By Gilbert Falso :: 9:12 PM
As Oprah begins her exclusive interview with fallen cycling star Lance Armstrong tonight, many are taking to Twitter and Facebook complaining that their cable provider does not carry the OWN network – the Oprah Winfrey Network where the interview is taking place.
It appears that the folks at OWN realized this and have made a web streaming video option available online at this URL:Â http://ownspecial.oprah.com/lancearmstrong.html
The first part of the interview will air tonight. It is widely assumed that Armstrong — who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles — will admit to using performance-enhancing drugs while cycling professionally.
The 90-minute interview will begin at 9 p.m. EST. A second portion of the interview will air on Friday, also at 9 p.m. EST. The second interview will be simulcast to the web as well, at the same URL.
Related books on Lance Armstrong and the doping scandal:
By Paul Thomson :: 5:53 PM
Instagram recently sent a reminder e-mail to users, about the changes to its terms of service that will take effect on January 19.
You may recall the social media outcry that occurred in December when the social photo sharing service announced changes to its terms that led many to believe they would lose all rights to their photos to advertisers and others on the platform. After a day or two and updates to the original terms changes by the Instagram team, much of the frenzy died down, and many have forgotten about the impending changes, until now.
Instagram’s e-mail reads as follows:
Our community has grown by many millions of people since we wrote our original Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. As we announced in December, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These policies also now take into account the feedback we received from the Instagram Community. We’re emailing you to remind you that, as we announced last month, these updated policies will be in effect as of January 19th, 2013.
You can read our blog post that highlights some of the key updates. And remember, these updates don’t change the fact that you own your photos that you post on Instagram, and our privacy controls work just as they did before.
Although Instagram worked quickly to address user concerns, the damage may have already been done. Reports came out earlier this month stating that Instagram’s daily active user base fell from about 40 million users to 17 million users. They do appear to have seen a recent uptick, but nothing that can correct the steady overall decline in user base since after the holidays. See chart below.
Some details of the terms of service and user agreements that take place on the 19th will allow Instagram to more easily share data with its parent company, Facebook, by porting all of Instagram’s data to Facebook servers. Unfortunately for Instagram, Facebook doesn’t have a stellar track record when it comes to user privacy and trust.
Instagram Daily Active User Drop:
By Katherine McClosky :: 1:03 AM
If you landed on the Google home page today, you were greeted with this image at the right – an ice rink, complete with Zamboni game. All in honor of the 112th birthday of Frank Zamboni, the legendary ice resurfacing machine’s inventor.
In 1949, Zamboni transformed and simplified the ice arena management task of cleaning and resurfacing the ice – which used to take an hour and a half, and often required three to five people to do properly – by coming up with a device that could be driven across the ice and resurfaced it as it traveled along.
He applied for a patent on his device that same year and set up shop in Paramount, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles where he built and sold his machines. In the early days, Zamboni resurfacers were built on the top of a modified Jeep chassis.
Google’s doodle drawing is an interactive game where you are the Zamboni driver – you control it across the ice using your keyboard’s arrow keys, and clean up the ice after the skaters. As you successfully resurface the ice rink, a new level appears, more difficult than the last. Watch out for banana peels, and don’t speed too fast!
Below – Frank Zamboni.
By Paul Thomson :: 10:17 PM
Google has announced two developer events for its Google Glass product. Google is calling the program its “Glass Foundry,” and will host the events in New York City and San Francisco.
The company sent an e-mail to developers who had pre-ordered the product at the I/O conference last summer. It read, “join us for an early look at Glass and two full days of hacking on the upcoming Google Mirror API in San Francisco or New York. It’s the first opportunity for a group of developers to get together and develop for Glass.â€
The first day of the two-day developer event will offer an introduction to Google’s Glass product, and the second day will set aside time for developers to explore the Google Mirror API, which allows for data transfer to the Glass platform and for user interaction  over REST.
During both days, Google will make its engineers and developers available to participants for help as they step through the learning process.
The event culminates in a show-and-tell portion at the close of the second day, with Google judges looking at work that developers have created.
Google Glasses have the ability to record videos, receive weather updates, and display social network messages from your friends and contacts. The glasses received much hype when they were announced last year.
Google’s San Francisco Foundry will be held on January 28th and 29th, and the New York City Foundry is planned for February 1st and 2nd. Developers who signed up for the program should have received an e-mail with registration instructions.
By Gilbert Falso :: 1:17 PM
Facebook today has announced a new pillar to its social networking experience. Joining the news feed and the timeline on the social network will be the new Graph Search feature.
Announced at a news conference this afternoon, Graph Search will build on the data that Facebook has already collected on millions of people, such as their friend connections, locations they have visited, things they like, comments, and indexing it all so that it can be searched and retrieved.
“We are not indexing the Web,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We are indexing our map of the graph, which is big and constantly changing with almost a million new people every day. 240 billion photos. 1 billion people. 1 trillion connections.”
With the new Graph Search feature, users will be able to look for data amongst their connections. Friends in a certain city, restaurants in a specific area, television shows recommended by your connections, etc. “My friends who live in Palo Alto who like Game of Thrones,” Zuckerberg explained as an example.
Search results will be ranked according to your Facebook friendships and connections. The people you care the most about will appear at the top of your search results, while the rest of the results will be sorted by mutual friends and other points of interest that you may have that Facebook believes are relevant to you.
Facebook developers have designed the search feature to work with very natural, casual language. During the Graph Search demonstration, one search query was typed in as “People named Chris who are friends of Lars and went to Stanford.” This type of search will now allow you to help find people you met might know through a mutual friend or at an event you attended with a Facebook friend.
The new Graph Search has implications for using Facebook for dating now, too, for example. A query showing “Friends of my friends who are single males from San Francisco and who are from India” would return a circle of possible acquaintances for a date, suggested the developer.
The Graph Search feature is currently in beta. Access will be given to Facebook users who sign up at this site:Â http://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch
This story is developing, and we will update it as news continues to be released.