Tag Archive for ‘Facebook’ at Callum Macdonald

Tag Archive for 'Facebook'

Magic pidgins

Published

3 months, 1 week ago

. 4 Comments

Pidgin is my instant messaging client of choice. It means my MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, ICQ and other contacts are all in one place. Today I have taken that to the next level with three new plugins.

I need to have skype installed and running, but now I can send / receive messages from within pidgin. On linux, this is a big deal. The skype interface sucks. It lacks spell check, among other things. Now I can even send encrypted, deniable messages through Skype with the Off The Record plugin. All my other pidgin plugins work with Skype. Fantastic. Get the plugin here. (It works for poor people on Windows also).

Facebook Chat on Pidgin

More and more people have started talking to me on Facebook chat. The interface was a little ropey, I much prefer talking to people in Pidgin. For example, when somebody sends me a message, a web site has no way of letting me know. So if Facebook is open but not on the screen (say on another tab) I miss the messages. Pidgin on the other hand is great for that. Now pidgin supports facebook chat.

Twitter via Pidgin

I haven’t actually activated this plugin yet, but I have installed it. I believe it allows you to set / get Twitter messages via Pidgin. I like that idea a lot. I really liked Twitter’s IM service (before it died). But now I’m using ping.fm (invite code vivalaping) to update all my statuses in one go. So Twitter only via IM might be a bit weird. I can post to ping.fm through IM no problems, they have a Jabber interface.

Plugin Pack

Before I forget, I recently installed the available plugins from the Ubuntu repository. I grabbed all the pidgin related plugin packs that looked good. That made a big difference. Added Extra Prefs and Off The Record Messaging which were the biggest changes I think.

Pidgin is on a new level today. Here’s a pretty picture for all you visual / non techy types out there.

Facebook is turning into MySpace

Published

Callum

9 months ago

in Predictions and Techy

. 4 Comments

My biggest complaint with MySpace is, the profile pages get out of hand. They become outrageously long with vast numbers of images, videos and other junk. Facebook by comparison has always been cleaner, simpler and lighter. MySpace profiles take forever to load, even on broadband. Facebook profiles were snappy.

No longer.

I checked a profile today that contained a total of 1750 files coming in at 11.83 Mb. It took a total of 9minutes and 19 seconds to fully load. Outrageous. This user has a total of 75 Facebook apps installed.

Facebook need to fix the problem. There are a few simple solutions. For example, split the profile into multiple pages, with a few apps on each page. Or let users load one app at a time. Whichever way, something has to change.

I wonder if this signals the beginning of Facebook’s end.

Cape Town Facebook Developers Garage

Published

Callum

9 months, 3 weeks ago

in Business, Events, Photos and Techy

. 1 Comment

I was at the Cape Town Facebook Developers Garage last night. I have the badge to prove it!

It was an interesting evening. Pizza was generously provided by Butler’s Pizza. If I’m not mistaken their delivery staff arrive wearing a tuxedo shirt (whatever it’s called) and a bow tie! Fantastic. Drinks were supplied by Joyent (I think I got the link right).

There were a few interesting presentations. Jacques Marneweck spoke about memcache. He looked pretty nervous, but had some interesting things to say. He talked about starling, a memcache based queue server developed by Twitter and some other highly techy stuff. His slides were missing due to a format issue. I think the slides would really have helped the presentation, maybe he’ll post them online.

I’m meeting a few of the same people at most of the tech events in Cape Town. There seems to be a few interesting businesses going on down here. It feels like a small tech community, with a few “big fish”. Reminds me of Edinburgh.

Affiliate Revenue Sharing

Published

Callum

1 year, 3 months ago

in Business, Ideas and Techy

. 1 Comment

A friend recently told me about rakeback poker sites. When you play poker, you pay a small fee to the casino for the use of the table, this is called a rake. If I introduce you to Poker Website X, they will pay me a percentage of your rake. The latest affiliates offer to share that percentage with you, it’s called rakeback.

I think this concept will take off and spread to other affiliate schemes. For example, the travel related site BeWelcome.org could sign up as an affiliate with somebody like Expedia (an online travel agent). If BeWelcome receive 5% of user spending, they could split that with the user. The result as a user is a 2.5% discount on Expedia.

The same principle could apply to any number of affiliate schemes. From selling books to cars or credit cards. I think there’s a great untapped market here, particularly amongst existing community web sites like Facebook and MySpace. These sites could command impressive deals with affiliates and offer their users great bargains. It’s a win-win.

Using the purchasing power of 30m Facebook users to get better deals would be great for business on all sides.

Notorious nobodies - Times Online

Published

Callum

1 year, 4 months ago

in Personal

. 0 Comments

Andrew Chant sent me a link to an article Notorious nobodies at the Times Online. It’s a great piece about Web 2.0 and how the user generated content revolution is changing the world. Well worth the read I thought.

Callum Macdonald