Technology Effect

Since Facebook first rolled out the new real-time post insights last week, many page administrators have noticed that their impressions appear to have dropped substantially. Apparently, this is a bug that the social network is working on fixing. For an understanding of the size of the impact, we saw our average post impressions drop from upwards of 90,000 down to 1,000 or less. Fortunately, that number appears to be increasing steadily, but it still isn’t completely resolved. While Facebook claims that it’s a counting bug, the greatest fear of page admins is that their overall reach would decrease. Facebook has confirmed that this is just a bug,  and tjat the numbers should soon return to normal. Have you seen any impact aside from your numbers dropping on your page?

During a panel at the Inside Social Apps conference, Bret Taylor, chief technology officer of Facebook, made it pretty clear that the platform team will be focused on mobile for much of 2011. He said that the past year or so has been focused on improving the overall user experience on Facebook, with the company effectively cutting down 95 percent of application spam. Now, with an eye toward the future, the company is expanding the platform team in an effort to enable developers to more easily implement Facebook within their mobile applications. The company is also hoping that social media helps impact other industries in the same way it has for games. While practically everyone at the Inside Social Apps conference appeared to be focused on gaming, Facebook is working to convince other industries that implementing Facebook will result in the same massive impact that games have experienced. So far, Facebook is just in the beginning phase of pushing forward with mobile...

Facebook pulled the personal page of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg after word got out that his profile had been hacked.  We’ve asked the company for comment and plan to update this story with the official response. The hacker posted what appears to be a rogue status update, because it contains typos (how many of them can your count below?): Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011 The hashtag referring to the Hacker Cup suggests that perhaps the posting came from a disgruntled participant in the event. Some 1,803 people “liked” the post and 438 replied to it by the time TechCrunch took a screenshot of the thread that we’ve reproduced below (Note: I edited out TechCrunch’s ...

This edition of NetSpeak further explores the ongoing trend towards web-based applications and discusses ‘Google Web Store', yet another tool for managing them. As you are aware, of late, many of the popular desktop applications have an online equivalent too. For instance, the Office suite, one of the most popular desktop applications, has several online solutions. Google Docs, Zoho Docs and the like are some of the prominent ones in this genre. You can use these applications to create text/spreadsheet/presentation documents from anywhere on the Web. You can even use them to conduct instantaneous surveys-using Google Docs ‘Form' option or Zoho creator, you can create a data collection form and administer it online within a few minutes. Microsoft OfficeLive (http://www.officelive.com/en-us/), the web-based office suite from Microsoft, Sliderocket (http://www.sliderocket.com/), the online presentation application, are a few similar products worth a look. This ...

A curvilinear camera, much like the human eye, with the significant feature of a zoom capability, unlike the human eye has been developed by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The tuneable camera — once optimized — should be useful in many applications, including night-vision surveillance, robotic vision, endoscopic imaging and consumer electronics. The “eyeball camera” has a 3.5x optical zoom, takes sharp images, is inexpensive to make and is only the size of a nickel. (A higher zoom is possible with the technology.) “We were inspired by the human eye, but we wanted to go beyond the human eye,” said Yonggang Huang of Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and co-author of the paper. “Our goal was to develop something simple that can zoom and capture good images, and we've achieved that.” The tiny camera combines the human eye and an expensive single-lens reflex (SLR) ...

After a delayed launch because of problems, Wolfram Alpha has now appeared to many – therefore technically launched. The new search engine has been called the Google competitor, which I refuse to call it because it uses Google under its “Search the Web” feature, but it isn’t. It’s so much more. The search engine is a very intelligent search engine as it manages to compile a huge amount of data, like trading data, recent returns, charts, dates, historical facts, timelines, etc. in one single search page – and while you can say it does a step better than Google, it does take time to load up all that information, as it image intensive – mainly because of the font they are using is not a “web standard font”. Still, the design is pretty sleek. While it is an intelligent search engine, being a computer can bring some mixed results – since it will choose the most common assumption. While it does make such assumptions, you can change the assumption to something else, like i...

See something new? Well, you should. Google has now introduced on its mobile versions of Google Docs and Gmail a brand new feature – printing. Yes, now you can print documents from Google Docs and Gmail from your mobile device. Wait, what? Yes, turns out it’s going to be using – you guessed it – the cloud via its new service Google Cloud Print. How does it work? It’s essentially a Google Chrome add-on and will send your data from your mobile phone to your computer with the printer hooked up. This also means that you will have to leave your computer on before you leave if you happen to be on the go. Not that convenient. But, once that has been done, you just go to Google Docs or Gmail and press the two arrows button to reveal the Print option. You will also be able to print email attachments with the little “Print” link next to the attachment. Right now, it will be rolling out to all users in the US (and who happen to be using the English version) today and tomorrow, a...

To rebuild damaged parts of a human body from scratch is a dream that has long fired human imagination, from Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein to modern day surgeons. Now, a team of European scientists, working in the frame of the EUREKA project ModPolEUV, has made a promising contribution to reconstructive surgery, thanks to an original multidisciplinary approach matching cutting-edge medicine to the latest developments in nanotechnology.According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 322,000 deaths globally per year are linked to severe injuries from fire and in many of these cases death could have been avoided with surgical intervention. In this type of intervention, when major burn patients have insufficient skin left to graft on the most damaged part of their body, new skin has literally to be grown from the patient's own skin cells. However, the long delay in growing the skin can expose the burns patient to increased risk of infectio...

 In a technique that could eventually shed light on how gene expression influences human disease, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have for the first time ever successfully visualized single molecules of naturally-occurring messenger RNA (mRNA) transcribed in living mammalian cellsThe scientific achievement is detailed in the January 16 online edition of Nature Methods. Gene expression involves transcribing a gene's DNA into molecules of mRNA. These molecules then migrate from a cell's nucleus into the cytoplasm, where they serve as blueprints for protein construction. Robert Singer, Ph.D., codirector of the Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center and professor and cochair of anatomy and structural biology, was senior author of the paper. Working with his colleagues, he generated a transgenic mouse in which genes coding for the structural protein beta actin would, when expressed, yield fluorescently labeled mRNA. Beta a...

 single new connection can dramatically enhance the size of a network -- no matter whether this connection represents an additional link in the Internet, a new acquaintance within a circle of friends or a connection between two nerve cells in the brain.The results, which are published in Nature Physics, were part of a theoretical study carried out by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen and the University Göttingen. This study mathematically describes for the first time the influence of single additional links in a network. Imagine the following scenario: In your sports team you get to know a new player and arrange to go out and see a movie on the next weekend. The new team member brings along three friends -- and suddenly by adding one new contact, your own circle of friends has grown by four people. Growth processes of this sort occur in many networks: ...

IN DECEMBER, a pair calling themselves "The Benevolent Fisted Rulers" offered up 4-hectare plots of Gliese 581 g, the most habitable exoplanet yet discovered,Setting aside the ethics of exoplanetary land grabs, the move seems a touch premature. The alien world is 20 light years away and its very existence is not confirmed. Still, if the planet does exist, it is possible that it has some good exo-real estate. Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago examined the range of climates that Gliese 581 g might have and found one that would have a pool of water on one side, making it look like an eyeball. Even if further observations disprove the existence of Gliese 581 g, the work could help determine the habitability of exo-Earths still to be discovered. First spotted in September via wobbles in the light emitted by its host star, Gliese 581 g is likely to be rocky. That, combined with the fact that it orbits the star at just the right, "Goldilock...

flumpCakes Online CSS Optimiser/Optimizer This feature rich tool takes your CSS file and parses and outputs a leaner version, removing any redundancies and attributes which are not needed. Here is a full list of what it can do: Removes commentsa Removes white space (such as excess spaces) Converts RGB values to Hex (they’re smaller) Converts Hex values in the format #RRBBGG to #RGB. Changes zero values with a size specified to 0. (0px would change to 0) Changes values such as border: 1px 2px 1px 2px; to border: 1px 2px; Converts multiple background, font, margin, padding, list attributes into a single attribute Converts multiple border values into single attributes Option to convert absolute values (PX & PT) into relative values (EM) Groups style attributes and values which appear mutliple times into a single style This tool reads CSS just like a browser would. So using hacks which are browser specific will give random results, make sure any hacks are removed before...

ProCSSor – Advanced CSS Prettifier ProCSSor is a useful tool that will 'prettify' and format CSS files on the fly. ProCSSor – Advanced CSS Prettifier → ScriptSrc.net Tired of hunting down the script tag for the latest version of your Javascript Library of choice? ScriptSrc allows you to copy the latest library (jQuery, MooTools, YUI…) script tags. ScriptSrc.net → HTMLform.com With HTMLform.com all you have to do is design your HTML form and you will get a Zip file that can be very easy installed in your website, with everything needed to make it work: a form that can be embedded in any webpage, a small but very potent database to suit your needs, a tool for checking data online and a button for exporting to CSV and Excel formats. HTMLform.com → Spritebox Spritebox is a WYSIWYG tool to quickly and easily create CSS classes and IDs from a single sprite image. Spritebox → HTML Purifier HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. ...