FOAF and the Facebook Death Star
The Facebook Death Star
Since the February confirmation of the Facebook IPO, Facebook has continued to stagnate in user-base yet as an organization it holds no punches as it attempts to grow internationally, and its stock price continues to soar as Class A shares finally open up to the average person (major investment firms had first dibs at the initial Class A shares released during the IPO). Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg maintains 58% control of the company through complete control of Class C shares and veto power over all Class B shares. This is indeed shaping up to be a new Galactic (global internet) Empire, similar to that sought by a young Annakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith. The new schematics for a seemingly unstoppable battle station would be the carefully-timed Facebook Timeline rollout along with Facebook Connect and OpenGraph protocol. So if one can draw vague parallels between Mark Zuckerberg and Darth Vader, who can play the role of the Emperor? An obvious choice would be early angel investor Petr Thiel of PayPal, but a more appropriate figure is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose company owns approximately 2% of Facebook:
Symbolizing Facebook as the death star is hardly a new concept, just check out these previous references.
Enter the FOAF project and its RDF/XML data format for representing friendship connections in a social network, as well as personal interests and contact info. Although the FOAF file format is designed first of all to be machine readable, it is often desirable to be able to browse it as if it were a usual Web page.
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XmasListz – A Facebook app for Holiday Wish-lists
Announcing the release of a Facebook App for XmasListz (formerly had its own site at XmasListz.com now only available at http://apps.facebook.com/xmaslistz), a wish-list web application originally created on the Java platform using JSP and Servlets, now ported to PHP/AJAX and running on the Facebook Apps platform.
It is my first Facebook Application and depending on its success or (imminent) failure, probably my last!
Check it out at:
http://apps.facebook.com/xmaslistz/.
The application integrates the Amazon Product API with the Facebook API and uses the latest jQuery and CSS3 tricks for creating dynamic and interactive list effects for its search results, showing a nice horizontally scrolling widget for just about any product name. When I was first throwing this together, I was sure it would be an overnight sensation like some other success stories on Facebook Apps, but after the first 72 hours and merely 12 close personal friends or family adding the app, only time will tell.
I won’t hold my breath!
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.