ajb{log} » Social Networks

Twitter Adds Cool Soccer Ball Icon to Status Updates With The #worldcup Hashtag

aj — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:23:35 +0000

Blog title says it all. Here’s a screenshot:

Cool huh?

Yahoo! acquires Xoopit. Shuts down its Gmail service.

aj — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:19:54 +0000

Here’s an announcement on their site:

Yahoo! acquires Xoopit.
Xoopit is joining Yahoo! to make the world’s best email even better.

Yahoo! will be integrating both our photo sharing applications and our content indexing and discovery technology into Yahoo! Mail and other services over the coming months.

Xoopit has emerged as a leader in mail applications, indexing and content discovery. Yahoo! has recognized that Xoopit’s technology elevates photos to the forefront of people’s everyday email experiences. Mail is the original online photo sharing experience, and combining these two products results in an evolved inbox experience. Yahoo! Mail users can expect to see their mail become even more efficient, social and fun!

The Xoopit team would like to thank our users for all the support and guidance in developing a service that people love. We would also like to thank our angels and venture investors, Charles Moldow from Foundation Capital and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta from Accel Partners for wisdom and commitment along the way!

The official announcement from Yahoo! can be found here.

Dear Xoopit team, I hope you’ll never share our Gmail account information to Yahoo! Thanks and looking forward to the Yahoo! Mail integration.

Technorati Tags: xoopit,gmail,yahoo,ymail,google

Google Reader’s FriendFeed Envy

aj — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:42:33 +0000

Google Reader just released new features such as people you can now follow, liking a post, grouping of people you follow, finding publicly shared items. Features seems familiar? Yes, you got it right. They’ve been features of FriendFeed for quite some time now.

Your move FriendFeed.

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed,Google,Google Reader

Liked this post? Subscribe to the feed

Thanks to Ted Roden of enjoysthin.gs

aj — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:46:37 +0000

Ted Roden of enjoysthin.gs sent me stickers last winter and I’ve totally forgot to thank him. Hey Ted, thanks for the stickers, and for the awesome effort! I really appreciate it. My notebook is “enjoying” them!

Send me your address and I’ll send some tokens your way.

Talk to you soon!

Visit Ted Roden’s blog, take a look at enjoysthin.gs and subscribe to his FriendFeed here. He’s really one cool guy!

Here’s my enjoysthin.gs and my FriendFeed is here.

New FriendFeed Beta is Live and Real-Time!

aj — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:19:47 +0000

The new FriendFeed beta is live and can be found at http://beta.friendfeed.com. It now sports a new look and feel. You have to see it for yourself!

Click here now

Twouble with Twitters

aj — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:24:14 +0000

“Twittering is just randomly bragging about your unexceptional life.”

Too funny to pass.

del.icio.us Tags: twitter,twouble

My Twitter Follower Mosaic

aj — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:10:23 +0000

Totally cool huh? Here’s where you can get it.

del.icio.us Tags: twitter,twitter mosaic,followers

Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined

aj — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:47:30 +0000

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
Over one petabyte of photo storage
Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

*Source: Wikipedia

del.icio.us Tags: facebook,statistics,cnet,petabyte,terabyte,jonathan heilieger,mark zuckerberg

My FriendFeed Stats (01.08.09)

aj — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:26:05 +0000

People I find interesting

Mona N.

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

People who finds me interesting

Morton Fox

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

There are tons of interesting people at FriendFeed. But these are the ones I highly recommend. They all have high-quality content on their feed.

del.icio.us Tags: friendfeed,interesting people,statistics

How To Find Your Google Profile And Search For Other Google Profiles

aj — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:17:33 +0000

I’ve been searching for a quick link to Google Profiles on Google.com and there really isn’t one that is obvious to the regular users. It’s actually buried in a help page from Google.

So, here is the link to your Google Profile, making it easy for everyone else who is having a hard time looking for it.

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me

Want to search for someone else’s profile on Google? Easy. Let’s say you are looking for Barack Obama’s Google Profile. Just go here…

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles?q=

…then simply enter “Barack Obama”.

That was easy right? Yeah I know, it’s pretty cool.

del.icio.us Tags: google profile,google profile search,barack obama

Interesting People at FriendFeed

aj — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:24:40 +0000

Here are the people I find interesting at FriendFeed

Mona N.

Cee Bee

l0ckergn0me

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Here are the awesome people who finds me interesting!

Morton Fox

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Cee Bee

(jeff)isageek

Who are yours?

del.icio.us Tags: friendfeed,interesting people

FriendFeed is down. The Interweb is broken! :(

aj — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:14:37 +0000

FriendFeed is down as of 4:10PM Central.

Update: It’s back up (4:40PM) yay!

Technorati Tags: friendfeed

Load Friendfeed Real-time Beta On Your Firefox Sidebar

aj — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:50:56 +0000

Friendfeed launched today a cool beta feature, Friendfeed Real-time. Here’s a quick tip on how to load Friendfeed Real-time on your Firefox sidebar:

1) Add this to your bookmark http://friendfeed.com/realtime?embed=1

2) Right-click the bookmark

3) Properties

4) Tick the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”

5) You’re done!

It should look like the screenshot below

Now you get the best of both worlds in FriendFeed. The standard view and real-time view at the same time.

Enjoy!

Tad’s Meme on FriendFeed

aj — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:30:56 +0000

Today is “Tad’s meme” day on Friendfeed.

Tad Donaghe started a simple spark posting a photo and a simple instruction “Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.” and guess what happened? It just spread like wildfire! Boy, it was a fun day at Friendfeed!

Here’s the photo that started it all:

And the rest followed…

(Click on the above image for the original size or you can visit the album here)

So, are you in this collage? I hope you are! Because we had a lot fun today at Friendfeed!

It was also a good day to push and leave the FriendFeed Beta!

UPDATE: Collage updated

Cleaner FriendFeed for FriendFeed Beta (Minor Improvements)

aj — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:53:59 +0000

Here are some options for minor improvements for the Cleaner FriendFeed Beta stylish style.

Here they are:

Extends the left sidebar’s width to fit your rooms:

#sidebar
{
width:160px !important;
}

Make changes to the font size of your rooms, friend grouping links to your preference:

#sidebar a:link, #sidebar a:visited
{
font-size: 12px !important;
}

Highlights the likes background to light pink

.likes
{
background-color: #FFEFE8 !important;
}

A screenshot of how a post item should look like after the update:

* Highlights likes with light yellow
* Highlights friends comments with light yellow
* Highlights your comments with powder blue
* Regular font color (gray) on comments from non-friends

Three Guys And A Hurricane On HurriCam

aj — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:53:59 +0000

While the powerful Gustav Hurricane Category 3 leaves Cuba, New Orleans residents already started to evacuate. Except for some people and three guys with a webcam.

I don’t know who they are but they are streaming live right now from New Orleans.

So, if you want to know what is happening at that part of the world, logon to their stream now and join the stream.

Just be safe guys and the rest of you out there at the path of Gustav.

Cleaner FriendFeed For The New FriendFeed Beta

aj — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:36:51 +0000

I’ve created a new userstyle.org + stylish version of my old Cleaner FriendFeed for the new FriendFeed Beta that was launched hours ago. Grab it here.

Here are the screenshots (before and after)

Before Cleaner FriendFeed

After (Cleaner FriendFeed Beta applied)

So what were the changes?

* Cleaner and cool look and feel (FriendFeed Beta is already clean, this makes it a lot cleaner)
* Different font style
* Highlights friends comments with baby yellow (instantly know that the user is already your friend)
* Highlights your comments with baby blue (it’s cool to see your own comments from river of comments. Looks good when you are a distance away your computer, makes your comment a marker in conversations)
* Dims comments from non-friends (normal color of FriendFeed comment)
* Separated each posts with a bottom border

This userstyle brings the FriendFeed conversation to another level by instantly letting you know…

1) Your own comment (Powder Blue)
2) Your friends comments (Light Yellow)
3) Your non-friends comments (Normal FriendFeed Comment Color)

As FriendFeed becomes popular, you’ll definitely need some kind of instant and attention grabbing color that catches your eyes and tell you where you left off in a conversation.

Hope you like it.

You can download/install it over here.

Preview The Uber Cool New FriendFeed Design

aj — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:43:17 +0000

Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit and the FriendFeed team broke the two month silence today launching the newly redesigned FriendFeed. VentureBeat spotted and reported this four days ago.

New features includes:

Friend List
Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups, get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Best of day and Best of week Summaries
A “best of” page for a friend lists shows you the most popular entries among people in the list for the day/week.

Enhanced Photo Posting
You can now upload photos with your posts. The photo uploader lets you select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required.

New sidebar link, favorite friends, groups, rooms and a lot more.

Head to http://beta.friendfeed.com and see the cool new FriendFeed!

Force FriendFeed To Refresh Your Tumblr Feed

aj — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:45:51 +0000

There are many ways you can refresh your feeds on FriendFeed. One of my favorite is Hao Chen’s “FriendFeed Refresh Feeds Button” userscript. However, if you are not a Greasemonkey fan or you simply do not use Firefox, there is a way to refresh a feed on FriendFeed.

I took Tumblr as an example for this post. So here goes… I just posted something at Tumblr and I can’t wait for FriendFeed to schedule the crawling of my feeds. Here are the quick steps to force FriendFeed to refresh it immediately:

1) Assuming you are already logged in, click on the “Share something” button (image)

2) Now, click on the “Import your stuff” link. No, you are not going to import your feed again.

3) Once you’ve done that, click on the feed that you want to be “refreshed”. In this case, I chose Tumblr. Click on it.

4) You will see something like this (below). Now click on the “Refresh feed” link.

5) You’re done! You should see the content now on your Friendfeed.

It should be noted that you shouldn’t abuse this functionality as it might put some stress on FriendFeed’s servers although I’m pretty sure they can handle it.

By the way, I am using the “Cleaner FriendFeed” userstyle in case you were wondering why I have a different look and feel. You can also use Cleaner FriendFeed. All you have to do is install the Stylish Firefox plugin then install the Cleaner FriendFeed userstyle.

Anyway, hope this helps someone today.

BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform

aj — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:09:56 +0000

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU plugins that adds distinct features and basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

The standard features of BuddyPress are as follows:

    * Extended Profiles
    * Personal Blog
    * Private Messaging
    * Friends
    * Groups
    * The Wire
    * Status Updates
    * Albums

Each one of the above is a separate plugin to that site admins can pick and choose which components they want.

Some more screenshots here:

Download and try it over here.

–aj