Facebook announced their impending internet domination today at the F8 conference. One interesting thing is the ability to add a facebook “like” button to any page on the internet:
This simple bit of social proofing immediately adds credibility to a page in the eyes of a user – Hey! My friends like this, it must be worth a read. That said, they’ve done a lot more. Their graphing API aims to link every piece of information that a user creates online back to their profile. This could get interesting.
Facebook Like Button API
The API docs for facebook’s ‘like’ button are straightforward – to use the iFrame version is just a copy and paste, whereas the javascript SDK is a bit more bothersome.
Predictions:
- The ‘Like’ button being absolutely everywhere by the end of the week
- Shoddy marketers creating static images of the like button icon at the top of their pages.
- Someone figuring out how to game the figures or creating a fake version by legitimately using the user’s friend data to create a spoof ‘like’ button.
After some initial messing my biggest problem is that the button itself seems to take up a lot of space with the default settings. I’m sure the CSS-savvy can style it to their heart’s content.
This season’s must-have startup feature set is the quick fix. At the crossroads between the attention deficit disorder of internet users and voyeurism we have the phenomenon that is Chat Roulette. In some sort of mix between the visuals of the classic 80’s board game Guess Who and some sort of stalking application we have the recent StartupBus winner DateBrowsr.
Under the category of mobile applications there is the simple check-in use cases of Gowalla and FourSquare. And of course, the standout heavy hitter in the category of quick fixes that I’ve yet to mention is of course Twitter, fueling the zeitgeist one minuscule update at a time. There is an element of both bragging and voyeurism to all of these services, and the major usage is built around the fact that the user can leave at any time – the user workflows are very short and there’s a lot of fun to be had in that short time.
Chris Dixon has an excellent article about why for a lot of business models having the user stick around for a long time may not help the revenue model. On a consumer web app dependent on advertising revenue having the user hang around not clicking on ads is just burning up your server cycles. More and more, the simpler web applications are tending towards just a single feature. Foursquare has an interesting revenue model, bringing game mechanics and analytics dashboards to real-life businesses. Twitter has ubiquity which should eventually lead to decent revenue, but it remains to be seen whether there is a sustainable business in the other ideas.
It’s been about twenty years since I first met Eoin Ryan, the artist behind Space Avalanche. While spreading the news of his latest Batman-themed comic everywhere and anywhere I can think of, an odd thought struck me – The reason we first met and eventually became friends was Batman.
Twenty years ago I was five feet tall and had an outrageous twang to my voice as a result of six years of American schooling in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Apart from the desert heat, great sports fields, and pools, Jeddah was fantastic for it’s imported technology at bargain prices, and access to freely pirated music and movies from Asian countries. This meant that I found myself in a small Irish town with access to the summer’s biggest blockbuster several months before it would appear in Irish cinemas – Tim Burton’s original Batman. Not a bad bargaining chip for a fish-out-of-water twelve year old in a new school in a country he didn’t really remember very well.
Long story short, Eoin hatched a totally transparent plot to make friends based entirely on the fact that he’d be able to watch Batman before everyone else in the country. Minor disagreements aside, we’ve been good friends ever since.
Twenty years down the line, we’ve been working on this web comic nonsense as a bit of a labor of love in our spare time. Eoin does the creative bit, and I play the part of the town crier who moonlights fixing webservers. In the meantime we’ve been nominated for the Irish Web Awards, made the front pages of Digg and Reddit, and become rich and famous. What have we learned in the process?
Well, mainly that it’s bloody hard work. In a later post I’ll go into the various ways we’ve tried to spread the word and how it’s affected our traffic.
I’ve been messing with Django recently, and wanted to record a few setup notes for future reference. It might be of use for anyone else who’s experimenting with it to have some setup notes in one place.
I’m playing with a small project as a learning exercise which I hope to announce in the next few months and coming from the configuration-heavy world of J2EE using Spring and Hibernate, Django is a breath of fresh air. Django’s version of MVC is very nicely put together, and the framework comes complete with just about every feature that you might attempt to write yourself such as generic views, cache plugins, and URL rewriting. The ORM is fantastic, and Django 1.1’s addition of aggregation and “greedy” fetching of foreign key relationships using select_related() is a pleasure (though be sure to filter the fields you need or you can end up with unnecessary database queries).
Django setup with MySQL on Ubuntu -
- Download Django
- Download the latest version of MySQLDB for Python
- Before you build / install the above you’ll probably need the python dev libs and the mysql dev libs:
- sudo apt-get install python-all-dev
- sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
- Install MysqlDB and Django, start reading through the django book.
(As an aside, when you’re missing a library on ubunutu is there any easy way to figure out what apt package it resides in? I would like to be able to figure it out without resorting to just asking google and finding that some other poor soul has spent a few hours looking for the answer.)
I’d recommend mod_wsgi over mod_python. In completely unscientific performance tests mod_wsgi seemed to play nicer with the other children. Here’s a good install document for Django and mod_wsgi.
An alternate to these notes is this step-by-step guite to django on ubuntu, including memcached, Nginx, and a whole host of other nonsense you probably don’t need to do some tinkering.
If you’ve just signed on to twitter and are used to other social network sites such as Facebook, the sheer amount of information that twitter presents and the not-so-friendly user interface might be a little daunting.
Thankfully, Twitter has opened up it’s API to allow smart code monkeys to develop all sorts of interesting visualisations and tools. Here’s my list of the top five (With a bonus or two!):
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Tweetdeck is a beautifully polished desktop application to view your twitter stream. Tweetdeck happily sits in the background and keeps a track of your friends, replies and direct messages as well as allowing you to group followers into handy buckets. It’s the simplicity of the interface that really provides the real benefit here, it’s a pleasure to use. Written using Adobe AIR means it installs nicely on Windows and Mac, as well as Linux with a little messing.
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TwitScoop exposes the benefit of Twitter that some are calling a possible “Google Killer” – Real-time search. While you might have to wait a few hours or a day for google to have information on the latest happenings, twitter delivers information from thousands of people as events unfold. Twitscoop lets you see what phrases people are most tweeting about at the moment, and which way they’re trending.
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I’ve heard social networks described in the phrase:
”Facebook is for catching up with people you used to know, Twitter is for networking with people you want to know”.
So if this is true, who should I be following? (The answer of course, is me. ;) ) – Luckily who should I follow have answered this question nicely. Using the Twitter API to figure out people who are similar to the people you are currently following, who should I follow gives you a page of recommendations which can be tweaked to find people who are more or less popular, or closer to a specific location. (And they’re aware that ’Whom should I follow’ is more gramatically correct, but they don’t care. Good for them).
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www.tweetree.com provides a nice visual filter for people who might be more used to Facebook or forums – Threaded discussions between users. If you’ve ever tried to pick through an extended conversation between people you’re following on the twitter website and found it frustrating, this might be for you. It provides a much more attractive view on who is talking to whom, and nicely separates out links that people post too. You have to provide your twitter username and password, but they insist it’s never stored anywhere. That said, they don’t seem to use HTTPS on their login form…
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Companies have started realising that social networking is a very targetted way to service their customers. For example, I’m interested in pursuing an MBA and sent out a random tweet asking if anyone had any advice. In response I got a nice chap from Queen’s School of Business in Ontario who was happy to help with any questions. These people are on the ball, but they’re not alone. More and more companies are viewing what their customers are writing about them, and hoping to address questions and potential negative publicity proactively.
Twitterhawk is this concept taken the the next logical step – automation. Twitterhawk provides an automated service to answer these sorts of queries with content you provide. Admittedly this could be plenty spammy in the wrong hands, but it fits into the category of web app that I like to call “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that”.
- Bonus round!
Twitter Mosaic is a cute little application for the narcissists in the house. Pretty simply it displays your legion of followers or friends, and lets you slap their adoring faces on to mug, business card, t-shirt, or bag. Also, you get a nice chunk of HTML you can put on your web page which displays a mosaic of their profile pictures.
- Bonus round #2!
I’m not entirely sure what Twecipe is yet, but it’s from the clever foodies behind LookandTaste.com. The name would suggest some amalgamation of twitter and recipes. At the very least, I think it’ll keep the gourmet snob in me happy.
