As a necessity for human life, sex has been a popular topic of conversation undoubtedly since the advent on communication. And thanks to various technology, things like phone sex are a part of our culture these days. So why not explore sex with the newest emerging form of communication: Twitter? Behold, Twitt Sex.

The site is very barebones at the moment, but it appears that it is hoping to the the adult version of Twitter. But rather than being one of the countless sites built on top of Twitter’s APIs, it looks like Twitt Sex wants to be its own contained site that simply mimics much of the Twitter functionality in its own contained environment. And it actually has its own API.

Right now, there are only 2 users of Twitt Sex and creating a new account doesn’t appear to work correctly yet. But one of the first two tweets on the service shows what it will be able about. It looks like the service will let you attach sexual pictures to your tweets, which then display in others streams. That should make tweet sex (the action, not the service) decidedly more visual and interesting — and should help with that whole 140 character limit thing (though being unable to test it, I’m not sure if Twitt Sex has that same limit).

While the service’s about page has no information yet, oddly, its Terms and Conditions page seems to be from 2007. Also weird is that its Privacy Policy page makes numerous references Twittr.com, which may look like the old name for Twitter, but it’s not (that would be Twttr). While you might assume this is just an old site that never launched, the first tweets are from today and yesterday.

I’m shocked that it has taken this long for someone to come out with a Twitter for sex. But then again, there are plenty of people out there using the regular service for that purpose. Violet Blue wrote a good overview about it back in January in the San Francisco Chronicle.

[thanks Thiago]

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If this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

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So you want something to look forward to in your fast approaching old age, eh? If robots playing baseball doesn't quite cut it, how's about a robohand that redefines what we understand by the word "dexterity"? The Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory is at it again, this time demonstrating robotic appendages with a reaction time of a single millisecond. Using harmonic drive gears and a (really) high-speed actuator, the three-fingered hands can tie your shoelaces, tweezer your brow, and even perform some kung fu pen spinning for the ladies. Video after the break -- skip ahead if you must, but don't miss out on the slow-mo action at 2:40 in the demo, it's pure kinetic poetry.

[Via Hizook; Thanks, Thomas B]

Continue reading Video: Robot hand shows off amazing dexterity, speed

Filed under: Robots

Video: Robot hand shows off amazing dexterity, speed originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees.

Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

• FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
• Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
• Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
• While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
• With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
• That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
• Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
• Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
• He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
• Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
• He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
• Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
• There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
• On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
• Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

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