Our favorite gladiator, Spartacus will be coming back soon in the next season of the acclaimed Starz series. The new season entitled, Spartacus: Vengeance airs January 27 and promises to be just as edgy and exciting as in the past. Now you can join in the fight on Facebook as they introduce a game of the same name when the new season premiers. Build armies, free slaves and make them warriors all in the comforts of Facebook.Why farm when you can battle the Romans!?!

Starz Takes Spartacus Outside the Arena with New “Spartacus: Vengeance The Game,” Sampling

How huge is Facebook? A recent estimate says:

Facebook accounts for 95 percent of social networking time on internet in United States. It has been found that on an average 1 out of every 7 minutes U.S online users spends their time in using Facebook .

As a result speculation of what a Facebook IPO (initial public offering, in other words becoming a publically traded stock) might look like has run rampant.

Carly sent along an article at BusinessWeek that discusses how the massive IPO would further illuminate the dependance of California on capital gains taxes and how the volatility – particularly with the economic downturn the last few years – has hurt the state, saying it

shows the boom-and-bust cycle that capital gains taxes often inflict on California’s budget. In fact, capital-gains tax revenue as a percentage of the state’s general fund plummeted from 12 percent to just 3 percent between 2007 and 2009 as investors pulled away from the stock market, a decline of $9.3 billion, according to state finance department figures.

“It is a significant concern,” said Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s, which ranks California’s credit the worst among its peers at A-. “It’s probably one of the things that presents a structural impediment to the rating and makes it hard for the state’s credit rating to move up into the AA range that the typical state is.”

Now we have an infographic that breaks down the estimated 10+ billion IPO (6x bigger than Google’s 2004 IPO), the 25 BILLION Mark Zuckerberg could make, and more! Check it out!… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Okay, so there’s Facebook, right?  And there’s internet chat, and internet video chat, and web chat (and don’t get me started on ChatRoulette).  And there’s games–computer games, and internet games, and interactive games, MMPORPGs, and I don’t know what all.  All this different stuff.

Well, Rounds for Facebook has kinda smooshed them all together and gives you a Facebook video chat gaming kinda thing to do with your remote pals.  I’m not a big Facebook guy myself–I simply don’t trust their security (or should I say, “security”)–but let’s face it:  I’m in the minority.

Here’s what the makers say about it:

With no other like it out there, Rounds for Facebook combines video chatting with

Okay, so as far as I’m concerned, the line between genetics and eugenics is ‘way too malleable.  Probably I’ve just read too much science fiction.

Or maybe it’s because I’m just a nervous nellie.  Or maybe it’s because I’m Jewish.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of the good stuff that modern genetics can offer, right?  Even I think so.  Which leads us to 23andMe, and they personal genome service.  Interested in analyzing your DNA and getting an idea of your health and ancestry?  That’s what these guys are up to.  And on Cyber Monday, you can get $25 off your genetic assay.  Check it out; full information below.

Special Holiday

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of accounts in a lot of different places.  Google; Yahoo; Facebook; Skype; I don’t know what-all, frankly.  And many months ago I thought, “Yeesh; I sure would like it if all my IM accounts were in one place!”

And then ShapeServices asked me to review IM+, an app that allows you to access all your IM accounts in one place.

I’ll keep this short:  I use IM+ all the time, both the iPhone and iPad app version, and online via their web interface.  I find it an enormous help.  Maggie, my 16 year-old daughter, also uses it regularly, so you can see that it’s… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

With the new Facebook Timeline it is possible to discover who has unfriended you, which might cause some distress in general. Add to that last week’s ‘National Unfriend Day’ on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and you add to the possibility of being unfriended.

But on a holiday weekend there is even more cause for concern: I got a notice that my high school graduating class is having an informal mini-reunion, and my brother is going to his 30th high school reunion, meaning there are more opportunities than ever to come face to face with someone who has unfriended you.

Fortunately William Shatner is here to help. Watch and enjoy!… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Last year, it was, we told you folks about EgoBook, a Facebook app that allows you to create books from your Facebook info (status updates, wall posts, and the like).  I guess they’ve done okay, because now the EgoBook folks are offering a new format, in hardback:  large format 8.25″ x 10.75″ (21cm x 27cm).  This strikes me as a pretty nice upgrade, honestly; if you’re wanting to create an EgoBook for yourself, why not make it hardcover?  Looks better, plus it lasts longer.  Seems like a good deal to me.

Here’s what EgoBook says:

EgoBook now exists in a brand new Large Format (21x27cm), with a rigid cover (hardcover).

The pictures are printed

Last night my son came to me with a message some of his Facebook friends had been circulating. He knew that there was a big Facebook announcement last week, but didn’t know if it involved instituting paid service levels. I told him ‘no’ and thought no more. Until this morning, when a post at the Consumerist told me that this message was much more widespread than a bunch of eighth graders.

The image above is from the IT security blog at Sophos, and you can see it refers to ‘this summer’, as this message already got passed around earlier this year. But this weekend – likely in the wake of other Facebook… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

One of the annoying things about tablets is lack of support for smartphone apps. For iPad users the ’1x/2x’ screen doubling for iPhone apps is the bane of their existence, and for Android tablet users they often find that their favorite apps simply aren’t available on the Android Market. Facebook is one of the worst offenders of this – though they ironically have one of their best versions for the now defunct webOS platform!

Today brings a fresh update for Facebok for Android solves one of those issues by restoring it to the tablet market for Android devices!

AndroidPolice notes the updates:

Users now have access to the same

Facebook is great in many ways. You can communicate with friends, share pictures, and vent your feelings. But be careful what you say if your rant is about your employer! As more cases appear where people are fired for complaining about work on social media, there’s more precedent for what is and is not ok!

Forbes has two scenarios, along with explanations of what has and has not been protected in past legal battles.

Scenario one:

Pop quiz, hotshot. You’re a manager at a BMW dealership. One day, someone drives one of your luxury cars into a pond. One of your employees takes a photo of the busted BMW. At a later date, you throw a

Are you one of the millions of fans of The Sims franchise? Do you like Facebook games? If so … rejoice, because The Sims Social has arrived! The game will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever played a Sims game: you set up your character, then start doing some basic tasks, and slowly built a life for your Sim including interactions with others. The image below shows the basic starting point for a character.

As with the other games in the franchise you have extensive tools to alter your appearance to… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Three requests I encountered this summer:

Scenario 1: Parents make a big purchase, and need to specifically instruct their children not to talk about it on Facebook.

Scenario 2: A baby is born, and the new parents ask that no one posts pictures of the baby before they do.

Scenario 3: A very private couple gets married, and guests are instructed not to tag or add photos on Facebook.

What’s the theme here? If you guessed Facebook, you win! In each of these scenarios, it had to be explicitly stated that being present at someone else’s event, or tangentially related to big news, didn’t give participants the right to share all the details. The frightening… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Image courtesy of PocketBerry

I’m always happy to get a news item about a product with which I’m familiar, like the iFrogz cases, or the Mophie Juice Packs, or ScotteVest gear.  It’s so easy to say, “Hey, check this stuff out!” when you’re personally familiar with it, you know?

In that category is IM+, a central IMing app that lets you consolidate all your various messaging apps into one place.  I use IM+ Pro on my iPhone, my iPad, and via their online site as well, and it makes a huge difference in my messaging (although there are a few glitches in the online version with regard to Facebook, but honestly that’s a minor nit)… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I’m not one of those parents who is totally panicked by the idea of all the kinds of scary things that are made available by new tech like cell phones, social media, and the like.  Yes, there are a lot of scary things kids can access or be sucked into via new technology.  But as a guy who spent his childhood in the late 60s and 70s, it’s not like it was a non-stop, safe party for us, either.   Yup, you can get talked into stuff by strangers over your cell phone, or via Facebook, or Yahoo IM, or some such; no question.  In my day, it was “talking to strangers” and whack jobs prowling the… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Oh the shame – you have to set your relationship status on Facebook to ‘Single’. What will your friends think? How can you possibly cope?!?

Fear no more – a new company called Cloud Girlfriend promises to help you out with a simple four-step process:

Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network. Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.

However, as the AOLNews article notes:

Facebook’s Terms of Service agreement strictly prohibits computer controlled accounts, which would seemingly rule out cyber-based special lady friends.

“Some