Tag: Facebook

  • Data Mining the Electorate

    Data Mining the Electorate

    The New York Times Magazine had a cover piece on the Obama data mining team that used modern data-mining techniques to more efficiently target the undecided voters that they needed to bring across the fence to win the election. Check out the last line (emphasis mine) on their clever use of Facebook photo tags as […]

  • Wolfram | Alpha Personal Analytics. Quantified-self on demand

    Wolfram | Alpha Personal Analytics. Quantified-self on demand

    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

    Facebook Find Friends Nearby

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    Facebook virtual currency now real

    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

    EdgeRank, the Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm

    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

    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 […]