From "Personalized Search for everyone" to "Personalized recommendations" to "User behavior control"

Google took a big step from generic search to customized and personalized one with the announcement of Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone. Do we like personal attention? Sure! What's the price? Privacy. Since technology is relying on tracking user behavior from cookies embedded by Google. Privacy advocates, I am sure, will be furious over the "big brother" watching every step and move. As for me, I think, privacy battle is lost for general Internet user. Those who care should be using anonymizer software and other tricks and tools.
So what's next? I think - personalized recommendations. Google is sitting on the top of goldmine of ratings and reviews crawled from the Web, extracted and normalized from RDF and microformats (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html). And that will be a huge step for the giant - whoever can tinker with recommendations can control user buying behavior. And as you can guess, how much money is behind that... Advertising market will be a part of a bigger "user behavior control" market not too far in the future.

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Posting to FaceBook feed using Graph API

Graph API was announced at F8 with a promise to dramatically simplify the FB API. I checked the read access over the new interface during the presentations and to my big surprise it worked flawlessly and from the first time. When I tried https://graph.facebook.com/facebook , JSON-formatted info about the FaceBook page was returned (as expected). Then I tried OAuth 2.0 way of accessing the API to post a message to the feed. And to my even bigger surprise it worked too! Here is what you need to do to access Graph API over OAuth: 1. Create a FB app, store app properties to a file: $appkey = '7925873fbfb5347e571744515a9d2804' ; $appsecret = 'THE SECRET' ; $canvas = 'http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/' ; 2. Create a page that will prompt user the access permission (I am prompting for the publish_stream and offline_access permissions at the same time) //http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/ require 'settings.php' ; $url = "https://graph.face...

Freebase Hack Day

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and PHP

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called " Simple Email Service ". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else. Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple! Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library : // Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829 error_reporting (- 1 ); // Set plain text headers header ( "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" ); // Include the SDK require_once '../sdk.class.php' ...

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