Facebook

Wolfram | Alpha Personal Analytics. Quantified-self on demand

August 30, 2012

Wolfram | Alpha posted about a self-analysis tool, the Personal Analytics for Facebook. All you need to do is go to their site and register with Wolfram | Alpha and connect it to your Facebook ID (giving them permission to read your friend lists) and then they’ll run all sorts of analytics on your social [...]

Facebook Find Friends Nearby

June 24, 2012

UPDATE: Looks like the feature got pulled offline. Wonder if the legal department got involved. Some are calling Facebook’s new Find Friends Nearby feature (turned on just this weekend) as a Highlight-killer. Maybe so but that’s only if you keep the app on the FFN page at all times. It doesn’t track your location in the [...]

Speed of Execution

April 10, 2012

The Instagram deal came together in record time: A call late last week from Mr. Zuckerberg to Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom led to a weekend powwow at Mr. Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home and ended in a handshake Sunday night, people familiar with the matter said. The Wall Street Journal on the $1 billion Facebook [...]

Push Button Social Networking

February 15, 2011

HTC announced two phones with dedicated buttons for Facebook. The touchscreen Salsa and ChaCha (pictured below). Running Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, HTC modified the Sense UI to integrate the Facebook into the experience. According to the HTC press release, The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there [...]

Facebook and your Contact Info, a Proposal

January 18, 2011

Facebook just announced that they are suspending a previously announced expansion of their API allowing third party developers to request access to a user’s address and phone number. Some history and a modest suggestion follow. When Facebook announced Facebook Connect in 2008, Dave Morin wrote about a concept he called Dynamic Privacy. Facebook Connect would [...]

Re-Skinning Facebook

October 10, 2010

Stumbled across a quick and dirty side project that uses Facebook’s social graph api to pull your newsfeed and present an alternate display. Try it yourself at Facebook-me.com.

Facebook virtual currency now real

September 1, 2010

USA Today reports that Facebook Credits will be available as gift cards at Target. The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target’s 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months. The article [...]

EdgeRank, the Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm

August 25, 2010

Michael Berstein, a researcher at MIT, posts a snapshot of the algorithm used to calculate what is shown to you in the Facebook Top News feed. The algo is called EdgeRank and he describes it as such: I’ll cut through the math using words. Whenever somebody interacts with a news feed item, they create an edge [...]

Social Discovery, Social Filtering, and other Web-Squared Shapes

October 24, 2009

It’s hard to wrap up a major conference, especially when you didn’t attend, but viewing things from a distance sometimes helps because only the loudest messages make it all the way over. Before the conference even started, Fred Wilson threw out a one-liner that got people thinking. He called it the Golden Triangle. The three [...]

Barack Obama’s Facebook Page

April 30, 2009

This is really well done. In honor of Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office, Slate has mocked up a parody of his Facebook page. Remember, What will Facebook look like in 40 years?