China to get some Facebook love, your digital camera knows you look a hot mess, MySpace is still somehow making the news and Richard Branson is heading to the deep sea. Yum, tech updates…
1. Rumors, Rumors: Facebook Plans to Enter China Through Various Partnerships. Talk of a Facebook enterprise in China (a country notorious for blocking said social network) started when Hu Yanping, a director of the Data Center of China Internet and respected journalist, posted a message on the Chinese Twitter-esque website Sina Weibo. Last year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg traveled to China on “personal interests” and met with a gaggle of social media businessmen. Most likely, Zuckerberg will reach an agreement with the Chinese search engine giant Baidu, or Chinese-language information portal Sina.com . Zuckerberg points out the importance of this connection: [TechCrunch]
It’s such an important part of the world. How can you connect the world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?
2. Summer Interns Asked To Apply via Social Media. About thirty out of the 500 start up companies under Dave McClure’s start up portfolio will require their summer internship applicants to submit a social media component. Most applicants will be asked to make their cases on Twitter, YouTube, or Quora. As the online world shifts culturally, start up companies will look for creative and flexible individuals. [Mashable]
3. 3Frames Application Allows IPhone To Make Animated Gifs. For $3, 3Frames uses your iPhone’s camera to capture 3 to 10 frames in succession, then turn them into an animated .gif, played back at the speed of your choice. Once complete, you have the option to send it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr! [Gizmodo]
4. Panasonic’s new camera is just assuming you look really bad. One of the new Lumix’s features, Beauty Retouch, automatically reduces wrinkles, whitens teeth and applies virtual eyeliner, eyeshadow, blush and lipstick. The more expensive version even gives you color palette options! You’ll never look better…? [CoolestGadgets]
5. San Fransisco’s Proposed Tax-Cut For Twitter Explained in Cartoon Form. Featuring Biz Stone as Twitter’s CEO, Zynga as the frontiersman, and an accurate take on the Tenderloin. [TechCrunch]
6. Dodgeball, the Dennis Crowley-founded antecedent to Foursquare, would have turned 7 today. The short-lived service, which Engadget described in 2004 as “Friendster for your phone”, (throwback, anyone?) let you see which friends were within a 10-block radius of you, and then hit them with a rubber ball. [Soup]
7. Craigslist is facing some disarray because other sites wish they could be Craigslist. Sites like Etsy, StubHub, and OK Cupid have taken over Craigslist on a category by category basis, turning the beloved classified site into basically one big pop-up ad. [The Gong Show/Business Insider]
8. Ford is making chocolate cars. OK, not really, but they are finding inspiration in yummy places like Nestlé’s Aero bar. The candy bar is made of light honeycomb bubbles of chocolate, which Ford then copied in plastic form. The idea produced plastic that is 20% lighter, making for better handling and acceleration in cars like the Focus, C-MAX and Galaxy. But please, don’t try to eat your car. [Gizmodo]
9. Richard Branson is willing to risk being crushed to billionaire pulp in order to explore Earth’s last, shark-infested frontier. Virgin Oceanic has built an amazing submarine (8,000 pounds of carbon fiber and titanium!), the first in existence with full ocean depth capacity. That means Branson and co. will be able to dive 7 miles under the sea to explore places where no human being has ever been, like the Mariana Trench, where the pressure per square inch in 8 tons. That’s enough to dissolve bone, in case you didn’t know.[TechNewsWorld]
10. MySpace topples under the weight of Facebook empire. Actually, they’ve now allowed the “Connect with Facebook” option, making the whole site pretty redundant. MySpace was the undisputed social networking champion from its launch in 2005 until 2008, when Facebook started casting a longer shadow over the competition. How do the numbers look now? Facebook – 500 million users, MySpace – 66 million. But who knows? Maybe transferring all the “likes” will up their traffic. [CNN]
11. iPad self-portraits and 404 Error pages that take the edge off. Mashable’s got some great tech-savvy galleries, check out these two that’ll give you a laugh. [Mashable iPad] [Mashable 404]
