Cross Post between Facebook and a Personal Blog

 

Why do we need to choose between Facebook and our personal blog? It is obviously painful to post manually the same information on Facebook and on our blog. At the same time we don't want usually to post the same type of information.

On Facebook: Casual post, short and aimed to our tech savvy friends (they need to use Facebook regularly)

In a Personal Blog: Usually longer post targeted to our non tech savvy friends

Bottom line, we need to be able to share content automatically between a Blog and Facebook but not all of it. How can we achieve that?

Let's start with what we cannot do:

1) Share RSS feeds from the Blog to Facebook - It copies *everything* and sometime this is an issue. Not possible to "filter" the feed.

2) Share the RSS Facebook feed in the blog - This is not possible as they change the link all the time! Facebook worked very hard to make the news feed not RSS capable. That is a shame but a reality. And this solution as anyway the same issue than above: it shares *everything* which is not our goal.

So, here is what I am doing now… the solution is different for my laptop and my mobile device (iphone)

On my laptop: I am just using the “share” button on my blogger account as explained here.  With this simple solution, I just publish once and then pick and choose which post I want to share.

on my iphone: I tried Seesmic or ping.fm without success (impossible to download an image on blogger with those apps, I am getting an error message all the time). They should also seriously invest in some documentation for the ping.fm web site. this is *so* confusing. I am now using pixelpipe to cross post with great success.

Parental control for Starcraft 2

I started playing Starcraft2 2 weeks ago and I am now completely addicted. As I have a work a and a family that I want to keep, I was trying to find a parental control software for me…

Looking inside Starcraft2 , there is still no parental control. At least no good enough to limit my time of play per week.

I tried Rescuetime as well but it is not possible to block an application. Wierd because it seems they clearly could but for whatever reason, you can only block some web site and not even all the time.

So the solution for me was timesheriff. It seems to be a very solid application. Very flexible (you can control your time per week, per day, …) It is not free but with a one month trial period, you have well the time to test the application or just give up playing the game.

As a note, I am limiting my game time to 4 hours a week so far. Seems to work fine for me.

Organize your contact on Outlook and Iphone

 

A couple of tips to organize your contacts on Outlook and on your iphone.

1) First you need to be able to synchronize your phone and Outlook.
The easiest solution by far is to use Itune: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1386

2) Often, when trying to sync up between those 2 sofwares, you can create duplicate. Here is the best guide on the net to remove duplicate but also to do batch updates on your contacts list (copy one field to another one for part of your contact list for example):
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/07/30/remove-duplicate-outlook-contacts/

3) When you have a huge list of contact on your iphone, it is hard to remember which friends or family you have to call from time to time to keep the relationship going. A nice way to “mark” those contacts is via the “favorite” option on the iphone:
http://www.touchtip.com/iphone-and-ipod-touch/iphone-tips-managing-your-iphone-contacts/

Design a new web site or a new application

 

I was looking for best practices to create a web site or in my specific case a facebook apps design.

This is for our MyNewResolutions Facebook applications. See this blog post for more information about it.

It seems that the most common way is to use Photoshop and then to create the XHTML/CSS from there. This is most common for graphic designer.

For HTML hackers, it is easier to start directly the mockup in XHTML/CSS.

If you are neither a photoshop guru (or an artist) nor a HTML hackers, you need to use a Fireframe software with a wysiwyg interface. The most common one seems to be from Adobe. Then, you still need to transform the resulting design to proper XHTML/CSS.

I was looking for a super simple and super quick Fireframe application. Facebook apps is usually not high in graphism anyway. Powerpoint is one solution but it seems to me cumbersome for web design.

And I found Balsamiq. I think this is the perfect match to quickly design a Facebook app. It is also possible to create automatically the XHMTL/CSS from the mockup with Napkee or BmmlExporter. I did not try those applications though.

Outsourcing an application in India

 

For our MyNewResolutions Facebook applications (See this blog post for more information about it) we were trying to understand the possibility of outsourcing the coding.

In my quest for Indian programmers, here is a quick study of the best outsourcing web sites.

Outsourcing website with Alexa ranking:

elance.com - 433

oDesk - 639

GetAFreelancer.com - 1200

rentacoder.com - 1800

guru.com - 1900

http://scriptlance.com - 3000
http://www.mturk.com - 7700

TopCoder - 35000

www.globalworkforce.com - enormous in US

And some review from various web sites:

www.elance.com – Generally a bit more expensive than other web sites, but still much cheaper than hiring someone locally in the USA. Providers on Elance are often of a higher quality than other web sites.

www.guru.com – Another possibility with freelancers in many different fields such as engineering, sales, legal – this site doesn’t focus only on programming.

www.odesk.com – Odesk is a bit different from other freelance websites in that it is more geared towards hiring people on an hourly basis and hiring teams of people. This is more effective for long term projects.

www.rentacoder.com – Very good for programming projects done at a fixed price. It works by escrowing the money for the project to give the provider some security, but you don’t need to release it until the project is completed.

www.globalworkforce.com – A provider of full time employees from multiple different countries (the Philippines, India etc).

 

Summary

I used elance and odesk to get quotes but finally as we were in a rush we had to build the application ourselves.

I got 4 propositions for the full facebook application: $250, $500, $500, $460

This was for a simpler version of MyNewResolutions. In our opinion to do the full MyNewResolutions Facebook application, it would require at least 5-10 times this.

15 propositions with hourly rates. From $6 to $20 per hour. Those prices are dependant of the number of referral (with $6, the engineer has no referral). The average is around $9-$12.

The birth of a new Facebook application

 

After many months (year?) of discussions about creating a web2.0 application, we have finally done it.

Here is the baby: Mynewresolutions on Facebook

to be fair, I had a couple of friends super motivated by this idea and I thought it was a good time to jump on the wagon. Here are some tidbits from one month of work.

The idea

The idea behind Mynewresolutions is very simple: it is the end of the year, people need an application to log their new year resolutions.

If this is successful, there are lots of possibilities to keep people interested by actually keeping track of those resolutions.

Design and framework

It is just so easy to jump into the code without thinking too much about the usability or the design. Especially as we were under crunch time and we thought the application would be small.

Big mistake… we wasted a lot of time on changing the design. It is almost as doing the application 2 or 3 times.

See my specific post about some other thought gathered on the net:
http://zhorba.blogspot.com/2009/12/design-new-web-site-or-new-application.html

Coding a facebook application

No beginner guide here. There are so many already on the web. We were almost beginner developers one month ago. The last time we coded was 10 years ago during our study. And it was a long time before social networking. This application is the fruit of 200-250 hours of work with all the learning.

We were under crunch time (the end of the year is only… once per year) so outsourcing was not an option. We did explore the idea though:
http://zhorba.blogspot.com/2009/12/outsourcing-application-in-india.html

The good news is it is so much faster than before to build a good application. Ajax is now quite easy thanks to Jquery. And the APIs and examples are everywhere on the net.

The bad news is about the Facebook API. Very sparse and bad documentation. The API itself is changing all the time and very buggy. This means applications have to be updated regularly and books are almost immediately outdated.

Monetizing

This is also a bad news. It is now very difficult to make any money from a facebook apps.

The success of an application is now related to its “stickiness” or ratio between daily users and monthly users. 

This is thus no surprise that most successful applications are games.

This probably explain the relative mediocrity of non-games applications on facebook. No revenue means no investment in those applications.

Trends for monetization:

1) Advertisement is not working. tons of data on this subject on the net.
2) Affiliation – Seems not that successful neither – No link about revenue from this model.

3) Virtual currency/virtual goods

4) Resell Emails address

5) Resell the application based on the number of active users. Even with no revenue those apps can be used in a marketing campaign to increase the users of another social media.

Almost 4 percent of applications have over 10,000 monthly active users which isn’t bad (June 2009)

Using a Wii as a media center (Updated)

This is a major update from this post: Wii as a media center

Ok, I bought a Wii a couple of months ago. My main goal was to get rid off Comcast cable (too expensive). I thought that instead of buying an expensive laptop to stream hulu, It would be better to buy a gaming console. I have 2 daughters (1 and 3 years old so I thought the Wii was the best fit as a gaming console for the next 2-3 years).

Looking at the Console competition landscape: Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. The Wii seems not, at first glance, the best console as a media center:
- Can't just plug it to a Windows media center
- No upnp capability
- No Hard drive so limited streaming capacity (In fact it is possible through the homebrew hacking scene.)

But the cheap price, the integrated wifi and the fact that it is the best console for young children made my decision.

Anyway, here is my need:
1) Stream my music from my windows PC
2) Possibility to use Hulu
3) Movie streaming from my PC

There was some major updates since my last post on this subject:
- The Playon version for the Wii is now in Beta. here is my review.
- After hacking my Wii, I tested MplayerCE
- Flash upgrade on the Wii browser (hello Youtube)

I am blown away by the quality of the video that you can stream through Wifi now! Playon and MplayerCE are just awesome softwares. I tried tons of other solution: Orb, Tversity, Weezo and all of them had terrible streaming video quality.

It is great! I can watch all my last Hulu show on my TV through the Wii now. Bye bye Comcast, hello Hulu.

Basically, I am using Mplayer for Music and Divx Streaming and Playon for Hulu streaming. (Those two solutions let a Wii connect a remote PC with media content).

Of course, I am still missing some old DVR features. I would need to add a tv tuner to my PC to fix this but it would become an overly complex project.

[Update August 2010] - I tried this month the Netflix online service with my Wii. It is awesome. Hard to believe the streaming is coming throught the Wii.

Here how it is working: When you subscribe to Netflix online package, you can ask to get the streaming through a Wii. In this case, you will receive a free DVD with a software to Stream Netflix (yes, even with a one month trial). The interface is great, the movie quality perfect. You can stop the movie/rewind/move forward/Resume a movie couple days later. No bugs, hassle free. Compare to Playon this is night and day. Of course, Playon is giving Hulu...

The only drawback of the Netflix online streaming solution is the choice of movie. It is really poor. Perhaps good enough during a couple of month and then I guess you will have seen all the interesting movies.