- The Remixing Dilemma — summary of research on remixed projects, finding that (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. (3) Remixes are more likely to attract remixers than de novo projects.
- Scratch 2.0 — my favourite first programming language for kids and adults, now in the browser! Downloadable version for offline use coming soon. See the overview for what’s new.
- State Dept Takedown on 3D-Printed Gun (Forbes) — The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
- Data Science of the Facebook World (Stephen Wolfram) — More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes. A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data… (via Phil Earnhardt)
ENTRIES TAGGED "Facebook"
Phishing in Facebook’s Pond
Facebook scraping could lead to machine-generated spam so good that it's indistinguishable from legitimate messages.
A recent blog post inquired about the incidence of Facebook-based spear phishing: the author suddenly started receiving email that appeared to be from friends (though it wasn’t posted from their usual email addresses), making the usual kinds of offers and asking him to click on the usual links. He wondered whether this was a phenomenon and how…
Four short links: 10 May 2013
Remixing Success, Scratch in the Browser, 3D Takedown, and Wolfram Network Analysis
Four short links: 6 May 2013
Artificial Emotions, 3D Printing Culpability, Mr Zuckerberg Buys Washington, and Pirate Economics
- Nautilus — elegantly-designed science web ‘zine. Includes Artificial Emotions on AI, neuro, and psych efforts to recognise and simulate emotions.
- A Short Essay on 3D Printing — This hands-off approach to culpability cannot last long. If you design something to go into someone’s bathroom, it will make it’s way into their childs mouth. If someone buys, downloads and prints a case for their OUYA and they suffer an electric shock as a result, who is to blame? If a person replaces their phone case with a 3D printed one, and it doesn’t survive a drop to the floor, what then? We need to create a new chain of responsiblity for this emerging, and potentially very profitable business. (via Near Future Laboratory)
- Zuckerberg’s FWD.us PAC (Anil Dash) — One of Mark Zuckerberg’s most famous mottos is “Move fast and break things.” When it comes to policy impacting the lives of millions of people around the world, there couldn’t be a worse slogan. Let’s see if we can get FWD.us to be as accountable to the technology industry as it purports to be, since they will undoubtedly claim to have the grassroots support of our community regardless of whether that’s true or not.
- Pirate Economics — four dimensions of pirate institutions. Not BitTorrent pirates, but Berbers and arr-harr-avast-ye-swabbers nautical pirates. Pirate crews not only elected their captains on the basis of universal pirate suffrage, but they also regularly deposed them by democratic elections if they were not satisfied with their performance. Like the Berbers, or the US constitution, pirates didn’t just rely on democratic elections to keep their leaders under check. Though the captain of the ship was in charge of battle and strategy, pirate crews also used a separate democratic election to elect the ship’s quartermaster who was in charge of allocating booty, adjudicating disputes and administering discipline. Thus they had a nascent form of separation of powers.
If followers can sponsor updates on Facebook, social advertising has a new horizon
The frequency of sponsored posts looks set to grow.
This week, I found that one of my Facebook updates received significantly more attention that others I’ve posted. On the one hand, it was a share of an important New York Times story focusing on the first time a baby was cured of HIV. But I discovered something that went beyond the story itself: someone who was not…
Why isn’t social media more like real life?
You know the graph. Use it to provide a more human experience.
I finally got around to looking at my personal network graph on Linkedin Labs the other day. It was a fun exercise and I got at least one interesting insight from it.
Take a look at these two well defined and distinct clusters in my graph. These are my connections with the startup I worked for (blue) and the…
Four short links: 13 December 2012
Top Chinese Memes, Raising Quality, Retro Browsing, and The Clicks of the Dead
- Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012 — most are political, unlike Overly Attached Girlfriend.
- Evaporative Cooling — thoughtful piece about the tendency of event quality to trend down unless checked by invisible walls. (via Hacker News)
- What Was It Like to Browse the Web in the 90s? (Quora) — it was awesome, because the alternative was television. Couple of whiny “you won’t believe how hard we had it” posts, from people who obviously believe that everyone in history has been miserable because they don’t have it as good as we do now. And, thus, by extension, we are miserable because we don’t have it as good as future generations of silver-robot-bearing flying-car-driving humans.
- Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff on Facebook? (ReadWrite Web) — a good question.
Four short links: 12 November 2012
Motivated Learning, Better Hadoopery, Poignant Past Product, and Drone Imagery
- Teaching Programming to a Highly Motivated Beginner (CACM) — I don’t think there is any better way to internalize knowledge than first spending hours upon hours growing emotionally distraught over such struggles and only then being helped by a mentor. Me, too. Not struggle for struggle’s sake, but because you have built a strong mental map of the problem into which the solution can lock.
- Corona (GitHub) — Facebook opensources their improvements to Hadoop’s job tracking, in the name of scalability, latency, cluster utilization, and fairness. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
- One Man’s Trash (Bunnie Huang) — Bunnie finds a Chumby relic in a Shenzhen market stall.
- Dronestagram — posting pictures of drone strike locations to Instagram. (via The New Aesthetic)
Four short links: 7 November 2012
Relativity Toys, Removing Metrics, Parallel Open Source, and Text Karaoke
- A Slower Speed of Light — game where you control the speed of light and discover the wonders of relativity. (via Andy Baio)
- Facebook Demetricator — removes all statistics and numbers from Facebook’s chrome (“37 people like this” becomes “people like this”). (via Beta Knowledge)
- Rx — Microsoft open sources their library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators.
- Typing Karaoke — this is awesome. Practice typing to song lyrics. With 8-bit aesthetic for maximum quirk.
Commerce Weekly: Will NYC taxis get Square?
Square cab fares, Wal-Mart looks to beat Amazon to the same-day punch, and a major player update in the mobile payments war.
Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week.
Square may be courting cabs
Square not only is gearing up to launch in Starbucks stores in November — it may also be looking to enter the New York City taxi cab market….
You still need your own website
Brett Slatkin on the federated social web and why a website still matters.
Brett Slatkin's hope for a federated social web hasn't worked out as expected, so he's shifting perspective from infrastructure to user behavior. Here he explains why you shouldn't abandon your website for third-party platforms.
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