Over the summer we’ve seen a bunch of presumed blockbusters falter after their opening weekends. Brüno was no success (if you’ve seen Borat, you’ve seen Brüno), Duplicity with Julia Roberts cost $60 million to make, but made only $40 million in the US. Land of the Lost, Will Ferrell’s $100 million adventure-comedy, made $49 million in the US. Funny People and Public Enemies also disappointed at the box office.

Former chairman of Sony Pictures, Peter Gruber told New York Post:

“You look around the theatre and can see the glow, not on people’s faces from watching the movie, but on their chins – from the BlackBerrys and iPhones. They are immediately telling their friends whether it’s worth their time. And the answer to that, more often than not, seems to be no.”

The movie business is obviously afraid of a merely 140 characters and perhaps with a good reason. Before the end credits are done rolling I can tell my tweeps if I recommend the movie or not.

So what does this mean for the movie industry? Make better movies. Now it doesn’t take a week or two before the word about a bad movie spreads, it takes a few hours on Twitter.

Have you avoided a movie because someone on Twitter said it was bad? Do you think Twitter is killing Hollywood?

Update: Dan at minute44.com has some really good points.

Source: Daily Telegraph

One of my favourite applications, Evernote, released another update today. Besides fixing some minor issues, it features great news for especially Mac-users. The Safari plugin, lets you clip entire web pages to Evernote or a PDF. Evernote now also supports Growl notifications (known from Adium and Gmail Notifier).

FireFox Mac-users will enjoy the updated clipper. The clipping is sent directly to the Evernote client. No more signing in or pop-ups. If you prefer the “old” method you can still use the bookmarklet.

I have Evernote installed on all my supported devices, my PC, MacBook Pro and iPhone. I love how easy I can sync my notes, record an audio note and take advantage of the many Evernote-enabled apps. I used to be a huge fan of Google Notebook, but unfortunately Google doesn’t support that anymore.

What’s your experience with Evernote? Do you use another application to write and sync notes and clippings?

Do you miss Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special? Or perhaps The Smurf’s Christmas Special? Or Alf’s? How about the Cabbage Patch Kids commercials?

Fear not. You can see all the christmas specials from 1988 in the comfort of your own basement or you can get close to.

A BeTaMaXMaS does exactly that. You have three channels to choose from and if the reception isn’t good, you simply adjust the antennas.

Remember to check out the TV Guide too. Just like real television, there are commercials and programs all day. So if you want to see Married With Children Christmas Collection, tune in at 2:19 PM (I think it’s your local time even).

Have yourself a very betamaxmas and watch some classic christmas specials.

I was “lucky” enough to get a beta invite to Google Friend Connect and like any good blogger I never turn Google down. Nobody wants to get in bad standing with Google.

So now I’ve installed it so please join this site, which is now in the same league as The Inquistr, Louis Gray, Mashable, WinExtra and TechCrunch (They use Facebook Connect).

The installation went very smoothly. I uploaded two files to my server and add a link to a text widget BAM! it was up and running.

I’ll be completely honest though. I’m not sure what I can do with it yet, but I guess something viral and important will happen very soon. I’ll take a look at the few gadgets available at the moment and decide which one adds value.

What do you think about it? Will you join my site? Perhaps even add it to your own blog?

YouTube has silently just “updated” the embedded videos with a very ugly search bar. It’s there until you click play and will reappear for a few seconds every your cursor is near the top of the video.

If you pause a video it will also reappear.

I know I know, this will help YouTube (Google) get even more user data and probably help them target ads even more.

To me it looks more like a piece of malware has infected my PC/Mac and added this terrible search bar to my videos.

YouTube please remove it or I’ll find another service to host my videos. (Yes, that quite a threat I know). Viddler, Vimeo, Blip and a few more are very interested in my many videos and they will give me a free T-shirt if I let them host my videos.

What do you think? Do you like the search bar or is it annoying?

Update: You can remove the search bar by adding this “&showsearch=0? to the URL. Google Code has released this information concerning the search bar.

Google has teamed up with LIFE Magazine to showcase millions of LIFE’s acrhived photos. There are photos from every decade from 1860 to 1970.

It’s a very impressive archive with many classic and some unpublished photos. They photos are also categorised, so if you are looking for pictures of the 1930s oil boom, Abraham Lincoln or thanksgiving, they are there.

Which photo is your favourite?

Nimbuzz has just released this:

NIMBUZZ TO PROVIDE SOCIAL NETWORKS WITH REAL TIME WEB AND MOBILE COMMUNICATION
Announces first commercial partnership with StudiVZ

11th November 2008, Rotterdam – Nimbuzz (www.nimbuzz.com), the most comprehensive mobile VoIP, presence and IM provider today announces its first key revenue sharing partnership with a social network, formalising its push to provide online communities with real time web and mobile communication. StudiVZ, the biggest German speaking social networking site, becomes the first in a series of international networking sites to integrate the Nimbuzz technology into its community, bringing real-time web and mobile communication capabilities to members for the first time.

By integrating the Nimbuzz VoIP, presence and IM features, social networks can extend their offering beyond their current online networking experience. StudiVZ is the first partnership of this nature to be announced by Nimbuzz with similar deals in Turkey, Asia and Italy imminent.

The Nimbuzz powered web and mobile clients launch in unison today for StudiVZ members. The web chat is fully integrated into the existing StudiVZ interface allowing IM conversations between all community members. The full mobile Nimbuzz portfolio including voice calls, chat, file sharing across popular IM communities will also be available and a link to a bespoke download page will be promoted across the StudiVZ network.

Nimbuzz founder and CEO Evert Jaap Lugt: “Strategic distribution deals are our key targets for growth and we are pleased to announce this important social network partnership just six months after our launch. The ability of social networks to provide a complete day to day experience is restricted by the nature of the product being tied to the PC. But people are mobile so by partnering we can blend our technology with their existing communities with the resulting product benefiting and adding value to businesses and consumers alike. This deal is just the beginning for us and we will be making further social network and operator announcements in the very near future.”

StudiVZ is one of the largest European social networks and the biggest German speaking network with over 12 million members spanning across Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Adding this powerful and popular community to the existing Nimbuzz repertoire enforces the company’s goal of becoming the largest global communications platform for seamless IP-based communication among mobile devices and social media platforms.

Clemens Riedl, CEO of StudiVZ commented: “Nimbuzz’s impressive solution not only offers us an additional ad-revenue stream but enables us to seamlessly extend our product to offer real time communication on our platform and on the mobile phone.”

The partnership with StudiVZ sees Nimbuzz entering a revenue sharing agreement with income generated from adverts sold as part of the social networks own advertising opportunities.

~Ends~

About Nimbuzz
Nimbuzz offers a social interaction service combining presence, IM, and VoIP. The free application is available for mobile, PC and Web, enabling calling, instant messaging, file/location sharing across popular IM communities and 23 social networks including Facebook and MySpace.
Nimbuzz has positioned itself to become the largest global communications platform for seamless IP-based communication among mobile devices and social media platforms.

About StudiVZ
studiVZ Ltd. was founded in October 2005. Since January 2007 studiVZ Ltd. belongs to publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck. studiVZ Ltd., with its platforms studiVZ.net, schuelerVZ.net and meinVZ.net, is the most successful and influential social Network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Together, these platforms make up over 12 million users. Growth continues to be exponential.
It is the goal of studiVZ Ltd. to make it the most successful and furthest reaching network in all of Europe. StdiVz has its headquarters in Berlin has around 200 employees.

It’s about time soomething like this happened.

Nimbuzz supports all the major cell phone brands including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Windows Mobile and Blackberry, but not iPhone.

Nimbuzz: We need iPhone support for this too please