Author: karlbunyan

LinkedIn to get a newsfeed

LinkedIn to get a newsfeed

It looks like LinkedIn has been looking at which Facebook features it can steal. LinkedIn’s newsfeed does appear to actually be news rather than friend activities, however, and tries to work out what the user might be interested in. It’s only in beta at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if it does …

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Facebook: “It’s okay to spam your friends”

Facebook: “It’s okay to spam your friends”

“It’s okay to spam your friends” may not be the company’s official strapline, but it certainly seems to be a key part of Facebook that spamming your friends with everything you’re doing is the way to stay “in touch”. It’s a fine line to tread, however, and the recent additions to the newsfeed seem to …

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How to find Firefox easily in Task Manager

How to find Firefox easily in Task Manager

Often I need to kill firefox.exe so I’ve identified this simple way of finding it without having to sort alphabetically and scroll all the way down through reams of pointless, resource-sapping Windows processes (which are no doubt running “just in case” to shave 1 microsecond off an app I use every once 3 years… acrotray.exe, …

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Facebookster spam

Facebookster spam

Self-proclaimed Facebook development specialists Facebookster have been spamming blogs with a huge number of comments, including this one. It really isn’t a good sign for a company to be reduced to barely ethical means of marketing, especially when the Facebookster spam messages aren’t even relevant to the posts. It’s just blatant commercial spam. We need …

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Facebook to become more open?

Facebook to become more open?

Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network’s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company’s CEO said Wednesday. It’s already possible to take some data out of Facebook for use in third party applications (but not store it), but …

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The long tail of Facebook applications

The long tail of Facebook applications

This article from O’Reilly on the long tail of Facebook applications ties in with some of the comments I made on the Exponetic blog a few weeks ago comparing Web 1.0’s history with Facebook’s own progress. The key points are: Some applications are getting huge traffic The majority of applications aren’t Only 45 applications have …

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Rubik’s Cube still in the news

Rubik’s Cube still in the news

It’s good to see the Rubik’s Cube going strong after all these years. “Nakajima solved the classic 3×3 version of the six-coloured cube – which has nine squares on each side – with an average time of 12.46 seconds in five attempts.” “None were able to beat the world record of 9.86 seconds set by …

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It’s official: swallowing swords hurts your throat

It’s official: swallowing swords hurts your throat

The Ig Nobel awards are out, and a great collection of flagrant abuse of science they are too. My favourite is the awards in the linguistics category: “Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person …

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