Friday, March 28, 2008

Facebook "You Suck" app, aka. the real world version of "People You May Know"

Some time ago I was joking with some of my studdy-buddies about the happy world of Facebook. Everything is so great, you can have nice things said about you by your friends, etc. It was about the time to make things more realistic, hence the conceptual design of "You Suck" application.

The concept would be based on the recently added "People You May Know" feature, the same one that has been on LinkedIn for quite some time now. You know, the freaky list of people that you "should" connect with, because they happen to be on the list of your friends, or friends-of-your-friends? I am actually pretty amazed how well LinkedIn has been able to make it work, it's almost freaky to see some ghosts from the past re-appearing.

The idea of "You Suck" app is that there is a reason why those people are not on your friends' list. You may not want to have them "friend" you on Facebook! Hello, anyone thought of that?!

So, the "You Suck" app would use the list of "People You May Know". Then, let's say Brian would be on the top of my list, begging me to connect to him. After all, he is already friend with 5 of my friends. Then there would be Mary, Ann, etc.

Now, it's time to calculate the "You Suck" value for Brian. From me, he gets 5 "You Suck" points. Brian might be on the "People You May Know" list from some other people too. So, similarly, we would count those values and add them up.

Then, next time when Brian logs in to his Facebook account, among other nice and positive things about the world, he will be able to check how much he sucks to me and other People He May Know.

Now, talking about a killer app?
Facebook has quietly rolled out a new feature called “People You May Know”, which, as the names suggests, attempts to identify members of the social networking site who you likely know but haven’t actually “connected” with yet i.e. invited to be a “friend.” ZDNet

Friday, March 21, 2008

Reflections on Romania

I usually try to think of at least 3 things to take home with me from a new country, but now only 2 comes up from Romania. Romania, by the way, is the 44th country that I visit, making me have seen only 19% of the countries in the world. Still quite some way to go!

  • The first and last thing that you notice about Bucharest are the cars everywhere. Like many other merging nation, the biggest status symbol is owning a (new) car. My knowledgeable source of information (again a taxi driver), told that there is 800% growth in cars since 90's, that is the end of Ceausescu's regime. I bet that, as megalomaniac as he was (built the 2nd largest administrative building in the world for his comrades of the Communist party), he could not have foreseen the growth and build his road infrastructure accordingly.

    Example, I was not advised to take a taxi before 9pm to avoid the evening rush-hour (from 4 to 9pm!). Just imagine the time the Romanians have to waste in traffic jams every day!

  • The language is intriguing! I did not get hardly anything while listening ppl to talk, but when you see it written, there are so many romanic words that you are bound to make some sense of it. However, they disguise the language well by using all the Slavic looking signs (^), so it's not easily recognisable.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Hole in the wall-experiment and eTwinning

The eTwinning conference is just kicked-off by the Commissionaire Figel here in Bucarest.

I'm very exited to hear the keynote speaker Dr. Sugata Mitra who will speak in a few hours. He is the one who made the most exiting (OK, that's my idea of it) experiment with kids and computers, namely, made a "hole" in a wall at the slum in Delhi to allow unprivileged kids to access computers and the Internet. He came up with something that he calls "Minimal Invasive Education", which allows kids to learn without formal instruction.

So, more about him later, I already had a chance to have a beer with him last night, but I'm really looking forward to some more question time with him. I saw that Downes talked very highly about one of his previous speeches.

Tomorrow I will have 3 workshops in a row to talk about social bookmarking and social tagging with teachers.

Update: I have blogged about the speech at FlossePosse the audio of his excellent (!!) keynote is available there too. Dr. Mitra is so inspiring that you just want to leave everything that you are doing now and start working for him!