HomeSlyce: Collaborate to Make the Perfect Dorm Room

Wouldn't it be great if there was some cool interface to somehow organize what you and your roommate were going to bring to school? Man, it would be great if that existed, really great. Oh wait, it does... kind of. This post is about a new site called Homeslyce.

You Do It Like This

Step one: Talk to your roommate. Two: Log into Homeslyce, build the perfect dorm room. Three: Divy up payment. To give the system a try, I selected one of the template rooms they had available. The most interesting one was the "Gamer" room. $2,660 later, I would have a sweet room specifically engineered for playing video games. The collaborative and shopping element of the site work great, but there are a few drawbacks. That brings us to...

Room (zing!) For Improvement

Homeslyce is great for what it is, but it isn't quite "Web 2.0" yet. Unless you attend [school known for irreverent students that are children of millionaires], you can't even begin to afford a room built with Homeslyce. It's like building the best MacBook Pro possible on Apple.com; let's face it, you're never going to buy it.

The one feature that Homeslyce needs to add is the ability for me to add "ratty old Lay-Z-Boy" to my shopping list. They could easily be a one-stop shop for assembling dorm rooms.

For now, it's useful for those with deep bank accounts. For me, it's useful to dream.

Facebook Developer Garages and What That Means for College Students

Yesterday evening I trekked down to Seattle to check out one of the inaugural Facebook Developer Garages. Think a networking party with beer and laptops and above-average IQs.

There were two presentations, mostly talking about the technical workings behind the new Facebook Platform. The biggest point of the talks was to design to retain users. Sorry to say it, but the X Me application might not stick around forever. Their graphs (from what I could tell) showed that these one-trick pony applications aren't cutting it.

Most of the audience members seemed eager to be there, ready to share their ideas and network. You won't see all of the ideas materialize into cute Facebook applications, and even fewer will you want to use. By serving up a tour, however, Facebook is drumming up plenty of support for platform. You'll see some truly ingenious applications, just not quite yet.

Stay tuned. Although the "killer app" (I hate that phrase) has not arrived--yet--expect an article soon about the best apps out there right now.

New Theme and Upgraded Wordpress

You may be reading the site right now and wondering where the non-sequitur black-and-blue went. Rosario and I felt that the theme didn't quite convey the purpose of the site. Hopefully we're closer to the mark with this one.

So let us a know what you think, either in comments or by emailing us.

Quick Read: Student Loan Update

Quickie from the Consumerist:

• The Senate's New Student Loan Plan to Give Aid to Students Not Corporations

Highlights from the YouTube/CNN Democratic Debate

As many of you know, 8 candidates running for the Democratic nominee position in the 2008 election took questions from CNN and also YouTube just about a week ago. By mixing in YouTube-submitted questions and a little humor, it was thought that more young people would be watching. Were you?

If not (bad, bad, bad...), here are some highlights:

And here is a complete transcript. Check out Jon Stewart's response, too.

Facebook Updates: Picture and Videos on Yo' Wall

In another Microsoft-reminiscent swoop to incorporate third-party application features into Facebook itself, the Facebook Blog just announced the extension of wall posts into the realms of pictures and video. Cool.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough money for a fancy MacBook or Sony Vaio, so I can't do some field reporting with PhotoBooth (or the Sony equivalent).

This is all great and is an expected improvement. The thing that's most concerning, however, is that Facebook seems to be squashing smaller, original third-party apps. The Super Wall Application, a third-party application with an identical feature-set that boasted 2,849,543 total users today, will inevitably suffer. Sure, these wall additions are nothing major. But the limited potential of Facebook applications allows the big (and maybe bad?) Facebook to copy any idea willy-nilly. And Facebook is the landlord. So when fancy-pants analysts say that Facebook is the next Microsoft, they could be right, but not in the way they originally thought.

We'll keep an eye out for you, Facebook. Until then, I'm going to litter my friends walls with pictures of kittens.

Forward Web Content to Your Phone With Mobilizer Firefox Extension

Summer lends itself to long hours of boredom followed by brief periods of responsibilities and more stuff than you know what to do yourself with (like dangling prepositions, zing). How many times have you been trying to get out the door while reading that vacuous digg.com front-page-r? It doesn't work so hot.

So, we introduce the Mobilizer Firefox Extension (or Add-on?). Select whatever you want to beam to your phone and then right-click to select "Mobilize This!". Shazaam, not Kazaam.

Now you can contribute to a statistic [DARK HUMOR WARNING] or two while keeping updated on all those blogs.

Get it and don't forget it: Mobilizer Firefox Extension

Tying Your Shoes Faster

Today, I heard a commercial that said we'll spend about a week of our lives on average tying our shoes. As a preacher of the HackCollege dogma, I refuse to be so inefficient. Unfortunately, this will be redundant -- I'm basically ripping off one of the websites that Rosario mentioned below. But since I'm apparently a plagiarist already (long story) and this is way too cool to miss, I'll link it here as well. One look at the GIF animation and you'll get sucked right in:

Ian's Fast Shoelace Knot

It took me about a minute to get it down, but I'm really smart, so don't feel bad if it takes you several years. It's worth it in the end. Eventually, you will turn heads with your quickness.