to bring uniqueness into its social experience via neighbors, customization of your plot, and collections.

When people talk about exclusivity and scarcity these days, discussions of game mechanics are never far behind. I love game mechanics as much as the next person. However, if you are implementing game mechanics in the exact same way as everyone else, you’ve got a problem. It goes back to the issue of infinite supply. If there is an infinite supply of points, badges, and levels because they exist on every single social product out there, the minute you use them without being thoughtful, you are losing your shot at exclusivity and scarcity. A better approach is to figure out what makes people feel unique and special on your service independent of any specific game tactic. Then, selectively cherry pick the features that reinforce your emotional reason for existence for people. For uniqueness to work, you have to lead, not follow.

4. Focus on your most important interaction until you have it right. Once you have the critical features defined, there is typically one interaction that is clearly the most important to get right. It’s the interaction that if you get right means someone comes back and, if you don’t get it right, you can’t realize your full potential. Take this interaction and be maniacal about it. For Twitter, this is the Twitter stream. For Polyvore, this is the set page. For Facebook, this is the news feed. For YouTube, it’s the video page. For Dailybooth, it’s the live feed page. It’s the interaction where your magic happens, so give it the care and feeding needed to make it a star.

5. Choose your words carefully. The earlier you are as a social product, the more your word choice should be different and distinct from everything else out there. Early on is the time to have something important and different to say. In fact, all the great brands of the past 30 years have started out appealing to the passionate and rebellious first. Virgin? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Apple? The 1984 commercial. Nike? The subculture of intense runners sporting moustaches. Facebook? A few still remember the original Scarface logo.

There are things to copy from other services and there are things to make uniquely your own in social products. Layouts? Do your best but pay attention to what is already working. Colors? Hard to be original here, but blue is pretty played out. Icons? A toss up. Terminology? Own it. Your word choice is the primary place for you to have a point-of-view and present not only what you want your brand to emotionally mean to the people using it but the kinds of relationships you want people to have as a result of using your social product.

6. Create a party, not a museum. Great social products are clean, simple, and fast. The successful ones have little design flare, so that the people, photos, videos, text, and comments are front and center. The more design you add from colors to treatments, non-web-fonts, and graphics, the less your social application will feel like a party and the more it will feel like a museum. Or a magazine. Neither are a great goal. You want your social product to feel like it is a living and breathing party, not expensive furniture you’re not supposed to sit on.

7. Develop relationships, not features. Today, we have multiple personalities and different types of relationships with people in the real and virtual worlds. If you are going to design a new social product, it’s not enough to just offer a feature, like photos, videos, or events. You need to look at how the relationships on your social product will be important and different from the relationships you and others have already on Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter.

Most people will say that Facebook Connect handle the whole “people” thing for any new social product. I would argue that Facebook Connect is a start but if you can’t quickly show someone a new relationship dynamic or similar people in your social product in a way that is unique to your application, the value of people interacting in your new product will accrue back to Facebook and not you.

For example, I’ve found that on most new social applications I join I have the same 10 Facebook friends – typically my most prolific friends on Facebook already – on this new service too. In most cases, because these new social applications are just an extension of the things I’m already following them do on Facebook, such as sharing photos, events, lists, and videos, I don’t have a reason to come back to this new application a second time.

For a new social product, you need to think about how your social product expands, deepens, and changes the relationships people have today online and in the real world. This isn’t easy to achieve. The best example of a social product doing this well is Quora. Originally seeded with Facebook’s social graph, it has quickly differentiated itself by showing you people you may care about because of their thoughtful commentary, experience, and expertise displayed on topics that are important to you.

It takes alot for people to care about new people in the context of a new social product. Spending your time and energy on what constitutes similarity or what new relationships you want people to have as a result of your application is time worth spent.

As I think about what’s going to be created, discovered, invented, and re-imagined with social software in the next six months let alone the next five years, I can’t help but be excited. These principles shine a light on the first few feet in front of us, but, with every new social product success there will be new ones. As Alan Kay timelessly put it, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.

Gina Bianchini is the founder of Ning, the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social experiences with over 80 million unique users each month.

HopeLab is a nonprofit video game lab founded by Pam Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. That’s right, I said non-profit video game lab. It seeks to make the world better through video games, and it’s hoping it has a new hit on its hands with Zamzee. Zamzee combats sedentary behavior by giving kids and teens points for moving more throughout the day and those points can be used to buy virtual goods or exchange for gift cards.

Early research shows a whopping 30% jump in activity when people play Zamzee– the equivalent of running a marathon every month. HopeLabs has decided to spin the game out into a for-profit company to help commercialize the game faster. Richard Tate of HopeLabs joined us via Skype to talk about the game that may be a solution if your kids ate too much Turkey yesterday.

Welcome to Death/Star, a new show we are testing on TechCrunch TV. It’s a product review show with a twist. My co-host, CrunchGear editor John Biggs, and I give our opinions on three hot products. In the inaugural episode we cover the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tablet, photo-sharing app Instagram, and the Boxee Box.

To spice things up, we try to go beyond the traditional thumbs up/thumbs down to predict whether each product will end up in the graveyard (in which case we mark it for death) or become a bona fide hit (in which case we give it a star). Hence, the name: Death/Star. A surprise guest appears at the end and punks Biggs (the look on his face is classic).

The idea behind the show is not to do full reviews. You can read our previous review posts for the Galaxy Tab, Instagram (see more posts), and Boxee Box (see also demo video and CEO Avner Ronen interview). It is to evaluate each product’s chances for success and survival.

The full 7-minute episode is above, but we also broke it up into three shorter video segments below for each of the products. We shot the show at one of AOL’s video studios in New York City, and they helped us with the editing as well. Please tell us how you like the show in comments, what products you’d like to see us review next time, and any suggestions for making it better.

Samsung Galaxy Tab segment

Instagram segment

Boxee Box segment

The mobile check-in is not just a way to tell your friends where you are via FourSquare or Facebook Places, it is a marketing opportunity. Southwest Airlines is combining Facebook Places and charitable giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to encourage travelers to check into Southwest when they get to the airport.

From now through Christmas, Southwest Airlines will make a $1 donation in the form of free travel credit to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Often these wishes involve travel, an Southwest will donate up to $300,000 in travel credit through this promotion.

The promotion is a good example of cause marketing. It gives people an actual incentive to check in that is altruistic and makes them feel good. (Southwest is partnering with Microsoft to place photo-taking Santas at different airport terminals). Some of that good feeling might rub off on Southwest for making the connection, and it also has the added bonus of training people to use their mobile phones to check in at Southwest Airline locations. Next time they fly, they will probably check in again just to see what other geo-promotions Southwest is running.

Companies are still trying to figure out how to take advantage of geo-promotions. Turning check-ins into matching donations is certainly more compelling than trying to get people to check into billboards. What is the best check-in promotion you’ve seen this holiday season?

To quote Dwight Hansen, I do know a thing or two about a thing or two and as such I’m allowed, sometimes, to prognosticate. Even as we thrust our fists into the air triumphantly when we snag the last tattered box containing a Kung Zhu hamster value bundle, the IT industry never sleeps and, like a shark, it must keep moving to survive. Based on what we’ve seen this year, let’s take a look at what we can expect to see next year when we once again fall into the Black Friday Breech.

Chrome OS Laptops and Tablets – We know that Chrome OS is coming in 2011 and I wouldn’t be surprised if early versions start appearing at CES. Why is this important? Because Chrome OS is an OS for the everyman. It is “just” a browser which means, in theory, that the problems related to many OSes won’t be a problem here. It will, in short, be the ultimate “default” OS for beginning users and it will save us all from the Microsoft and Apple “taxes” simultaneously. If Android is any guide, the first versions will be garbage but by November 2011 they should be in the second release (Peanut Butter Cup or whatever they’ll call it).

Blackberry Playbook – We’ve been pretty hard on the Playbook because Matt and I don’t think Blackberry can make non-keyboard devices for a general market. The Storm, if you’ll recall, was a piece and the Storm 2 wasn’t much better. But a brand is a brand and a Blackberry device will sell. Best Buy even wants to sell it, which can make or break a device. Also look for an upcoming Palm OS slate from HP.

Impressive Playstation Phone – This came out of left field but it seems quite interesting. Sony Ericsson is working on a new phone designed for game players. It appears to be PSP compatible (we aren’t sure yet) and it will launch in February. Our own tipster told us that the screen and game playing experience were “incredible.” If they can pull this off and offer great games in the Android store SE will finally have a winner.

iPad 2 – MG created a speculative history about what would happen when the iPad 2 drops and it sounds pretty exciting. First, you’ll definitely get a front facing camera and a nicer screen and, if all goes according to plan, you’ll be running it on Verizon.

Google TV Powered Cable Box/DVR – Cable isn’t going anywhere, even with the rise of a la carte and general TV piracy. That’s why Google TV needs to end up in more devices and that’s why it needs to be integrated more deeply with a general set top box experience. If there’s one thing I enjoy about the Logitech Revue it’s how it plays quite nicely with the DISH box. However, if all of that were integrated into one uniform UI, you might be able to sell the device to more than just hard core geeks.

Nintendo 3DS – This year’s hot toy will be the Kinect. Next year’s will be the Nintendo 3DS. Like the Kinect, the 3DS is kind of a gimmick but it will breathe life into the DS platform and give Nintendo another piece of hardware to sell until they come out with a new console in about 2012.

The Kackel Dackel – Sorry. I just had to put this in here.

This is just getting silly. Yesterday, we reported on a new Chrome extension created by a developer that allowed you to scrape your Facebook contact information. Called “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends,” the extension provided a workaround to import your friends contact information on Facebook into Gmail and CSV files. As we noted in our post, the extension was taken down shortly after our story went up. The exporter is still down, and it’s unclear who has actually taken the exporter down, but the implications are clear. The only companies that will provide these technologies are Facebook and Google, and this will probably involve a peace treaty of some sort.

So what got us to this dark place where ten minutes after the workaround was posted on TechCrunch, it was taken down? Nearly a month ago, Google began blocking Facebook API access to download Google contacts. Facebook hacked its way around that, and Google subsequently issued a statement that they were “disappointed”. Facebook Platform engineer Mike Vernal then responded in the comments of one of our blog posts about the slap fight, defending Facebook’s policy and calling it “consistent”.

A few weeks ago, Google started posting a warning to users who tried to import their Gmail contact to Facebook, effectively saying that your contacts information will be effectively trapped inside Facebook without the ability to re-export the data. It seemed that the message was somehow blocked because the “warning” subsequently disappeared when you tried to export your Gmail data.

Then last week, Facebook started removing the Gmail option from the list of third party email providers on “Find Friends.” The Gmail option was also removed on Facebook-owned FriendFeed.

What’s so confusing about this back and forth, passive-aggressive brouhaha is that it’s unclear which company is initiating each action. Both companies have remained fairly tight-lipped about the issue.

The key part of all this is reciprocity—Google feels that since they are providing the ability to export Gmail contact data to Facebook, Facebook should allow Gmail users to do the same.

The thing is that reciprocity is an issue that affects relationships between major countries. Whether it be over tariffs, law enforcement or immigration policies, countries and states deal with reciprocity daily. Often times, agreements are finally made through treaties.

For now, this rigmarole has continued for nearly two months-is it time for a peace treaty between Google and Facebook?

A recurring refrain in my Twitter feed is the coded question, “11 or 13?” Despite it’s religious overtones, this is not a reference to passages in the Bible. It is a question familiar to any Apple-obsessed consumer: Should I get the 11-inch MacBook Air or the 13-inch?

If you’ve been asking yourself the same question, today the price difference will not be the deciding factor. Although the cheapest 11″ MacBook Air is still $999, a Black Friday deal on the the 13″ models makes the lower-end one with a 128 GB flash drive the same price as the higher-end 11″ model with the 128 GB flash drive. It is actually a dollar cheaper, $1,198 versus $1,199, and the battery lasts longer.

Apple has other Black Friday deals, most of them rather meager, but this is the one that caught my eye. The MacBook Air replaces the hard drive with flash memory, and as a result is a lot faster for many tasks than even more powerful MacBook Pros. You can read MG’s loving review for more details.

If you are thinking about getting one today, the only reason not to get the 13″ MacBook Air is about half a pound of extra weight.

A lot of people out there still seem to think that all blogs do is riff off of major media content. Reblog it, or just plain plagiarism. Most people know that most major news is now broken by blogs, but the prejudice is still out there.

One thing we abhor is “the unattributed rewrite,” When some publication takes a story that was broken by someone else and simply rewrites the same story in their own words without any attribution to the source of the story. It’s just not done by reputable sites, whether they’re blogs or mainstream media. A simple “the story was first broken by the Associated Press,” or whoever, is the honorable thing to do.

Speaking of the Associated Press, they’ve stepped in it again.

We’ve been critical in the past. They have ridiculous rules around the quoting of their work. Rules they’ve broken themselves multiple times. They still owe me $12.50, for example, and there’s the more recent Woot story. Then there was that whole Obama thing. And the legendary story about AP Threatening their own affiliate for embedding an AP YouTube video.

We love them so much for their hapless foray into the Internets that we’ve banned them for life. We’re not sure exactly what that means, but we’ll figure it out over time.

Now there’s this.

On November 18 we broke the news of the MySpace/Facebook surrender in a post titled Hell Freezes Over As MySpace Fully Surrenders To Facebook. Everyone covering the story read ours, simply because we were hours before the news officially broke.

The AP later that day published their own version of the story. And they used “Surrender” in the title. See MySpace to Facebook: OK, We Surrender.

Even that isn’t cause to complain. I mean, they were surrendering after all. But their choice of picture for the story – the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, is just too much of a coincidence. There is no way that story was written and that picture added as a completely independent beginning. They should have chosen a different picture, or they should have given us credit for breaking the story.

And so for that, AP, we must respond. As of this moment, you are on double secret probation, and we ask that you exit the tech news business in an expeditious and orderly fashion until you can behave like non-evil, non-lazy citizens again.

Update: Jason Kincaid says that CBS may have chosen the image and even the title, not AP. See here for the same article without the picture and with various titles. If that’s the case I apologize to AP and revoke the double secret probation. Insert CBS above instead. We’ll update if we hear more from either organization.

 

Last year, Google Checkout debuted a holiday savings promotion in time for Cyber Monday, the monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It looks like Google has gotten a slight head start this year, and is now offering Black Friday promotions for Google Checkout promotions.

 

According an email sent to consumers from Google Checkout, Google will offer exclusive discounts of $5, $10, or $20 when you use the payments system for purchases on Buy.com, BlueNile, and others. You can find participating e-retailers on the deals homepage here.

Black Friday spending is expected to exceed that of last year, and as more and more consumers flock to the web for their holiday shopping, it makes sense for Google to offer lucrative discounts in return for using the search giant’s payment system.

It’s worth noting that Google Checkout competitor and online payments giant payPal debuted its holiday deals a few weeks ago.

Get thee to the Applery! Apple’s Black Friday deals are now up and you can grab:

• $101 off Macs including the iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook
• $41 off of the iPad and the iPod Touch
• $21 off of the iPod Nano
• Free shipping on all Apple goodness

A few more deals after the jump.

Read more…

So, it appears that the first Chrome OS netbooks are set to launch in the next few weeks. And it now appears that the first ones will be Google-branded versions, built by a third-party manufacturer. And you can be sure that Google is already testing these internally, as they do this for basically all of their products leading up to launch. And a few more hints about them may reside in the Chromium issue tracker.

For several months, Google has been internally testing Chrome OS on a wide variety of netbooks. These have included Asus Eee machines, Lenovo machines, Dell machines, and a few others. How do I know? Because they’re often listed under “Type of computer” in bug reports. But more interesting has been the numerous references to “dogfood” machines. “Dogfooding” is the name given to the process of internally testing your own product. Again, Google has been doing this for months.

But a “dogfood” machine could be anything. Perhaps it’s just one of the brands mentioned above slightly modified. But recently, the number of bugs referencing “dogfood” machines has seemed to give way to two new types of machines: “Mario” and “Andretti”.

For non-IndyCar fans, Andretti is basically the Michael Jordan of the sport. He’s often referenced as the fastest driver on the planet. And that’s important because Google has made it very clear that perhaps the main key to their Chrome OS netbooks is that they must be fast. They must boot in seconds. Basically, instantly. They must be like Mario Andretti.

Obviously, it’s just a guess. But given the number of references to “Mario” and “Andretti” machines, I’m thinking these may be the nicknames that Google has given to their dogfood Chrome OS devices that they mean to release next month. The names didn’t start appears in the logs until mid-October, and since then, references have increased in the reports.

Further, more detailed reports list the OS version as “Indy” (the platform is “Chrome OS”). Cute, Google.

If my guess is right, the next question is if it will be “Mario” or “Andretti” that crosses the finish line next month and gets released? Or perhaps both will? Fasten your seat belts.

[photo: flickr/Thomas Duchnicki]

Well look what we have here … Last time we checked in on the Facebook/Google slapfight, Facebook had removed the option to import your contacts from Gmail and was still holding strong on the whole “denying contact info access to Google” rigamarole that started the fight in the first place. Up until now many had no other choice but to use Yahoo Mail if they wanted to mass export their Friends data from Facebook into Google. Well Happy Thanksgiving data reciprocity fans! A third party developer has decided to build “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends,” a Chrome extension that lets you easily export your Facebook Friends’ contact information.

Whoever built this is pretty vehement about whose side they’re playing on. Take a look at the sarcastic tone of the “About” description.

“Despite what Facebook says, if someone is your “friend” and you can see his/her email address on his/her Facebook info, they are probably OK with you emailing them.

Facebook doesn’t let you export this data, so they expect you to click on each of your friends’ pages, copy their email address (or other contact information), and paste it into your email client. Kind of ridiculous? Yes.”

I just tried it and it works, scraping and exporting your contacts into both Gmail and CSV files even though it might take awhile and multiple tries if you’ve got hundreds of friends. And while the extension is not officially affiliated with Google (or Facebook), it going to be exciting to see what happens to it after this post.

Since this is a Chrome extension it might be harder for Facebook to block, as browser extensions can make scraping seem indistinguishable from actual users clicking in their browsers. It looks like the Berlin Wall of data portability has started to crumble, so hurry up and export those Friends contacts while you still can.

Update: No confirmation on whether this is an intentional block from Facebook’s side but users are reporting that the extension stopped scraping about 10 minutes after this post went up. I’ve contacted both Facebook and Google for more information and will update the post if I hear back.