Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify Is So Good”.
Posts Tagged: Facebook
16
Aug 09
RockMelt: Netscape’s Andreessen Backing Stealth Facebook Browser
Crazy concept.
What if there was a Facebook browser?
RockMelt: Netscape’s Andreessen Backing Stealth Facebook Browser .
11
Aug 09
You’re Gonna Love Socialism!
If you’ve been watching either the Daily Show or Colbert Report recently, you’ve seen the displays caused by Americans who have been whipped into a frenzy by proposed healthcare reform. It’s impressive to see the power and cunning behind the resistance to change in this area.
Astro-turf (fake grass-roots) campaigns like this always freak me out, probably because they look like, but are so obviously not, democracy in action.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was actually relatively simple. The people who are genuinely upset because of the disinformation campaign. The psychological warfare has led them to believe that we’ll all be eating babies before the mid-term elections.
While that’s obivously totally accurate (“Johnny – it’s the cops!”), this bad news is all being set against the backdrop of the worst econimic downturn of the post-war American century. Plus, don’t forget we still have a few more payments to make on that Cold War.
Couple all this with the general slow decline of the average American’s standard of living that’s been taking place since the 1970s. Add in a dash of xenophobia and, “Voila: ‘Obama killed my momma!’” Serves 4 – 6 generously.
So, my point is that these people that are getting all upset are probably the one’s who would actually benefit most from socialist policies. It’s like watching a child who’s being dragged off to summer camp, filled with fear of the unknown, only to discover he loves canoeing. No, I’m not drawing from personal experiences!
Okay, maybe the summer camp comparison is a bit of a stretch. But, there’s something there. Besides, this is all so far from a socialist ideal anyway. Eisenhower was more of a socialist than Obama will ever get to be.
8
Apr 09
HOWTO: Auto push your Facebook status updates to Twitter via Twitterfeed
It’s been a while since I had to figure this one out and Facebook has gone through a few revs since I last tried it.
It’s a bit of a hack. I’ve not been able to identify any official support or documentation from Zuckerberg et al. Maybe it’s deprecated; maybe it’s a REST API experiment gone awry. Who knows?
The first thing you need to do is get your status updates page which is found on “minifeed.php”
The URI format is simple.
http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?id=
Where the value for the id parameter is your profile ID. Get this from the URI for your profile page.
Next, get that content in RSS format by appending another name/value pair to the querystring. This one is called “filter” and the filter for RSS is 11. Like Spinal Tap.
So, add it all up and you should have a URI like this:
http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?id=625839607&filter=11
At least, that’s what mine looked like.
If you haven’t done so already, sign up for an account at twitterfeed. This is a service that somebody was bound to create sooner or later. You can take any RSS feed and rebroadcast it as Twitter posts. I use it with last.fm, my blogger posts (via feedburner), hulu, and am looking into other REST APIs I can consume into it.
I think you can take it from here.
17
Mar 09
HOWTO: Send Twitter updates to your Facebook wall
In this modern day of mashable web services, we sometimes get caught up in what the latest app or web service is enabling us do. All for the simple price of our e-mail address.
Sometimes we just want to do something simple, like have our Twitter updates go to our Facebook wall – rather than using the Twitter Facebook app to pull our Facebook status updates from our Twitter posts.
In such a case, one could easily overengineer the problem. Fortunately, enough functionality is exposed by the two websites to allow us to do this with just the slightest effort.
The first thing you are going to need is the RSS feed for your Twitter updates. You can find it at the bottom of the right toolbar on your public Twitter page. It will look something like this:
You want to get the target for the URL. For most people, that will mean right-clicking on the link and selecting, “Copy Link Location,” or something like that. For instance, the URL for the RSS feed for the updates to the QuantumTom user account is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14244238.rss. If you click on that link your reader is going to try to subscribe to that feed. Hang on to this URL for a second (copy it to your clipboard maybe?).
Go sign in to Facebook then navigate to your Profile tab. Click on the “Settings” link as is shown in the bottom right corner of the following screenshot:
This should open up the “Stories Posted By You” settings starting with the “Imported Stories” section.
In there you should see a bunch of links that automatically import activity from other sites. One of these is for generic “Blog/RSS” activity. Click on that one to open up a text field. Paste the Twitter RSS URL in that field, click the “Import” button and you should be good to go.
13
Mar 09
Oprah to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tomorrow
You heard it here first.
Wall Street Journal is reporting that the famed talk show host is going to have the founder on her eponymous show tomorrow. They probably aren’t going to talk about the brain drain, or the devaluation of the facevalue (c’mon, I’m dying here) of the company.
This looks to me like a sign that Zuckerberg is taking it a bit easier and may be relaxing for once – enjoying things while he’s still on top.
11
Feb 09
RSS, Web 2.0 and the Future Part II
This is a continuation of a post from 2009-02-10.
While the post-IPO price of Google shares was still inflating the company engaged in a dot com buying spree perhaps only previously rivaled by giants like Yahoo! and IAC. They shopped for small groups serving this niche and consolidating Google’s control in this proto-industry before any of the statups could IPO (I’d speculate that futurist thinkers at Google may have also detected competition might one day develop from some of these companies). Bookending the series of acquisitions were Blogger.com and FeedBurner.com.
At first I didn’t understand why they would want to get into the business of blogging, if you could even call it that. At the time, we were all still looking at traditional commerce sites which looked like the golden goose. Back in 2003 we were still nursing our wounds from the bursting of the bubble. We were impressed by the survivors – eBay, PayPal, Amazon.com and busters like toys.com and pets.com were not yet forgotten.
That, and The Google.
What Googlers got, and we didn’t, was the significance of the nature of their revenue stream.
And perhaps some insight into the inherent narcissism in human nature.
Blogging puts you on stage. Even if no one is watching, it is a thrill. It’s like going streaking with a blindfold. You go out there letting it all hang out and you have no idea if anyone is, or will be, looking.
Remember, hardly anyone was using Facebook or Myspace at the time. The big social network was Friendster, and the big blog service was Livejournal. Privacy wasn’t so much a concern, because you wanted people to look. Exhibitionism is an extension of narcissism. “I am so pleasing to look at that I know you’ll want a peek.”
The folks at Google have done a great job of integrating the Blogger service, pairing it up with their Single Sign-On technology so that once you are logged in to your Gmail account you are logged into it and all of their other services. This is important because they are building a fabric of collaborative services that when combined are far more powerful than the sum of their individual capabilities (see Voltron for more information).
Unfortunately, Google seems to have dropped the ball on integrating one its more recent acquisitions. Google bought Feedburner back in 2007 and it is still having trouble getting the service to run smoothly. It is also slow to integrate its single sign-on technology into the service. The company has suffered much criticism as a consequence of this. Nevertheless, they have done a remarkable job of positioning themselves to control every stage of the means of production.
This buying spree may be the herald to a revolution in communications that will dwarf the arrival of television programming. And Google wants to make sure it owns, and consequently controls, as much of the distribution pipeline as possible.
As I mentioned, e-mail is increasingly growing to be a tired marketing medium. Increasingly, consumers will opt to view content at will, and consuming feed syndication is the means by which they will do this. More often than not, savvy consumers will opt out of e-mail distribution subscriptions for even their most adored products and brands.
Additionally, the Facebook experiment has proven that not do many of us enjoy putting our lives on display, we also have a voyeuristic penchant for peeking behind the curtains of the private lives of our friends and associates. More robust and granular privacy controls are allowing us to limit unwanted to exposure, while effectively controlling the permissions of those to whom we are “exposing” ourselves.
The news feed reader is the both the sieve and the spigot through which the media consumer will come to guide the flow of data they view. The contemporary web surfer will have a list of sites they check on a regular basis for new content. Professional blogging and conventional journalism sites will publish new content on a daily or realtime basis. The latter schedule is the ideal fit for the news feed consumer.
No longer will media consumers subscribe to e-mail updates or periodic electronic newsletters. Using electronic messaging for this purpose has always gone against the grain of the original intent of e-mail: bidirectional – not unidirectional broadcast – asynchronous, instant, interpersonal composition. The mailbox will once again regain its status as the sanctuary for personal interaction. Occasionally, personalized automated messages will show up for things like password reminders and banking notices. But, the mass marketing e-mail will make way for the news feed.
E-commerce sites should begin preparing for the transition. Now is the time to start subscribing readers to feeds, hiring talented and engaging writers to combine original written content with marketing promotions. Imagine corporate blog sponsorship on a whole new level.
Gizmo Feed, embedded product links to bestbuy.com in every post.
Writers Feed, with links to amazon.
Survivorman Feed, linking to REI.
And so on.
And all this before mobile web and location awareness gain mainstream adoption.
9
Feb 09
25 Random Things About Shakespeare
I just found this on Boing Boing.
I rarely actually laugh out loud from things I find on the world wide internet, and they are usually Flash files, audio files, or some combination thereof.
What we have here is written humor of the highest quality.
If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of your friends have had status updates from a new app called something like, “25 Random Things About Me.”
Mike McPhaden satirized the posts – with spin.
Wm. Shakespeare’s Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me
The meme is older than anyone guessed! Here it is, something I just dug up at the library: the First Folio edition of…
Wm. Shakespeare’s Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me
1 Sometimes I Feele so trapp’d by iambic pentameter… Does that make me a Freake?
2 I haue been Knowne to cry at Bear-baiting.
3 I am not uery ticklish. I am Not. So prithee, do not euen try. Waste. Of. Time.
4 I cannot keep Lice, and know not why.
5 Sometimes I thinke plays are all Talke, Talke Talke, and wish for a cart-chase scene. I tried one in The Merry Wives, but it looked like Shitte, so I cut it. The men playing the horses were so Pissed at me.
6 I once threw vp on a man’s head, from a high Windowe. I was so fvcking Sicke that Daye.
7 I hate to wear a Ruff, for I haue such a pleasing Necke.
8 As a player, I am painful-slow to learn my part. Once whilst playing Edward I, I used the prompter so ouermuch that a groundling yell’d ~Stop interrupting, Will! And it was my Dadde. (Kydding!)
9 Sometimes when I am Stvck for a rhyme, I new-mint a Worde because I jvst want to get the Damned script ovt the fvcking doore.
10 I play the Flute yet poorly, but I can make any crumhorn beg for Mercy.
11 When I am happy I call Anne my Kicky-wicky. When I am cross I call her “Olde Fun Killer Hag-Ass.”
12 I keepe my Stashe hidden in our seconde best bedde. Shhh. Don’t tell the Fyve-Oh.
13 The people that loue my Wordes the best are always the most disappointed vpon meeting me. Is thisse List ouer yet?
14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.
15 I deteste it when the Low-Comedians improuise the scenes I writ them… becavse they always make them so mvch fvnnier.
16 I haue, on occasion, thovght abovt hiring a Boy to fixe my Latin.
17 When I was sixe, my Goode-Friend Charles brovght to Schoole a wood-cut of his mother, qvite naked. After that we called him Charles Nudie-Mummy, whiche did make him Crye.
18 I take my eggs ouer-medium. If I get them O’er-Easily, I tell my Porter, ~You may thinke this is what I ordered, but it’s snot. I thinke that one is a real Slap-A-Th’Knee.
19 I work ovt my calues thrice weekly, usvally three pyramid sets of Calf-Rises whilst holding a flagon of Meade. I knowe I should stretch afterwards, but it Bores me so I do it not.
20 As a boy in my Bed, I would shriek i’the night that Witches wovld come to eat me. My Mother (bless her) wovld smooth my Hair and whispr ~ Be not afear’d, the Witches onlie eat the Jews.
21 Whitsuntide has become so commercial.
22 Nobody euer forgets where they were the moment they heard that Thomas Kyd died. I was shopping for codpieces in West Cheape. I came ovt of the Change-room and the proprietress was i’tears. I said ~What is it, now?~Kyd is dead. There was a melancholy qviet, and then she said ~And that Piece is a mite too small on ye.
23 Euery time we do the Taming of the Shrew, some pvnter wants his Money backe, because we don’t actually show a shrew getting tamed.
24 I do not vnderstand all the Fvss over Currants. Sure, they are both sweet and Small, but must they bee added to EUERY FVCKING MEAL these days? Yestermonth, found I currants in a Tarte of Spinnedge. I meane come on, People. Seriovsly.
25 When I am feeling Melancholic, I console myselfe with the Knowledge that, aboue all else, I will be remembered for my Musick.
Kyle Hayes