Thursday, July 31, 2008

New Facebook design...

About a week ago Facebook started given its users the option to switch over to the new Facebook design, now I had already seen it and used as I'm a developer on Facebook and had to test out how my applications were working or not working on the new design.

So I happily switched across last week and was enjoying the new design and the use of AJAX throughout most of the site when I started to notice quite a few irritating bugs!

The first irritating bug was that if someone sent me a message I couldn't read it, I could get into my inbox but no further (thought that Facebook would have defintely tested this one before releasing live!)

Secondly if someone added me as their friend (I had 4 requests, popular I know) I couldn't view who the requests were from thus couldn't accept.

So 2 very irritating problems I have since switched back to the old design and am hesitant now to switch back across.

Scrabulous taken off...

So, after my last post regarding the lawsuit filed against the Indian brothers by Hasbro has resulted in Scrabulous been taken off Facebook.

But, it only seems to be off in the US and Canadian Facebook Pages.

Its a pity Hasbro couldn't buy it from them or just work with them to make it legit as Scrabulous has 500,000 users.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Scrabble and scrabulous...

So, Hasbro (which is the parent or company that owns Scrabble in the USA) has filed a lawsuit against Scrabulous and sent notice to Facebook that the game be removed from Facebook.

Now, just some background info - Scrabulous is a Facebook App version of the famous game, Scrabble, and was started by 2 brothers in India (Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla). This application quickly rocketed to popularity with more than 500,000 people - read article here on MyADSL.

So now we have a Facebook App that has been made in India and is earning the 2 brothers some money from the ads been displayed and Hasbro in the USA wants it off. Hasbro has filed a lawsuit against it but as the brothers are in India something can only be done if the Indian courts agree/work with the US Courts.

This is bringing up quite an important issue here - international copyrights and the global market that is been created by the internet. Do I agree that the App should be removed, no I don't but they do need to work something out with Hasbro.

Facebook has indicated that they don't want to get involved or be dragged into it, they said they have notified Scrabulous of the problem and hope to rectify it. The Indian brothers have said that they expect their fans to remain loyal to the App. This also comes a week after the big games giant, EA, released a new Facebook App with Hasbro's permission of a free online Scrabble game.

We'll wait and see what happens.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Facebook Connect

Finally, a new breakthrough with something that could be quite useful if used the right way.

View this report here from Mark Roff at the F8 announcement by Mark Zuckerberg.

The summary of the change here is that if the user gives the website permission a 3rd Party website, like MyKindaPrices.com can work with info coming from the users Facebook profile and display it on the website.

Another example is a website that does restaurant reviews, if you view that website there could be a 'Friends Fav' tab on the side with reviews on restaurants from your friends on Facebook which should hopefully be trustworthy.

This is a development that I see could really make Facebook the only player in the social web, I don't see major websites having 3/4 different tabs on the side to account for every Social website... Then again if Facebook adopted Google's OpenSocial it could work very well. We'll see.

For now its amazing to see that Facebook has reached 90million users after only having 24million 14months ago. WOW, is all I can say.

Possible breakthrough in the online music world

The UK Government is proposing or mulling over the idea of imposing an annual fee/license/tax on internet users.
This will allow them to download free music with no problem caused in obtaining illegal music as you'll be paying this annual amount.

I think I'd be very happy to only pay R300-R500 a year to get free music and not worry about the rights of the music etc. The musicians will get their money back through a system working out the most popular/downloaded songs and pay out appropriately. This annual fee could be extended then to cover TV shows and movies, wonder what DSTV will think about this.

Something else that they are doing which might cause a bit of a fright - working with the ISP's the UK gov is sending out around 12,000 letters to internet users warning them to stop downloading illegal music.

I reckon this annual fee could work, just will be a nightmare trying to monitor country to country. Read the full article here.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Whats up with YouTube

Now, maybe other bloggers will laugh but what is happening to the quality coming out of YouTube? Or am I just missing the plot...

I listen to the ZA Tech show quite regularly, and in their 19th podcast they interviewed Stafford Massie, CEO of Google SA. This was a pretty interesting podcast, always good to hear from someone who've knows some of the most influential people in the world today.

Anyway, he spoke about the improvements they were doing for us fellow internet users in South Africa and one item he mentioned was that we should be experiencing faster usage of Google programs like Youtube... but I think with all the lawsuits Youtube has been receiving they have to take down a lot of video's because most video's I try watch now don't seem to work and come up with the annoying message - 'We're sorry, this video is no longer available'.

So now because of that I couldn't watch the interview between Jake White And Stafford Massie which was listed on Jake's new blog.

Could they have an automated system that checks video's descriptions/names and automatically removes them if it contains anything that could contain copyright information? We'll have to wait and see.

First time for everything

Well I've huffed and puffed and I finally started a blog, what I'm going to write about you may ask? Well, it will generally be about online/internet related issues but I will diddle daddle into other areas of interest be it sport or life in Cape Town.

A bit about myself, after been schooled in Port Elizabeth at Grey High School I managed to read myself a Bachelors in Commerce from Rhodes University. This took me 4 years, but they were 4 good years with many a party and good times (the councilor in my 1st year recommended I do it over 4 years due to the fact that I was rowing...)

I then had a quick stint at UCT to complete my post-graduate certificate in education (as I thought I wanted to be a teacher, main reason was to coach rowing and rugby as that was one of my passions) - this year turned out to be a great year (was newly single and Cape Town was a jol!)

SACS tried to lure me into a teaching post after that year and I was very tempted as they offered 1st team rowing coach which would have been great but I needed more experience! So I went to London as lots of saffas do.

From 2005 - 2007 I was in London for almost 3 incredible years, I made a good choice of joining the London Rowing Club and continueing my rowing career. This was pretty hard as it would involve waking up at 5:40am to be on the water by 6am (freakin freazin in winter!) and off by 7am to then make the trek to work. Work was ok, it paid the bills - worked in the Department of Health managing a database/website.

During this time I started my first proper website - www.mykindaprices.com which was great and I loved getting it going - eventually it took up too much of my time and I had to return to SA (Sep 2007). This is something I again have loved been back, though I do miss London now and then and rowing on the Thames. See pic of rowing there!


This picture was taking in 2006 while racing at the Royal Henley Regatta - I'm the one with the head band on.

So now I'm back in Cape Town and will blog now and then about things happening that I feel are important, now if I don't mention something political that is important please don't be concerned - I'll will assume that you know about that already and don't need to know more about it.
 
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