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...