- fbootstrap (GitHub) — HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit for Facebook apps based on Twitter’s popular Bootstrap library.
- Focus on the User — adds a bookmarklet “Don’t Be Evil” which shows your Google search as it would have been before Google+ began artificially inserting itself into Google search results. Written by Facebook engineer and Firefox co-creator Blake Ross, this is a gloriously subtle commentary on the pollution of search results from the privileging of Google+.
- Treasure Hunt for Mysteries of Mind and Brain (Mind Hacks) — one of the coauthors of Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford, has written two small self-published books on the cool things you can do with your brain: exploring your blind spot, and lucid dreaming.
- Pirate Bay Launches Physical Object Category — We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years. We at O’Reilly believe this too. (via Annalee Newitz)
ENTRIES TAGGED "Facebook"
Four short links: 24 January 2012
Facebook Apps, Google+ Remover, Mind Hacks Books, and Pirate Bay Adds Physical Objects
Visualization of the Week: Visualizing your friends' Facebook likes
Tony Hirst's Facebook visualization shows "social interest positioning."
Tony Hirst used Google Refine and Gephi to reveal the likes his Facebook friends have in common.
Four short links: 13 January 2012
Internet in Culture, Flash Security Tool, Haptic E-Books, and Facebook Mining Private Updates
- How The Internet Gets Inside Us (The New Yorker) — at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind. (via Tom Armitage)
- SWFScan — Windows-only Flash decompiler to find hardcoded credentials, keys, and URLs. (via Mauricio Freitas)
- Paranga — haptic interface for flipping through an ebook. (via Ben Bashford)
- Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users Political Sentiments (All Things D) — Facebook will analyse all public and private updates that mention candidates and an exclusive partner will “use” the results. Remember, if you’re not paying for it then you’re the product and not the customer.
Four short links: 2 January 2012
Finland Schools, Open Source Prezi, Debit Cards for Hackers, and Sensor Startups
- What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (The Atlantic) — Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen)
- impress.js (github) — MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I’ve never been happy with the Prezi because I fear data lock-in. This might be a way forward. (via Hacker News)
- Facebook Offers Debit Cards to White Hat Hackers (CNet) — paying vulnerability bounties without handing out cash. I figure it’s the start of a loyalty program. Will Facebook learn what the hackers spent the money on? Interesting possibilities opened up here.
- Green Goose — interesting startup selling consumer sensor hardware. My intuition is that we’re platforming too soon: that we need a few individual great applications of the sensors to take off, then we can worry about rationalising hardware in our house. The biggest problem seems to me that we’re talking about “sticking sensors on milk cartons” rather than solving an actual problem someone has. (“There are no sensors on my milk cartons” is not an oft-heard lament)
What happens when an old law is updated for the digital age?
Attorney Dana Newman discusses a proposed update to the '80s-era Video Privacy Protection Act.
The '80s-era Video Privacy Protection Act had the unintended consequence of inhibiting consensual sharing of video viewing habits. Attorney Dana Newman weighs in on updated legislation.
Can the People's House become a social platform for the people?
The combined potential of social media and legislative data took the stage at the first congressional hackathon.
Leaders of the House of Representatives met with Facebook developers and open government advocates to talk about how technology can improve the legislative process. New prototype apps hint at the future that awaits the "People's House" in the 21st century.
Developer Week in Review: Developers are our most important asset?
A good hacker is hard to find, a cheap data center is hard to get to, and the app store model is hard to ignore
An argument for the value of highly productive programmers, datacenters head for the country to save a few bucks, and the app store model seems to be taking over the industry, and not just for mobile.
Strata Week: 4.74 degrees of Kevin Bacon
Facebook says we're closer than we thought, Gnip targets finance, and eBay grabs Hunch.
Facebook research questions the "six degrees of separation" rule, Gnip gets into the real-time financial data business, and eBay looks to put Hunch's recommendation engine to use.
Four short links: 22 November 2011
Facebook Encircles the Web, Async UIs, SimRedistricting, and Questioning the Flipped School
- Facebook is Gaslighting the Web (Anil Dash) — interesting to see the way in which Facebook is attempting to embrace and extend the web, as opposed to AOL’s doomed attempt to set itself up in competition and opposition to the web. As Molly’s piece eloquently explains, what Facebook is calling “frictionless” sharing is actually placing an extremely high barrier to the sharing of links to sites on the web.
- Asynchronous UIs — interfaces should be completely non-blocking. Interactions should be resolved instantly; there should be no loading messages or spinners. Requests to the server should be decoupled from the interface.
- Public Mapping Project — lets citizens draw up their own redistricting, and in doing so get a sense for the power that redistricting boards wield over the political representation of the state. I’m big on interaction being how you get a deep understanding of alternative and consequences, rather than reading or seeing which at best is a surface process. (via BoingBoing)
- Flip the Flipped School — makes the very good point that lectures aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of teaching, and questions Khan Academy’s usefulness for subjects where interpretation and nuance are all-important.
Four short links: 17 November 2011
University Relevance, Free as in Dom, Patent Trolls, and Facebook Teams
- Questioning University — my take on the issue of whether a university education (particularly CS) is still relevant or whether kids should go straight to startups. So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what’s occupying my mind now.
- Still Cripped by Free (Simon Phipps) — the freedoms of free and open software (the ability to use it for whatever you want, to improve it or give it to others who can then improve it) represent creative and financial independence. Fifteen years after open source and business really started to get dirty with each other, the misunderstanding is still widespread that it’s about price. Simon has a clear and robust essay about the latest UK procurement guidelines to show why price can be subverted in a way that freedom cannot.
- The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls — Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives. (via BoingBoing)
- Facebook’s Teams and Use of Data — great talk by Adam Mosseri of Facebook, where he covers the composition of teams at Facebook, how they use data to make decisions, and when they don’t use data to make decisions. (via Bryce Roberts)
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