Take all the hard work out of stalking.
Have you ever seen a friend has updated his/her profile on Facebook and you scour the page to see what's been changed? Someone came up with the
Facebook Stalker, a Firefox extension that highlights what's been changed in someone's profile since the last time you looked at it.
The only real work is predetermining who you want to stalk basically so it can record the page before it's changed. Also on your friends page you can click on "Never Viewed " in the drop-down to see whose pages you haven't looked at since you've added the extension.
I'm all for things that propagate my laziness.
Link.
geriatric1927 on YouTube.
This has been all over the place, but a 79-year-old widower in the UK started posting videos on YouTube on August 5th and the YouTube community has embraced him.
geriatric1927's channel took over Brookers' as the most subscribed of all time, with 23,647 subscriptions to date. His 17 videos, which focus on him telling his life story, have been viewed over 700,000 times and the news media has picked up on him. He's had many requests for interviews with traditional media, but has thus far refused any forms of communication other than YouTube. He cites his complete editorial control over the videos he creates and the site's sense of community as reasons to communicate only via YouTube. I've watched many of his videos so far and can see why people like him. His audience seems to be enthralled by a grandfather figure who braved this youth-dominated digital world to connect with people. His next-to-last video has a "Au Revoir" byline but I hope it's not true! He's even garnered an entry on the reluctant-to-highlight-Internet- memes
Wikipedia.
Facebook Applications.
Like I said before, Facebook released their developer's platform a couple weeks ago. Basically right now it's just for members (read: college kids plus whoever wants to join a high school or work network) so it's been a bunch of collegefolk creating stuff they like. It's not like MySpace where you can add an application to a page...they've just released their API so a registered webpage can access the information of the person who signs in. Here are some of my favorites (which may or may not be in the
Product Directory):
- FacebookRSS: not exactly an RSS feed but a nice app that shows the number of wall posts, messages, and new messages you have, as well as a map of your friends' locations (that's embeddable elsewhere), your photos, and friends' pictures (and a male/female ratio chart). Really nice UI here.
- FaceSave: download your own photo albums as zip files. Pretty handy for if you lose your pictures or want to grab them all.
- Spin the Bottle: with your friends. You can pick males or females or both. It's cute!
- MatchBook: see which of your friends you have the most in common with (musical, cinematic, political, etc. interests). Now if only it wasn't my ex that I had the most in common with!
- BookFaced: a Google Map mashup. There are a few of these floating around but this one seems to be popular. This was an obvious application and it's cool to see - I've done some Google Maps API stuff before.
- Interesting Friendship Finder: this is a pretty cool app. It finds your friends that are friends with one another but not necessarily what you might think (because they're in different networks). There are some false positives but it showed the ones I was waiting to see - which I had found out by the mutual friends list on Facebook (e.g. someone from my college knowing someone from my high school) - plus it came up with one or two more I didn't know.
- lickuacious: See who of your friends is most popular according to the number of wall posts they have. My most popular friend is Big E of Wake Forest Basketball fame. There's an option for you to figure out where you lie on the list, but it would be nice to be able to search for one of your friends. Because if Eric Williams is at the top, I want to know where Chris Paul is...you know, without having to do all that work of getting on Facebook and looking at his page ;)
- PhotoMosaic: makes a mosaic of your blown-up Facebook picture...from your friends' Facebook pics. It could be better-executed but it's a hot idea.
- FaceFreaks: analyzes the interests of your friends and tells you who's the nerdiest, shallowest, sportiest, and emoist. It's "a somewhat spiteful production"...I like it. Except I'm the emoist of them all.
So yeah, these are some of the cool applications that have popped up in the last two weeks since they released it. People are contributing their own client libraries which Facebook
has posted. I still can't get enough of it! People get to create things that are relevant/fun/useful to the community and Facebook gets some good ideas they might be able to implement in the future. And now that someone's made a PHP4 library I might be able to get an app done in the near future :)
Link.
Some Hot Diagrams on Index Cards.
My third post and I'm already diverging.
This is just cool.
Link.
Stylish.
Stylish is a great Firefox extension
Dave told me about that lets you easily look at a page's CSS styles...
and then change it within your browser! I know
GreaseMonkey has been around for a long time, but I just like this CSS-specific add-on.
You get the picture. So now my Google homepage has a Georgia font instead of Arial. It's a start :)
yo.
Here comes my new blog. Working this summer and being exposed to a bunch of cool things has inspired me to create a blog where I can show off the stuff I like. Oh and I wanted to make this blog the more hip "that's my jam" (a phrase I fully endorsed this summer in describing anything from boys to potato chips) but
thatsmyjam.blogspot.com was taken already :(
I guess I'll start off with the kind of stuff I use when it comes to computing. And interested in.
 | Ah, Apple. I got a Powerbook last September and haven't looked back. Oh and an iPod. The great 20GB. Rock on. Oh, and I lived through an iTrip for a year but just a couple weeks ago got a good ol' fashioned output-to-fake-cassette-tape thang that was commonly rocked during the portable cd player era, and it's marvelous. |
 | Firefox. You know you love it. Skins, extensions (one of which in fact prompted me to start this..more to come)...now once they figure out a DRM equivalent we can throw away IE once and for all. |
 | Facebook. Rocks so much. It's mosdef taken the hold over the college and new alum (and, erm...high school) population. And they just released a developer's platform that the college kids are going crazy for. |
 | Photoshop. Can't go a day without it! |
 | Gotta love the Macromedia suite. Director and Dreamweaver baby. |
 | Adium. My AIM client of choice. I tried iChat, but couldn't really stand not being able to see how long someone had been idle for if they had an away message. Thus came Adium, where I now live in customizable glory. |
 | del.icio.us is pretty mint. Here's my page (mostly filled with advertising blogs and programming stuff) |
 | I'd say Google's pretty well embedded in my Internet experience. Search engine, mail, RSS feed, homepage, image search...should I keep going? |
I guess that's about it for my tech preferences background, unless I think of some more things :)
