Of course it is!

And by the way, this whole new API and concept proves Twitter’s interest in a new self-owned datacenter. Heck, User Streams API needs a lot of bandwith and infrastructure. The world will be instant. Like, real instant or like, IM instant.

TNW did mention a kind of bug/problem related thing. New User Streams API will be useless for power users (read: Scoble and his friends). Either they (Twitter) should make the new API opt-in/opt-out with a Settings option — which is, I think, very likely to happen or Scoble and his friends should a) unfollow a ton of people b) setup new accounts (pointless, in my opinion).

There’s also a new concept. Again, TNW points it out. An idea of implementing Favorites into a built-in Retweet system (I imagine it as something like Flickr’s favorites which are now together with comments in comments format.).

I love favorites. Yes, I am the very single person after Scoble who favorites tweets. It’s very handy when I’m with my iPhone outside and see interesting tweets for great articles and stuff like this. It serves as an Instapaper for my Twitter. Yes, I know there’s Instapaper on Twitter for iPhone. Whatever..

As with Flickr, I’m against this new favorites implementation. I don’t see it as a Twitter’s “Like” button. I’m positive though, that the Twitter guys will surprise us. Or at least, I hope so.

Back on the real-time thingie. We’ll all like it. A lot. I was looking for a such upgrade since May or June, mainly on my Tweetie desktop client. During the summer I found out that I was desperately looking for it on Twitter for iPhone. So, guessing from my experiences and keeping in mind that you follow under 1,000 thousand people (I follow 540), I bet it will be great.

I’m just wondering how Twitter will solve — not only their’s — bandwith problem. I mean, being mobile with a data plan it’s ok nowadays but won’t Twitter for iPhone will fetch a lot of calls (read: MBs of your data plan in the long shot), especially if you follow a lot of people and they tweet like a thousand monkeys on keyboards. A good solution could be if Twitter would sum-up 5-10 tweets at a time and send them to you (if you’re mobile) in intervals. That’s a lot of nerd-talk in their geeky meetings I guess.

Conclusion

Straightforward: I like it. It will bring Twitter into the next level and I am sure about this. There’s a small technical problem that can be easily hacked-around. Do you think that will, the new User Stream API indeed bring Twitter in the next level? Oh and by the way, you should follow me, I’m @apas.

Αν και είναι μόνο η αρχή, είμαστε ήδη 4 άτομα. Ο Δημήτρης και ο Γιώργος που είχαν την ιδέα, παρέα με τον Γιάννη και εμένα. Όπως είπα, μιας και είναι αρχή, ίσως προσέξεις κάποια λαθάκια, ίσως κάποια άρθρα δεν βγάζουν νόημα, ίσως ίσως ίσως… Το παλεύουμε όμως και ελπίζουμε σε μερικές μέρες να έχουμε συντονιστεί πλήρως, παρόλο που είναι Καλοκαίρι!

Για οποιαδήποτε ερώτηση, πρόβλημα, απορία, γενικά για τα πάντα μπορείς να επικοινωνήσεις μαζί μας στο team@tutz.gr. Αν ενδιαφέρεσαι για συνεργασία θα χαρούμε να σε έχουμε μαζί μας, αρκεί να επιλέξεις μια κατηγορία! Ακόμη, αν έχεις κάποιο πρόβλημα ή θες βοήθεια για κάτι που σε παιδεύει στον υπολογιστή σου, θα χαρούμε να σε βοηθήσουμε. Το μόνο που χρειάζεται να κάνεις είναι να μας στείλεις ένα email στο requests@tutz.gr!

Καλή μας αρχή!

—
[via]
Το έκανα κατευθείαν copy το post από τον Γιώργο μιας και το περιέγραψε πολύ καλά.

This might be a trend — or an effect on people from the notorious Privacy problems. Well, to admit it, I had a fully customized profile. A selected few could see my wall, write, comment, etc while others could not see all of my photos — just some albums in most cases. I had also a list of “friends-I-don’t-know”, who could only see, let’s say, my profile picture.

I was “evangelizing” Privacy settings to my friends. Most of them didn’t care, others looked like “Oh, that’s interesting. I’ll do it.” And from the guys who did not care some of them are asking me how to customize Privacy now. That being said, I don’t think Privacy was an issue for the masses. People didn’t care or didn’t know — that’s exactly were Zuck was and is betting on. Unawareness.

A little bit off-topic: There’s an interesting thought that this “opting-out Facebook” thing is something like a “being alternative” trend — being against masses. Being not “hip” or something. That could evolve into peer-pressure later (in a few months — under a year) — more on peer-pressure in a minute.

The masses will never deactivate/delete their Facebook all-together. They’ll never care for privacy (admit it, we, only the geeks care for such things or evangelize them and so on). They’ll never care why “Like” and not “Fan”. They’ll never care about what technologies are being used by Facebook. They’ll never care why Facebook evolves that way (if they know why Facebook evovles in the first place from a plain soc. net. to a all-things-social-we-control-your-internet thing). They’ll never do something out of the ordinary. In fact, they are bound to one another. Heck, that’s why they’re a mass in first place!

My guess, if there’s any way to achieve or even understand why will ever (if they, honestly) move out from Facebook in masses, this is peer-pressure. Imagine something like a tsunami wave of influences spread very fast. I quit, you quit, he quit. Oh, another one has just quited. This series of events — chain reactions will affect them. They’ll start eventually saying “Uh, oh, something’s going on here. Everyone’s leaving. Nothing else to do here alone, I’ll leave too.” Obviously, this is a pure “early-adopters vs. laggards” concept — and answers both to the “why” and “how” of the question “Why and how teens move out from Facebook.”

But yet again this is, in my opinion, very unlikely to happen. As I can see and observe from friends and people I know, most of the Facebook users are kind of Facebook addicts. But if the thing starts rolling, that equals too a pretty much decent number of people moving out, it won’t stop. Picture this.

Now, picture Diaspora. This is what I am waiting for. This is something really cool. Personally controlled, do-it-all, distributed open-source social network. I pray that it will have easy-to-install packages and installation in general, so it can attract the non-early-adopter geeks, aka the masses and the mainstream. I think this is a good way for pushing peer-pressure. I think Diaspora can become the tipping point, the change for many users.

We’ll see. We cannot predict, we cannot be sure.

What do you think? What’s your opinion about the “why” and the “how” of teens —or in general people— abandoning Facebook?

PS.: I’m 17.

PS. 2: This is post is basically my thoughts on “Why many teens are moving from Facebook” post by eMarketer and the reason why I wrote it, is to publish my thoughts as an ex-Facebook teen. Oh, and by the way, eMarketer’s post is definitely a good piece of read.

So, this is the new design.

Some quick facts

They’ll be rolling out the fresh features to the entire Flickr audience in the coming weeks but there’s also a beta opt-in (just visit a photo page and follow the 1-click-instructions atop). Photos will now be displayed with a larger 640 pixel wide size — plus the photo page will be a bit wider.

The photo owner, dates taken, camera, and location (with a great Yahoo! Maps implementation) of the photo are all within easy reach to the top-right of the image. They’ve reorganized all of the helpful features that we already know into a handy Actions menu.

There’s also a brand new light box view to spotlight your photos (no need now for 3rd party sites). Favorites integration into the photo’s comments. Finally, improved navigation controls and performance on the photo page (yes, it is faster).

And some thoughts

I’d prefer the old-school buttons above the photo and not the new reorganized shiny bling bling thingie. These buttons were something like a trademark for Flickr, don’t you think? I don’t like the idea that all actions will be packed under a drop-down menu with more submenus and clicks. The photo page has become wider — so, why change the famous buttons?

The new “sidebar-like” structure with the photo owner, dates taken, camera, and location of the photo, all within reach to the right of the image is great. I mean, I like it a lot. There seems to be a bug, though. My photos were taken using an iPhone 3GS and not 3G.

The light box vew is ultra fast. Like, ultra fast multiplied by fast. The next/previous works absolutely great and the one-click enable/disable is quite of a cool concept.

Obviously, last but not least, the new width of the photos is very handy. More detail, more pixel love combined with Flickr photo quality equals more fun using the website.

Summing up

• Things I did like: new sidebar structure & layout, lightbox feature, larger photo width
• Things I didn’t like: new “Actions” menu, 3G/3GS bug, favorites-in-comments appearance

Did you opt-in for the beta? Do you like the new Flickr redesign or care to share some thoughts? Feel free to comment.

Update: Also the home page is redesigned (click for original size)

1. Tumblr

Εάν έχεις ένα tumblelog, τότε αυτό το bookmarlet θα το ξέρεις ήδη. Αν όχι, δεν ξέρεις τι έχανες τόσο καιρό. Το βρίσκεις εδώ.

2. Subscribe at Google Reader

Το bookmarlet που δίνει η Google για instant add στα feeds του Reader. Θα το βρεις στα Settings του Google Reader στο tab “Goodie”. Είναι το τελευταίο (Subscribe as you surf).

3. Posterous

Πολύ χρήσιμο και αυτό — ίδια λειτουργία με αυτού του Tumblr. Το βρίσκεις εδώ.

4. Instapaper

Instapaper ή αλλιώς read me later. Άλλες φορές η βιασύνη, άλλες η έλλειψη όρεξης, το Instapaper αναλαμβάνει να αποθηκεύσει το άρθρο σε ένα to-read list. Σε περίπτωση που δεν το ήξερες, όλα αυτά από εδώ.

5. Readability

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your browser.

In fact, it’s piece of cake. You don’t have to know anything about PHP or CSS.

Step 1: your Comments loop

Every WordPress theme supports comments. That equals to a comments.php file in your theme directory. Open it and find the the foreach and endforeach loop (it might look something like this:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?> and <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>.)

Now, place this code everywhere inside this loop:

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); } ?>

The “50″ string or whatever in this code is your Gravatar’s photo size. You can edit it so it suits your theme’s design or your own likes.

Step 2: Style the Gravatar

By now, Gravatars won’t be styled (left, right, padding, etc). We will do it with a simple CSS code snippet. You probably have noticed that the Gravatar code spits out the “avatar” class on each image. Why not tell now the CSS to float the image left and add a small right margin. Open your style.css file of your WordPress theme and add this line of code:

img.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px;}

This is it!

There you go! Simple and efficient Gravatar implementation to your WordPress comments. Of course themes will differ, you can style them however you like using CSS. (Hint: this code will only work on WordPress 2.5 and above; but I assume everyone now uses at least 2.9.2 so it won’t be a problem.)

More info about Using Gravatars at the WordPress Codex.

Having problems? Do you want to suggest a different workaround? Feel free to comment.

DIY Powder is the product of an idea which did hit my mind a week before. Creating a simple & cool WordPress blog about ski movies and focusing on diy and indy ones.

I installed the WordPress the other day and yesterday started and finished with the development of the blog. Found an excellent theme by Tudinh, called Equilibrium and suits perfectly. I recommend it a thousand times.

If you’re into skiing or the outdoors in general, subscribe on DIY Powder’s feed. Feedback is always welcomed, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Spread the world people! Keep riding & happy blogging!

Thanks to Hostgator too, for such an excellent hosting and giving me unlimited subdomains with just under €4/month.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Web 3.0 must & will be the future, the evolve from Web 2.0. Location will not play anymore a core-role as it’s been fragmented already. We have built tons of geo-loc enabled applications that satisfy every need, thus now we need to link data. As Sir Tim-Berners Lee said in his TED talk: “Open your data, open your data!”

We need to make computers understand all of an item’s connections with other things/people/everything. That’s trillions of trillions of collections. Here we get to the question as Clay Shirky puts it:

I’ve often joked that the Semantic Web is a witness protection program for AI researchers. That what the Semantic Web held out was the possibility that instead of making machines think like people, we could describe the world in terms that machines were good at thinking about. So we would switch from trying to build up brains in silicon, and instead rerender the actual world as information. And that gets very quickly to one of the deepest, you know, questions in all of Western philosophy, which is: Does the world make sense? Or do we make sense of the world? I don’t think you can unambiguously describe the world. I don’t think you can describe the world, or even large subdomains of the world, in a way that all observers or even most observers will agree with.

You see, this is very tricky.

What do you think? Is Semantic Web real possible in computing or even in philosophical terms, or it is not?

Το μόνο ερώτημα που έχουν να απαντήσουν οι τύποι του Foursquare είναι «Πολλά λεφτά και μέρος μιας εταιρείας ή περισσότερα λεφτά και startup για πολλά περισσότερα λεφτά αργότερα;» όπως το έθεσε ο Στέφανος. Κανείς δεν ξέρει, ίσως μόνο αυτοί.

Το θέμα είναι εάν εξαγοραστούν, θα πρέπει (και θα θέλουμε) να συνεχίσουν το creative development και να μην γίνουν just-another-bought-startup. Να συνεχίσουν να πέφτουν new ideas. Δηλαδή, να αγοραστούν μόνο και μόνο για το background help μιας μεγάλης εταιρείας, να την έχουν σαν big advantage. Βέβαια, αυτό ίσως περιορίσει την «ελευθερία» τους ως προς το τι μπορούν να φτιάξουν και τι όχι. Αλλά αυτό φυσικά θα το δουν στο συμβόλαιο.

Από την άλλη, αν μείνουν on their own, θα τρέχουν πάλι από πίσω τα χρήματα μέσω VC funds που έτσι και αλλιώς οι investors είναι πολλοί, άρα θεωρητικά money flows and is no problem. Και φυσικά θα έχουν όλη την ελευθερία του κόσμου να προγραμματίσουν ό,τι θελήσουν και όπως το θελήσουν.

Εν τω μεταξύ ο ανταγωνισμός αυξάνεται. Gowalla και Loopt έχουν μπει και αυτοί στο παιχνίδι. Την μάχη φαίνεται να την κερδίζει όμως το Foursquare και δεύτερο να φτάνει το Gowalla. Εάν το Foursquare γίνει κομμάτι μιας μεγάλης εταιρείας ίσως επικρατήσει ακόμη πιο εύκολα — βέβαια, ο ανταγωνισμός θα πέσει, εκτός αν εξαγοραστεί και το Gowalla. Τότε θα μπορούμε να μιλάμε και για μονοπώλιο του Foursquare στα location services.

Yahoo!, Microsoft και Facebook φαίνεται να είναι οι επικρατέστεροι. Προσωπικά πιστεύω η Yahoo! και Microsoft είναι πιθανότεροι εξαγοραστές ή αλλιώς VC funds. Εάν όμως φτάσουμε στο σημείο να αγοραστεί το Foursquare από το Facebook τότε θα μιλάμε για το απόλυτο internet domination από τον Zuck και την παρέα του. Όμως όχι και τόσο απίθανο.

We’ll see.

I came with the idea of using the Like button as a post-to-Facebook button, something like share but renewed and with the “like” keyword in it’s description. It serves two aspects: the act of liking the post and the act of sharing the post.

In the short, I wanted to embed the Like code in my single.php file in order to appear below each post the same way Sociable plugin works and when someone clicks on it to like, share+post the specific post into Facebook.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out of the box.

The thing is that when you try to create the Like button via iFrame or the Javascript SDK you are prompted to enter a URL that Like will prompt users to “like” and post to their Facebook’s profile. The URL itself is dummy. That means it’s not dynamical. Wherever you will put the Like button it just will like+share+post the URL you typed before (in my case, http://apas.gr/).

In fact, the workaround of this problem is very easy — and you probably thought it already by now.

The Like code looks something like this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?
        href=http://example.com">
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

Instead of giving a statical http:// URL, why not give inside it a WordPress PHP tag called

<?php the_permalink() ?>

This PHP tag will, everytime, give the Like button the permalink URL of the specific post the visitor reads. Isn’t it cool?

So, your code have to look something like this now:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?
        href=<?php the_permalink() ?>">
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

I found it very useful and fun to workaround this little problem. Do you know or can you think of other useful ways of using the new Social Plugins? Feel free to comment below!

P.S.: You can see the custom Like button in action a few pixels below this post.

The Social Graph is dead, long live Open Graph

But what exactly is the Open Graph? Until now, we all know the Social Graph. Well, Open Graph is Facebook’s huge social graph combined with the social graphs of other, third-party services and networks (like Yelp, as Zuck said — they didn’t mention Foursquare at all by the way).

It’s a semantically-aware, more open and social graph. In other words, a huge, combined, connected, immersive graph. Welcome, the Open social graph.

Scoble, is eventually proven right today with his last year’s post about the Facebook phases. We’re in the 6th one, moving to the 7th.

What backs up the new Open Graph?

Social Plugins Open Graph API & Protocol, as Zuck explained. New plugins and APIs are available to be added in your website with just a line of HTML.

The Open Graph Protocol is a new Semantic markup, something like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="Green Day" />

(don’t tell anyone, Green Day suck)

Plugins are the new Like, Activity feed, Login boxes and a bunch more little things that we add to our websites. The API is just what back-ups everything.

A great win

Facebook today said to all of us: resistance is futile. Their new platform is beyond awesome. If you can spell “new Internet” then you can spell Facebook, too. A powerful, yet simple platform for everyone to use. It can be the basis for great things in the future. With Open Graph, they just killed Twitter’s @anywhere platform announced at Chirp days ago. Facebook wants the whole internet connected with it. They beat Google with this now, they beat Twitter, they beat everyone. Quoted from Zuckerberg,

We’re building towards the web, where every application is social.

In only the first hour after the launch, Facebook will server 1 billion (1,000,000,000 — that’s huge!) new Like button clicks.

The whole thing starts to make sense now. That’s why Facebook didn’t want to open it’s public timeline.

What about Privacy though?

Facebook is like wanting to know every data about you and the world, in the whole wide Internet. Admit it, they’re very good at it.

They are going to personalize the Internet. They can. That’s what they do —  they do this now.

Also Facebook is showing the path to the future of APIs: iFrame for dummies and REST+JSON for the rest of the world. Perfect balance, or not?

Personally, I don’t want Facebook, when I click to Like something or to become a Fan or edit my interests, etc in my profile, to throw them up to this open platform or even to show them in public search, as they announced.

My profile is private, only I want to select the people (even websites) that will have access to it. I don’t want my Facebook data publicly available. You have to respect that Facebook. On the other hand, Twitter you’re good to go and make the Open Graph your way.

Thoughts on FOG

Well, this is a giant step forward. Facebook now kicks the competition with Google and Twitter. And at this point, they seem to win big time. If you don’t get it: Facebook basically told us they plan to take over the entire Internet. Disappointingly, they have a very good plan for it. They kick the whole Internet, it’s openness, neutrality, diversity and hacker culture in the butt. Seriously, not that of a cool thing to do, but they can.

They try to make Internet a monopoly. That’s a dislike for me.

A monopoly, that’s against the open hacker internet community. Open data my ass, Facebook. That’s open ad data. Seriously, I mean this.

One Graph to rule them all. All your base belong to us. Or to put it in a better way, all our base belong to them.

But in the end of the day, it won’t affect the 14-15-16-17-year-all teens that use Facebook in Greece and in the world? Will it? Nah.

Για να είστε εδώ κατά πάσα πιθανότητα ξέρετε ή και χρησιμοποιείτε το Foursquare. Όμως πιθανότατα δεν ξέρετε για το Plancast. Ένα startup που θεωρείτε από πολλούς εκεί έξω στην Αμερική το μέλλον των Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt και λοιπών. Επίσης δεν ξέρετε ότι ήδη μετράει κάποιους μήνες ζωής και ανεβάζει ρυθμούς, αναπτύσσεται και ετοιμάζεται να προστεθεί στα location services που χρησιμοποιούμε χωρίς να θέλει να αντικαταστήσει κάποιο υπάρχον — εδώ είναι που καινοτομεί.

Και αυτό γιατί το Plancast δεν το νοιάζει που είσαι τώρα, αλλά που θα είσαι μετά. Τι σκοπεύεις να κάνεις, που και με ποιόν χωρίς να είναι ο Μεγάλος Αδερφός. Με άλλα λόγια, το Plancast είναι a way to easily broadcast your plans to your online social circle ή ακόμη καλύτερα is a service for sharing your upcoming plans with friends. It’s a social calendar of sorts.

Επιβεβαιώνοντας το KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) background, ήρθε για να πετύχει. Μέσω μιας εξαιρετικά απλής διαδικασίας εγγραφής, Facebook & Twitter connect μέχρι το πρώτο plan που ετοιμάζεις — όπως και όταν θες να κάνεις το δικό σου slick online presence webpage — το Plancast σε κερδίζει από την πρώτη στιγμή.

Δεν στηρίζεται στην επισημότητα, για αυτόν ακριβώς τον λόγο ήρθε για να μείνει. Σε αντίθεση με το Facebook και το RSVP του, το Plancast με ένα απλό “Count me in” σε φέρνει ένα βήμα πιο κοντά στα upcoming social σχέδια σου. Αφήνει στην άκρη τα Upcoming, Going, Google Calendars και άλλα γιατί πολύ απλά αυτά είναι event-centric — δεν μπορείς να γράψεις & δεν έχει νόημα να γράψεις εάν θα βγεις με φίλους έξω, εάν θα πας να δεις μια ταινία στο σινεμά, ενώ το Plancast είναι ακριβώς προσανατολισμένο σε αυτόν τον σκοπό. Δεν λείπουν όμως και τα big events όπως το SXSW στο San Fransisco, όπου έχουν δημιουργηθεί από έναν χρήστη και όλοι απλά κλικάρουν στο “Count me in”.

Αν και δεν τους αρέσει ο όρος event,

“We shy away from using the term “events” because we don’t feel it’s very appropriate for the scope of activity we’re trying to capture. While our users may be interested in posting more formal, organized parties and whatnot to Plancast (and we certainly encourage them to), we want them to also feel completely comfortable sharing more informal plans (getting drinks, seeing a movie, going to the zoo, traveling to new york for a week, attending a conference, etc).”

όπως μας λέει ο Mark Hendrickson, ένας από τους 3 πίσω από το Plancast και blogger του ΤechCrunch μέχρι και το Φθινόπωρο όπου παραιτήθηκε για να δουλέψει αποκλειστικά στο startup του.

Το μόνο που του λείπει yet, είναι η mobile εκδοχή ή καλύτερα ένα iPhone και Αndroid app. Σύμφωνα όμως και πάλι με τον Μark Hendrickson, το iPhone app ετοιμάζεται και θα είναι σύντομα κοντά μας.

Ρίξτε του μια ματιά — τουλάχιστον, αξίζει.

Μπορείτε να βρείτε τα upcoming plancasts μου εδώ.