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Talk about adding insult to injury: a burglar who stole a laptop and other properties from a woman’s house later logged into the victim’s Facebook account and bragged about the deed, complaining that the TV in the victim’s house wasn’t good enough to steal.

The property was stolen from Victoria Richardson, 42, who lives in Hove, UK. The burglar stole an iPhone, a Nintendo DS, a handbag, some cash and credit cards and a black Toshiba laptop. As if that wasn’t enough, Victoria later logged into her Facebook account, discovering that the thief had left several messages on her account. They read:

“on my new laptop”

“Listening to music on my new phone feels so good.”

“I have the laptop , phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it, ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make”.

“regards your night time burglar”.

This incident proves that an invasion of your online space can be just as traumatic as the invasion of your physical space. As Ms Richardson put it: “I felt very spooked. I have never felt like that before. It felt like they were rubbing my nose in it.” However, these despicable Facebook messages also prove that the thief is quite stupid. Leaving traces of his/her activity on a social networking site can only help the police trace them and bring them to justice.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: burglary, facebook, thief

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Overwhelmed by boring tweets? In CollegeHumor’s latest original, notorious bio-exorcist Beetlejuice gets a modern revival as Tweetlejuice to help you out.

Invoke his #tweetlejuice hashtag three times in a tweet to @SomeoneBoring and he’ll help you kill those nasty Twitter critters with their pointless babble. After all, you don’t want to just unfollow them, because “you’ll feel guilty.”

Check out the video below and let us know what you think. Does it do Tim Burton’s comedy horror masterpiece justice?

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: Beetlejuice, collegehumor, Movies, spoofs, Tweetlejuice, twitter

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If you’ve been following the Facebook for iPhone Facebook page, you know that Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone is coming very soon. The application has been submitted to Apple for approval, and – though this process doesn’t always go smoothly– we can expect it in the app store in a day or two.

Of course, the new version brings many improvements – check here for a list– but one of them, added somewhat unexpectedly, towers above the rest: video uploading.

Now, while Facebook is immensely popular when it comes to uploading photos, when it comes to videos, it seems that the majority of users still prefer YouTube. But the new iPhone 3GS can finally record videos, and if the new Facebook app for iPhone makes it dead simple to upload them to Facebook (which it hopefully will), I can imagine that iPhone owners might simply start uploading their videos directly to Facebook.

As you may remember, Facebook’s support for video uploading has been a shoddy affair for a long time, and even Facebook itself didn’t put much emphasis on it, making it a tiny link that most users never even noticed. But then, late last year, Facebook added support for HD videos, and (even more importantly) embedding videos on other sites.

It’s still far from perfect, as Facebook’s privacy settings can make it hard for a video to go viral, but the set of video features Facebook is offering is – taking into account the needs of most casual users – actually not that much worse than those at YouTube. With the addition of iPhone video uploading, perhaps Facebook will finally become a place where you go to see videos of your friends, not only photos.

We’d like to know what you think and what do you expect from the app. Have you been uploading videos for Facebook, or have you used sites dedicated to video, such as YouTube? If you’re an iPhone 3GS owner, do you plan to upload more videos to Facebook when the new version of the Facebook iPhone application becomes available? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: Facebook, YouTube

Tags: facebook, iphone, iphone app, Mobile 2.0, video

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Radiohead has proven itself to be one of the world’s most forward-looking bands, having released the album In Rainbows online for whatever price fans wanted to pay…even if that price was nothing.

Today they’re continuing that innovative streak, releasing their new song These Are My Twisted Words for free at waste.uk.com.

See also: Radiohead’s Numbers Are in, and Yes, the Experiment Worked

Tags: mp3, radiohead

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Online newspaper The Huffington Post has added a feature called “Social News”, allowing users to interact more with stories on the site.

Powered by Facebook Connect, Social News shares stories you’re reading with friends, produces stats on your habits and lets you track the content others are interacting with. It is somewhat aggressive, however: leave the default settings on, and every click is tracked and sent to Facebook, reports All Things D. A stealth mode option lets you turn off this auto-posting to Facebook. In a press release announcing the change, founder Arianna Huffington explains:

This new platform lets our community of engaged users easily share stories and post comments for friends to see–it’s HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler, enriching and deepening conversations around the day’s news. Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse. HuffPost Social News makes this more dynamic than ever.

It’s another victory for Facebook Connect and social media in general: having already been integrated with NBC, it seems that newspapers are now getting on board with social integration.

Reviews: Facebook

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Bet you don’t get this at your local Apple Store: a group of Hula dancers staged a “Hit and Run Hula” at the San Francisco Apple Store this weekend.

The “Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu Dancers” had been touring various venues in SF, and once at the Apple Store, they spread out across the entrance and the glass staircase. Moments later, they were gone again, leaving the crowd to return to their perusal of expensive shiny objects.

[via SFist]

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There’s a cool torrent available on The Pirate Bay, one of the last cool torrents you’ll encounter on the site (as it’s due to close in a couple of days). It’s a copy of the (almost) entire Pirate Bay, containing over 800,000 torrent files and a mockup copy of the actual website.

As you may know, The Pirate Bay actually tracks many more torrents than 800,000. Here’s the explanation for the missing files from the torrent description:

“The index has 873671 torrents, ranging from id 3211594 to 5051940 (2009-08-13).

I only got 873671 torrents, but according to the website the tracker tracks over 2 million torrents.

The discrepancy is most likely due to many torrent files including the TPB tracker but has not been uploaded to the web site.”

I doubt many users will want to download the 21.3 GB heavy file, but this torrent is important because it proves, once again, that the demise of The Pirate Bay is not the demise of BitTorrent technology and the community that uses it. Simply put, new Pirate Bays will sprout up somewhere, and the cycle will begin anew.

Tags: bittorrent, the pirate bay, torrent

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The saga surrounding URL shortener Tr.im just keeps getting stranger. First Tr.im shut down in dramatic fashion. Then Bit.ly tried to save Tr.im with a collaborative, independent project called 301works. Then, Tr.im suddenly reopened.

Now, there’s yet another new twist, as Tr.im has announced that it is going open source and that its parent company, Nambu Network, is completely renouncing all ownership of Tr.im. It will be “community-owned” by September 15th. Oh, and the company took every chance it could to bash Bit.ly and Twitter.

Tr.im’s Announcement

Before Nambu got into its detailed plan to turn Tr.im into an open-source software, it went right into harsh criticism of Bit.ly and Twitter. Specifically, they revealed that Bit.ly made a $10,000 offer for Tr.im, which they rejected. They also called the 301works initiative a “Bit.ly public relations stunt.”

“We would like to set the record straight. Last Monday, August 10, 2009, bit.ly offered $10,000 for the tr.im domain name and everything associated with it. They used this “offer” to inject themselves into the conversation, and generate attention for their shallow initiative to address link-rot. It was transparent, and so I rejected it.

That initiative, 301works.org, is little more than a bit.ly public relations stunt, which is why we have not joined it. It has little substance, claiming to address link-rot while it does nothing of the kind. If a URL shortener decides to close, only the donation of the domain name and the data can address the existing links. For any high-volume URL shortener, like tr.im, it is unlikely a commercial entity would do that given the offers we have seen come in this past week to immediately hijack all tr.im URLs.”

Nambu then went into detail over what would be happening to Tr.im in the next few weeks. Here are the key points:

1. Nambu will renounce its ownership of the Tr.im domain.

2. The source code will be released to everyone, under the MIT open-source license

3. The link-map data of Tr.im URLs will be available to anyone in real-time, including click data and the number of URLs created for any specific URL. It’s also going to publish statistics related to usage.

4. Nambu’s Eric Woodward will personally guarantee any shortfall in Tr.im’s operation budget.

5. Tr.im will now accept donations

There’s more, but the point is that Tr.im has decided not to sell, but to give its entire code structure to the masses. That is a positive step for innovation – that code could build some really powerful URL shorteners in the near future – but Nambu’s motivation for opening up is less than thrilling. Woodward’s entire argument is that Bit.ly and Twitter have monopolized the market and are the ones creating the URL shortening crisis. It’s a very negative motivation, and that can lead to bad decisions.

Will the new Tr.im work as intended? Can it survive in a community-owned structure? And are Bit.ly and Twitter really destroying innovation in the URL shortener market? We leave those questions for you to ponder in the comments.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: bit.ly, Tr.im, twitter

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After our report yesterday that in-car GPS system TomTom had released an iPhone app in New Zealand, it appears the app is now available for purchase elsewhere, including the US and UK. Mapping data is available for New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, US & Canada and Western Europe [iTunes link].

Obviously you’ll need an iPhone 3G or 3GS to make it work. What’s more, it’s not cheap: in the region of $100. However, in most cases that’s much cheaper than a standalone GPS unit.

UK site Recombu downloaded the app and took it for a test drive (video below). While it comes highly recommended, the app does of course pause when you receive an inbound phone call.

Tags: iphone, TomTom

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Felicia is fading, but Bill is building. Forming early Monday, Hurricane Bill sustained winds of 90 mph which are expected to climb to 110 mph — putting it in the running to become a major hurricane in the next couple of days.

The first official hurricane in the Atlantic this season, Bill is some 1000 miles east of the Lesser Antilles and is expected to track west-northwest as it builds. Residents of Bermuda should monitor its progress closely, and East Coast residents might be in for some choppy surf as a result as well.

Luckily there are umpteen ways to follow the progress of the storm as it develops. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite hurricane-chasing resources here, broken into sections for web-based resources, Twitter-specific sources and mobile hurricane tracking.

Web

1. MyFoxHurricane

MyFoxHurricane has been a staple of our hurricane tracking resources for its tracking maps, video footage, satellite photos, and live chat with other site visitors. You can also get updates coming right to you from their Facebook page and Facebook app, as well as follow them on Twitter.

2. Hurricane Central at Weather.com

It’s another old standby but we’d be remiss for not including Weather.com. You can get the latest news on specific storms, track them live and even upload video footage if you’re near an affected area and have something interesting to share.

3. StormAdvisory

StormAdvisory is a nice and simple Google Maps mashup where you can pick a current storm to overlay and see its trajectory. The link provided is to the Atlantic map tracker for Hurricane Bill, but the site provides eastern and western Pacific maps as well.

4. Ibiseye

Another Google Maps based web app, Ibiseye lets you plot multiple storms, see various views of the data and get a display of relevant statistics including distance from the nearest cities for each path point.

5. Intellicast

Intellicast offers current tracking and forecasts as well as visible and infrared satellite imagery, news, bulletins and alerts. They also have an iGoogle gadget available for start pages.

6. Weather Underground’s Tropical Center

The tropical weather/hurricane section of Weather Underground offers tracking maps, satellite images, public advisories, computer models and interactive Flash maps. As we noted for Hurricane Fay trackers, one of the nicest infoviz options here is the Wundermap Google Maps mashup.

7. AccuWeather

AccuWeather is worth mentioning again as well for being one of the few that actually make their own forecasts, whereas many other resources pull in government forecast data. Videos and weather analysis are offered as well.

8. Stormpulse

Stormpulse is notable for its eye-catching interactive maps with full-screen functionality. They also have an API for embedding maps onto your own site.

Twitter

9. @MyFoxHurricane— Twitter feed from the web-based resource we mentioned above.

10. @hurricanes— regular updates about hurricanes in the tropics, with a focus on the Atlantic region.

11. @hurricanealerts— hurricane alerts and tropical storm updates and advisories for the coastal U.S.

12. @breakingweather— AccuWeather.com’s Twitter feed offers updates on tropical storms and other severe weather conditions.

13. @wunderground— get hurricane and other severe weather warnings and updates from Weather Underground’s Twitter feed.

14. @stormpulse— the Twitter feed of the Stormpulse site offers frequent updates on tropical weather worth tracking.

15. @hurricanetrack— for hardcore hurricane geeks, get stats and occasional live video streams from the folks behind hurricane news site HurricaneTrack.com.

Mobile

16. Weather.com mobile site

Head over to The Weather Channel’s mobile gateway on your regular browser to get started using Weather.com’s Mobile Web on your phone.

17. AccuWeather mobile site

This mobile-formatted version of the AccuWeather site is free to use in your mobile browser. They also offer a free iPhone app (warning: iTunes link).

18. Hurricane (iPhone app)

The Hurricane iPhone app (warning: iTunes link) is rated 4.5 stars and was an iPhone Apps Excellence Award Winner in 2008. It provides Atlantic and Pacific interactive tracking maps with data points including wind speed, position, speed, direction, pressure, date and time. Also included are satellite imagery, bulletins, alerts, and historical data on past hurricanes for $3.99.

19. MyFoxHurricane (iPhone app)

This $3.99 iPhone app from one of our web picks above (warning: iTunes link) offers mobile tracking maps, radar and satellite imagery, video briefings and eye-witness vids. You can also rewind a bit through hurricane history and see past storm tracks and information by date and location.

20. Tracking the Eye (iPhone app)

This iPhone app from HurricaneSoftware.com comes in both a free (warning: iTunes links) and paid version, with the former offering current active storm data, distance from your location to the storms, satellite and radar information and historical data on past storms. For $2.99 you get essentially the same featureset but without any advertising.

21. Hurricane Central iPhone/iPod touch web app

If a full-on mobile app isn’t your style or you just don’t want to shell out for Yet Another App, you can check out this web app formatted for iPhone and iPod touch. It has its fair share of ads to wade through, but is updated frequently.

Reviews: Google Maps, Twitter

Tags: hurricane bill, hurricanes, iphone, Mobile 2.0, twitter, Weather

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