Today's Most popular News

October 7th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

MySpace has partnered with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to bring print-on-demand capability to the popular social network. That’s right. Those embarrassing photos of you Xeroxing your rear end at the office Christmas party aren’t just on your receptionist’s MySpace albums anymore. They’ll be printable so that even those who haven’t found the Internet yet can see them.

In all seriousness, this means that MySpace, home to over 4 billion images already, may fast become a hub for people looking for an easy way to share and print photos and information online. MySpace is already working with a user base that remains one of the largest in the social networking space, which means that this partnership puts both MySpace and HP at the forefront of the online print on demand market.

The partnership starts off with a simple “Click to Print” icon on MySpace blogs, comments, photos and mail. This will allow users a one click way to print from MySpace. This is where it might make some users nervous. In order for the technology to work, HP and MySpace will be “unlocking” user profile data to format for printing. What this means for users of MySpace with private profiles is that their friends will be able to print their profile photos once they are allowed to view their profile page. I’m not sure this will cause Facebook and Beacon level angst among users, but I’m thinking MySpace and HP might want to make this opt-in for those with private profiles before launch just in case.

In the meantime, this will be rolling out just in time for the holidays, scheduled for November of this year. A future phase of the roll out will include a way to print your MySpace photos on actual merchandise such as hats, mugs, and calendars. This will make gift giving easy for friends and family, but for now it is strictly print to paper. The MySpace and HP partnership will roll out the “Click to Print” feature in America, as well as parts of Australia, Canada and Western Europe.

Source:Mashable!

Want your Firefox 3 browser to be location-savvy? Mozilla is making that possible with the release of Geode, an “experimental Firefox add-on” intended as something of a holdover until Firefox 3.1 arrives with support for the W3C Geolocation Specification.

The purpose of Geode is to give current Firefox installations the option to specify location, determined through Skyhook’s Loki Wi-Fi mapping service, with varying levels of exactness, to be manually chosen by the user. If you need or want to share exact location, neighborhood or city-level information quickly, Geode makes it happen in much the same way that your standard Firefox installation would request you to save login data to a website.

If you want Geode to automatically submit broad or precise information, or, alternatively, to refuse input of such data, you can check the corresponding box adjacent to the four primary options available. Mozilla states that Skyhook Loki enables Geode users to pinpoint their locations between 10 and 20 meters.

Users not fond of the Wi-Fi-based system that Geode is built to tap will have to wait for Firefox 3.1 to present itself in order to quickly manage Web-based location services through GPS devices. But those in settings home to Wi-Fi signals aplenty will be off to a solid start with the Geode plugin.