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Gdgt, a new site co-founded by Peter Rojas (founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget) and Ryan Block (former editor in chief of Engadget) is opening up today.

It is–surprise–yet another gadget site, but it’s quite good, and more useful to real people than the gadget porn sites these two editors came from. It’s a community-driven site, wiki-like in features and general atmosphere, so it’s the site’s users that will make it succeed or fail.

Meanwhile, the new version of Retrevo (previous coverage), another tech product site, launched on Monday of this week. It’s a more sober site, useful but not as exciting as Gdgt. It’s more of a buyer’s and owner’s resource.

Gdgt: By geeks and of geeks

“It’s the gadget site we always wanted,” Rojas and Block say about their new site. Conceptually, it’s quite simple, and potentially powerful. Users on the site pick the products they have, want, or once had, and write up quick reviews of them if they like. It’s social, it’s fast, and if the product you want to write about isn’t in the database, it’s pretty easy to add it.

If you’re looking for solid advice on a product–how to fix it, if you should buy it–the community could provide value. You’ll be able to see what users are saying about products and dive into discussions about particular features. If you like researching what the people who are really passionate about their gear say, this will be helpful.

But the people who get the most out of Gdgt will be product geeks and fanboys who like chatting about toys. The service has a very high social component. You can follow people, friend them, get alerts when your friends write reviews or respond to yours, and so on. There are also free-floating discussions about product companies, and “feature” stories (blog posts) by the editors that will serve as jumping-off points for community chatter.

It sounds like an straightforward concept, but Gdgt wins points for execution. It’s fun to use. It’s fast (at least the unloaded beta I tried was) and most of the pieces are where you expect them to be. Those that aren’t (like the site’s preference for using product model numbers instead of more popular brand names) will likely be fixed based on user feedback.

I admit I do have issues with sites that encourage people to define themselves by what they own, and Gdgt definitely does that. There’s a tacit game of one-upsmanship in the “I have” list. But if you do have the gadget bug and see no issue with feeding it, I think Gdgt will end up being a great place to hang out.

Gdgt is as much about products as it is about their fans and owners.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Retrevo: Get in, get info, get out

In contrast, the new, recently launched version of Retrevo is designed to “make the shopping journey simple and enjoyable,” an anodyne pitch if ever there was, but attractive, no doubt, to people freaked out by the idea of buying a digicam or a flatscreen.

Retrevo has an AI core that gathers up product review and pricing data from numerous sources (including CNET), to present overall recommendations on products. What’s new is its Farecast-like feature of telling you if the product you’re looking at is at its peak of popularity, or heading toward or away from it, plus indicators telling whether users like it, and if it’s a good value or not at the moment. If you trust the Retrevo machine, it provides good info to reduce buying anxiety.

A new automated “product catalog” also gathers up information on entire categories of products and puts into a catalog-like format that’s supposed to be comfortable to users. I found the information on the catalog pages poorly organized, however.

The site will now also telegraph the essentials it knows about products to you via Twitter if you send it a query, which is potentially useful if you’re in a store and curious about a product you’re looking at on a shelf, and if you don’t care if all your Twitter followers see when you query the Retrevobot. Another handy feature (which I don’t think is new) is an electronic “shelf” for keeping product manuals. Retrevo has a nice library to stock it from.

This should make it easier for you to part with your money.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

If you’re a gearhead, try Gdgt for fun and community, but don’t skip Retrevo when you’re looking to make a purchase.

And to keep me employed, be sure to check out CNET reviews as well. Thank you.

Disclosure: In past jobs at Red Herring and Ziff-Davis, I have worked with people now at both Gdgt and Retrevo.

Read the rest here:
New sites for gadget nuts: Gdgt and Retrevo

Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook.

The social network’s privacy controls had gotten so sprawling that they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings, according to a conference call the company held on Wednesday.

“These can add up and pile up and not be as clean as one would like,” Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said on the call. From what it sounds like, they’d gotten so complicated that many members just ignored them altogether–something that Facebook certainly doesn’t want as it encourages its 200-million-plus members to post and share even more content.

As a result, Facebook’s new controls will be more streamlined so as to offer easier and simpler controls about how much everything from entire profiles to individual pieces of content are shared. Users will be introduced to this through “transition tools” that allow them to toggle how open everything on their profile will be–totally public, friends-only, restricted to company or school networks, etc.

One of the biggest changes along with the new controls is that Facebook is getting rid of “regional networks,” the opt-in way that members could designate themselves as residents of certain geographic areas. Only half of members even joined these networks, according to Facebook. It’s a change that’s been anticipated for some time, and privacy controls regarding regional networks have already been phased out.

“Networks were kind of the bedrock of privacy,” product manager Leah Perlman said on the call. “When we expanded past college and work (networks), we created the concept of regional networks in order to have our privacy model expand.” Members could share content selectively with members of their regional network, but representatives said that it was never quite clear as to exactly who else was in that regional network, and the delineation of networks was messy–some were defined by city, other by broader region or state, and others encompassed entire countries.

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly is also considering a run for attorney general of California.

(Credit: Kelly2010.com)

There were, for example, separate networks for each of New York City’s five boroughs, but most residents just chose to join the broader “New York, NY” one instead. Facebook says that this shouldn’t affect locally targeted advertisements: the company will be porting regional network data to its “Current City” field, and has already been using other data like IP address information to hone local ad targeting.

Facebook is keeping school- and company-based networks intact.

This comes in the wake of an announcement that Facebook would be tweaking its “publisher,” the toolbar that lets members update their status messages or post content like individual photos and videos. The “publisher” will now have a privacy toggle for individual pieces of content, letting a user choose whether to make them available to friends only, custom friend groups, or–for the first time–to the Web at large. Making content available publicly will bring Facebook better in line with the thirst for real-time, searchable mass information that Twitter has captured so effectively thus far.

So how will this be handled? Facebook members will be guided through one of the aforementioned “transition tools,” which representatives said will take one of two forms: either an ultra-specific set of granular, custom controls or a more no-brainer set of radio buttons. The new controls will first be tested with 40,000 users in the U.S. before rolling out to a bigger, international group of beta testers and then worldwide.

Last updated at 12:20 p.m. PDT.

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Facebook cleans up its privacy controls

Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.

A developer building an application using Twitter’s API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter’s own, as well as his use of the word “tweet” in the application’s name.

The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: “Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own.”

Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word “tweet,” that could mean a problem for TweetDeck, TweetMeme, PoliTweets, and some of the other extremely popular businesses built atop Twitter.

A few things to keep in mind here. One, the developer was also creating a service that looked a lot like Twitter, the TechCrunch post explains, which means that the use of the word “tweet” may really have been less important than the e-mail made it out to be. Second, it’s a personal e-mail coming from a Twitter employee–not a company representative or executive–which means that it may not be perfectly aligned with the company’s official stance on things.

(Case in point: A Twitter investor hinted to The New York Times that the company would be making money with virtual coupons. One of Twitter’s co-founders said in a comment on a blog that the investor was “brainstorming on his own.”)

But the tech industry does have a history of getting into one skirmish after another over names similar to their trademarks. Several years ago, Apple started sending cease-and-desist letters to some third-party equipment companies and fan blogs that were using the word “pod” in their names. Google, too, has taken issue with the word “googling” being used as a generic verb.

And as TechCrunch points out, Twitter has filed for a trademark on the word “tweet.” On the other hand, being possessive of this term (which, it goes without saying, has been a dictionary word for centuries) might not be the smartest strategy, if Twitter indeed wants to be a Digital Age communication standard “like electricity,” as one executive said last month. So we’ll see how this one unfolds.

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Is Twitter freaking out over ‘tweet’ trademark?

A funny thing to happened to Firefox on the way to vanquishing Internet Explorer: the Mozilla browser’s success opened the door for a host of its other competitors.

Even as Internet Explorer’s market share has slipped–down a dramatic 8 percentage points to 65.5 percent in about the last year–Firefox programmers face a surprising question: should they be more worried about the programmers in Redmond, Wash., or about those working on Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and Opera?

Firefox has gained about 3 percentage points to 22.5 percent in market share, according to Net Applications’ statistics since July 2008, and Firefox backer Mozilla doubtless hopes for more gains with the release of Firefox 3.5 planned for Tuesday. But Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome each gained 2 percentage points, to 8.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, indicating a growing appetite for alternatives to Internet Explorer that’s not completely met by Firefox. Opera stayed flat at about 0.7 percent.

In short, Firefox isn’t the only scrappy underdog in town, and Firefox fans’ easy us-versus-them polarization is transforming into a more complicated multilateral equation.

Having other IE challengers helps legitimize Firefox, because the idea of straying from the IE fold appears more legitimate, but the alternatives also collect some of the new users venturing farther afield. For its part, though, Mozilla likes to see the glass as half full.

“One of our biggest challenges is helping people to understand that they have a choice about their Web browser, and how big a difference
that choice can make,” Firefox director Mike Beltzner said. “Every release is an opportunity for us to bring improvements directly to our growing user base, but also help many users indirectly by putting pressure on Microsoft to improve their product as well.”

Version 3.5 has been, relatively speaking, long in the making. It began its life as what was intended to be a quick and modest upgrade to Firefox 3.0, but the version number expanded along with Mozilla’s ambitions for the software.

And it is indeed an important release, both because of competitors and because of new Firefox 3.5 features.

What’s in it for users?
Firefox 3.5 has a host of improvements, some the sort of thing people can notice immediately and some plumbing improvements that could help the Web in the long run. With a release in 70 languages, a lot of people will be able to try

Under the covers but providing a direct benefit it TraceMonkey, the new engine that runs Web page programs written in the common JavaScript language. That will mean Web applications such as Google Docs get faster today and, if JavaScript speed improvements continue, more sophisticated tomorrow.

Weave is a project to synchronize many browser settings across multiple versions of Firefox, on PCs and mobile devices.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Another feature people might appreciate directly is private browsing mode, which erases evidence on your computer of where you’ve taken your browser. It’s flippantly called porn mode, but it also can be useful to keep your boss from knowing what you’ve been up to while on company time or searching for Valentine’s Day gifts. Along with private browsing goes the ability to excise particular sites or recent activity after the fact, too–though it should be noted that none of these options erase your fingerprints from the servers you visited.

Mozilla also is excited about HTML video, which makes it possible not only to embed video in Web pages without using plug-ins such as Adobe Systems’ Flash Player, but also to have that video interact with other elements on the Web page. That’s not likely to revolutionize the Web in the short term, especially because of prickly issues regarding file format support, but it could help in the long run.

Design fans will be excited about embeddable fonts that can spruce up Web pages, though typeface designers might be leery of yet another avenue for unlicensed copying of their work.

Deeper down, Firefox 3.5 also adds HTML 5 storage abilities to help make Web applications work when offline, “Web Workers” to let Web applications work on tasks in the background without the user interface bogging down, and improvements to standards such as CSS and SVG for better graphics. And a geolocation function can let Web sites know where you are, handy for maps and other local services.

Collectively, it’s an important foundation, though just getting them into version 3.5 is only the first step. Firefox users tend to update relatively swiftly, but they’re still a minority on the Web, and Web programmers tend to wait for some critical mass before they can afford to support the latest browser features.

Fending off rivals
Competitors aren’t standing still. Chrome was missing many important features such as bookmark management when it launched in September, but Google has rapidly been fleshing out the product, including the addition of rough Mac OS X and Linux versions in May. Also notably, Google has continued to drive its V8 JavaScript engine ever faster, and Chrome’s extensions mechanism is rapidly maturing.

Meanwhile, Apple released Safari 4 in June for both Windows and Mac OS X. Safari uses much of the same WebKit engine for rendering Web pages that Chrome, but it uses a different JavaScript engine, called Nitro by Apple and Squirrelfish Extreme at WebKit. Apple is loudly banging the “fastest browser” drum for Safari, and though the claim is grand, it does spotlight that performance is a major issue in today’s browser competition.

Don’t view Firefox developers as complacent, though. Performance improvements are a top priority in the successor to Firefox 3.5, called Namoroka, including fast launch speed, a present Chrome advantage. The new version is scheduled for release in early to mid-2010.

A host of other improvements also are under development. Among them:

• Weave is a project to synchronize bookmarks, passwords, preferences, and other settings across multiple browsers, including the mobile version of Firefox, code-named Fennec. Weave also can sync personas, another new feature that lets people customize Firefox’s appearance.

• A project called Electrolysis is designed to improve isolation between different tabs and between plug-ins and tabs, improving security and reliability.

• Jetpack is designed to be a new framework for add-ons that can be developed using Web page design standards. That’s the same approach Google chose for Chrome extensions.

• People use more and more tabs, and tab management is tougher, so work is under way to address the issue–perhaps with an automatically expanding or contracting tab list on the left edge of the browser instead of on a strip along the top.

• Snowl is a system that tries to unify messaging operations, whether messages originate from e-mail, Web forums, RSS feeds, social networks, or other sources.

• Ubiquity is designed to let Firefox interpret a wide range of formal or informal text commands, turning the browser into a more general window on the world.

Also, Firefox has some incumbent advantages of its own–enough market share that Web developers need to test their sites for Firefox compatibility and a range of add-ons to customize the browser, for example. Those are strong enough to keep people from rapidly switching away even if they’re trying other browsers, too.

So yes, Firefox has abundant new competitors. But it hasn’t been pushed aside.

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With 3.5 launch, Firefox faces new challengers