Afterweb

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...

Policy changes: Single permissions dialog Data retention policy changes Platform changes: 1. Social Plug-ins ( tested on this blog ) o a way to provide personalized experience with “Like” button in the core, work on any site o works via iframe, single line of HTML code o activity stream plug-in (newsfeed filtered for events only related to the site) o recommendations plug-in, personalized recommendation experience for users about any product or service o log-in plug-in that shows friends who are already there o FB chat plug-in o “Like” button in the center with hope to serve 1 Billion “likes” within 24 hrs after roll-out 2. Open Graph protocol o Semantic markers (my understanding is that is another name for microformats) o Design to represent any object on the web – books, celebrates, movies, etc o Objects has the same properties as FB pages 3. Graph API o Complete re-architecture of current platform/API/SDK o No need for SDK code o Graph.facebook.com/ID/connection_name – ...

After a trip to a local pharmacy, and a sticker shock from one of the prescribed medications (one that treats pimples), I decided to cool myself with bit with arithmetic. Retail price for the medication (30x 115mg tablets of Solodyn) is $700.99 Current price of gold is $1134 per ounce Question : What is more expensive, Gold, or medication for treating pimples? Solution : $1134 x 1 ounce/31.10 grams = $36.46 is the price per gram of Gold $700.99/(30*.115) =$203.18 is the price per gram of Solodyn Conclusion : Solodin is more than 5 times more expensive! Observation: No point of Gold prospecting these days. Just find a deposit of Solodyn!

After a complete system rearchitecture, full code rewrite, and database migration, Trusted Opinion Site was re-born. Birth was painful (as it should be) with sleepless nights and emotions were running high. But that's pretty much what was expected. What was not expected is the huge amount of crawling traffic the site got from the second it was up (hundreds of thousand hits per hr). It looked (and still feels) like we are under DOS attack. But we are not! That's the new reality - computers are much better at networking than humans are, and by the virtue of the Internet, they use their potential to the full extend. I like the quote from our COO Todd Greene : Launching the site these days is like giving a newborn baby a firehose to drink from" A few lessons from the launch: What looks impossible and feels impossible, is possible as long as everyone ignores that it is impossible Food is important! After 30 hours of work it becomes even more important than internet connectiv...

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, ho...

Even in this job market companies should be creative to attract star programmers: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/1246353621.html Great job hunting for great talent!

As an act of unprecedented generosity (or desperation) Google decided to give gPhone to every attendee of Google IO conference. While I can certainly applaud Google for the move (as a direct benefactors, of casue) a few red lights start to flash on my technology-navigation dashboard: 1. Does gPhone lost so much ground to iPhone (in terms of applications) that desperate and costly measures are required? 2. If (1) is true, users will flock to iPhone and whatever Google trying to do to mitigate the situation will fail – iPhone will remain dominate cell phone technology(like Windows in consumer OS market) for a long while 3. If (2) is true, open source approach once again has to yield to commercial interests Regardless of the Google motivating factors, the decision to give gPhones to Google conference attendees is flawed for a bunch reasons: - Google IO attendees are Google fans already, they know about gPhone platform - Conference attendees either write gPhone apps already or do not have ...