Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “Social Media/Networking” Category

Is Google Plus’s Problem One of Design?

Posted on March 15th, 2012

Nick Bilton, at The New York Times’ Bits blog: We skitter around the world with our smartphone cameras, taking pictures of leaves and sugar cubes and sunsets, then applying filters and making even the mundane look beautiful. Clearly, design is becoming increasingly more relevant to people. Google Plus doesn’t seem to understand that. Google’s iPhone app, for example, looks like a sketch that was never finished. And if you think the iPhone isn’t important for a good social network, just ask Instagram, an iPhone-only photo app that has more than 27 million users. That’s a quarter of Google Plus’s users, and Instagram didn’t need the Google homepage to get there.

How Facebook Tracks Users and Non-Users Alike

Posted on November 18th, 2011

Ben Brooks, writing on Brooks Review: Byron Acohido reporting on Facebook tracking cookies: Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log. If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, or if you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging; it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information. Later Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s engineering director, is quoted as saying: “But we’re not like ad networks at all in…

The State of Twitter Spam

Posted on July 13th, 2011

A Running Count As many people have noticed, over the past year Twitter spam problem has become increasingly bad. I decided today that I am going to start a running count on Twitter of each and every spam Tweet I get. Starting today. There seems to be two types of spam tweets: replies and cold tweets. Replies With this type of Twitter spam, you only get spammed after you’ve recently tweeted. Send a tweet with many popular marketing-friendly words, such as iPad, iPhone, Apple, Mac, Loan, Money, Job, Bookstore, Cash, Gold, etc and you’ll probably get a spam reply back trying to get you to click a link to some type of marketing related spam. This has gotten progressively worse in the past year.…

Mr. President: What Twitter Users Asked vs What The Press Asks

Posted on July 7th, 2011

Boston.com analyzed the Tweets sent by Twitter users from 2 p.m. on Monday and the transcripts from White House press briefings for the past few weeks and compared them. I think a lot of Twitter users do a better job than the press at asking questions. See the results.

The AppStorm Guide to Google+

Posted on June 30th, 2011

Matthew Guay, writing at App Storm: While Facebook and Twitter have tweaked their design and added new features over time, Google+ includes a beautiful design and an incredible amount of features from day 1. With extra touches such as the Huddles video chat and an option to download your Google+ data, it’s easily a step beyond what we’ve come to expect from social networks. That said, the birrage of features can be overwhelming, and Twitter’s 140 character simplicity seemed refreshing after spending a morning in Google+. Look for a guest appearance by yours truly.

Apple’s Social Networking Choices

Posted on June 7th, 2011

When Ping was first released last year, very briefly, it was possible to connect your Facebook account to your Ping account to share your Ping activities or find new friends on Ping. This feature was pulled at the eleventh hour due to breakdown in negotiations between Facebook and Apple. Ping launched without support of a major social network to piggyback off of for friend recommendations. Sometime over the past year, and I’m not sure when as I only noticed it recently – which goes to show how often I use Ping, Twitter was added to Ping. Under your Ping account, it is now possible to connect Ping to Twitter to have it share your Ping purchases & likes. Clearly this would not have happened…

Twitter Reveals Photo Sharing Feature

Posted on June 1st, 2011

Jack Dorsey, writing on the Twitter Blog: Millions of people share photos on Twitter every day. We’re going to make that easier than ever. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes. Services like yFrog and Twitpic are in trouble. Other services like MLKSHK who provide more value that just a dump for photos might be okay though.

More iOS 5 & Twitter Integration Speculation

Posted on June 1st, 2011

Shawn Blanc posted two links to interesting posts which have more speculation related to possible Twitter integration into iOS 5 system-wide. The first link is to a post by Anil Dash who writes: But in short, the hardest, most expensive technical part of building a web-scale Twitter competitor already exists in Apple’s infrastructure. What’s missing, in an odd reversal of Apple’s usual pattern, is a well-designed, simple user experience that makes people want to participate. Could a small team of developers and designers within Apple make a credible realtime messaging service with first-rate native clients on every important platform? Could they graft on a simple, REST-based web-style APIs to the complicated, old-fashioned API that enables push notifications right now? It’d be a lot like…

Twitter’s New Photo-Sharing Service To Get iOS 5 Integration

Posted on May 31st, 2011

MG Siegler writing for Techcrunch: We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device. John Gruber, on Daring Fireball: So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account…

xkcd: Online Communities 2

Posted on October 7th, 2010

xkcd has updated their map of online communities Caption: Best trivia I learned while working on this: ‘Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it’s the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?’ Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.