But is that all there is?

With only a smattering of deliberate exceptions, new sites and apps launch with Facebook Connect to get the network effects of tying into its powerful social graph and potent spamming tools. Instead of attempting to create their own social network, they piggyback on top of Facebook’s.

In fact, one former Google product manager told AllThingsD recently that one of the biggest reasons he left the company to work on a social start-up was so he could use Facebook Connect, something Google discourages.

But while Facebook might be the hottest game in town, it’s still a pretty warped and inaccurate picture of what it means to have friends.

And it all makes me wonder, what are other models of “social” besides Facebook’s current product? Could someone who does social better than Facebook mount a significant competitor to the site? And, most importantly, could they succeed?

Friending Is Broken

One of Facebook’s most fundamental flaws is its notion of friending. Relationships on Facebook don’t naturally expire as they do in the real world. To unfriend is drastic, used only in the direst of circumstances–like a bad breakup.

And the fact that people from so many parts of our lives are on Facebook elicits bland communication. You often don’t really know who you’re talking to, so you stop talking.

Akshay Kothari, CEO of the news app Pulse, only recently started a new Facebook profile. He friended just 15 people: His family, closest friends, and Pulse co-workers. It turned out great, he said–his newsfeed was full of relevant and important information.

But after about two months, Kothari started logging back into the old profile. “It was like a telephone book that I had lost,” he said. Plus, he’d missed out on parties, because he hadn’t seen the event invitations.

You might think that some of these complaints have to do with life in the hyper-connected tech industry–where talking to someone for five minutes at a conference often results in a friend request–and they often do.

But meanwhile, a family member of mine joined Facebook this past year when she started high school. She already has 500 friends. Just imagine how many she’ll have in five years.

Friend overload was part of Facebook’s rationale behind Facebook Groups, 50 million of which have been created in the past six months. Start-ups such as GroupMe and Fridge are focused on groups as well.

But while explicitly designated groups might make great sense for co-workers, or a family, or even a neighborhood, not every relationship fits neatly into a group.

Proximity

One alternative to Facebook’s static friending is dynamically created relationships based on common experiences. The start-up Color, despite its many flaws, is certainly onto something here.

The idea behind Color is to create a collaborative record of a place and time where people were together. The company’s app aggregates users’ photos by location, using factors like GPS as well as sound and light detection.

As compared to Facebook, proximity-based approaches from companies like Color could potentially do a better job of integrating the offline world, and be better at helping us find and meet people we do not already know.

Color, with its big funding and smart team, should have had better intuition about helping people understand and find value from its app.

Even so, it might not have been able to solve the extremely hard problems it is posing.

For instance, how do you get new users to see the value of a social product without connecting to people they already know? How do you do social without the notions of friending or privacy?

Interestingly, Color CEO Bill Nguyen has said Color may add Facebook Connect, as well as tell new users who are not within a reasonable distance of other people to come back later.

Other companies are working around this approach too. The college flirting service LikeALittle, aka LAL, recently released an iPhone app that creates an on-the-fly chat room for any location. Users can see who else is currently present and scroll through a historical stream of photos and statuses posted from that place.

If you’ve checked out Yobongo, the pleasantly designed but often empty iPhone chat room app, the LAL app feels kind of like a hybrid of Color and Yobongo. But there’s a difference: LAL already has millions of users at 450 colleges, so it doesn’t have quite the loneliness problem of the other two apps.

LAL, which is public and anonymous by default, says it’s only for colleges, but when I logged into the app recently I could see active streams for Bay to Breakers, LAL headquarters, and Las Vegas.

Beyond Real Names

But Facebook is not just about friending. The service has become the identity provider for much of the Web–a powerful asset that’s increasingly hard for competitors to challenge.

This real name system has been a core tenet of Facebook since it started, and in many online situations entering a Facebook-approved real name is tantamount to swiping a card that verifies you’re a real person.

But a name, password and profile picture are a two-dimensional version of a person. You could better ensure that someone is who they say they are by adding fingerprint scans, VPN dongles and, perhaps someday, X-ray vision.

Or you could try users’ mobile phones, which are always with them. You could use something like a Google Voice account that rings all their numbers: Home, work and cell. You could incorporate their presence from instant messaging to better indicate availability.

If you think about it, there has to be some sort of virtual unified identity system that’s better than just a real name.

Incidentally, this could be an awfully good way for Google to compete with Facebook.

The Interest Graph

Another meaningful alternate to Facebook’s social graph is the so-called “interest graph,” as best demonstrated by Twitter.

On Twitter and other sites like Quora, people you’re interested in are commingled with topics you’re interested in. Once you follow a critical mass of Twitter accounts, you get a non-stop flow of personalized content.

A weather update combined with a friend’s post about winning a soccer game combined with a breaking news alert plus three heaping servings of self-promotional tweets does get a bit chaotic sometimes, but it’s all stuff you’ve explicitly said you want to hear about.

Twitter may not be a full competitor to Facebook, but it obviously fills a simple and accessible publishing function better than Facebook. And because Twitter is almost completely public, and because it’s designed around one-way relationships, the notion of un-following is less dramatic than un-friending.

But that begs the question: Are public, one-way relationships really all that social?

Distributed Networks

Another approach might be to go the other direction, one toward more privacy. Facebook’s Achilles’ heel is privacy, so one way to defeat the company might be to conceive of a social network that gives more power to users.

Altly is a newly launched company that promises it is building an alternative to Facebook that will be more respectful of users’ information.

Altly CEO Dmitry Shapiro, who was most recently a Myspace executive, wrote a manifesto about his company’s premise:

For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void!

Shapiro isn’t the first person with this idea. Last year, Diaspora, which has yet to deliver on its promise of a distributed open source social network, attracted more than 6,000 donations before it even got started. The founders recently promised “we’re still here, and we’re going strong,” although their network is still invite-only.

Another fresh new company called SecretSocial (which operates out of the cute URL https://shh.sh/) allows users to create chat rooms that expire, leaving no data behind, after a user-designated time period of 15 minutes to one week. Organizers can invite participants via SMS, Twitter or phone and then converse without logging in.

Or there’s Path, which uses a one-way relationship model that’s the opposite of Twitter: Users choose whom to share with, instead of whom to follow. Path limits users to sharing their pictures and video with 50 people to encourage them to pick carefully.

A more private social Web site will grow more slowly as it loses the benefit of network effects that Facebook and others so effectively enjoy. Users are probably more likely to choose a site because their friends use it than because it promises to keep them safe.

It’s clear that existing social networks value publicness, for advertising purposes and others. Attempts to regulate privacy could significantly change the social networking dynamic.

Facebook and other companies including Google, Twitter and Zynga are this week aggressively fighting a proposed California law that would make social networks more private by requiring their users to choose privacy settings up front and defaulting all options to private.

Mobile

When you ask tech start-up folks who or what could best compete with Facebook, as I have repeatedly, the most common answer you get is “mobile.”

Said one social start-up CEO:

“The way people use web is very different than the way people view and interact on mobile devices. One company can’t focus on and win on both platforms at the same time since they are so different. There is definitely a chance for companies to compete with Facebook by focusing on mobile.”

The reasoning goes like this: Using a phone is an intimate and personal experience in ways that a Web browser isn’t. It’s also much more connected to the offline real world. Your phone is always with you and knows where you are, and you’re probably the only one who uses it. It has your text and calling contacts.

Plus, competing with a company that has a seven-year, 700 million-member advantage requires ingenuity. Facebook became a viable competitor to Google not by improving search (in fact, Facebook search is awful), but by changing the Web paradigm to include social.

That said, it seems like a cop out to say the best way to compete with Facebook’s version of social is not social, but mobile. But perhaps it’s true.

(Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.)

Phone book photo credit: Flickr user bondidwhat

“We will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device,” Bezos told the magazine. “In terms of any other product introductions, I shouldn’t answer.”

His comments suggest that any tablet would be kept distinct from the company’s Kindle e-reader, which uses a grayscale E Ink screen well suited to reading but not so hot for things such as video and advanced gaming.

Although this was Amazon’s most official comment yet on the long-rumored tablet, there has been no shortage of signs that the company is headed that way. In addition to reports of manufacturing plans, there are the steps Amazon has taken to pave the way for such a product, including the launch of its Android App Store as well as a tablet version of Kindle Reader (though admittedly Amazon has apps for nearly every mobile platform out there).

Rival Barnes & Noble has been inching toward all-purpose tablet status itself, though with a different approach. The company’s Nook Color has always been Android-based. However, it has been getting additional tablet features over time. Last month, the Nook Color gained an email program as well as access to a Barnes & Noble-curated store of approved apps.

Meanwhile, dedicated e-readers have come under fierce competition from general purpose tablets like the iPad that have e-book apps, including Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, but can also do everything from play movies to surf the Web and do 3-D gaming.

I use Facebook Connect to integrate with these services when I use them for the first time because it’s easier to click one button than retyping all that personal information, and because these services are better if I’m not trying them all alone or with only strangers. Plus, when I connect I can share content back with my non-early adopting friends on larger services.

But I use way fewer than 106 apps on a daily basis. Facebook’s stats show me that I’ve exchanged data with only a little more than half of them in the last six months.

Meanwhile, I have connected 47 applications to my Twitter account, 15 applications to my Google account, and six applications to my LinkedIn account.

I’m sure other busy bee app lovers pollinate far more widely than I have. You can go see your own stats by visiting these pages: Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn.

It would be sacrilege to launch a social Web service today without connecting to one or more of these services. To not use Facebook Connect or an equivalent abandons immense potential for a service to grow naturally using network effects.

Multiple social apps have tried to strike out on their own and not be dependent on larger networks, but they seem to give up after a few months of being out in the wilderness.

Path, for instance, launched its more intimate photo-sharing service without the ability to post photos to Facebook; that was quickly rectified.

New heavily funded photo-sharing app Color, in its attempt to shake up the world of social networks, only asked users to register with a first name and no other tie to their preexisting online identity.

But that radical departure meant that many people logged onto the proximity-based service and found nobody to share pictures with in their vicinity. And there’s nothing more lonely and confusing than using a social service with nobody else on it.

Even Color is coming around, CEO Bill Nguyen told me. The company plans to add Facebook Connect in a coming version of its apps. “We’re not going to give up but we’ll start making Color more familiar,” he said.

What’s perhaps most crazy about all this to me is that Facebook Connect has only been around less than three years. After beta testing throughout 2008, the service launched to all Web sites in December of that year.

Now, it is just the way things are done.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Earlier this week, I had the rare opportunity of sitting down with both the CEO Kelly Smith and Chairman Mika Salmi, who were in Seattle before heading to Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road in search of fresh capital. Smith works out of the company’s Seattle office and lives in Seattle, but Salmi lives in Barcelona.

On Monday, the two were absolutely buzzing about the application’s initial reception–which included 50,000 downloads–and that their application has already been featured by Apple since launching last week. “We are super pleased. It’s an obvious application, and we are really happy,” Smith said.

Zapd expects to make building Web sites exceedingly easy from the mobile phone, which is increasingly becoming people’s way to communicate. Subjects for Zapd’s already include such things as a dog that needs adopting; a man who went a whole day without shoes; and a wedding journal.

To make a site, users pick from one of the 21 background themes provided, and then upload photos and text. Zapd auto-generates a URL using the domain at Zapd.co, and the Web site is ready to go. The site is automatically viewable from a mobile phone, an iPad and a PC.

Salmi, who is the former CEO of Atom Films, and Smith, both believe they have come up with a better alternative to other applications, such as Path, Tumblr, Instagram, Posterous, or even the well-funded startup Color.

What’s especially advantageous is that the company has raised $410,000, unlike Color, which is in a similar vein, but has secured a jaw-dropping $41 million, but so far has had a questionable launch. Investors in Zapd include the who’s who of angel investing in Seattle, including Mike Slade, Nick Hanauer, Pete Higgins, Rich Barton, Erik Blachford, John Cunningham and others.

Smith said next up for the four-employee company is adding new features, such as the ability to comment on sites and creating an Android application.

Smith also envisions adding the ability to create group sites, where a Web site can be built around a specific event, like a sport. Fans from the stands would be able to upload pictures and make comments from multiple perspectives.

Smith’s company Pressplane also is operating other entrepreneurial ventures, such as Inkd.com, which is a marketplace for graphic design. Although Inkd is profitable, now that Zapd has taken off so quickly, they are thinking about selling that business and swinging for the fences.

The application is definitely not proven, and it’s in its early days, but the enthusiasm is undeniable.

Here’s a video of the two very animated entrepreneurs:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110407/zapd-aims-for-the-big-leagues-with-web-publishing-mobile-app-plus-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110325/aha-so-this-is-what-youre-supposed-to-do-with-color/ http://allthingsd.com/20110325/aha-so-this-is-what-youre-supposed-to-do-with-color/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:13:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31179 Liz Gannes–along with many other people–has tried to explain what you’re supposed to do with Color, the photo-sharing app that’s much more than a photo-sharing app but in a hard-to-explain yet extremely well-funded way.

But it didn’t really click for me until just now, when I saw this tweet from Kevin Marks (via Eric Eldon).

Now I get it. Cool!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110325/aha-so-this-is-what-youre-supposed-to-do-with-color/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110323/with-41m-in-hand-color-deploys-new-proximity-based-social-network/ http://allthingsd.com/20110323/with-41m-in-hand-color-deploys-new-proximity-based-social-network/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:17 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4692 I can hear the haters already: ANOTHER photo-sharing app? ANOTHER social network?

Yes.

Bill Nguyen, the serial entrepreneur who most recently sold Lala to Apple for around $80 million, is today launching Color, a proximity-based social network with no privacy settings.

The effulgent Nguyen has already gotten Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank to buy into his next act, raising $41 million in seed and Series A rounds in the eight months since he left Apple last year.

Color launches today on iPhone and Android (BlackBerry and Windows Phone are said to be coming soon). It is primarily a photo-sharing app, though text and video are also supported.

Rather than friending or following each other, Color’s users simply post pictures. Then, other users open the app and see pictures that Color has determined are relevant to them.

Users see pictures posted recently and nearby to their current location, as well as pictures posted by other members they’ve expressed an interest in by looking at, liking or commenting on their content.

This concept seems fitting for events–say, a sports game or a wedding–where lots of people who don’t necessarily know each other are taking photos of the same thing.

Everything posted on Color is public, and Color owns the rights to all content on the service (though users can delete their own uploads.)

What’s different about Color is relationships are implicit rather than explicit. This tweak may well resonate with people who feel their Facebook and Twitter friend lists are random, outdated and overwhelming.

Color hired away LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil to lead a team that dynamically determines what pictures and users are relevant.

So, for instance, to augment a location signal from GPS, Color will use clues like lighting and ambient noise to understand that two photos were taken in the same place. It will also try to understand which people users are interested in, and how that changes over time–so if a user hasn’t interacted with someone’s pictures for the while, that person’s icon will appear further out and darker in the user’s list of relevant people (Color calls this the “elastic network”).

Color hopes that the public nature of its service combined with the personal nature of a single user’s smartphone photos will ensure that people keep it decent. Its business model is to be location-based advertising.

Color also counts Peter Pham, formerly of BillShrink and Photobucket, as co-founder and president. (There are seven total with the co-founder title.) Pham and Nguyen showed off the product and described the company vision and business model in a video interview at the company’s expansive downtown Palo Alto offices earlier this week, which seem mostly empty despite Color’s team of 30 employees.

The real test, of course, will be not how many employees it can hire and how much money it can raise, but how many people actually find the product useful.

Will people see the value in contributing their experiences to Color’s massive repository? Will they understand how the app works, with its ample use of coinages like “bulletins” (proximity-based view), “visual diary” (chronological diary view) and “multilens” (albums of multiple people’s photos of the same thing)? We’ll have to see.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/with-41m-in-hand-color-deploys-new-proximity-based-social-network/feed/ 14 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/new-nook-brings-a-little-color-to-e-reading/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/new-nook-brings-a-little-color-to-e-reading/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:44:47 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1511 Book lovers nowadays fall into one of two camps: They either eschew e-readers altogether, preferring the look and feel of print books; or they dive wholeheartedly into e-books, instantly downloading and racing through more titles by the handfuls. If you count yourself in the latter category, you’re in luck.

Starting this week, Barnes & Noble will ship its $249 Nook Color (nookcolor.com), a luxury model in the e-reader world currently dominated by the $139 monochrome Amazon.com Kindle. While the original Nook offered a gray-scale reading screen and a thin, color touch strip for browsing the bookstore, this model is one big color touch screen. It connects to the Web using only Wi-Fi and costs $100 more than last year’s comparable Wi-Fi Nook, but a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said that preorders online and in stores are far exceeding company expectations, with over twice as many as for last year’s Nook.

I’ve been testing the Nook Color over the past week and I like its book-size build and stylish design. Its user interface is inviting and its digital bookstore is redesigned to make shopping for books enjoyable. Nook Color is aimed at people who are primarily focused on reading but crave the iPad’s color and some of its versatility.

Like the Kindle, the Nook Color has a Web browser and some apps but no dedicated email program or way to access an app store. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble says a full email program and app store are expected early next year.

The Nook Color is unapologetically focused on reading. It accesses Barnes & Noble’s library of two million downloadable books and over 100 magazines and newspapers (fewer were available during my pre-release testing). The reader has a feature called ArticleView that displays magazine articles in a clear, readable format. You can highlight passages from books and then share them with friends through Facebook, Twitter or a limited, in-book email system. A LendMe feature gives users an easy way to digitally lend their books to friends for 14 days. And for kids, there’s a feature where popular stories are read aloud by people rather than a computer voice.

The Nook Color is more than just a bright, color screen: It’s built on the Android 2.1 operating system—the same mobile OS used to run many smartphones. This gives the device access to a full Web browser for tasks like reading favorite sites or checking Facebook, which I did easily. Early next year Nook Color will upgrade to Android 2.2, allowing it to play Flash videos.

The Nook Color

Eight apps found in a section called Extras come loaded on the device including apps for Pandora Internet Radio, chess and Sudoku. I logged into my Pandora account, quickly retrieved my saved list of stations and played a QuickMix of music. I was able to work on a crossword puzzle or read a book or magazine on the Nook Color while still listening to Rihanna on the music app. Quickoffice software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint comes built into the Nook Color so users can view—but not edit—documents in these programs if they’re loaded onto the device with a MicroSD card. Until the Nook Color’s app store launches early next year, there’s no way to download free or paid apps.

Navigating around the Nook Color is a cinch. A tiny “n” just below the screen returns you to the home screen, which can be customized with photos loaded via a MicroSD card. The Daily Shelf is a dedicated horizontal section at the bottom of the home screen that updates whenever possible with new versions of newspapers (daily), magazines (weekly or monthly, if you subscribe) or books lent to you by friends. Anything on the Daily Shelf can be dragged out onto the home screen, placed anywhere and resized by pinching two fingers out or together. A Quick Nav button displays the Nook Color’s six sections: Library, Shop, Search, Extras, Web and Settings. A helpful “Keep Reading” prompt at the top of the home screen shows the last thing you were reading; selecting it sends you to right where you left off.

Nook Color weighs just under a pound, or twice as much as the Kindle but still a half-pound lighter than Apple’s larger iPad. It felt a bit heavy in my hands as I read from it for a long period of time, but I solved that by leaning it against a desk or pillow.

While reading Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” I found a particularly interesting tidbit about first-century B.C. marriage contracts requiring wives to vow not to add love potions to their husbands’ food or drink. I highlighted this passage by tapping once on the screen and dragging highlighter handles around it, and then sent it to friends via email with a built-in shortcut for sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter. I selected another passage and posted it on my Facebook wall for friends to read. All these posts had links to buy books from Barnes & Noble.

I really enjoyed reading magazines on the Nook Color because these appeared much as they do in print. Brightly colored pages appeared one at a time when I held the device vertically, or two pages at a time in horizontal view. Magazines can be bought per issue or via subscriptions; a single current issue of House Beautiful was $4.50 or $1.99 with a subscription. The Quick Nav button works in magazines, too, so you can flick a finger right or left to skip ahead to specific sections or articles.

If you love reading and want to share your books with friends or reading updates with social networks, the Nook Color has you covered. It will also give you a taste of tablet computing with functions like browsing the Web, using some apps and eventually, full emailing. Just remember that Nook Color is laser-focused on e-reading.

A correction was made to this column on 11/17/2010 to reflect that Quickoffice is not owned by Microsoft.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/new-nook-brings-a-little-color-to-e-reading/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:02:56 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1610 After seven months of unchallenged prominence, Apple’s hot-selling iPad now has its first credible competitor in the nascent market for multitouch consumer tablet computers: the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The Tab is being introduced over the next week by three major U.S. wireless phone carriers at $400 with a cellular data contract, or at $600 with cellular capability but no contract. The iPad starts at $499 for a Wi-Fi model with no cellular-data capability or contract, and is $629 for the least expensive model with cellular data capability but no contract.

Like the iPad, the Tab, which uses Google’s Android operating system, is a good-looking slate with a vivid color screen that can handle many of the tasks typically performed on a laptop. These include email, social networking, Web browsing, photo viewing, and music and video playback. It also can run a wide variety of third-party apps. But it has major differences, most notably in size.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab has less than half the screen real estate than that of the iPad.

The Tab has a 7-inch screen versus the 9.7-inch display on the iPad. That may seem like a small difference, but the numbers are deceptive, because screen sizes are always described using diagonal measurements. In fact, the actual screen real estate on the Tab is less than half of the iPad’s. That’s a disadvantage, but it allows the overall unit to be much smaller and lighter, and thus more easily used in one hand, something some users will welcome.

The new tablet will be introduced in coming days by Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, with a variety of cellular data plans. AT&T also will carry the Tab during the holiday season but hasn’t announced its timing or data-plan pricing. Although it is being sold by cellular carriers, the Tab, like the iPad (which offers optional month-to-month cellular data through AT&T) can’t make cellular voice calls.

I’ve been testing the Tab for a couple of weeks and I like it. It’s a serious alternative to the iPad and one that will be preferred by some folks. It includes the three most-requested features missing in the iPad: a camera (two in fact); the ability to run Web videos and applications written in Adobe’s Flash software; and multitasking, though, to be fair, the latter feature is coming to the iPad imminently via a software update. Another strong point is that like Apple, Samsung has rewritten some of the standard apps, such as the email and calendar programs, to make them look more like PC programs and less like smartphone apps.

On balance, however, I still prefer the iPad. For one thing, I like getting twice the screen size for a little more money up front—as little as $29 for the no-contract model with cellular capability. For another, the iPad has vastly more apps specifically designed for a tablet versus a smartphone—about 40,000 according to Apple, compared with just a handful for the Tab. And it can run about triple the apps overall, if you count smartphone apps that aren’t optimized for tablets.

Also, in my tests, the iPad’s battery life was about five hours better than the Tab’s, its maximum storage capacity is higher, and its aluminum body is more rugged than the Tab’s plastic casing. Finally, the iPad can be bought in a Wi-Fi-only model that frees you from any entanglement with cellphone carriers. The Tab also has Wi-Fi, but, so far, no Wi-Fi-only version, though Samsung is promising one next year.

Still, the Tab is a very attractive product and I enjoyed using it. For buyers who want to spend less up front, don’t mind the smaller screen, prefer the more compact dimensions and one-handed usability, and place high value on the cameras and on Flash, it may well be a better choice.

Hardware

The Tab is a rectangular slate about two inches shorter and three inches narrower than the iPad. It is also a tad thinner. It weighs less than a pound, compared with 1.5 pounds for the iPad. While its screen is smaller, it has almost the same resolution as the iPad, so almost as much material can be displayed on it.

The screen is sharp and generally responsive to touch, though, in my tests, a bit slower than the iPad’s screen. The Tab comes with 16 gigabytes of flash storage, the same as the base iPad. But with some carriers, this storage is internal and in others, it’s on a removable memory card. The card slot comes on all models and can hold up to 32 gigabytes at extra cost. The iPad, also at extra cost, comes in versions that go up to 64 gigabytes, all internal.

With its lighter weight and smaller size, I found the Tab easy to use while standing and moving. It easily fit in one hand, though for many tasks you’ll still need two hands.

Battery Life

Samsung and its partners make wildly varying battery claims for the Tab. The former says it can last up to 13 hours on a single charge, while T-Mobile claims just eight hours. I gave the Tab the same test I used for my iPad review: I put the screen on nearly full brightness, left the Wi-Fi on to collect email and played back-to-back videos until the unit died. My test Tab lasted six hours, 50 minutes, though at six hours, 10 minutes the screen dimmed irrevocably to a darkness level that made it useless. In the same test last spring, the iPad logged 11 hours, 28 minutes.

Cameras

The Tab has a 3-megapixel rear camera with flash and a 1.3-megapixel front camera mainly for video calls. Still-photographs and videos I took were of average quality, but videos taken with the front camera were fuzzy.

I tested video calling using a pre-release, tablet-optimized version of Qik, the software being preinstalled for this purpose on the Tab. Results were mixed. It will work over either cellular or Wi-Fi connections, but the version I tried wasn’t tuned for cellular, so we used Wi-Fi. In my conversation with a Qik executive, the call at first failed to go through. When it did go through, it worked fine for awhile, and then failed when I tried a feature designed to hide my image. Later, the audio dropped altogether. Qik says it is fixing the problems.

Software

The Tab uses the latest version of Android, and it generally worked very smoothly, even though Google has warned that Android isn’t yet ready for tablets. I was especially impressed with Samsung’s attractive and usable rewrites of the calendar, email and contacts apps, which, like their iPad cousins, use multiple panels to make them more computer-like, while still remaining touch-friendly.

I found the Web browser to be a bit jerky in zooming into text and scrolling through long pages. I tested several Adobe Flash videos and websites written in Flash. Sometimes they played and sometimes they didn’t. In all cases, they slowed the browser down. On one site written in Flash, I got a warning saying I might want to “abort” lest the computer become “unresponsive.” In another case, the Tab crashed. So I conclude that while the Tab does play Flash, it needs work on that score.

I downloaded a few third-party apps. I couldn’t find any that were rewritten with extra features for tablets, nor any way to discover these in the Android Market. Some of my downloaded apps scaled fine to tablet size. Others were surrounded by large black bars.

Cellular pricing

On an iPad, if you opt for cellular-data service, there is no contract and only two monthly prices—$14.99 for 250 megabytes and $25 for 2 gigabytes. On the Tab, it’s much more complicated. Verizon, which is selling only the $600 no-contract model, says its pricing will start at $20 a month for 1 gigabyte of data. Sprint charges $29.99 monthly for 2 gigabytes and $59.99 for 5 gigabytes. T-Mobile has different prices for no-contract and contract models, and different rates for new and existing customers. Just two examples: a new customer under contract on a Tab can pay $30 monthly for 200 megabytes or $50 for 5 gigabytes.

So, I urge Tab buyers to do the math carefully on the overall cost of the device under various carriers and plans.

Bottom Line

The Tab is attractive, versatile and competitively priced, though monthly cell fees can add up. It’s different enough from the iPad, yet good enough, to give consumers a real choice.

Find all his columns and videos at walt.allthingsd.com Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101109/e-ink-will-sell-color-screens/ http://allthingsd.com/20101109/e-ink-will-sell-color-screens/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:45:28 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32255 Your e-reader may be about to enter the wonderful world of color. E Ink, the company that makes the grayscale display for Amazon’s Kindle, has announced E Ink Triton, a new technology that displays 16 shades of gray and thousands of colors. Amazon hasn’t commented on whether a color Kindle is imminent, though. Chinese manufacturer Hanvon will be the first to ship an e-reader with the new E Ink screen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101109/e-ink-will-sell-color-screens/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/ http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:56:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36209

Empty bracket or no empty bracket: Will it work?

That’s pretty much the big question at News Corp. tonight, as its much beleaguered social networking site, Myspace, rolls out a new beta version aimed at shifting its fortunes.

And how will it do that? By moving dramatically away from its roots as a social networking site–and far, far away from powerhouse Facebook–and becoming a “social entertainment” hub aimed directly at the Gen Y audience.

That means heavy emphasis on the sharing and discovery of music, television, movies, games, videos and photos from within Myspace and without. There is also an upcoming new mobile site and better apps for smartphones and tablets.

And it also includes a new logo that features “my” with an actual fill-in-the-space bracket after it.

By the way, it’s now “Myspace”–dropped second cap–rather than the old “MySpace,” and the new color palette is black, not blue.

It is a bold, if risky, move, which could result in a dramatic decline of users or–despite the grim reality of second acts on the Internet–reset Myspace to begin a new cycle of growth.

For sure, as you can see from the screenshots below, it is a cleaner, hipper and much more attractive offering, with a tile format, ridding Myspace of its longtime cheap and noisy feel.

You can still toggle to a list or video view of the homepage.

Still, Myspace continues with the irksome moving parts, such as continually updating live notifications and real-time rolling number tickers that move constantly as people share various content.

It sort of reminds me of that national-debt clock in Times Square in Manhattan, but not as riveting.

Amid the better ability for bands and artists to more easily attract fans and promote themselves on Myspace, regular users can also become social arbiters–called “curators”–by active and useful sharing of their tastes.

And, perhaps most important of all, you can bring in a lot of outside sources, broadcast out to Facebook and have a two-way feed with Twitter.

Behind the scenes, Myspace has also done a major overhaul of its tech structure, which has been much maligned. In fact, it was once described to me as being made of “bubblegum and baling wire.”

Here’s an appalling stat, for example: There have been 117 different Myspace logos created for the service.

We’ll see how it goes, but here are videos Myspace did about the launch, including a logo-ganza:

And here are more screenshots than you ever would want (click on the images to make them larger):

Finally, here is the official press release:

MEET THE NEW MYSPACE

Myspace Debuts New Brand, Beta Website and Suite of Products That Focus on Social Entertainment for Gen Y

Beverly Hills, October 27, 2010 – Today Myspace announced a new brand, beta website and a suite of products that together redefine the company as a social entertainment destination for Gen Y. Myspace is creating a rich, highly personalized experience for people to discover content and connect with other fans who share similar interests. The entertainment experience will span music, celebrities, movies, television and games and will be available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices and offline events.

“This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace. Our new strategy expands on Myspace’s existing strengths–a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural trends in real time through our users,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace. “Myspace is unique in that it is powered by the passions of our users, who program the site by expressing interests, sharing tastes and knowledge around particular topics, and scouting out up-and-coming subcultures. This is the just the first step and there will be many more features, programs and improvements to come.:

Specifically, Myspace will provide people with the ability to:

• Discover and engage with Myspace’s broad array of programming, including originals, exclusives and content from around the Web.
• Express, collect, and display their creations and interests on their profiles and through sharing tools.
• Connect to other fans with similar tastes.

Myspace will also focus on promoting curators–a subset of its audience whose reputation and knowledge around particular entertainment topics and emerging cultural trends make them uniquely influential–by supporting them with the resources, tools and a platform to expand their reach within the Myspace community.

Newly Designed Beta Site

Myspace has completely rebuilt its website, with a new visual identity and product features that put content center stage. From the color palette to the way the site is organized to the improved navigation, everything has been redesigned to help people easily find relevant content.

The redesigned Myspace welcome page showcases fresh content as it bubbles up across the beta site in real time. Additionally, once a user logs in to Myspace, the page will instantly populate with content based on the individual’s interests, creating a unique, contextually relevant discovery experience.

Registered users can now also toggle between three different views of the homepage, each specifically designed to display their stream in the way that resonates most. These include:

• List view: Traditional view
• Grid view: A magazine-like format
• Play view: A video format that allows users to watch, forward and resize their updates to full screen

To complement the online experience, Myspace will soon release a mobile version of the beta site, accessible on any mobile browser. A new Myspace app for iPhone and Android devices will follow later this year.

New Products

Myspace has released a suite of initial features that empower people to discover, collect and display entertainment content, while also offering tailored recommendations. These features include:

Topics–Myspace features more than 20,000 entertainment-focused, dynamic pages organized around topics. These pages provide a centralized location to view aggregated information about specific subject matter from a wide variety of news sites and blogs including MTV, Los Angeles Times, Access Hollywood, New York Times, Village Voice and Just Jared.

Content Hubs–These comprehensive entertainment destinations are specifically dedicated to movies, television and celebrities. The pages combine programmed editorial with trending articles that feature news, videos and photos from various content partners. Additionally, each individual article within the hubs recommends related content and topics. Hubs focused on games, comedy, sports and fashion will be revealed in the coming months.

Personalized Stream–The new stream automatically learns what to feature based on a user’s preferences and habits, so they see more of what they love and less of what they don’t.

Recommendations–This feature recommends relevant topics and other fans based on algorithms that learn the type of content a user views, listens to or watches and from whom or where they discovered it.

‘Right now on Myspace’–This feature shows trending content in real time on Myspace, helps fans find recently added music and videos, and lets them listen or watch right from the interactive chart. Myspace uses these trends to inform recommendations that promote discovery and engagement.

Discovery Tab–This always accessible tab combines videos that friends are watching with what’s trending in real time on Myspace. Scroll to the top of any page and the new Discovery Tab drops down as a horizontal film strip.

My Stuff TabMy Stuff is an easy way to see all that’s personal to a user – their profile, photos, videos and uploaded content, structured as a drop-down menu with different content areas.

Badges–This feature recognizes and rewards curators and fans for their social activity around entertainment topics on the beta site and promotes them with badges – graphic icons that appear in a user’s stream.

New Brand Identity

Myspace has also introduced a new logo that captures its revamped brand identity and values. The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves, enabling users to personalize the logo and make it their own–just as they can throughout Myspace.

The newly-designed Myspace begins rolling out today in beta and will be available to all users worldwide by the end of November. New users will have immediate access to the beta site. For more information, please visit www.myspace.com/newmyspace

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100907/viral-video-facebook-live-versus-google-beat/ http://allthingsd.com/20100907/viral-video-facebook-live-versus-google-beat/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:15:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33415

While the Silicon Valley digital giants are fighting on much bigger playing fields, BoomTown is enjoying the mini-battle brewing between Facebook Live and Google Beat.

What, pray tell, are those?

Well, Facebook Live launched about a month ago, and includes all kinds of insidery videos from the social networking giant.

Facebook Live notes on its Facebook page that it is an “official live video streaming channel, providing a deeper look into our features, partners & employees.”

That includes interviews by Facebook’s marketing exec Randi Zuckerberg, live event streaming and also a look-see at demos.

Google (GOOG) has been putting up a lot of videos on its official YouTube channel for a while now, such as executive talks, tips, product explainers, life-at-Google vignettes and even a Rubik’s Cubes Googley art wall competition.

Now, it seems to have upped the stakes with last week’s launch of Google Beat, which is–as a blog post described it–a video series that “highlights some of the hottest searches on Google in the U.S.”

This past week, searches centered on Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally and hurricane information, which seems like a good fit.

Personally, I like both entries from Facebook and Google and want even more.

What about a look inside Facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s sock drawer? Or perhaps a gander at exactly what Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin searched for over Labor Day?

I say, the more, the merrier–or, in this case, the geekier, the nerdier!

Although here is something to ponder: While Twitter is likely minutes away from broadcasting “Twit Wit,” would Apple (AAPL) ever do something like this?

(Answer: Never ever ever.)

Here are two recent Facebook Live posts–one an interview of the Places team and the other a tech talk on Facebook infrastructure.

They are followed by the first two Google Beat episodes, starring Anne Espiritu, as well as the ever-changing colors of Google’s signature exercise ball.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100907/viral-video-facebook-live-versus-google-beat/feed/ 1