We love the United Kingdom, especially the way they use all these adorable names for things: "lorry," for truck, or "loo" for bathroom, or "sin bin" for an Orwellian program whereby "problem families" (currently numbering 2,000, but someday as many as 20,000) are placed under 24/7 CCTV surveillance in their own homes. Chris Grayling, something called the "Shadow Home Secretary," puts it thusly: "This Government has been in power for more than a decade during which time anti-social behavior, family breakdown and problems like alcohol abuse and truancy have just got worse and worse." Meaning, of course, that cameras must be moved from the streets of England into people's homes, where they'll be used to make sure that kids go to school, go to bed at a decent hour, and eat proper meals. If only they'd had programs like this when we were kids -- maybe things would have turned out differently.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

UK puts CCTVs in the homes of lousy parents originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve written about Foursquare a number of times. It’s a really nice tool for keeping track of where your friends are, while at the same time playing this oddly competitive social game. As a stand-alone app, it’s great. But the data it’s collecting may be just as interesting, and the service SocialGreat is one of the first to make use of it.

The idea behind SocialGreat is very simple: To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time. As the tagline says, “Where’s the crowd?” But here’s why it’s better than a regular rating system: You vote with your feet. As in, if you go to a place, and check-in there, it gets a point on the leader board.

The service launched in New York City a couple weeks ago, and last week it added San Francisco. This allowed it to track the movements of nearly 3,000 people, which provided some interesting data about how groups migrate from place to place. But starting today, it’s now available in all the cities that Foursquare is available in. This will undoubtedly mean a lot more data points, and even more interesting information.

SocialGreat uses Foursquare’s API to pull your information. When you visit the site, you click the “Join” button and you’re taken to a Foursquare page to allow your data to be sent via OAuth. Your data is then entered into the information pool.

SocialGreat’s main page keeps it simple: You can track the hot places based on hour, day, week, or all-time. A list shows you how many people have been to that place, as well as the recent trend of people going or not going there (expressed in positive or negative numbers, respectively). To the right of this list, all of the popular places are shown on a map. From there you can click on any of them to get their address.

One downside is so many people check in at airports. That’s why in the image above you see “San Francisco” leading the pack (it’s really SFO, the airport). The same is true in New York. Still, that should be easy enough to filter out if the service chooses to.

As I said, it’s a simple idea and application, but it’s potentially a very good idea to track trendy places based on a very real metric — people actually going to them. Of course, it will be more useful the more people who sign up and use Foursquare, and in turn allow SocialGreat to access their data.

SocialGreat is the brainchild of Pepper Lillie’s Bill Piel and Googler Jon Steinberg (which is kind of interesting since Foursquare itself is the similar, follow-up service to Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005, only to let it die). The duo also go the help of Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin.

Update: As Piel notes in the comments, the full range of cities aren’t quite live on the front-end of the site yet (they will be tomorrow), but you can probably figure out the URL for the city you’re looking for pretty easily.

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Up until now, Bell's been coy about an exact availability date for the Palm Pre -- a tactic borrowed from Sprint prior to its release -- so we're happy to hear that they've finally decided on August 27 to get it out of the door. It'll run CAD $199.95 (about $187) on a three-year deal, ramping all the way up to $599.95 contract-free with a minimum 500MB / month data plan (trust us, you'll want every megabyte of it). Preorders are now being accepted online and in Bell stores, so if you want it on day one, you might want to get moving on that.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Palm Pre comes to Bell on August 27 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.

Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.

The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.

“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.

One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.

And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.

All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.

The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.

And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.

But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:

I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh

But later he completely rips the new feature:

i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.

Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.

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