New Send Button on Facebook Plugin

Like buttons has been so popular for almost a year now. This has enable the web to be more interesting, more relevant and more social. By hitting this simple button, your friends on Facebook can see what you liked. This has also provided numerous websites to increase their visitors and provided a new metric.
Just yesterday, a new feature has been added by Facebook on its variety of social plug-ins.  They call it the Send Button. While Like button allows user to share things to all of their friends, Send Button allows user to share things to certain people.

Send Button can be used to privately send a link as a message to a friend or a group. This is very practical and convenient if you really want to get the attention of a certain person. As this will be more visible on the inbox rather on the news feed. Moreover, this plug in lets user drive more traffic by sending link and short messages to friends and Group without having to fill-up annoying forms. With the help of its auto-suggesting feature (native to Facebook) to get the friends list, the effort is less.

To add this feature to your existing Like buttons you include send="true", as shown bellow(a snippet from Facebook Developers' Blog post):

<div id="fb-root"></div><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like href="example.com" show_faces="true" width="450" send="true"></fb:like>

You can also put Send button alone, using the code below:

<div id="fb-root"></div><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:send href="example.com"></fb:send>

Over a couple of days, Facebook will be providing real-time metrics with regards to this new feature on the Insight Dashboard. This will include impressions, messages and referral click to your site. Facebook is hoping that this new feature will be a success like the Like Button.

Facebook Fellowship Program Awardees

Two days ago Facebook has awarded the winners for their "Facebook Fellowship Program." It's a scholarship program that supports student on their Ph. D. research. Facebook has always been generous when it comes to academic relations. They believe that such relationship will help solve problems that the social web has. For the lucky winners, each would receive the following:

 .Tuition and fees will be paid for the academic year.
· $30K stipend (paid over 9 months of the academic year).
· $5K per year toward conference attendance and travel.
· $2.5K toward a personal computer.
· Opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship.
· Recipients are responsible for the taxation on any funds.

And the lucky winners are:

Marek Olszewski, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston
Area of Focus: Compiler Technology

Adrienne Porter Felt, University of California, Berkeley
Area of Focus: Computer Security

Wei Liu, Columbia University, New York
Area of Focus: Machine Learning

Kurt Thomas, University of California, Berkeley
Area of Focus: Computer Security

Yinan Li, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Area of Focus: Databases

Congratulations! And good luck to your thesis.

New Twitter Homepage!

Twitter has just recently updated their homepage that non-logged in users see when they visit. So I have to log out just to see this. I was impressed for the overhaul. Things are much better, to see a more relevant content and appealing layout. From its previous look of light blue color palette changed its homepage to a more sleek metallic look .

There were also changes on the contents displayed on the homepage. Instead of the top tweets, the most popular users where featured on the lower part of the page. Also the search box which was formerly on  top is placed on the lower-left part for emphasis. The sign-up form was placed on the right look, more like Facebook's signup form. The sign-in form is place on the upper-right corner.

The site also change their lead message. From the old:

Discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world

to the new:

Follow your interests: Instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.

With these subtle changes and hopefully a big impact on billions of users both current and potential, Twitter is hoping to be able to draw their philosophy and refine the message they wanted to tell the world.
Changes are very inevitable in this world and these is just one of them.We just have to hope for the best and expect the unexpected. Happy tweeting!

Short Tweet History

just setting up my twttr

http://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20

This is where it all began. The first tweet in human history.  The name "twitter(originally called twttr)" was inspired by the famous photo-sharing site Flickr. With its founders: Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, they change the way people communicate, from celebrities, politicians, business and marketing people. It's the best thing that happened in the Internet. The project was meant for employees of Odeo to brainstorm. Dorsey introduced the idea of people communicating via SMS to small groups. Twitter was released on July 15, 2006 for public consumption. The service was simple yet it actually became popular, 140 characters at a time.

Flog (Facebook Blog) your Blog

Blogging is fun! It lets you tell your story to the world. But sometimes others wont actually go directly to your blog just to read your story. And if your blog is still starting, people wont really mind checking it. I have experienced that for quite sometime. I usually tell my friends to go to this link and check out my articles. Few people appreciated this kind of social activity. So I decided to think of a way to make it more convenient for my friends to view my blog posts.

After googling for several minutes, I discovered that Facebook actually caters importing external blogs to user's notes. I was amazed to see that you can actually get to link your blog so easily. I would like to call this Flog as in Facebook Blog.

First you need to go to your notes page. On the left most corner you will find a subscribe section at the bottom.

Click on "Edit import settings" and you will be redirected to a page as shown below:

Put your blog's URL and start importing like magic. After linking your blog, Facebook will automatically add your new posts into your notes. It's as easy as that, one time set up and you're good to go. Every time you add new articles, it gets published to your wall and to the news feeds, thus your friends can actually realize you just did something awesome Being able to penetrate Facebook can attract more readers. Soon you'll realize you'll have a good traffic for your blog.

But wait! One caution to you people who are so excited with this feature. After setting up mine then undoing things and setting it up again my Facebook account became "temporarily unavailable." The system thought I was spamming. I had to wait for few minutes before my account recovered. I was so scared. I thought I would loose everything. So to you people out there be careful next time you explore Facebook because you'll never know where's the booby trap. Nevertheless, don't stop blogging and tell the world your story (even if few cares).

Quitter - Sweet tweets via DOS

Tweet like you never tweeted before!

Tonight I  found this cool application that enables you to tweet using your command line (Windows version) called Quitter. The name might sound weak but never judge the book my its cover(or even its title).

Quitter is a Twitter client that doesn't announce itself to the entire cube farm; it runs in a command window (or "DOS window"). There's no installer and no entries in the Start Menu; it will run from a thumbdrive. It's a single small EXE file (about 105k) and it stores its settings in a small XML file.

With this you can do your regular twitter activity such as  posting tweets, reply, retweet, direct message, open links to a web browser and a whole lot more. With this "Quiet Little Twitter Client", you can tweet like a geek. I personally enjoyed this application, with its old school ambiance, as if your tweeting way back in 1990's.Imagine twitter in black and white.

Quitter runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and requires Version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework or higher (version 2.0 was released in 2006; most Windows machines should have version 2.0 or higher).

The timeline shown Twitter can be also be viewed in the command line.It is displayed into two columns. The author's name and time published is on the left column while the tweet is on the right column. You can also filter (or highlight) tweets from users and certain #hashtags you specified on the configuration menu. Follow and unfollow other users like you do on a normal twitter environment and other cool stuff you might want to discover yourself. Download it at http://quitter.codeplex.com/!

For those people asking what's the practical application of this thing. Why would someone use console if the web can offer a more compelling graphics and user experience? I'm not certain about the essence of using Quitter; but in my opinion when you have scarce resources, specially if you're in  a place with limited bandwidth. It would be much better to use this kind of application so you don't need to download unnecessary things like mark-up, style sheets, images, and other designs you might not want. Of course it would still look nicer to see a neat layout; but if your primary concern are information via public timeline I recommend Quitter. Small but terrible!

Photo Tagging + Facial Recognition

Filipinos has always been know to its hospitality and love for celebrations. Today I've celebrated my graduation which was held yesterday.The warmth from relatives and friends is very overwhelming. Not to mention the abundant food to ease the tummy (specially the worms inside) of every guest.

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Special occasions could not be completed without taking pictures. I can still recall when I was a little boy my mom used to take pictures. During that time the only available medium of storage was film. After developing those pictures, people usually keep the negative for future use of reproduction.

With the advent of technology, digital cameras where born. Taking pictures were as easy as pushing a button and a flash(well not always).

When the Internet was born, it was made even cooler. Social networks offered photo publishing. People can upload and share their precious moments to the world.

Photo tagging in Facebook has been there for quite sometime. It allows user to tag people inside that picture. With this feature it became useful to everyone. It made photos over the network more organize and more related.

I was surprised that this feature went to the next level. Facebook has been clever of actually detecting faces on the picture and grouping them to help you quickly label them. I was so astonished of how it was able to accurately detect my face(yes I think my face is a challenge for facial recognition). All I can say to the people inside Facebook is a good well done. I can't imagine how much more innovation can Facebook offer among its user. Could there be anything more compelling than this? I hope the next time I upload picture on Facebook, they'll do the tagging for us; and that's we call laziness.

Life After Death

When I was a little kid, I grew from a Catholic School. The nuns (yes, the one with a veil) thought us so much about doing good deeds, praying the rosary and helping others, just to pacify the idea of entering the kingdom of heaven. As I grew older and took up some lectures about other religion I realize that there are contradicting beliefs. Not no mention that Christianity has several variation. In that case, I have nothing against any of the religious groups and/or organization out there. As for my opinion, things could not be summed to what those people dictates you. You will only get confused to which is right. As you age, you will be more knowledgeable about things. One day you will find your self laughing and realize things could be much lighter.
I wonder what lies after this life. Is there really a "life after death"? Will there still be Facebook there? Can we still tweet? Well, no one know until we get there. So just to give you a nice glimpse of what could possibly be there, here's a short film called Saga of Biorn.Hope you'll like it.

Cool Paper DS

With so much creativity people can inspire others. Just look at this cool video I found via Stumble. I was inspired too.

Facebook ruined my life!

Facebook is considered as the most popular social network of today's generation. Almost every people on the planet is using it. Either from the main website, mobile devices or desktop applications, it stays to its promise of connectivity to the people you care about (or even worst the people you don't).

With all the good deals the site has to offer, we cannot neglect some of  the negative effects to us. Some people over the internet coined it as "Facebook Addiction Disorder". This post may be a little bit outdated with regards to Facebook addiction; but I think this could be still to others who aren't aware of this uncontrollable craving. This repetitive act can actually ruin your life or if  not destroy your image as a person.

Being an active user of the site, I witnessed many instances of disagreement online. Even I was also a victim of this online fight.  I realized that the insanity of actually visiting someone else's profile just to know what the other is telling about you is ruining.With so much information at hand and exposure to public eye there could be a dilemma. Though the feeling of  reading posts against you is not that good, it is still addictive.In my case I don't really mind what it's all about I just wanted to know what does the post says. Then later down the line I realize things wont end if I wont stop. I will only live to ill feelings and hatred.

Being an application developer of the site, I too have some troubles special when I actually broke my own account. Without knowing what does a test account means. I was too late for me to know that the settings is irreversible. I had to suffer the punishment of curiosity. All my friends and other connection became in accessible. And as the name implies my account became a test account for the application I'm developing that time. During that moment I realize the true meaning of the phrase "experience is the best teacher." That experience was so good that I learned to add all my friends again after creating a new account. And it wasn't that easy.

With all of the things Facebook has done to my life I still wont regret that "Facebook ruined my life!", because it wont be this good if things didn't happened. I always believe that things happen for a reason. Reasons we don't know yet until the time comes.