The AppsLab

I bought Fruit Ninja ($0.99 iTunes), produced by halfbrick, for my iPhone last week, and so far, it’s more than paid for itself. What’s struck me most about it is its simplicity. It’s truly “walk up and use” design. When presented with the app, everyone can play the game and be successful enough to get… Read More

About an hour ago, Alex Payne (@al3x), one of Twitter’s early employees and their API Lead, announced he was leaving Twitter for a startup called BankSimple. BankSimple is very early stage and little is known beyond what Alex includes in his post. The most telling sentence has to be: Imagine, for a moment, a bank… Read More

A lot of ink has been spilled lately about Facebook and its privacy changes. Some key people have deleted their accounts, and not one, but two so-called open projects have started. This is all noise. Even if all the people who rail against Facebook’s privacy changes, do actually quit (they won’t), that will only be… Read More

John Sim has produced an Iron Man skin for WebCenter. Pretty slick, although I’m not sure how long I could use it. Add this to his list of other WebCenter skins.

About a month ago, Google announced they were giving away Droids and Nexus Ones to Google IO (@googleio) attendees, which is next week. Droids go to attendees registered with US addresses. Nexus Ones go to international attendees. The Droid comes with 30 days of complimentary 3G service on Verizon, so it’s fully functional. Android will be a… Read More

I found Cultivated Play, an essay about Farmville and why it works, absolutely fascinating. I’ve never been a fan of games on Facebook, even when all they involved were throwing sheep or biting someone. So, I’m dimly aware of Farmville and its ilk, but never really cared to know how they worked. After reading Cultivated… Read More

I’ve been staycationing this week, in case you were wondering why it’s been quiet here. It’s Friday, so I thought I’d extend a Twitter tradition and do a follow Friday of my own, in longer format. At SXSW in March, Paul and I both attended Clay Shirky’s keynote, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature… Read More

So, our changes to the internal instance of WebCenter have been live for a week now, and the feedback so far has been very positive. We did get our first rant yesterday, but it seemed to be frustration about the loss of an OOTB environment for demos. It’s Q4, so everyone in sales is running… Read More

This blew me away; Hitwise reported that “facebook” was the top search term across the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) in March 2010. Dig deeper and you’ll find that some variant of “facebook” accounted for eight of the 30 total spots. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since we saw glaring evidence… Read More

We joined the WebCenter development team back in late September of last year, and since then, one of our major projects has been redesigning the internal WebCenter 11g instance used by employees. I’m happy to report that our first round of changes went live on Monday. More on that in a minute. Coincidentally, the latest… Read More

The release of the iPad and the subsequent debate around who would use it and why has me on a personal crusade to design simpler software. Technology inspires nervousness and fear among everyday users, and frequently, geeks don’t help the uninitiated, as we saw when ReadWriteWeb was mistaken for Facebook. Prowess with code puts us… Read More

At Chirp last week, there was a lot of talk about filling holes. As background, this is the term Fred Wilson (@fredwilson), an investor in Twitter, used in a post that sent understandable shockwaves through the Twitter developer community, erm, ecosystem. Oh, and the release of a Blackberry app and the acquisition of Atebits (@atebits),… Read More

Earlier in the month, foursquare announced some changes to their game that would curb cheating. The following day, they posted an update, which said in part: First of all, I can’t tell you how psyched we are to see so many people passionate about foursquare – this is crazy!  Second, a few quick updates that didn’t… Read More

Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a guy about Apple’s products and specifically the iPad. This guy isn’t a geek, but he’s computer savvy and has been for a while. He’s also a bit of an Apple fanboi and recently bought an iPad, which was the jumping off point for our conversation. He’s also… Read More

So, Rich (@rmanalan), Anthony (@anthonyslai) and I (@jkuramot) are at Chirp (@chirp), the Twitter developer conference in San Francisco. One of the many tidbits from yesterday’s sessions was the general release of the @Anywhere platform Evan Williams (@ev) announced at SXSW in March. If you’re not already familiar, @Anywhere integrates Twitter into any website with… Read More

Fresh out of @twitter’s oven is @anywhere, one of the big features they announced recently.  The service is now live at http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere.  @jkuramot and I (@rmanalan) just implemented it on this blog.  To see it in action, hover over any of the @twitter names.

If you read here, you’ll know I’m generally against online anonymity. Sure, it has its uses, but the rise of Web 2.0 has proven that being yourself on the intertubes isn’t bad, although it can be dangerous. But that’s a different post for a different time. When you’re anonymous, it’s much easier to be a… Read More

Maybe you noticed Apple announced today a bunch of new features will be coming soon to the iPhone OS, more than 100 by their count. Top of the list for many is multitasking. The iPhone OS has notoriously been without classic multitasking since its inception nearly three years ago. Actually, no one said boo about… Read More

Next week is Chirp, the inaugural Twitter developer conference, and as I mentioned, Rich, Anthony and I are attending. Safe to say, we’re all pretty excited, although it looks to be a marathon, with the conference running pretty much 9-6 on the 14th, the hack day starting right after and running for 24 hours, and… Read More

No, I didn’t buy one, so my review is limited to five minutes of fiddling with a display model at Best Buy. Here’s a protip. If you want to touch/feel an iPad and don’t have any friends who’ll let you mess with theirs, avoid the crowds at your local Best Buy. I swung by in… Read More