Facebook deserves props for smart response to outage

The Facebook faithful are usually very quick to blast the company when the boat gets rocked - changes to the design, changes to the privacy settings, even just some tweaks of the news feed.

So I thought for sure that the world would implode yesterday when Facebook experienced an afternoon outage that lasted for a couple of hours, not only affecting visitors to the main site but also those “Like” buttons that are connected to Facebook from third-party sites across the Web.

But that didn’t happen - at all.

On the contrary, the users have been pretty good about the whole thing. Sure, there were a fair number of tweets that hinted that an outage had something to do with the pending release of The Social Network movie - but that theory never really resonated across Twitter. In fact, when the site came back up, there didn’t seem to be any chatter - at least among my network of friends - about the outage.

I give credit for the no-outrage response to Facebook itself for being transparent and forthcoming on its Twitter feed about the problems, just as it had been the day before when a problem with a third-party networking provider caused some site problems.

Sony to unveil first integrated Google TV device October 12

Tis the season for all the cool stuff to start hitting shelves — one of the big ticket items this year is Google TV. Sony has been working with Google to get their Google TV technology baked directly into new flat panel televisions, and they are about to be unveiled.

Sony will be holding a press conference on October 12 in New York to reveal the new televisions — just in time for the holidays. Surely it won’t be long until Logitech’s Google TV device will be for sale as well.

I own an Apple TV right now, and is great, but I am excited to try out a Google TV device. Certainly “the real internet” on your TV will be nothing but awesome. What do you think?

Acer packs Core i7 CPU in 11.6-inch TimelineX laptop for just $899.99

In addition to rolling out new Aspire multimedia notebooks (see my previous post), Acer has just announced an expansion of its svelte TimelineX laptop line, with the smallest one including the new Intel Core i7-680UM ultra-low voltage processor.

The TimelineX 1830T-68U118 weighs a little over 3 pounds, packs an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display, and is priced at just $899.99. Of course, the ULV version of the Core i7 can’t keep up with a conventional laptop i7, but it does include Turbo Boost and four cores, bringing potentially new performance gains in a ultralight notebook. You can also score an 1830T with a Core i3 or i5 ULV for a couple hundred dollars less. All include 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, and HDMI output.

The other new models in the TimelineX lineup are the 13.3-inch 3820T, 14-inch 4820T, and the 15.6-inch 5820T, all using non-ULV versions of mobile Core CPUs. The 3820T provides a choice of Core i3 or i5 chips and 3GB or 4GB of RAM. The heftier 4820T and 5820T come with DVD drives, and the 5820T even includes a numeric pad. These lines start at $699.99.

You can also get two 14-inch TimelineXs with discrete graphics. In fact, the 4820TG models not only include AMD’s Mobility Radeon HD 5650 card, but also deploy switchable graphics technology depending on the application used. They each sport a Core i5-460M processor and are available from $799.99.

But the 11.6-inch TimelineX with the ULV Core i7 is clearly the most intriguing offering. For those who want a netbook’s small footprint, but can afford to pay more to actually be capable of doing some real computing, it might be a perfect mix. It will be interesting to see just how well it performs in independent testing.