company has found a way to incorporate smells into the Internet. Imagine, your significant other mentions you on Twitter and magically you smell his/her perfume. If someone tags you in a Facebook video, the scent of buttered popcorn or fruit fills the room. Olly makes an Internet with smell possible.
Olly — a web-connected smelly robot — created by London and New York-based company called Mint Foundry will give all your online notifications a scent. The creators figured since the web incorporates sight and sound, it’s time to experience it in a different way.
Olly would scent anything from a tweet on Twitter, Like on Instagram, to a photo tag on Facebook.
As seen in the video, Olly is a compact white box that has a removable space in the back that can be filled with any scent you desire. The company suggests essential oils, fruit, perfume, cologne or a drop of gin. They can be stacked, so you can give all your online accounts a different smell.
The process would involve downloading an application, signing in with a username and password into the Olly app and having the physical Olly reader.
Olly is not available for purchase yet. The company is working to garner backers for the project.
One upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
Facebook learned a lot about balancing developer success with user experience during that first boom period, often called the wild west days. Game spam such as users asking all their friends to install and give them virtual good overran the news feed, making it a bore to non-gamers. Facebook will surely be monitoring the volume of mobile news feed game stories to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Rather than pepper the feed with individual stories, Facebook is using aggregated stories that read like “Rose Yao and 9 other people recently played games”. Below users see a few friends names and links to the games they played, and can tap to expand to see the whole list. Tapping a game will launch its HTML5 version, or that native app if already installed. The aggregated stories give users control, so those that want to discover something to play can, while those uninterested can breeze by.
Earned viral channels also democratize the Facebook platform, as they provide exposure to small developers without big marketing budgets. Facebook launched the HTML5 platform to make sure Apple and Google weren’t the only ones making money off mobile games. Developer adoption of the channel has been a bit sluggish so far, though. The opening of this viral channel could convince developers to experiment with Facebook mobile.
Feeling housebound by Facebook addiction? Facebook just released “Suggested Events,” which uses your own check-in information to point out events you might want to go to in the real world.
Suggested Events replaces the old Friends Events menu choice that was there before. We’re not seeing this new Suggested Events feature on all our accounts — it might have something to do with whether you’ve checked in anywhere yet on Facebook, or it could be another Facebook slow rollout — but if you’re one of the lucky ones so far, here’s how to access it:
Go to your Facebook Home page, and on the left side, click on Events. As usual, different events that are coming up will display on the right side of your screen.
But if you look underneath Events, there’s a new menu choice called “Suggested Events.” Click on that, and you’ll see a list of suggested events for later this week, next week, and on into the following months.
So Facebook will be using information it's gathered about you to suggest more places to go? This is the kind of feature that might be considered "creepy" by some users, but others will welcome the suggestions that might actually have something to do with places you've been -- or places you're interested in going.
Anything to get us out of the house and away from all the screens can't be bad in my book. Oh wait, will Suggested Events be available on the iOS and Android Facebook apps? We've contacted Facebook to find out, and will let you know. In the meantime, how do you like this new feature?
Facebook officially took the “beta” label off of Timeline, the updated version of a user’s profile page, on Dec. 6, but as of today, the update is being rolled out to every user worldwide.
Previously, the slow rollout started in New Zealand and gradually spread to other places across the globe. According to the Facebook Blog, all Facebook users will have the opportunity to update to Timeline today. There will be a several week opt-in period before users are no longer given the option of the old Facebook profile.
Timeline originally debuted in September at F8, but the official launch was delayed until now. Early adopters, however, were able to get the beta more quickly. According to Sam Lessin, a product manager at Facebook, “since then, over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline.”
While a large part of the Teppanguru community had the developer preview, or at least knew of Timeline’s imminent arrival, many readers who do not follow technology news as closely may not even have known Timeline existed.
As an experiment, we’ve partnered with our friends at USA Today to find out how Timeline is viewed across a much wider demographic.
The informal survey below is posted on both Mashable and USA Today’s website. After the results are tabulated, we’ll share our findings with you all.
A new Facebook program aims to prevent suicides by connecting distressed users with counselors via chat.
The program, which launched Tuesday, lets friends alert Facebook when users express suicidal thoughts, reports The Associated Press. If your friend posts a comment related to suicide, for instance, you can report it to Facebook by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook will then send an email to the comment’s author directing them to a telephone hotline or a link they can click to start a confidential chat. Facebook reps could not be reached for comment on the program, which was identified as “Lifeline.”
The initiative illustrates Facebook’s growing sense of responsibility for users’ lives. That sense seems to have fueled other recent programs, including a suite of tools introduced in March to crack down on cyberbullying. Facebook has also stepped out to encourage users and the company’s employees to support gay rights with an Oct. 20 initiative for Spirit Day.
This isn’t the first step that Facebook has taken to address suicide rates. In November, an app from SafetyWeb.com appeared on the network that made it easier for users to report suicide threats through Facebook.
Meanwhile, in May Google introduced a feature that triggered an image of a red telephone and the toll-free number to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline when a user searched for suicide-related topics.
What do you think? Will this Facebook program be effective? Do you have any other ideas for Facebook regarding suicide prevention? Let us know in the comments.
