So I decided to let Facebook check my Gmail contact list to see if I had missed some contacts (people using aliases, etc …). After carefully selecting a couple of FB friends to invite (a buddy from the army, …), I clicked ‘Select’ and then ‘OK’ on the next screen that I supposed was a ‘Confirm’ window. I didn’t even read what was written on it. Some minutes later I saw emails starting to come in on different email aliases I had created in all my years of Internet activity. Apparently I allowed Facebook to send email messages to all Gmail contacts with email addresses that were not yet ‘known’ in Facebook. I have about 1500 addresses in my Gmail, let’s say some 500 already have a FB profile: so I just allowed Facebook to send out 1000 ‘unsollicited commercial emails’ or *spam* on my behalf. There is no way for me to know how many emails went out, nor to whom. I feel strongly embarrased, since I have been a strong opponent of spam for years, and since I have no idea who I have bothered with this bulk mail.
A company like Facebook probably has a whole team concentrated on user experience and workflow streamlining, so I can only assume that this strategy is by design. They probably have to keep the monthly exponential growth numbers so they use every opportunity to collect new email addresses. This is plain wrong. The default should be ‘opt in‘, not ‘opt out‘ (that is, select those you want to invite instead of unselect those you don’t wanto to invite).
So dear Christopher Cox and/or Chamath Palihapitiya at Facebook, while you will probably say that ‘but it is clearly written on the page that they’re about to send an invitation to (in my case, 1000??) contacts‘, you know that you are wrong on this one. You’re spamming. Big time, like real jerks. Since you’re probably not going to do anything about it, Google: any ideas?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=46004a5733eee4f0&hl=en
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=266
http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/09/02/facebook-friending-spam/
Wouldn’t this be a great idea: the Brussels public transport not mapped by MIVB’s horribly unpractical route planner, but by Google’s Transit maps. You just need to get an export of the stops, the routes and the times, and they can be shown on Google Maps just like that. Where should we start looking for the source data? Then create agency.txt, stops.txt, routes.txt, trips.txt, stop_times.txt, calendar.txt and that’s it.
Google Transit Feed
I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (’only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ‘1 week in advance’, ‘1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:
Metadata/Folksonomy
Currently an event in the agenda has the fields Title, Date/time (with recurrency, if any) , Location and Description. What I really miss is Tags (or categories, keywords, whatever you want to call them). Tags would allow me to attribute events to categories so that I can easily slice and dice them: only display the “milonga’s”, the events in Antwerp, the events in a specific place. Now I had to write a modified ‘filtered printable view’ for PHPiCalendar so that I can search on specific words in the event title, but that is really a hack. E.g. I now ask every editor to create the event titles as
“[TYPE]: [name of the event] @ [LOCATION]“
so that I can filter on “CONCERT:” or “@ Gent”. With the tags “concert, gent, polariteit, openair” it would be so much easier.
The iCalendar specification even mentions a ‘Categories’ field, although Google Agenda currently does not use it.
Published on
July 5, 2007 in
Google.
I have been working a bit on Google Maps visualisations for my milonga.be tango site, to show an overview of all Belgian tango sites. I did it the following way:
- I use Google Maps‘ “My Maps” to create a collection of pointers on a map. I called this map “milonga.be tango venues”. It’s not complete yet, but I have about 25 locations in it for the moment. I can easily link to this page so anyone can see it: Belgian tango venues.
- But let’s say I want to embed it into a page. I could do it in-line (which would add a lot of JavaScript to the HTML) or use an inline frame (
IFRAME). I decided to use the frame approach and build a generic KML visualizor.
So how can you use it to show any KML/GeoRSS feed on your website?
- Go to the forret.com Google Maps visualizor tool
- Copy/paste the KML feed URL. Example 1: the KML link from Google Maps:
Example 2: Flickr feeds also have a Flickr GeoRSS format which is compatible (now also KML).
- Choose the appropriate center point. Currently you have to copy/paste it from Google Maps or another application, I still have to add some interface magic to do it in the page.
- Press “Show!” and copy/paste the resulting
IFRAME HTML code. Voila!
Continue reading ‘Web tool: visualize on Google Maps’
This is what a YouTube clip page looks like now:
And this is what YouTube is developing as a new ‘beta’ version:
- they got rid of the large banner (” Use Quicklists!”) which was basically a waste of space.
- all clip info is now under the video instead of to the right. All info on and action on a video are now in one place. I like it.
- Youtube likes you to check out other videos. Most newly freed space is dedicated to thumbnails of other (’related’/'promoted’) clips: you now see 13 of them on the frist page instead of 5.
Resurrection of milonga.be
When I started dancing argentine tango, there were two sites that gave you an update of where and when you could dance tango in Belgium. The first one was tango.be, with a frame-based layout that I don’t find the most user-friendly nor visually pleasing, and the second www.milonga.be, with a Flash-based agenda that was quite easy to use. Unfortunately the editor of the latter had to stop the site due to lack of time. Two weeks ago I noticed that he had even let the domain name expire and it was free again. Five minutes later I was the new owner of milonga.be. My goal: to make it again into a comprehensive overview of where to take tango courses and dance tango in Belgium.
Wordpress again
Oh, what can I say, I know Wordpress so well now, I use it wherever I can. So yes, it’s a Wordpress site, with the K2 template, but with (currently) only static pages and no posts. I’ve divided the site into 2 parts: where to follow classes, and where to go dancing (practicas, milongas, salons, workshop). I’m obviously going to sprinkle some Web2.0 gold dust on the project. One example of this: Google Calendar.
Continue reading ‘Creating a tango calendar’
Published on
April 12, 2007 in
Google.
Whether Twitter will turn out to be a conversational revolution or a giant waste of time, I’m still not sure about. Sometimes it feels like instant messaging (chatting *with* someone), sometimes like just changing the subtitle of your MSN/Gtalk (just a shout, no specific destination), sometimes it’s more like talking to yourself. But make no mistake: you are not just talking to yourself!
Thanks to its huge geek-appeal (over 145.000 backlinks in Technorati), Twitter is well on its way towards a respectable PageRank 8. Twitter also uses pretty URLs, (twitter.com/[user]/statuses/[messageid] ), which Google likes a lot. Twitter also generously links from one account to the other (Twitter Friends). And Twitter has a LOT of (small bites of) content. As a result of that, whatever you say in Twitter may come back to haunt you through Google.
Exhibit 1: Pietel
When you do a Google search for “Pietel”, his Twitter account shows up as result #4 of 226.000. Being the good boy that he is, he just wrote that he finished his work assignment at home. But if his last remark would have been: “stupid job, silly colleagues, moron boss“, would he like that to show up on Google?
(depending on what Google server you fall, your results might be different, but the Twitter result has a good chance of ending up on the first page of results).
Continue reading ‘Twitter: watch your mouth’
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