Sort of Creepy and Cool

I found this blog post on www.insidefacebook.com. This is an incredible site. I never would have imagined the depth and breath of this site. Let me know your thoughts about the article.

New Facebook App Lets You Find Untagged Photos Through Facial Recognition

 

March 27th, 2009

Face.com has released a new Facebook application calledPhoto Finder that lets users find photos of themselves or friends through facial recognition.

Here’s how it works: When you log into Photo Finder, the app uses its facial recognition technology to search for untagged pictures of you or your friends throughout Facebook by scanning all the public photos in your network. When it finds photos, it suggests tags based strictly on the faces identified. This could lead to less embarrassing pictures floating about without your knowledge. So far, it seems to work pretty well.

Face.com, based in Tel Aviv and New York, apparently built the Facebook app as a technology demonstration. The company is angel funded and currently raising an A round. While it’s still in closed beta, the first 100 Inside Facebook users who click on this link will be able to try the app out.

Social Gaming and Living Social

As I dig further into the world of Facebook, I am presented with more and more apps. I guess that we have finally found a way to make a business out of Facebook. The apps are the things that people will purchase for their phones or Facebook that add functionality and fun. Here are a couple of links to information about popular apps on Facebook. Shouldn't Facebook be charging for these apps to be present on their platform? What apps are you using? What is the most useful? What type of apps do you wish that you had? Do you have next great idea? Do you want to share it?

http://livingsocial.com/

http://livingsocial.com/about

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/31/BU5GVSA3F.DTL

Can Facebook be Everything for Everybody?

The recent new look Facebook page has come under fire by many. It has been interesting to watch Facebook try to be responsive to its users demands. It brings me to think though whether Facebook has any core principals or whether it will choose the being everything to everybody model that often fatigues an organization. If you could be the CEO of Facebook, what would your core principals be?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/03/facebook_readies_a_facelift.html?wprss=fasterforward

Facebook is Ready to Rule the (Social Network) World

Facebook can't be stopped. Review the article below and discuss the future of Facebook in your eyes. Will this trend fade? Is it just beginning? Discuss your vision for Facebook for the next decade.

JR Raphael, PC World

Mar 16, 2009 4:24 pm

Facebook appears closer than ever to social network domination, if some freshly compiled stats are to be believed. The site has more than doubled its traffic from one year ago, analysis firm Hitwise has found, jumping nearly 150 percent from February of '08 to February 2009.

Astronomical Growth

There's no question Facebook's growth has been astronomical: Since opening its doors to the public back in September of 2006 (the site has been limited only to college students up to that point), Facebook has seen what can only be described as an explosion in use. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said just a few weeks ago that a million new users are signing up every week in the U.S. alone. Worldwide, the number is projected at 5 million newbies every seven days.

Now, though, it's becoming even more apparent how drastic of a change that's bringing to the overall market. In February of 2009, Facebook received 36.03 percent of all U.S. social network traffic -- an increase of 149 percent from its 14.46 percent total one year earlier. Compare that to MySpace, which dropped 28 percent in the same timespan, falling from 72.92 percent in February of '08 to 52.21 percent in 2009.

Sure, MySpace is still in the lead -- but seeing the two rates of change side-by-side can't be comforting for the folks on Tom Anderson's team. It's akin to the situation in the Web browser world, where IE's crown has slowly but steadily been slipping away. Here, though, the shift is even more extreme. Some tech bloggers have already placed their bets on 2010 for a formal change of guards.

Twitter Integration

Add this into the Facebook win column, too: Just today, Twitter desktop utility TweetDeck announced a new beta version of its software that integrates Facebook functionality as well. TweetDeck 0.24.1 lets you send and receive both tweets and Facebook updates all within a single interface. The software gives you the option of adding a separate section to monitor your Facebook stream right next to your Twitter stuff.

What's perhaps most interesting about the update, though, is that it lets you seamlessly cross-post from one service to the other. Say, for example, you want to share a friend's Facebook status on your Twitter stream. Click a button and you can "retweet" it as if it were a Twitter message. With Twitter's own rapidly expanding adoption, this placement will no doubt be a big boon for the big "F" -- and TweetDeck says even more Facebook-Twitter integration is on the way.

Some may be predicting an inevitable social network backlash in the future, but I suspect any potential doomsday is the furthest thing from the minds of Facebook's elite right now. With the company's mobile growth and Web-wide Facebook Connect system also at play -- not to mention the newly debuted redesign and negative-turned-positive privacy debacle last month -- these days, the view from Mark Zuckerberg's chair has gotta be looking pretty sweet.

Roll the Tape- Old School

Walter Cronkite had a number of historic moments that he announced on television, but this clip is about the assassination of Martin Luther King. There are a number of contrasts between this broadcast and a more current broadcast from NBC. Watch both clips in their entirety, and comment at length about the many differences. Discuss why you think that television news has evolved the way that it has over time, and speak to the ways that you think that the news has stayed the same. This is the long post that is in lieu of our second hour of class, so I am looking for some depth to your analysis.

Open Source is Everywhere

This article was taken from http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=3596. It looks at a number of open source pieces of software that can be used for just about everything. Think about how deep our economy recession could be without tools like these and others on the Internet. Discuss the impact of technology and media on our first recession of the digital age.

1. OpenGoo is the open source Web office that lets you collaborate with your fellow jobless and organize that people’s revolution we have all been waiting for. Compare it to the student version of Microsoft Office.

2. Scribus is the open source desktop publishing program for Linux that will help you get out those flyers telling other homeless people where the demonstration is. Compare it to Adobe Illustrator.

3. TextPattern is a flexible content management system that also helps you publish standards-compliant Web pages that print nicely. The revolution deserves a good Web site.

4. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation System, is great for resizing or extracting bits from pictures like the one above. I use it all the time. You can use it to virtually link the President to the workers’ enemy of the moment. Compare it to Adobe Photoshop.

5. Kino is a cool video editor for Linux. You can use it for that revolutionary film you have been planning, “Triumph of the Geeky.” You can compare it to Final Cut Pro.

6. Pidgin is the universal chat client that gets you over all those proprietary walls erected by “the man” so you can communicate between cells. It even supports custom smileys, so if you want to add a Che Guevara beard to yours go right ahead.

7. Mozilla Thunderbird is the e-mail client I use here at ZDNet Open Source. It’s a good replacement for Microsoft Outlook Express, plus you can add-in features like a calendar so you won’t be late for the revolution.

8. KPresenter is the presentation piece of the KOffice suite. This will let you demo your revolution so it won’t be confused with those of splitters like the Judean Peoples’ Front or People’s Front of Judea. That would be very embarrassing.

9. Amarok is an open source music player, an iTunes replacement, which will be one of the 15 projects honored with a booth at CeBIT next month. If you can’t dance to the revolution what is the point?

More on Twitter

I have finally tried to figure out the power of twitter. I can be found at www.twitter.com/ideaguy42. Since I haven't figured out what to do with my twitter address to help the world, I decided to get your feedback. First, watch this link from Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, and then comment on the future of twitter with ideas about how it could have future positive implications in this crazy world of ours.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid988327350/bclid4865158001/bctid14771815001

Busting Our Cocoon

Here are two really good posts that speak to our discussions over the past week. I don't want to get too focused on the decline of traditional media, but there is a sense that this is the piece that could break the camel's back. How do we perform our essential duty as citizens of gathering varied sources of information, analyzing them for the truth, and begin acting in ways that positively impacts our community when media giants are merging, the number of reporters investigating local and international issues are disappearing, and the volume of information available makes the burrowing for gold nuggets of data so hard. Be solution-oriented. What can we do? What could actually work?


http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/2009/03/01/broadcast-news-vs-information-an-unfair-fight/

http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/2009/03/07/old-media-vs-new-media-continued/

Recap From The Bob Rose Visit

I hope you all took a few things away from our visit by Bob Rose. As a means of learning what you took from the evening and providing feedback to Bob, I ask that you ask the following three questions in your reply.

1. What are three things that you learned from the information that Bob Rose presented?

2. What three pieces of advice do you have for folks working with on-line and print newspapers to better cater to your demographic?

3. Generalize the information that you took from the presenter and discuss how it speaks to the big ideas of our class.

Lost Paper

I feel completely unorganized, not something that usually happens, but this is a message for Robin to resend her paper about religion. I looked and looked and couldn't find the e-mail that we talked about. My deepest apologies.