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All posts tagged "facebook"


Thursday, July 14, 2011

EgoBook: Your Facebook History in Book Form

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Printing" @ 08:00 AM

EgoBook. The name says it all. This is a clever merging of Facebook's data stream, a layer of software for formatting and parsing that data, and an on-demand print service. The result is your Facebook history in book form, which can make a great keepsake or gift for someone else. Is it worth the money? Yes, I'd say it is - but there are some rough edges that the service needs to smooth out. Read more...


Thursday, May 19, 2011

Microsoft's PhotoDNA Technology Used to Combat Child Pornography at Facebook

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 01:00 PM

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com...fts-technology/

"As online photo sharing has exploded so has, tragically, the distribution of child pornography. But while the rise of the Internet and digital cameras have revived a scourge that had nearly been eliminated in the late 1980s, new technology may also help to beat it back again. Microsoft says it has refined a technology it created called PhotoDNA to identify the worst of these disturbing images - even if they are cropped or otherwise altered - and cull through large amounts of data quickly and accurately enough to police the world's largest online services. And on Thursday, it will announce that Facebook will be the first service to join it in using the free technology, which Microsoft donated to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in December 2009."

It's great that Microsoft donated this technology and Facebook is implementing it - anything photo hosting companies can do to prevent child pornographers from amassing and sharing their collections of filth is a good thing. The key weakness here is that this technology isn't based on age/face recognition, it's based on pattern matching from a known database of images. It's a start, but it doesn't stop newly generated images from being shared everywhere until it's captured and put into the database. I feel a lot of admiration, but also sympathy, for the people that are on the front lines in this fight - they must have some awful images burned into their brains.


Monday, April 4, 2011

Calling a Spade a Spade: The Facebook EgoBook

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Printing" @ 02:12 PM

http://apps.facebook.com/my-egobook/

"EgoBook is a personalized book created from status updates, published pictures, wall messages and the comments from a Facebook profile!...The cover is personalized with the profile picture and description over a mosaic of his friend's profile pictures. Inside, the messages and the comments."

This is CLEVER. Getting a book printed of your Facebook history is an ego play - let's be real here - but it's also a snapshot of history that you might look back on and laugh (or cry) about later in life. And it's fun! I've requested one of these for review, so I'll let you know what I think of the whole thing when I get the book...should be interesting!


Friday, December 3, 2010

Help Me Win $1250 for Kids Who Need It This Christmas

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Thoughts Media Off Topic" @ 03:00 PM

Hi everyone! I need your help to win an unboxing contest that Best Buy is running on Facebook, and it’s for a good cause. Since I do a lot of those, I thought hey, why not enter? There are two grand prizes of $2500 CAD each, awarded as Best Buy gift cards. Since we’re coming up on Christmas, sharing the grand prize if I win makes sense – so I’ve publicly committed to donating half of the prize ($1250) to kids involved with Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Canada. My mother works for that organization, and I’ve seen first hand the needs that some of these families have. She works with the in-school mentoring program, which pairs younger kids with senior citizen mentors. Apparently the kids are Nintendo Wii-crazy, and it’s an activity the seniors and kids can do together, so I think what I’ll do is buy as many Nintendo Wii bundles as I can with $1250 (it should be at least five of them).

I'd really appreciate the support of the Thoughts Media community, because - and I'll be blunt here - Twitter is such a noisy medium that every though yesterday the message about this contest went out to over 5000 people from three different people, nearly zero votes came as a result of it. I'm currently #3 in votes, but I could easily take a dominating lead if even 20% of you reading this decided to act. Please help!

Here’s how you can help me, and the kids, win – oh, and enter to win a $150 gift card yourself!

  1. Log into Facebook, and visit the Best Buy Unboxing Day Contest Site. Click Allow when the app asks for your permission. I’ve noticed there’s a weird bug with Internet Explorer 8 where it loops the process for almost a minute, so you may want to use Firefox or Chrome if you run into trouble.
  2. Find my Samsung Focus video (see above) and click on it, then click on Vote in the window that pops up. You’ll need to fill out a little form; if you live outside Canada and don't qualify for the gift card, just put in whatever bogus information you want.
  3. Return to that contest site every day to vote – you can vote once every day up until December 31st.

The winners will be announced January 3rd, 2011, and if I win, I’ll announce it here and provide details and photos of the Wii’s I purchase.

(And for the Windows Phone Thoughts readers, I'll be doing a "real" unboxing of the Focus - that was just a simplified, quick version. I've got some serious concerns about the screen...).


Friday, November 12, 2010

So I Guess Social Media Isn't a Fad?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Thoughts Media Status Updates" @ 05:00 PM

A quick note for all readers of all sites: since this whole "Social Media" thing isn't going away any time soon, we've decided to modernize our sites a bit by adding both a Twitter "Re-Tweet" button and a Facebook "Like" button to the bottom of every post. If you find one of our stories useful, interesting, and worth sharing with others, please use the buttons. Thanks so much, and let us know if you see any problems. Right now we're using the basic Facebook integration rather than the deeper one that requires more coding work, but it should do the trick for now. And if you're using Twitter, you'll find our Twitter feeds in the upper right-hand corner of each site.


Friday, September 10, 2010

Social Networking Services Know Who You Are

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 12:30 PM

http://www.focus.com/fyi/informatio...k-google-apple/

"In order to use any facebook application, the user must agree to the terms of use, which include accrss to their personal information. Decide not to download the application? Too bad. If your friend decides to use an application, that platform can access your personal information."

Security, privacy and convenience all rarely work together. You usually have to compromise on at least one thing in order to have the others. This is especially true with social networking sites such as Facebook. In some ways, it really makes me wonder why people are complaining about privacy on Facebook and its brethren. The whole purpose of sites like Facebook is to share information, not hide it. You put things up on Facebook so that your friends, family, and maybe even the whole world knows what you have been doing. My general policy follows a quote supposedly from Benjamin Franklin, "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." If there is something you do not want anyone to know, do not post it, do not record it. Keep it tucked away in that little box you have under your bed. Assume that anything you send on the Internet can be copied, altered and redistributed at any time. Assume that anything you do on the Internet is recorded in one fashion or another. When it comes to technology, there is very little in the way of privacy anymore.


Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Preview of Windows Live Messenger

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Software" @ 08:31 PM

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wi...-messenger.aspx

"We've spent the last few months posting about how we look at the industry, the key customer problems that are top-of-mind for us, and where we think we can improve the lives of our customers. Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows Live Messenger. In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version. In subsequent posts we'll go into more depth on different aspects of the experience."

Talk about a major re-design! I wonder though, is it too little too late? I don't log into Messenger as much as I used to - I find that I fire up TweetDeck 10x more often than Messenger. Twitter isn't a complete replacement for IM though - being a public medium, I always keep that in mind when I post messages. If I could fire up one software client and get Twitter, Messenger, and Facebook messages...that would be very useful to me. What about you?


Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Why Are Browser Crashes/Hangs More Frequent Now?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 03:00 PM

You'd think that with all the browser development out there, browser stability problems would be a thing of the past - but perhaps any advances in stability are being offset by the increasingly broad range of technologies that browsers are required to support. The above is a screen shot from Google Chrome - about 90% of the time, when I go to a Facebook status update page, typically to respond to a comment someone else made about my status update, Google Chrome will hang. My CPU usage spikes and that browser tab becomes non-responsive. Thankfully, I can keep using other tabs and eventually Chrome will either process my request to kill that tab, or finally acknowledge that there's a problem with the content in that tab and show me the above messag. I wrote about my problems with certain Flash banners crashing my browser over on my personal blog, so me having with browsers isn't a new issue. Is anyone else out there using Google Chrome and seeing the same sort of problem with Facebook status pages? The good news here is that Google is apparently aware of the problem...but who knows how long it will take to get fixed.


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