Archive for the 'Facebook' Category

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Stupid Facebook Fan Pages Considered Harmful

Published on April 27, 2009 in Facebook. 2 Comments Tags: .

stupid-fan-pages

Yes, I’m breaking out the “considered harmful” cliche.

I think Facebook is jumping a proverbial shark. In addition to the “viral” quizzes that are really annoying (and occasionally interesting), the increase in random fan pages is really making the site hard to tolerate. Facebook wants to make fan pages like people. That’s fine, if you’re only allowing people to have fan pages. The fan pages seem to have been designed for entities who want to have a presence on the site. Like companies or celebrities, etc.

Lately there have been fan pages for random shit like hugs, rain, flip flops, music, etc. Who is supposed to be the owner of the rain fan page? Who decides what rain says? I think groups were a fine way of indicating that you supported something. But fan pages are supposed to be pseudo-official (at least when celebrities make them, they are required to show proof of identity). This mixture of official and random-shit fan pages just makes Facebook seem unprofessional.

I am all for developing tools and letting people use them for what they may. But maybe there should be some rules about superfluous junk like fan pages for “wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tubeman.”

OR! Maybe I’m just getting old. *sigh*

I Won a Facebook Contest!

Published on January 22, 2009 in Facebook. 4 Comments

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I’ve known about this for a while, but now that it’s Facebook Official, I can make a post on it. I won a contest held by Facebook! The contest involved presenting one’s programming environment and explaining how the tools and everything were used. The contest deadline was the day after Christmas, which was cool because I had some free time to make an entry.

You can see my entry above. Click on it to see the big version. Here’s the text that accompanied it:

I have a shiny new Macbook Pro running OS X 10.5 for development since it’s got those command line tools I know and love.

(I don’t use spaces normally but it’s a good way to show everything)

Quadrant #1: vim is better than Emacs, let’s just get that out of the way (I hope the Facebook judges agree)! I use vim for most of my coding unless I’m working with something slightly complicated. For local editing textedit works well. I might also go with DashCode or TextMate if I feel like getting fancy.

Quadrant #2: I use XCode because it’s required to do any coding on the iPhone. Just between us, XCode blows. It’s pretty retarded in the autocomplete and syntax highlighting departments.

Quadrant #3: Firefox and the Firebug plugin are the best thing to happen to design/CSS coding since… sliced bread. I really love Firebug. Oh, and I use Cyberduck for FTPing if I’m not feeling like using scp.

Quadrant #4: My wallpaper consists of dinosaurs with lasers. It’s the awesomest picture I’ve found so far. When I find an awesomer one, I might think about replacing it.

As per the explanation of why I won:

Vim + not-windows + xcode blows + dinosaurs with lasers = win

I mean, can you beat dinosaurs and lasers?

Yep, I pretty much won because of the awesome wallpaper I utilize. It really is pretty sweet. You should follow my example and use it as well. Maybe it’ll win you a contest someday!

For my trouble, I get:

I also get the privilege of having lunch with some Facebook engineers when I’m in the area. This is probably the neatest prize of all since Facebook is way cool and I’ve never been to their headquarters before. I’ve been to the Googleplex, the Appleplex (I don’t think it’s really called that) and the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, so this is pretty much the last stop in the list of software places I need to see before I die.

Anyway, I’m way grateful to Facebook for liking my entry enough to make it the grand prize winner. I had fun making it. I’ve gotten a raincheck on having lunch with Facebookers, so maybe during Spring Break or over the Summer I’ll report back on how it went.

Facebook Removing Network Pages: WTF?

Published on May 31, 2008 in Facebook and Social Network. 0 Comments

I was browsing around Facebook today when I thought of checking the network pages for my universities. Network pages are interesting because you can see stuff that’s popular in your particular network. While the Network pages seem to be rarely used, I still think they’re interesting to have around. For example, here’s the statistics page for Michigan as of right now:

I found it really difficult to find the network page today. In fact, I had to go to google and query for “facebook networks” to actually find the networks page. This is because Facebook is apparently discontinuing the network pages.

Now is a good time for me to ask, “WTF!?” Social networks are interesting because they have multiple variables. People know each other through networks, especially by regional and work networks. By removing network pages, Facebook is losing a pretty important source of info. I understand they’re not removing actual networks; just their pages. But still, why bother getting rid of something? They aren’t really being used, but I still like to check them now and then to get a quick overview of what’s happening.

Recently, Facebook seems to be closer and closer to jumping that proverbial shark. Not just because of this change, but because of changes to the developer platform as well. It’s gotten to the point where one cannot casually write applications for Facebook because the functions they use will surely become deprecated within months. Can you imagine that happening on a real OS? Combine the “alpha” hijinks of the platform with the fact that no meaningful income is being made on the apps, and you have a formula for slow, rotting death of applications!

Will the next Facebook please stand up?

Stats Project: Sociability of Musical Instruments Using Facebook Data

Published on May 8, 2008 in Facebook, Music and Research. 4 Comments

For my SI 544: Stats class this semester, I worked with two cool dudes, Jim Laing and Sameer Halai. Our project involved using data gathered from a Facebook application to test a hypothesis about the perceived sociability of certain musical instruments.

Continue reading ‘Stats Project: Sociability of Musical Instruments Using Facebook Data’

Facebook Lexicon: Kinda Fun, But Useful?

Published on April 21, 2008 in Facebook, Research and Social Network. 1 Comment

Facebook just recently released a fun new thingy called Lexicon. It shows you a graph of the occurrences of certain words or phrases over time on all Facebook walls. Since I do quite a lot of research using Facebook, I thought I’d take a look at it.

Facebook has some suggested phrase pairs that you can use such as “party tonight” and “hungover.” And as expected, the phrases are cyclical and you tend to see a spike in “hungover” the day after “party tonight.” But it’s worth noting that you can’t prove causation by just correlation.

What’s a little strange is that there doesn’t seem to be any growth going on in Facebook. Maybe they’ve normalized the data so you can spot trends, but you’d kind of assume that word counts would trend towards going up since Facebook is still supposedly growing. Or is Lexicon telling us something Facebook doesn’t want us to know about their growth?

Anyway, at least one question of the ages has been put to rest. According to Lexicon, shampoo really is better than conditioner. STOP LOOKING AT ME, SWAN!

Bonus Analysis:

It looks like the word “happy” is used more on holidays like New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day. But the word “merry” is kind of exclusively used on Christmas. See that strangely unhappy day near the beginning of March? Since it’s a leap year, Feb 29th was included in this graph. And since less people statistically have birthdays on that leap day, the word “happy” was recorded less. Pretty neat stuff, huh? I’m sure there’s other fun stuff to dig out of Lexicon, if you were really inclined to.

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