Author: Josh Wolford

After a week or so spent as the plaything of a select famous few, Twitter is now releasing their standalone music discovery app Twitter Music to the masses. At launch, the app is available on the web and on iOS only. It’s also only available in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand right now. Twitter promises that further expansion is coming, including an Android app.

Ok, so what is Twitter Music? At its core, it’s a music discovery app that lets users find songs based on their own Twitter activity and the popular activity of others. Twitter says that it will “change the way people find music.”

“It uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists,” says Twitter. “It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and center: go to their profiles to see which music artists they follow and listen to songs by those artists. And, of course, you can tweet songs right from the app.”

The app is broken down into four major sections: Popular, Emerging, #NowPlaying, and Suggested. All of them are about discovery. The Popular and Emerging sections simply display music that is, well, popular and emerging on the network. Pretty simple. The Suggested tab puts Twitter’s algorithms to work, recommending songs and artists using your Twitter data – who you follow, and who the people you follow follow. #NowPlaying lets you play music that has been tweeted out by people in your network who have used the #NowPlaying hashtag. That hashtag has been a popular one on Twitter for years, but Twitter Music is finally making it useful.

Once you find a song you want to listen to, you have a few options. If you have a Spotify or Rdio account, you can log into those and play the full song using your subscription-based service. If not, you can still listen to previews of track using iTunes. Early rumors of Twitter Music said that it wouldn’t launch with integration into a full subscription-based streaming service, but I’m sure we can all agree that it’s great that those were wrong.

Twitter says that they will “continue to explore and add other music service providers.”

The applets you follow artists, view their tracks, and tweet out what you’re listening to. The latter is especially important for the service as a whole, as the #NowPlaying aspect of the app is probably the most interesting.

Here’s what it looks like when you’re playing a track. Note the tweet button at the top right:

“Twitter and music go great together. People share and discover new songs and albums every day. Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician. This is why artists turn to Twitter first to connect with their fans — and why we wanted to find a way to surface songs people are tweeting about,” says We Are Hunted’s Stephen Philips. Twitter recently acquired We Are Hunted, a music discovery app, and they’re the ones who helped build Twitter Music.

As of this morning, Twitter Music is not yet up and running. The web app still says “coming soon” and the iOS ap has yet to appear in the App Store. But it will launch later today. We’ll let you know when that happens.

The pilot for Amazon’s new original comedy series Zombieland, based on the movie of the same name, is now available for Amazon Prime customers. You can find it here.

“Zombieland will strive to break the rules—action, adventure, thrills, chills and laughs and all packed into a half hour format,” said creator Paul Wernick. “This is not your average show but Amazon is not your average network.”

Zombieland features the same characters from the film – Columbus, Little Rock, Tallahassee, etc. But you wont see Woody Harrelson or Emma Stone. Instead, a new crop of actors take on the now iconic roles Tyler Ross as Columbus, Izabela Vidovic as Little Rock, Kirk Ward as Tallahassee, and Maiara Walsh as Wichita. Some of the film’s original creative team in on board, however, including writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. It’s being directed by Tucker and Dale vs Evil‘s Eli Craig.

You can check out the trailer below:

Zombieland is the 7th comedy pilot greenlit by Amazon Studios, which will all be available on Amazon Prime and LOVEFILM UK. User feedback will determine which pilots are developed into fill series.

You can debate a politician’s motives, their efficacy, and their morals – but there’s one thing that you can’t debate: They really, truly suck at rapping. You can thank HuffPo for this wonderful compilation of politicians fumbling awkwardly through rap references.

Check it out below for Joe Lieberman on “Slap a ho,” Orrin Hatch on “Hits from the bong,” Representative Rick Keller on LL Cool J, and much, much more:

[via The Huffington Post]

Google has just taken steps to eliminate a small, but annoying aspect of Google+ Hangouts: keyboard sounds.

In an update launched today, Google will now mute your mic when you’re typing.

Google’s Tim Haloun explains it as such:

Does anyone actually like the sound of typing in a Hangout?
click click clack clack click clack clack!

If you’ve done Hangouts, you’ve almost certainly experienced it. It’s hard to chat over that typing. Maybe you’ve accidentally been that typist, and didn’t realize it until someone muted you! That’s why we’ve added automatic muting when you type. Specifically:

– If someone keeps typing in a Hangout, their mic will be muted until they stop
– They’ll see an in-Hangout notification, so they know they’re not interrupting the conversation
– We’ll do this for larger Hangouts (4+ people).

We hope this feature makes your Hangouts experience even more enjoyable, and we welcome your feedback in the comments!

Users will be unmuted “within a couple hundred milliseconds of the end of typing.”

The muting is triggered by the typing sounds, not the mere act of typing. And if you’re a quiet enough typer or use a headset mic, you’ll probably not trigger the mute.

If you’re a person who types and talks a lot while using Hangouts, Google”s Chee Chew has this to say:

“There are indeed cases where people want to type and talk. we’ve been dogfooding this internally within google, where we often have people presenting and such, so we’re sensitive to this concern. We find that the vast majority of times that happens in smaller hangouts where one person is showing something to someone else…which is why we turned this on for 4+ hangouts only.”

Kickstarter has just announced a new way to explore projects on the site. It’s called “Video Mode” and it’s a “full-screen presentation where you can watch every single live project video”

Video mode is an interesting new way to jump around to various Kickstarter projects. One you enter, you’ll be shown a fullscreen video from a random project. If the video interest you, and you wish to learn more about the project, just click the green “explore this project” button and you’ll be directed to that project’s main page.

Or, if the particular project bores you are just looks plain stupid, you can move on. At this point, you have three options:

One, you can be taken to a project that’s completely different from the one you’re currently viewing. Or, you can find a similar project video by a) geography (something near Evanston) or b) category (something else in Short Film).

“Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, over 75,000 project videos have been uploaded to Kickstarter. From day one, we’ve been blown away by the amazing videos you’ve created — from the singer Allison Weiss setting the standard early on, to the incredible Wes Anderson spoof the Inman Park Squirrel Census produced, and all of the amazing “Oh hey, I didn’t see you there” videos. For a long time we’ve been wanting to find a good way to show these off, so people could explore projects through the medium of video,” says Kickstarter.

Kickstarter launched its first-ever iOS app back in February, and has since announced a couple of milestones including $100 million total pledges to games through the site.

Facebook is adding a new Timeline section to highlight the groups to which you belong. The new Groups section will appear on the About tab on the new Timeline.

Facebook launched their new Timeline design, a one-column format with more focus on interests, in early March. The main Timeline page got a facelift, streamlining stories and moving other information and activities to the left-hand side. More relevant to this story, the About section also got retooled. Each interest now has its own section, and you can also add custom apps like Instagram or Foursquare activity if you so choose.

Facebook is still in the process of rolling out the new Timeline.

Anyway, Facebook tells Inside Facebook that the new Groups section on your Timeline will only show the “open” groups that you belong to. Both closed and secret groups should be hidden from the new panel, something that should please those concerned with privacy in light of Facebook’s problems with Groups visibility.

Groups will join individual boxes for your friends, photos, music, movies, Tv shows, books, games, likes, and app activity on the About section on your Timeline. Facebook just unveiled the new Games section a couple of weeks ago.

With the proliferation of social media use, courts are having a harder time keeping jurors from making public postings about trials in which they’re currently involved. The latest example of this comes from the U.K., where a suspended juror now faces contempt of court charges.

According to The Guardian, a juror in the case of a now-convicted sex-offender will face prosecution at the hands of the Attorney General for “an act likely to interfere with the due administration of justice.”

In December of 2012, Kasim Davey was dismissed from the trial of Adam Kephalas in the Wood Green crown court of London. He was let go after making a Facebook post in which he claimed that the trial was giving him the chance to do something he’d always wanted to do: “Fuck up a paedophile.”

“Woooow I wasn’t expecting to be in a jury Deciding a paedophile’s fate, I’ve always wanted to Fuck up a paedophile & now I’m within the law!” he posted.

Although he initially denied ever posting the status, Davey was removed. Kephalas was eventually convicted and given a suspended year-long prison sentence. Today, the Attorney General was given the go ahead to prosecute Davey.

Keeping jurors off of social media it an issue that transcends geography. In the U.S., we’ve seen numerous cases of Twitter-happy jurors, some even affecting the outcome of major trials. Back in December, an Arkansas man’s death row conviction was overturned essentially because one juror couldn’t keep off Twitter. The juror was found to have been tweeting during court recesses.

What happens when you type the name of a certain style of pillow from IKEA into Google Translate?

Well, something interesting, that’s what.

Redditor 3rxx noticed that the Google translation for the IKEA pillow collection “Gosa Raps” is “Cuddle Rape.” Yes, cuddle rape.

You can try it for yourself, it checks out.

Before you start to think that IKEA is attempting to imply something with their pillow names, this can all be explained quite easily. Really, it’s just a problem with Google Translate. “Gosa Raps” actually translates to “Cuddle Rapeseed.” Rapeseed, as you know, is a yellow flower of the mustard or cabbage family that is cultivated for its oils, what you and I know as Canola oil.

Turns out, IKEA’s Gosa line utilizes various flower names like the Gosa Hassel (Hazel) and Gosa Tulpan (Tulip).

So, we’ve learned that yes, IKEA product names are a bit odd. But they’re not promoting cuddle rape.

Last week Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, their “app family” Android takeover that turns your device into a full-fledged Facebook-first hub. It takes over the homescreen, turning it into a stream for Facebook news feed content and works Facebook messaging and notifications directly into the Android UI. Although they may be hesitant to say that they’ve created a “Facebook Phone,” what they have done is given plenty of Android users the ability to turn their phones into Facebook Phones.

Is Twitter thinking about doing the same?

Speaking at All Things D’s Dive Into Mobile, Twitter VP of Product Michael Sippey left the door open for such a product.

“There are a lot of things we’re looking at on Android,” he said. “I think [Facebook Home] is an interesting product. I’d like to see tweets there. So we’ll see.”

So, what would a “Twitter Home” product look like? And would you want it?

Well, we can imagine an Android launcher that displays your tweet stream on the homepage in the same way that Facebook displays the news feed. Although Twitter can also be media-rich, the fact that Twitter users typically follow hundreds and even thousands of users, all of which appear in the stream unfiltered (unlike Facebook) makes it seem like there would need to be some tweaking to make sure the user isn’t flooded with too much content. It would be pretty easy to integrate Twitter notifications and messaging into the base Android experience, though.

Of course, there’s no telling what a Twitter-based Android OS-lite interface would look like. And Twitter hasn’t said that they are working on or even seriously thinking about something like this. But Sippey makes it clear that Twitter is curious about users being able to turn their devices into “Twitter Phones.”

What do you think? Sound like something you might want to play around with?

A small percentage of Graph Search users are now seeing some ads in their search results, marking the first time that Facebook has put any sort of advertising in their new product.

Josh Constine at TechCrunch has a shot of the ads, which look like your basic sidebar ads. The Graph Search ads appear between the page breaks in Graph Search results, if there’s more than one page of results on the particular query.

The ads are not based on your specific Graph Search search – in fact, they’re simply ads targeted to your basic information. This includes age, gender, likes, Open Graph activity, and of course, cookies. Otherwise known as the most basic form of ads that Facebook has employed for years – the ones you see gracing the side of your news feed on desktop. They’ll sport an image, some text, and clicking on them will lead you to a third-party site.

This is small test. The ads are only being tested on a small percentage of Graph Search users, and Facebook has still yet to roll out Graph Search to all users.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Eventually, Graph Search ads could be targeted based on keywords. Like Facebook’s Sponsored Search results of yore, businesses could pay to suggest queries inside the Graph Search bar. But for now, most of you won’t see any ads in Graph Search (considering you even have it). And for those who do, they’ll simply be standard info-targeted ads at the page breaks on search results.

Still, it’s a start. And you know more is coming.

Amazon has just announced that they are making another international expansion of the Android Appstore.

They’ve notified developers that they can now submit their apps for distribution in a bunch of new countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, and even Papua New Guinea and Vatican City.

Amazon says that the Android Appstore will launch in these countries “in the coming months.”

This brings the total number of markets with access to the Amazon Appstore to almost 200.

If you’re a developer, and you’re already registered, your apps will be internationally distributed automatically, unless you designate otherwise.

“Amazon’s platform is a complete end-to-end solution for developers wanting to build, market and monetize their apps and games on Kindle Fire and Android devices,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon. “Allowing developers to target distribution of their apps and games in even more international countries is yet another important milestone as we strive to serve consumers and developers globally. Many of our existing developers have localized their apps and games for international consumers, and we look forward to working with new developers that have been waiting to bring their apps to more Amazon customers across the globe.”

Of course, Amazon’s Kindle Fire isn’t available in many of these new countries. But with the expansion, Android users in those areas can still utilize that Amazon App Store on their mobile devices = giving Amazon a foothold some new markets where they can compete with the likes of Apple and Google.

Amazon’s Appstore turned two years old a few weeks ago. Since it’s launch, it has already expanded to many parts of Europe and Japan.

[Photo via Chris.Gray, Flickr]

Here it is, your first official Steve Jobs biopic in what is sure to be a long line of Steve Jobs biopics released after his death in October of 2011.

And it’s Funny or Die’s iSteve. After being delayed a couple of days in light of the Boston Marathon attacks, Funny or Die has finally released the film for you free, streaming pleasure.

It’s available here.

Funny or Die previously said that they simply wanted to do the first Steve Jobs movie (and beat out others like Ashton Kutcher’s and Aaron Sorkin’s films), and they have succeeded in doing just that.

Last week, Funny or Die producer Allison Hord said that the 79-minute long film was written in 3 days and shot in only 5 days.

The film stars Justin Long as the late Apple co-founder. You may remember Long as the guy who played the “Mac” in those old Mac vs. PC advertisements (The Daily Show‘s John Hodgman played the PC). Jorge Garcia ( Hurley in Lost) plays Steve Wozniak.

Billed as “a comedic look at the life of Steve Jobs,” check out iSteve and then let us know what you think.

An eBay seller is suing a buyer after she left a negative review on the site and refused to rescind it. The negative feedback was over an unexpected $1.44 postage charge.

According to the complaint, Amy Nicholls purchased a microscope part from Med Express in February. As a result of that purchase, Nicholls incurred shipping costs ($12 on top of the $175 purchasing price).

Med Express took her payment via PayPal, and shipped out the device. When it arrived to Nicholls, there was an extra $1.44 postage due.

Nicholls, operating under the eBay moniker chimera_studios, posted on February 26th that the “Order arrived with postage due with no communication from seller beforehand. It was logged as a negative feedback on eBay.

Med Express quickly responded, saying that “Sorry – no idea there was postage due. This has happened alot (sp) from USPS lately.”

Over the past year, Med Express has 298 ratings, only 2 of which or considered negative. Their positive feedback percentage stands at 99.3%.

“When notified of the problem, Med Express immediately offered to reimburse Nicholls for the postage due amount. Despite this offer, and before giving Med Express a chance to reimburse her, Nicholls on February 26, 2013, apparently as a result of the $1.44 postage due, posted negative feedback and comments for the transaction on eBay’s website and gave Med Express low ratings in the Detailed Seller Ratings section of eBay’s Feedback Forum, resulting in an unfavorable feedback profile for Med Express. In so doing, Nicholls falsely and deliberately slandered the good name and reputation of Med Express.”

Med Express goes on to say that Nicholls caused them irreparable harm and caused them to lose customers and income.

They seek not only an injunction to remove the negative feedback, but also damages (both punitive and reparative).

The facts of the case do not seem to be in dispute. And in a letter to Med Express, Paul Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group (on behalf of Nicholls) makes it clear that the feedback about them is true.

“In a sense, what you and your client seem to be contending is that your client’s offer to pay the $1.40 is a sufficient display of contrition that Nicholls ought to be forgiving. But the point that she made in her message to you was that the problem wasn’t the money but the hassle. she indicated that she would have been willing to pay $1.40 more in shipping up front, but that she was posting feedback because a company that ships products ought to be able to do a better job.

That opinion might be right, or it might be wrong, but harboring it and expressing it is not a tort. And it is certainly no reason to seek damages, attorney fees, and an injunction. Consumers might well take this sort of bullying into account when they are thinking about whether to do business with Med Express,” says Levy.

“Moreover, the relief you are seeking would be injurious to consumers. Your other potential buys have an interest in knowing the history – that, for a period of time, you were repeatedly using a shipper knowing of problems that could result in user having to pay postage due.”

Remember the response Med Express have Nicholls? “This has happened alot (sp) from USPS lately?”

Of course, Levy argues that’s not really the mot important part. Summarily, Ohio law and the First Amendment prevents Med Express from suing over an opinion – be it false or not.

[via Ars Technica]

Not only is Alison Brie a great comedic actress (Community) and a great dramatic actress (Mad Men), but it appears that she can also do a really good Grumpy Cat.

Watch Brie imitate more popular internet memes below, and accept the terrible fact that she’ll never be your girlfriend.

[MadeManDotCom]

In what is pretty big news for Google Fiber customers, future Google Fiber customers, and, most importantly, competing cable companies, Google has just patched a glaring hole in their cable offerings by adding HBO to the mix.

“Jon Snow. Hannah Horvath. Sookie Stackhouse. If any of these names ring a bell for you, then you’re going to be very happy to hear that we’ve just added HBO to our TV lineup. Starting today, our Google Fiber TV customers will be able to add on our new HBO package to their plan for $20/month (plus tax). The plan will include HBO, HBO2, HBO Signature, HBO Family, HBO Latino, HBO Comedy, and HBO Zone,” says Product Head Larry Yang on the Google Fiber blog.

Not only HBO, but Google Fiber is now offering Cinemax (Max, MoreMax, ActionMax, ThrillerMax, WMax, @Max, 5-StarMax, and OuterMax) for $10 a month.

Google Fiber already offered Showtime and Starz for $10 a month, and now if you want to get all four premium channels you can do so for $40. If you were planning to get all four anyway, this saves you $10 a month on the HBO.

In all, this means that you can get Google’s 1 Gbps internet + TV and 4 premium channels (including HBO) for $160 a month in Kansas City (and soon, Austin). Talk to plenty of cable subscribers and you’ll find that that’s not a bad deal, comparatively.

Google hopes to start construction on Fiber in Austin in 2014, and should have their first customers up and running by the middle of that year.

Well guys, it’s 4/16, April 16th, which means its officially Foursquare Day (four, squared). It’s the fourth annual celebration of Foursquare, an event that was first begun as a grassroots effort and has morphed into a much larger-scale app-holiday that finds businesses everywhere offering deals and specials in celebration.

For instance this year, Foursquare gave small businesses an incentive to offer specials today. They offered to feature any and all businesses who participated in the search results on foursquare.com.

“From checking in, to uploading tips, photos, and addresses, to telling friends about the app, the 33 million people on Foursquare have brought us to where we are today. Four years and over 3.5 billion check-ins since we launched, our community-created map of the world is more complete than ever,” says Foursquare.

In celebration of the 4th Foursquare Day, Foursquare has created a new interactive visualization that lets you look at your past year of check-ins in a few interesting ways.

First, you can organize them linearly by time, and then you can randomize them.

But the coolest ways to look at the past year of data is by category (food, nightlife, professional, shops, travel, etc):

And by connections, which will show you an awesome map of how you traveled between your check-ins:

You can check out your own visualization here.

It’s been a big year for Foursquare, complete with a bunch of core changes to the service that put more emphasis on search and recommendations than the app has ever done before. No bigger, though, than the recent update to version 6.0. Foursquare also announced $41 million in funding.

Also, remember to check-in today to receive your special 4sqDay 2013 badge. Foursuare may not be putting as much of an emphasis on the gamification aspect of the service, but that doesn’t mean that users still don’t love their badges.

Later today, Facebook will unveil an update for their iOS app that brings chat heads, stickers, and news feed improvements.

First up, iOS users will be able to use chat heads – one of the main features of Facebook Home for Android. Of course, these chat heads won’t work on your iOS home screen, only when you’re using the Facebook app. But it will let you keep multiple conversations going much easier when you’re inside the app.

As with chat heads on Android, you simply tap them to open up the chat thread, and drag them around and place them wherever you want on the screen.

Last week, on the same day Facebook unveiled Facebook Home for Android, they also brought chat heads to Facebook Messenger for Android – you know, to throw Android users with device not supported by Facebook Home a bone.

The update also brings stickers to the iOS app.

Also, we’re finally getting those changes to the news feed on mobile that Facebook announced but is still slowly rolling out on desktop. According to Facebook, the biggest changes will be seen on the iPad, “where you’ll see brighter, more beautiful stories.”

Facebook says that the update will be ready to download later today in the App Store.

Back before the big Spotify launch in Canada, it was rumored that the streaming music platform would also break into Asia and parts of Latin America.

Today, many months later, Spotify has finally made it official.

“Exciting times! Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing a new world of music to eight new markets across the globe,” says Spotify.

Four of the eight new countries come from these regions: Mexico, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The other four are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.

With the addition of these eight countries, Spotify is now available in 28 markets.

In March, we learned that Spotify had tacked on a million paid users in just three months. That brings the total to 6 million paid subscribers worldwide, out of 24 million total users. It took Spotify nearly a year to go from 3 million to 5 million piad subscribers, but just three months to go from 5 to 6. That’s the goal with these big expansions – to bring those paid subscribers even higher, even faster.

Spotify just launched its first ever ad campaign and updated their logo, too.