November 2006 Archives

5. Facebook has gone global… Its contact information should too. Originally Facebook was only home to American college students, a group in which everyone uses AIM. Now there are members from all around the world. And just like no one in the US has ever heard of Skype and MSN Messenger, no one in Croatia has ever heard of AIM. So add more messenger fields.

4. By hiding the Facebook Developer Platform where no one will find it, Facebook is getting everyone to think it’s a ploy to sell information, when it actually has nothing to do with that. Rather, it lets you use your Facebook login to access some boredom-killing and useful web software, much of which is Facebook related. There’s the Facebook Firefox Toolbar for example, and FB Notify, a program that will inform you about any new messages, friend requests, etc. Currently access is hidden under My Privacy > Friends, Notes, and Facebook Development Platform (Edit Settings) > Click here > Product Directory. Yeah… no one will ever find that. Here’s a direct link.

3. What is the point of sharing by posting something to my mini-feed? I get the sharing with actual friends idea, but if I just want to share something with all my friends, place it in their news feed, not just my mini-feed. Isn’t it a little naïve to assume people will check my mini-feed daily to see what I am sharing? OK... Shares can also be seen under "My Shares", but no one checks that daily. If I want to share something with everyone I have to post a note… Which is just what I’ll do.

2. Stop showing me John Doe’s new relationship in the center of the screen while restricting my new message notification to a tiny number in parentheses and my friend and group requests some tiny notification on the right menu bar. In the days before the news feed, these things were in your face every time you went to your home screen.

1. Stop the group-creation insanity! How? When someone posts on a group’s wall or in a thread, show it on my news feed! It seems everyone joins a group in the first 24 hours because their news feed shows them all their friends did. Then there’s some crazy wall posting going on before no one ever looks at the group ever again! So, the cycle continues to the degree that by the end of the year I’ll be in 500 groups because the ones older than a day have gotten boring.

"YouTube, the video-sharing Web site recently acquired by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, beat out a vaccine that prevents a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease and a shirt that simulates a hug to grab top honors as Time magazine's Invention of the Year for 2006."

That's what I got to read in my local newspaper yesterday morning. This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've heard this week, if not this year. The whole cancer prevention versus entertainment aspect aside, I don't even understand the hype about YouTube. Yes, it vastly made it easier for Joe Internet to upload a clip of him attempting to jump off a his roof into his pool, or, more likely, some copyrighted commercial from 1995, but I hardly see it as revolutionizing the internet.

Now back to the real issue: How can a video sharing site beat out something that can possibly save millions of lives? Aside from a potential a potential film clip that attempts to persuade viewers into not committing suicide, I'd like to see YouTube save one life. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it has already cost several lives from people attempting to copy what they see on it.

Next year: The cure for AIDS losing to some new Google innovation!

Ducking from and slipping on handbills is going to be a thing of the past on one side of Mariahilfer Straße, Vienna's busiest shopping street. Why only one side? Because the street forms the border between two of Vienna's districts, and only one of these has banned their distribution.

Mariahilf, Vienna's 6th District, run by the Social Democratic Party, recently decided on this ban, to be enforced after a couple "information days." Neubau, Vienna's 7th District, run by the Green Alternative, has not voted on such a ban. Seeing that it's the Green Party, however, it's doubtful that handbills won't also be banned on their side of the street soon, as otherwise it would be twice as littered as it is now.

I don't really know why I mentioned this, but it seems like a humorous case of inner-Vienna politics. Additionally, I really hate handbills... Intensely. Especially on Saturdays, it's impossible to walk down Mariahilfer Straße without having arms fly at you from every angle with some dumb handbills (often given out in sets of two or more so the distributor gets done quicker) advertising some junk you're not interested in. I'm pretty sure around 15 percent of the flyers end up in the nearest trashcan, and all but one percent or so of the remainder end up on the street. The end result is a scene like the one in the random photo of a street in Miami that I have attached to this entry (I couldn't find one depicting the situation on Mariahilfer Straße).

Image Credit:

1. "Image:Flyers sobe 2.jpg". Author: Wikipedia user Ld. Modified by Wikipedia user ArtMechanic. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

The video to what I called "Bill Maher's Best Monologue to Date" is now available on YouTube. I highly recommend you check it out:

Bill Maher, Final New Rule 10/27/06

If you want to laugh a little before it gets serious, check out the entire set of New Rules (about two extra minutes):

Bill Maher, New Rules 10/27/06