Friend Connect

I've been mucking around with Friend Connect on and off for a few months.
It finally launched, which is nice. There's a video, and links to sign up if you want to play with it.

It's a great tool, letting any site easily add a social element to it, with sites like Mashable already hooked up, which is pretty cool.

It also supports custom gadgets, built using the OpenSocial spec, where the owner of the page is the site itself. You can do some pretty interesting things, I reckon, with a bit of thought.

For example, a games site could easily add a gadget which let people share their gamercards without only pasting some code, just like a YouTube video (and a bit of programming for the gadget itself).

Net Neutrality

I'm not allowed to comment on this stuff, I guess, since I work at Google, and the article is about us, but I would like you to read the following 3 things.

First, bogus article. This guy is some kind of bozo.
http://www.precursorblog.com/content/google-uses-21-times-more-bandwidth-it-pays-first-ever-research-study

Our response.
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/response-to-phone-companies-google.html

Other sane people comment:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/law.ars/2008/12/04/can-we-get-some-better-telecom-shills-please

Feelings!

Hello there,

Glad you dropped by.

There's a few kickass things I need to talk about today.

1) I got a new handset, finally.
My old G1 was so super-prototype that it stopped working. So I got a new one.
And download THIS chap.
http://www.mobilizy.com/
You need to look at it, and, if you have a G1, install it right now.
Good.

2) Lots of xbox this weekend.
Left 4 Dead is freakin' sweet.
Gears horde continues to amuse and entertain in equal parts.
Lego Batman is, typically, awesome.

Here is a gamercard, so you may browse.


Anyway, Left 4 Dead.
Bugger me, this game is brilliant.

It's a 4 player co-op. There's a single player mode, but you really don't want to play it. It's shit. Well, actually, it's not shit. It's great. But it's not even close to the multiplayer version, which is insane.

Basically, it's 4 of you against 28 days later-style fast-zombies, plus some special types, which have excellent attacks.
The graphics are top notch. The gameplay is tight. You play it for the first time, and you think 'ok, that was fun'. Then you play it again, and even though it's the same level, it's a completely different game.
Rather than fix the spawn points for creatures, or even the spawn numbers, everything's semi-randomised each time you play.
That is, you'll have different numbers of zombies which are in different places, and waves of the bastards will come at totally different times.
It will also scale based on your performance. The better you do, the more zombies will try and eat your face.
If you leave the team at any point, you're dead. Pure and simple.
This is a game which doesn't just encourage co-op, it enforces it with a very big stick.

Which brings me onto Horde on Gears.
I got the chance, finally, to play with MonkeyMido over the weekend.


We had a bloody good laugh, and made it to wave 18 (a new personal record) thanks almost entirely to the stellar work of TOMMYGUNTOM31 who carried us through most of them single-handedly.

Gears of War 2

Yeah, it's a good game. Get it. End of story.

But, there are 2 sections in the campaign, which are hyper-weak. The fight against Skorge and protecting the comm array, both near the end.

As far as I can tell, both are entirely reliant on luck, and not skill.

That's pisspoor, and makes me very angry as well.

UPDATE: I saw a few searches coming in for this, so I thought I'd add some information about it, so that people actually get an answer.

Try and kill the reavers in the air - they die more quickly.

After about 45 seconds, one will fly from right to left, and bomb the final radar from the air.

When this happens, it's game over.

You need to down 6, quickly, before this happens.

The right hand turret is, for some reason, much easier to do it with.

Zoom in, lead them in the air (shoot just ahead of them), drop them out of the air.

Bottom line, though, unless you're an incredible shot with the Troika, there's a fair old bit of luck involved, and you'll probably have to try a few times. Also, and I know this sounds weak, taking a break can really help. Go play a round of Horde, or watch TV for a few minutes and then come back.

Good luck, and please leave a comment if you have any tips.

Lasers

I love to learn new things.
This thing, in particular, is both interesting and funny.

In other news, I was at SMX London yesterday, where I met some fun people. They also let me talk about search diagnosis, and I spotted that SeoMoz (I'm not linking, they have enough juice :P) messed up their alt tags. Well, there wasn't much else to mention. Let's be honest, it's a pretty good site.

We also looked at processlibrary.com, which ranks well enough in Google and Live, but not at all in Yahoo! How strange. (penalty? low content/noise ratio? Who knows?)

John Mueller was also over. The guy's a genius, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him face to face. At Google, we often work together for years before meeting people, even though we've seen them on VC or similar.

Anyway, that's all for me. Busy day.

Fable 2

So, uhh, there are some free items you can get if you hit fable2.com
But lordy, why do they insist on flash? It's so tedious. Long loading times. Slowing the computer.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Most importantly, you can't even resize things, with control+ and control-, which is crap if you're running at 1900x1200 on a small display like me.
Grrrrr.

3d Wii VR

Every 3 months or so, I remember this video.



It's frickin' sweet, and every console should have one.