Slacktivism has been exposed as a joke.
Half way through last week a nation erupted; the Republic of Ireland football team crashed out of the World Cup at the hand of Gaul, that of a certain Thierry Henry. A Facebook group was established. It took on something of a life of it’s own – over 300k users inside the first 24 hours.
“Something has to be done”.
FIFA made no mention of the incident in their official match report. It was edited several times, each time the Magnum PIs on Twitter reporting to the world the latest breach of instant populist moral values and punch-drunk notions of democracy. Avatars may not have been coloured green, but the online social network air was turning a particularly dark shade of blue and the feedback loop of increasingly agitated noise fed into itself, reaching a deafening cresendo online while steadily losing touch with reality.
Continue reading ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’
So I attended my first two tech events over the past few days. One good one bad – here’s why:
First the good one. I didn’t really know what to expect from Barcamp Derry and from the spiel delivered online was hoping that was the correct way to approach it. Half hour sessions organised in 3 concurrent ’streams’ meant the first 5 minutes of each was largely spent loitering in the doorway of each until one grabbed enough attention take a pew.
Continue reading ‘The Cathedral and the Barcamp’
Ok so I’m clicking around Facebook a lot these days looking into the viral aspect of the apps, what does and doesn’t work, etc, etc. I can’t help but pick up on the various hacks people have come up with on built in features, such as tagging any pics you like with your name to browse instantly from your profile. Or posting up those Mr Men or whatever collages to match up the friend with the trait.
All cool little diversions. And none requiring you’re friends to install any 3rd party contraption for the network dimension to be of use. And I’ve come up with my own – seeing how many of the rich and famous I can add to my network. Continue reading ‘Friend of the Stars’
I’ve seen some how-to guides for getting started writing facebook apps on the web but none really cover everything from start to finish. Even Facebook’s own documentation is somewhat disappointing. So to help others find their way around Facebook markup and the life cycle of a Facebook application here is a simple tutorial.It is a very basic app which aims to display a web image of the user’s choice a) in miniature on their profile, and b) in full on the application’s own canvas page. What is a canvas page? Simply the main page of your application that the user sees each time they click on your app.
Prereqs:
What you’ll need – an account on Facebook and a web hosting provider who will run php scripts and allows you to set up a database. I use mysql in this guide, but you can safely leave out the db steps if all you want to learn is the facebook-specific work flow stuff.
Continue reading ‘Step by Step Guide to Creating a First Facebook App’
Just finished release 1 of a nice and simple Facebook app that allows you to show off your Playstation Portable ID to your network. It shows among other things your last played online game and your trophy list including a breakdown across platinum, gold, silver & bronze.
Here is mine as an example
This gucci Portable ID that displays trophy count is only available from Playstation’s EU community site and so this is why Gamer Tag instructs the user to register there. The process is quite labourious but to help there is a great step-by-step guide at iTrophies.
As my first Facebook app I was surprised at the incomplete nature of documentation available, especially on the official dev site itself. Although concepts became less hazy by the time I fleshed out the full application life cycle it took a while for the building blocks to fall into place. The multi-dimensional nature of developing for the Facebook platform – i.e. working across 3 domains each with their own specific script or markup language – made for a trial and error development experience.
There are a lot of different paths into a facebook app and thus the challenge comes in creating a bullet-proof application that will withstand the many methods users will find to get to my little app. Storyboarding the various steps in signing up users helps immensely and can be safely broking down into a number of discrete steps.
This is definitely something that merits further discussion so look out for a tutorial somewhere in the not-too-distant future.
You can try it out for yourself here.
Facebook opened up it’s user activity streams to the public API today. “This is a big deal.” says TechCrunch, referencing an earlier article on the wider implications for micromessaging, likening it to AOL offering email to the masses.
But is it?
The chief upshot of this will be a mass of desktop and mobile activity updaters. I don’t yet have a Twitter desktop app, due to the fact I don’t want to read tweets in realtime. I like to browse a snapshot of the days events in my own time and not as a distraction. Ok so occasionally tweets and work do synergise to produce a new idea or extra insight to an old one, but the fact is the motley collection of fellow users I follow will always mean a high signal to noise ratio in terms of whatever it is I’m working on *right now*. Hence no realtime feed, no constant blast of interestingness.
Neither do I have an activity stream app on my mobile. And I won’t while the internets are still charged by the megabit.
So no, I really don’t think this is that big a deal. If anything I think it’ll create a backlash, certainly in the mainstream, that up to now appeared warmly receptive to the usefulness of a service such as Twitter in terms of a primary news source. Yes for 90% of people that meant following Stephen Fry, but it was adoption nonetheless.
Instead people will now be bombarded with a hail of disparate apps all doing pretty much the same thing with a slightly different flavour. I think the time has come to split, not aggregate, all these feeds. I had given some thought to submit such an idea for content creators to a recent competition for funding. But I’ll let the crazies crack on for now
Update: Things change fast. Especially when FB invite the devs round. My earlier twittering regarding OpenId or FB Connect now appears deprecated
Facebook security policy places your trust of third party apps in the hands of your friends …by default! First of all, to rectify your own account, go to FB’s privacy page and unselect everything your uncomfortable with – I unchecked all bar my profile pic – only came across this after a chance reading of zdnet.
Before you change these settings the apps your friends install have instant access to your employment history, political views, etc, etc all out of the box. I’ve nothing against my fb-connected friends but some of the apps they blindly opt into had me googling up how to dig into FB’s arcane maze of options in a mild panic.
Don’t get me wrong, they do win at letting you customise to your hearts content, what with blacklists, whitelists and any combination thereof, but to leave something like this as the standard setting is pretty crazy imo.
TechCrunch recently covered the phenomenol rise of FB photos over existing well established image stores such as Flickr. First mover advantage was always a big draw in the first dot com rush, yet the debate around FMA and what is termed ‘fast second‘ is a mature one in other industries. Size versus speed. I wonder is the web conforming to a more balanced ratio in this regard? A look around gives mixed signals -
- Twitter One of the hottest web properties today. A resounding success thanks to FMA. Just don’t mention the business plan.
- Friendster Big in the Asia-Pacific region (I’m not sure if that’s the web equivalent of stating a musician is “big in Germany”) but has fallen behind FB & MySpace in Western online society. Imo FB’s rep for being a college student’s thing got it viralling and the API sealed it’s dominance in the long term.
- iPhone App Store Certainly got developers excited, but then wouldn’t the devs who like to be known as creatives already have iPhones in the first place? The proliferation of announced app stores for the various mobile platforms since merely means the commoditisation of the idea and another wall around each silo. First mover advantage will mean little in this regard.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon went at it full pelt – access to root, command line, the whole server OS. A brave move. Second out of the blocks was Google’s App Engine, offering a much more restricted/simplified Python-based service depending on how you look at things. Crucially though it allows devs to play for free – that together with the “it’s Google” factor give it a much greater monthly pageview traffic than EC2’s homepage. But it’s cpu cycles that measure the success here and EC2 already bears the hallmarks of an enterprise-ready app in a production environment with a standard SLA in place. Too early to call then, but investors have been asking for more visibility on Amazon Web Services in general, so definitely a future battleground.
Has first mover advantage disappeared then from the web? Although many breakthrough applications have been superceded by bigger and better alternatives with a far greater leverage, none are by any means rendered dead in the water because of it. And neither are the fast seconds always some massive corporation throwing money at the latest buzzwords; Zooomr established itself by providing a slightly more interactive interface for what is in effect an online storage bucket. So I guess the answer is “it depends”.
‘Portals’ as they were have died: iGoogle & Facebook have placed faith in the tab. More than merely a user-experience metaphor, the tab allows apps to take back the browser from the platform, and in doing so affords the user a higher performance, leaving behind all those clunky multi-layered flash/js/iframe flashing lights, a la MySpace.
Except that Facebook’s performance seems to have gotten worse since it’s renovations. The umpteen ajax updaters located at various points around the page seem to wind the browser response down to a gradual, slow, painful death. Adding that to Gmail and Ebay in the list of pre-Alpha sites intent on destroying my browser window.
And I’m also adding a 2nd Adobe ‘platform’ to the blacklist of general technological cancers killing off the interwebs. Yes that’s right Acrobat Reader, global standard for electronic document stalling.
And Google now have the temerity to add a link to Gmail claiming to speed up the browser!
Browsers are getting faster and better at running web applications like Google Mail that use browser technology to its limits. In order to get the best experience possible and make Google Mail run an average of twice as fast, we suggest that you upgrade your browser to one of the fastest Google Mail supported browsers that work on Windows.
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