- Mobile Overtaking Web — provocatively packaged extrapolations of ComScore and similar numbers to conclude that Americans spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with web sites. I’m sure you could beat an iPhone developer to death with the error bars.
- Best Privacy Policy Ever — satiric privacy policy from a Firefox plugin.
- The Time for Libraries is Now — forceful presentation on the need for librarians (aka “information professionals”) in an age of excess information.
- Google 2011 vs Microsoft 1995 (Nelson Minar) — interesting analysis which prompted Andy Baio‘s comment Google will be in trouble if their strategy succeeds, or if it doesn’t.
"social graph" entries
Four short links: 25 January 2012
Mobile v Web, Great Privacy Policy, Libraries Now, and Google's Social Strategy
Four short links: 24 January 2012
Facebook Apps, Google+ Remover, Mind Hacks Books, and Pirate Bay Adds Physical Objects
- 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)
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.
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.
Strata Week: The social graph that isn’t
Pinboard founder questions the social graph, Cloudera and Kaggle raise money for big data.
In this week's data news, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski challenges the notion of a "social graph," Cloudera and Kaggle raise money for big data, and the Supreme Court looks at GPS and privacy issues.
Strata Week: The social graph that isn't
Pinboard founder questions the social graph, Cloudera and Kaggle raise money for big data.
In this week's data news, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski challenges the notion of a "social graph," Cloudera and Kaggle raise money for big data, and the Supreme Court looks at GPS and privacy issues.
Four short links: 9 November 2011
Social Graph Dismissed, Anonymous Explained, Resistance Explored, and Android Improved
- The Social Graph is Neither — Maciej Ceglowski nails it. Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
- Anonymous 101 (Wired) — Quinn Norton explains where Anonymous came from, what it is, and why it is.
- Antibiotic Resistance (The Atlantic) — Laxminarayan likens antibiotics resistance to global warming: every country needs to solve its own problems and cooperate—but if it doesn’t, we all suffer. This is why we can’t have nice things. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Deep Idle for Android — developer saw his handset wasn’t going into a deep-enough battery-saving idle mode, saw it wasn’t implemented in the kernel, implemented it, and reduced battery consumption by 55%. Very cool to see open source working as it’s supposed to. (via Leonard Lin)
Four short links: 13 July 2011
Freebase in Node, Form Styling, Implicit Friendships, and Dyslexic Font
- Freebase in Node.js (github) — handy library for interacting with Freebase from node code. (via Rob McKinnon)
- Formalize — CSS library to provide a standard style for form elements. (via Emma Jane Hogbin)
- Suggesting More Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (PDF) — Google paper on the algorithm behind Friend Suggest. Related: Katango. (via Big Data)
- Dyslexia — a typeface for dyslexics. (via Richard Soderberg)
Strata Week: Data Without Borders
Work on data projects that matter, data journalism, and a social graph of the Marvel universe.
This week's big data news includes a call for Data Without Borders, data journalism catches the Knight Foundation's attention, IBM's new big data appliance, and a social graph built around the Marvel universe.
Four short links: 26 January 2011
Identifying Communities, Web Principles, Wiring Library, and Instapaper Interview
- Find Communities — algorithm for uncovering communities in networks of millions of nodes, for producing identifiable subgroups as in LinkedIn InMaps. (via Matt Biddulph’s Delicious links)
- Seven Ways to Think Like The Web (Jon Udell) — seven principles that will head off a lot of mistakes. They should be seared into the minds of anyone working in the web. 2. Pass by reference rather than by value. [pass URLs, not copies of data] […] Why? Nobody else cares about your data as much as you do. If other people and other systems source your data from a canonical URL that you advertise and control, then they will always get data that’s as timely and accurate as you care to make it.
- Wire It — an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages, graphical modeling, or graph editors. (via Pete Warden)
- Interview with Marco Arment (Rands in Repose) — Most people assume that online readers primarily view a small number of big-name sites. Nearly everyone who guesses at Instapaper’s top-saved-domain list and its proportions is wrong. The most-saved site is usually The New York Times, The Guardian, or another major traditional newspaper. But it’s only about 2% of all saved articles. The top 10 saved domains are only about 11% of saved articles. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper Feed)