Dear ordinary Facebook user. If you’re not a developer, or ‘social media guru’ you probably didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech last week; you probably haven’t read about the open graph protocol, and you probably haven’t tried out any of the new social plugins that Facebook have released. Because of this you may not be aware of some seemingly small changes that affect you more than you might think.
Here’s one: the ‘like’ button. This has become more than just a casual way to show your friends you think something is cool. It’s become more powerful for advertisers, more useful for Facebook, and for you … ? Read more…
I couldn’t find this information today when I needed, so I thought I’d share. If it’s in the Google maps documentation, then I missed it.
If you want to zoom a map to fit a particular distance as tightly as possible, you need to know the scale of each of the 19 levels. In metres per pixel, I worked them out to be as follows: Read more…
I joked yesterday about writing one omnibus tweet per week. But actually, that’s not a bad idea at my current blogging rate. So here goes, my week in the Twittersphere -
Always the punctual adopter, I joined Facebook around the end of 2007. Since then I’ve observed many tweaks to Facebook’s features, but not until recently when I set up a second account for work, did I really take notice of certain changes, especially those that relate to privacy and sharing of data.
If you don’t already know that I’m a huge cynic, then you will do shortly. I’m going to lay out my observations as factually as I can, but they will be tainted with my usual dose of suspicion, fear and resentment. Below is a list of feature creep that I’ve observed, but there is an underlying point. If you don’t want to read the list, just skip to the bit at the end.
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I’ve noticed a lot of Facebook privacy creep recently. I intend to go into more detail in my next post, but this week saw a new Facebook feature worth a special mention because some are commenting that it breaks Facebook’s privacy model. I ran my own test to see for myself that [-Spoiler warning-] it does a bit, but not as much as you might have feared. Read on and decide for yourself whether they are breaking their privacy assurances.