Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I’ve posted another Facebook development article: Using the FacebookRestClient Class’ “Event” Methods, Part 1, in which I look at the events_get method of the PHP FacebookRestClient class.
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July 2007
“I felt a great disturbance in the force,” goes Obi-Wan Kenobi’s line from Star Wars: A New Hope, “As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror. Then were suddenly silenced.”
If you just heard those voices, here’s why: as of this writing, Facebook is “temporarily unavailable”. And just when I’m testing out the code for part two of the tutorial article series I’m working on…
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Here’s a story contributed by Dave Stolte who wrote in to BoingBoing:
I have a caveat emptor to top them all. I purchased an iPhone on opening day to use in lieu of a cumbersome laptop while traveling in Ireland and England for two weeks in early July. AT&T promises “easy, affordable, and convenient plans” in their advertising… turns out I got two out of three.
On the way to the airport, I activated the per-use international roaming data plan – the only one offered to me. The rep quoted me $.005 per KB but did not disclose what that would translate to in layman’s language (i.e., X amount per e-mail, X amount per web page, etc.). I’m a web developer as part of my career and I couldn’t even tell you how many KB the average web page is, no less a text message to my son, an e-mail with a photo to my mother, or a quick check of Google Maps. That’s part one of the trap. However, I now pay $40 per month for unlimited data usage on the iPhone, so really — how much could it be? $100 at the most, right?
Keep reading.
As we know, the iPhone can’t be unlocked to use a European provider’s SIM card for more reasonable rates while traveling. There’s part two of the trap.
To be safe, I went online to My Account at AT&T a couple days into the trip and again a week later and was told “usage data is currently unavailable”… and that’s part three. I had no way of knowing specific usage data until I received my bill over the last weekend.
A bill for $3000.
There’s more — click here for the full story.
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The obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I work for Tucows, where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist.
From Shareware to Solutions
The Tucows site — that is the one at tucows.com, the original site where the company got its start as being a place to download shareware — has undergone a big makeover. Here’s a screenshot:
Click the screenshot to visit Tucows.com.
Back when the company got started in the early 90s, finding software online was difficult. Search engines were just in their infancy, 28.8 kbps modems were considered fast and it actually made sense to publish magazines and even books simply cataloging sites and software that you could find online. During this era, Tucows and a number companies found a niche as places where you could find and download software as well as see reviews.
In the age of high-speed connections, Google search, AdSense and that amorphous thing called Web 2.0, the “shareware site” approach doesn’t make as much sense. I download many of my applications directly from the vendor, and number of other apps I use exist as web applications.
In spite of the technological changes since Tucows’ early days — when processor power was measured double-digit megahertz and there was less RAM in my machine than in my present-day key fob — one thing remains: people are still asking “How can I do this using my computer?”
The new Tucows site aims to be a place online where you can go to find solutions to your computer and internet questions and problems. By “solution”, we mean anything that solves your problem. Sometimes it’s software that you can download. Sometimes it’s a web application or site. Sometimes it’s a set of steps that you can follow.No matter what the solution may be, we want to be the place where you can find it.
A Quick Tour
If you visit Tucows.com, the first thing you’ll see, right near the top of the page is the Search solutions & software box, where you can start your search quickly.
Click the screenshot to visit Tucows.com.
If you’re not sure of what to search for or prefer browsing through solutions, there’s a list of popular and recent solutions just below the search box:
Click the screenshot to visit Tucows.com.
Clicking on a solution title takes you to the page for the solution, which may provide download links, links to site or an article, depending on the solution:
Click the screenshot to visit Tucows.com.
You don’t need to sign up for an account, but if you do, you can also rate and comment on solutions:
Click the screenshot to visit Tucows.com.
With an account, not only can you offer your feedback on an existing solution, you can also submit your own.
Give the new Tucows.com a try!
For More…
- Tucows Gets Social, the Original Software Download Site, Launches Radical Redesign: the official announcement of the site’s re-vamp.
- A screencast featuring the new site, featuring me and Greg Weir, our Director of Content Services. [Length: 8 minutes, 10 seconds]
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It was the geek party trick of the evening. I was standing by the beer fridge at Friday’s b5media office-warming party when someone asked where the bottle opener was. Not seeing one in sight, Chris whipped out his Blackberry and used it to open a beer bottle. I had my camera handy and shot this video:
Chris says that Blackberries are tough. Once, in a fit of anger, he hurled his Blackberry into his truck — he cracked his windshield, but the Blackberry was unahrmed. After opening a couple of beer bottles, he showed me his Blackberry: it had some gouge marks where it had made contact with the bottlecap, but it was working just fine.
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Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, two of the people behind Pownce.
Photo taken from the New York Times.
“JUST now, the hottest startup in Silicon Valley — minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors — is Pownce,” says the New York Times article A Social-Networking Service with a Velvet Rope, “but only a chosen few can try out its Web site.”
If after reading the article, you have that empty feeling inside — a feeling that can be filled only by a Pownce membership — I may have just what you need. I’ve got 10 invitations to Pownce! Be one of the first ten people to email me at joey [at-sign] globalnerdy [period] com with a request for a Pownce invite and I’ll send one to you after I come back from dinner tonight.
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Anyone Remember “Mainframe”?
See the guy on the right? That’s Mainframe, the computer specialist for the good guys in the animated TV series G.I. Joe. In case you’re not familiar with the character, you might want to consult this page on the JoeBattlelines site, which gives you his full bio.
Since this character was created in the 1980s, well before geek chic and internet cool, he didn’t get the respect that was afforded to other soldiers in the elite paramilitary force code-named G.I. Joe:
That’s okay — Mainframe didn’t get into computers for the respect. He got into computers for the chicks.
Mainframe was one of the better characters that the G.I. Joe creative team came up with; far, far better than, say, turning Walter “The Fridge” Perry into a member of the team, complete with signature weapon: a football on a chain. Really.
You Can Be Mainframe!
Well, sort of. If you’ve got some weapon skills and can code Ajax, Ajaxian points to a US$200K-paying job that might be right for you. Here’s a quick run-down:
Title: Web Developer Salary: $200K plus DOE Taxes: No Federal taxes taken out for the contractors that accept a 12 month. (6 month contractors will have taxes taken out) Location: Iraq Start date: ASAP with 2 weeks training (one in Washington DC and another in Ft. Bening GA) # of Openings: 1 Summary: A principal Department of Defense agency is looking for programmers, developers or coders to code, support field deployment and maintenance of a new database application which will be used by Army units in Iraq. Scope These are full-time positions (12/7) located at one of the major US Bases in IRAQ. Deployment will be period of 6-12 months. Training on the application software will begin prior to deployment and will take place in Virginia. These positions are available for full time employment or for independent contractors. These positions are available now.
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If you were looking for a quick and easy way to get started developing Facebook applications (perhaps you’re attending the upcoming Facebook Developer Garage/Camp in Toronto), you’re in luck: I’ve written the first of a number of articles that tackle that topic. Head on over to the Tucows Developer Blog and check out Getting Started with Facebook Application Development.
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Click this logo to see the event’s Facebook page.
Click this logo to see the event’s wiki page.
It’s the event so anticipated that it had to have more than one name. Whether you call it Facebook Developer Garage Toronto [this links to its Facebook page] or Facebook Camp Toronto [this links to its wiki page], so many Toronto-based developers have expressed an interest in attending that they had to change to a larger venue.
Originally scheduled to take place at No Regrets Cafe and Restaurant (home of a number of DemoCamp Toronto events), Facebook Garage/Camp will now take place at the MaRS Centre (101 College Street, Toronto, just east of Queen’s Park subway station). The event takes place on Tuesday, August 7, 2007, formally starts at 6:30 p.m. and the schedule is listed below:
Facebook Garage/Camp Description and Schedule
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Please join us to thrash out Facebook Platform: share ideas, troll for partners on your latest project, check out app demonstrations, seek developer support direct from Facebook Developers, or just socialize with people like you.
The Facebook Platform Team will give an introduction to Platform, discuss best practices around product design & viral marketing techniques, and hold a technical Q&A.
Please come ready to share, participate, and absorb new ideas along with other Facebook app developers.
- 6:00 – Social/Mingling
- 6:30 – Introduction by Colin Smillie Roy Pereira and Andrew Cherwenka
- 6:40 – Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing (Meagan Marks, Facebook.com)
- 7:30 – Anatomy of a Facebook Application (Jay Goldman and Michael Glenn, Radiant Core)
- 7:50 – FBML Overview (Sunil Boodram, Trapeze Media)
- 8:10 – FQL Overview (Craig Saila)
- 8:30 – Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners)
- 8:50 – Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo)
- 9:00 – Demo: Carpool by Zimride (Rajat Suri)
- 9:10 – Demo: Ogrant by Shachin Ghelani
- 9:20 – Wrap-up and drinks
The event is free to the public, but they do request that you sign up for the event. The problem is that there are currently two sign-up rosters — one on the Facebook page and one on the wiki page. If you’d like to attend, I suggest that you sign up on both.
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A Brief History of Payola
See the gentleman on the left? That’s Alan Freed, the “Father of Rock and Roll”. As a radio DJ and music television show host in the 50′s, he popularized the term “Rock and Roll”, turning it from an obscure euphemism for sex into a household phrase for a music genre. He helped break the color barrier in music, introducing America to acts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
His career and reputation were destroyed in the (painfully-named) Payola scandal, in which he accepted bribes from record companies to give their records more airplay. Dick Clark’s career was almost destroyed as well, but by cooperating with the authorities and selling off his share of a record company, he was able to have the charges against him reduced to a slap on the wrist.
(Freed, unable to find much work in the wake of the scandal, turned to alcohol and died of cirrhosis in 1965.)
Payola still exists today, thanks to a legal loophole. Rather than going directly to radio stations, record companies hire “indies” (independent promoters, not independent labels) to promote their albums — and by promote, I mean “provide payment as inducement to play their albums”. For more on the relationships between record companies, indies and radio stations, see this How Stuff Works article.
Radio: Bad for the Recording Industry?
Here’s a report from Techdirt earlier today:
Remember a few months back when the RIAA started asking the government to get radio stations to pay up for promoting their music? This seemed pretty ludicrous (especially when you add in the fact that record labels for years have paid radio stations via payola to get them to play their music in the first place). Well, the group organized by the RIAA to push this plan has found a professor to publish a study saying that radio actually makes people buy less music. This way, they can claim that radio actually is not a promotional medium for music.
Techdirt asks the question and I repeat it: If radio is bad for music as the RIAA says, why have record companies been bribing radio stations all these years?
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Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
For reference, see:
- Michael Geist in the Toronto Star — Time to revamp mobile Internet pricing
- Michael Geist — Canada’s Communications Outlook: Average at Best
- Thomas Purves — Canada Worse than 3rd World Countries when it comes to Mobile Data Access
- Information Echo — A Collossal Ripoff – Mobile Data in Canada
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Image created using the Tombstone Generator.
The younger set aren’t communicating via email, according to this c|net Digital Kids news story:
Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.
“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.
“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.
Reading this, I was reminded of danah boyd’s presentation, My Friends, MySpace at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. One of the points she made that stuck out in my head is that young people see email as a medium for communicating with people for have power over them: parents, school officials, employers, college admissions boards — in other words, “The Man”.
The use of social networking software rather than email for communications means that there’s some Balkanization going on, with users of each social networking app unable to send messages to friends on other social networking apps. The article points out that this problem may in fact be an opportunity:
…Ashley Qualls, president of WhateverLife, a graphical tool for users of MySpace, said she keeps adding on new social networks to her roster of memberships online. “People leave a trail of where they decide to go,” she said.
Badshah said that to subscribe to only one social network means losing out on friendships with people who are active on other rival social networks. That’s because having real estate on MySpace or Facebook means keeping tabs with only certain friends through messaging, blogs and recent photos. That the two major social networks don’t interoperate could be reason for a new social network that could act as an intermediary to aggregate friends in one place, Badshah said, much the way Trillian did for IM applications like Yahoo and AOL.
“It’s a problem for teens–you’re like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one,” he said.
“To have all your buddy lists in one place, that’s where this is going,” Badshah said.
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Tucows will be in Chicago at HostingCon 2007, which starts today (Monday, July 23rd) and runs until Wednesday, July 25th at Navy Pier. HostingCon bills itself as “the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world” and for more details about the conference, check our their conference program.
We’ll be making our presence known there — I won’t be there, but my coworkers Kim, Leona, Adam and Hasdeep will. Be sure to keep an eye out for squishy cows and…
Our Booth
We’ll have a booth in the exhibitors’ hall — booth 817, which is right beside the networking lounge. Feel free to come chat with us about our new Email Service, Premium Domains and other upcoming things from Tucows.
You can look for booth 817 on the official HostingCon map or use our slightly customized one below to find us:
Our Session: Rethinking Domain Name Search
This Wednesday, July 25th, from 3:30 – 4:15 p.m. in room 109, Product Manager for Domains Adam Eisner will be making his presentation, Rethinking Domain Name Search.
Here’s the description of his presentation:
With the rise of the domain name aftermarket, many expired names never return to the public for repurchase. This, combined with the fact most web hosting companies don’t provide an effective domain name search feature on their website, results in many lost sales opportunities for domain names, web hosting, email and more.
This session will show web hosts how to “re-think” their website’s domain name search strategy in response to market developments like better name suggestion technology, fewer available names, and the rise of the domain name aftermarket. The strategies outlined and demonstrated will help web hosts obtain tangible improvements in their domain name and web hosting sales.
Topics covered will include:
- How to improve sales by improving your existing domain name search process (using tangible examples)
- Maximizing the number of relevant results provided using name suggestion technology
- Using domain name aftermarket to ensure customers receive the most relevant domain name availability results possible
Come on out and say hello!
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One area of user interface development that could stand some improvement is spell-checking. I’m not aware of any widely-used system for spell-checking a web application’s template or resource files, but good spelling certainly helps an app look more professional.
The latest spelling mistake in an application I’ve seen comes from the “Edit App” page for Facebook developers. One of the fields on the page lets you specify the “Canvas Page URL”, the URL within apps.facebook.com where your app can be found. It uses Ajax to give you instant feedback as to whether the URL is available or not as you type — but the word “Available” is misspelled:
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In the most recent posting on Jeff Atwood’s excellent developer blog Coding Horror, the question is posed:
Why does the Mac require the user to jump through a bunch of manual hoops to install an application? Why not use a traditional installer (a.k.a. setup.exe) that automates this manual work for you?
Rather than get into the details of the debate in the comments to that article over the ease of installing apps on the Mac the manual way, let me instead show you Jing’s answer to the question:
(I wrote about Jing in the last post.)
The Jing approach is to give you two options:
- The incredibly easy way: Double-click the installer script and you’ll be shown this a dialog box that tells you that you’re about to initiate an action that will:
- Copy Jing to the Applications folder
- Eject the disk image
- Start Jing
- The traditional manual way, in which you drag the app to the Applications folder. An alias to the Applications folder is provided, so you don’t have to open another Finder window.
No options dialog boxes, no EULAs, no extraneous messages for the purposes of marketing — just install and go.
I think it’s a good solution. What say you, Jeff?
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