I’ve been a long-time facebook user. Dartmouth was one of the first 10 schools on the service in 2000-2001 and you could tell even back then that it was a special service. I’ve always thought it was the best social network – even as MySpace and others came around.
Facebook is a better services than other social networks simply because it has better features. Sure they have the same as a lot of sites, but they’re engineered better and they resonate with users MUCH more. Facebook features provide feedback, they portray status and most importantly, they’re social. Two of my favorite features on the facebook service are:
Photos. Supposedly this was the feature that spurned The Platform (see below). This feature is very similar to other services like Yahoo Photos, Photobucket, etc. except with one exception – it’s social. You can tag people in your photos and when you do it – that photo shows up in that user’s profile. In the past, if a friend of yours had a photo of you, this was never identified and you would never know. Or if you see a person in a picture with your friend, you can see who that person is and click through to their profile. Facebook made photo viewing easy and made it social feature instead of just a way to enhance your profile. This caused the facebook photo sharing to be the most popular photo network on the web (or at least a close #2). Check out this article for details- News Feed. RSS is a simple concept. It is publish/subscribe. You subscribe to get information from certain sources and updates to those sources are published to you. RSS readers are doing this for the web such as Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and the Google Reader (which is what i use). Just as your email inbox is a place for receiving mail messages, RSS readers are a place to receive messages from the web that you’ve signed up for whether it is a blog or a website. Facebook has an activity RSS reader called “News Feed” which displays any activity of a friend of yours on your home page. Most people don’t realize it’s RSS, but that’s essentially what it is and instead of delivering web messages, it delivers your friends’ activity. That is social and this feature alone is what makes facebook better than any other social network. It is great at telling you what your friends and network is doing and that is always relevant. I also wrote about this a few weeks ago here.
Last week facebook came out with a new feature called F8 and also known as The Platform. This is a huge deal and it will change the web for millions of users. This feature allows any company to develop an application to live inside Facebook and makes it easy for any facebook user to install, share and use. With this feature, facebook is now a platform of users and friends available for any application or company to access. I repeat, this is huge. It has always been my thought that going forward social networking is a foundational attribute of the web. Any activity you do online – shopping, reading, watching videos – is enhanced if you can see what your friends are doing (or have done) and can easily share it with them. For any traditional site (BestBuy.com, Google Maps, Fandango, etc.), it could be much better if it was built into facebook and showed you what your friends had purchased, or had done, or what their opinion is. I already love using the flickr, netflix, delicious, and other facebook applications that have been created in the first week and i’m positive the quality will only get better.
To summarize – Facebook is a great site and similar to how Google went from building a great search product to building just great products (gmail, docs, calendar, maps, etc.), facebook is now on the path to go from a great social network to being an integral aspect of the internet. Also similar to Google, they are winning not just because of their vision but also because they are better at the subtle differences in their features and the overall simplicity of their site which makes the experience usable and enjoyable. Little things like auto-complete textboxes, slick javascript, and empty whitespace is why the site is so usable. Facebook is primetime now and it’s only the beginning.
This morning i took out my new bike (named: Commodore Williams) for his debut ride and did 20 miles around ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=13f42b20-253f-4298-9cd6-5227e388524a)
First time up, Bo hit a 412-foot homer to center field.
I wrote a few weeks ago (
In the first and 2nd movies the super-hot Kiera Knightly is the daughter of Weatherby Swann, the Governor of Port Royal, a British base in the Caribbean, and seems destined to marry a bland british dude. At the age of 12 she removes a key from a shipwrecked Will Turner (protecting him from being accused of piracy). Today, at the age of 20, in Port Royal, she is kidnapped by the pirate Barbossa because it is believed her blood can free Barbossa and his crew from the curse of the Black Pearl. And she truly loves the young swordsmith Will Turner. Her boyfriend Will, with the help of Jack Sparrow track her down, rescue her, release the curse and then kill Barbossa, and then return home.
We first see him stranded on an island and learn that he has a deep hatred for Capt. Barbossa (Rush), who led a mutiny aboard Sparrow’s ship, The Black Pearl. Seeking revenge, Jack steals a ship and finds a new crew of his own, including Will Turner, to pursue Barbossa. With the help of Elizabeth and Will, he both releases the Barbossa’s curse and then kills him. After killing Barbossa, he escapes the island and is shortly after captured and taken hostage by cannibals on a remote island.
Will is a young swordsmith in Port Royal. His dad, “Bootstrap Bill” was a pirate on the Black Pearl with Jack Sparrow and Barbossa. As pirates they stole a chest of gold and spent it. This brought on a curse that left all of them as Undead until each coin and a drop of blood from each pirate is placed back into the chest. After Barbossa abandoned Jack, Bill complained so Barbossa killed him. Before Bootstap Bill died he gave one of his pieces of gold (the medallion) to Will. Jack figured this out brought Will to Barbossa as his blood could be used in lieu of Bill’s. Will manages to wriggle out of the trap and returns his medallion and gives his blood only after Barbassa has been shot, so he the curse will be released, he will be mortal and thus actually die. Will then returns home with his true love, Elizabeth.
He and the crew of The Black Pearl stole a chest of ancient gold. He first led a mutiny aboard The Black Pearl and leaves Jack on a deserted island. It turns out the gold is cursed and it turned the entire crew into the Undead. By day they look like normal if dissolute humans, but by the light of the moon, they’re revealed as skeletal cadavers. Because they’re already dead, they cannot be killed (however they continue to fight people throughout all of the first film – don’t ask me why). To reverse the curse, they need to place all the coins back and a drop of blood from each pirate into the Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Turner is already dead, but Elizabeth says her last name is turns so Barbossa kidnaps her. Barbossa tries to use Elizabeth, but Will rescues her. Jack then informs Barbossa who Will is and during the fighting Will and Jack end up killing Barbossa.
Cursed to roam the sea for centuries, Jones has a serious score to settle with ol’ Jack Sparrow — and he has a pretty nifty arsenal at his disposal. In addition to his undead ghost ship and a bunch of amazingly nasty sidekicks, Jones keeps a multi-tentacled water pet which can engulf any ship on in a spectacular fashion. Jones was once in love with a woman but she was lost to him. Because this pain of lost love became too much to bear, he carved the heart from his chest, and buried it in a secret location. Whoever possesses the heart controls Davy Jones, thereby controlling the world’s oceans. Jack wants to control the heart so he doesn’t have to spend 100 years on the Flying Dutchman. But, the heart falls into the hands of the British and Jones chases down Jack. Not able to take over The Pearl, he summons the Kraken who takes Jack down to the depths of the ocean.
I saw the new Pirates movie last night and was somewhat skeptical going in as the 2nd installment was more bloated than the first and just ok (do we really need a ferris wheel chase in a pirate movie?). The new one, however, packs much more of a punch. This quote by one of my favorite critics Michael Wilmington says it best:
the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change – though i am making no comment on what i might do in the future. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbring was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what i really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.