status

Sit up straight. Be on time. Watch your blood pressure; wise admonishments all, yet hard to enforce--until now.

A new type of undershirt wired with an integrated system can now monitor an individual's heart and respiration rate, activity, GPS location, and even posture, then transmit the data to a supervisor or other concerned adult.

Where are they? How are they? These are questions the TrainTrak physiologic "garment-based" monitoring ensemble promises to answer, according to developer, QinetiQ. By updating real-time location and physiologic status the "e-garment" can help maintain "personnel accountability, increase situational awareness, detect … Read more

In Jeff's absence, Wilson takes the reigns as chief engineer for the show...and runs it in to the ground. Just kidding! Today we invite host of The Green Show and longtime 404 friend, Mark Licea, to join us in a few stories about a handy iPhone app, traveling water bottles, Facebook jealousy, Internet addiction, and a hilarious Calls From the Public!

Hot on the heels of Motherboard and Laserjet comes Earth's newest superdefender, G-FORCE! A big thanks goes out to our buddy Hayato Shimizu for Photoshopping Wilson into this robotic Megaman-looking superhero that fights crime with two cameras and still has time to highlight his hair. We've actually received a lot of really talented Photoshopped images of The 404 hosts recently, so click through the slideshow below for all the images.

Jeff's away on vacation and Wilson surprises us all by stepping up to the board, so bear with us through this episode. With some help from our good buddy The Intern Formerly Known as Mark, we navigate our way through a bunch of newsworthy stories from the Internet, including an iPhone app that tells you the best time to cut out of a movie to use the bathroom, the recent popularity of Internet addiction rehab camps, and how Facebook is trying to ruin your love life. All that, plus a new character on today's Calls From the Public!

… Read more

When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.

First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select … Read more

It seems like just about everyone has a Twitter or Facebook account these days and I find myself checking the so called "status updates" for my friends and family more than I'd like to admit. I never thought when these services launched that a status update could become anything more than a simple yawn-worthy report of personal activity. But as we've seen with these services' growing popularity, and the recent explosion of activity during the aftermath of Iran's election, the idea of a status update has morphed into something much bigger. A simple sentence or … Read more

You don't go on Facebook to find friends. You go there to impress people.

So while many will be punching their keyboards at 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturday in the desperate quest to obtain a Facebook URL of the highest ego value, a new film has emerged on YouTube to remind us of the real Facebook vanity test: the status-off.

On Facebook, if you can make your status updates winningly fascinating, you will surely impress all those who need to be impressed.

Directed by Jonathan Emmerling and produced by Untucked Films, this deep and thoughtful piece is blessed … Read more

"All your networks are belong to us." That could be the tagline for Zensify, a new iPhone app that lets you view, update, and share content from multiple social networks.

In other words, Zensify aims to take the place of standalone apps for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr--or at least to save you the time of bopping from one to another just to read and post updates.

In addition to those three popular networks, Zensify can connect you with 12seconds, Delicious, Digg, Photobucket, and YouTube. (Support for more services is in the works, according to the … Read more

On Friday, Yahoo let it be known they added a small tweak to Yahoo Messenger 9 for Windows.

When the latest version of Yahoo's chat application launched, it broadcast as secondary status messages certain activities within the Yahoo network, like refreshing your avatar. Now the service has expanded to record your doings on roughly twenty networks outside of Yahoo--like Twitter, Last.fm, YouTube, Pandora, and Yelp--as well as tracking your whereabouts more thoroughly within Yahoo's network, like the sports, movies, and shopping silos.

Sharing is optional, of course, but to get it, you'll need to make sure … Read more

Myspace on Wednesday is revising its status update tool, something the company estimates is used in excess of 15 million times a day by its members.

New to the feature is a way to sort people's updates by type. For instance, if you want to see only your friends who have listed their mood as "aggravated," you can do so. Likewise you'll soon be able to search for specific friends and see their latest status updates without having to visit their profile pages. This comes with other granular filters that let you see just the friends … Read more

When is a Twitter user not a Twitter user? Well, according to a new study from Pew Internet, "Twitter user" is a broad definition.

The research firm released a study this week in which the results indicated that in December, "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." Wow! Twitter sure is catching on!

But then you read the fine print: The catch here is that "update your status" is also a … Read more