Wot no geo?
I’ve been saying to people that I’m not too excited about the announcements from F8 last week. I suppose this is because I was expecting the announcement that many were – that Facebook would launch a geolocation service. I still expect they will (even if it’s by way of acquisition). With 400 times the user base of Foursquare, just imagine how much faster they could build their ‘places’ database than the numerous firms all racing to do so; and what a valuable chunk of data that would be too.
Well, we didn’t get that announcement, but it’s taken a few days to dawn on me that geolocation is only one part of a much bigger picture – and that announcement we did get. It’s the Open Graph.
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Dear ordinary Facebook user. If you’re not a developer, or ‘social media guru’ you probably didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech last week; you probably haven’t read about the open graph protocol, and you probably haven’t tried out any of the new social plugins that Facebook have released. Because of this you may not be aware of some seemingly small changes that affect you more than you might think.
Here’s one: the ‘like’ button. This has become more than just a casual way to show your friends you think something is cool. It’s become more powerful for advertisers, more useful for Facebook, and for you … ? Read more…
I couldn’t find this information today when I needed, so I thought I’d share. If it’s in the Google maps documentation, then I missed it.
If you want to zoom a map to fit a particular distance as tightly as possible, you need to know the scale of each of the 19 levels. In metres per pixel, I worked them out to be as follows: Read more…
I joked yesterday about writing one omnibus tweet per week. But actually, that’s not a bad idea at my current blogging rate. So here goes, my week in the Twittersphere -
Always the punctual adopter, I joined Facebook around the end of 2007. Since then I’ve observed many tweaks to Facebook’s features, but not until recently when I set up a second account for work, did I really take notice of certain changes, especially those that relate to privacy and sharing of data.
If you don’t already know that I’m a huge cynic, then you will do shortly. I’m going to lay out my observations as factually as I can, but they will be tainted with my usual dose of suspicion, fear and resentment. Below is a list of feature creep that I’ve observed, but there is an underlying point. If you don’t want to read the list, just skip to the bit at the end.
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I’ve noticed a lot of Facebook privacy creep recently. I intend to go into more detail in my next post, but this week saw a new Facebook feature worth a special mention because some are commenting that it breaks Facebook’s privacy model. I ran my own test to see for myself that [-Spoiler warning-] it does a bit, but not as much as you might have feared. Read on and decide for yourself whether they are breaking their privacy assurances.
Well I did buy it in 1992, or rather I bought the album; but in 2009 I did not buy it as part of the ratm4xmas campaign to keep Joe McElderry (read: Simon Cowell) from the UK Christmas No.1 spot. Here’s why …
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I woke up this morning to the apparent viral spread of the TweetCloud app that unoriginally, but very nicely displays your most tweeted words of the year, or month, or .. you get the idea. Here’s mine ->
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After nearly two years I’ve finally gotten around to releasing my PHP JavaScript parser, although documentation is still thin on the ground.
The library has been split in two:
- jTokenizer – A JavaScript tokenizer designed to mimic the PHP tokenizer.
- jParser - The fully blown JavaScript syntactical parser which generates a parse tree.
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- or – “Confessions of a Google Wave N00b”
After scrounging myself a B-list Google Wave preview, I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so. Rather than read more and think deeply about it, I thought I’d blurt out my half-formed opinions now. In fact, this is one of those posts I’ll probably regret in a year’s time. It might look as naive as some of my early thoughts on Twitter when I didn’t quite get it, but that’s blogging for you… so here goes.