The new Facebook homepage that was released last week has messed up the opportunities for an app  to end up in a user’s (and subsequently the user friends’s) news feed. At Nudge we did a bit of research and discovered the new optimal way of distributing your application stories.

So what changed?

The mayor changes regarding Facebook feed stories can be easily summarized. Quoting from the Facebook developer Wiki:

• Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
• You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates
• One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the “recent activity”  section. They will not appear in the stream.

In other words: full stories are a thing of the past, and any other stories won’t appear in the user’s normal stream. As a consequence of this, an app’s feed story won’t end up on the friends’ news feeds either. Also: flash in feed stories seems to be a definite thing of the past.

So what can we do about it?
read more…

• YouTube – Pizza Hut "Happy Hour" – Is barcamp going mainstream? Check this commercial (about 8 seconds in)
• macosxhints.com – Fix backspace/delete when ssh’ing into Linux machines – I needed this for a while. but I had no idea what was the cause. Now I can finally log into a linux box and not have backspaces be interpreted as deletes!
• A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites – Like to see some funny pie charts on social networks? Well, here they are!
• INCOGNITO Boardgame – A game of secret agents in the Venice Carnival – I played this game a few years back and loved it, so I had a look at how much it would cost me to get it. Over 30 pounds is a bit much for such an old game. I might have to wait a few more years.
• photograph.miroen.nl – It's always cool when someone re-uses your code or ideas into their ideas. In this case, Photographer Jeroen has integrated my histogram service into his personal photo album, generating nice histograms next to the metadata in his site.

I had to update my histogram service a little bit because apparently it wasn’t handling files  with spaces in it properly. I have to thank Jeroen Kluft for notifying me about this. Go and have a look at his site to see how he has been incorporating my histogram service into his own photo album. I think it’s pretty awesome!

For the 5th week of our 52 movies challenge I saw Slumdog Millionaire (2008, #47 in the top 250). Melinda had already seen this movie last year during a preview screening and marked it as a clear Oscar contender from the start. Well, I guess she was right: it got 8 Academy Awards including best movie.

So what did I think about the movie? I thought it was fun to watch, that’s it. I think it was a bit mild in comparison to the much more gripping Cidade de Deus (2002, City of God, #17 in the Top 250) which also partially plays in a slump (but in this case in Rio de Janeiro). Additionally the film was also a bit predictable, but all and all the film was saved by the cinematography. I think this movie is a great recognition of the cultural and social diversity of India, and Danny Boyle managed to capture it very nicely.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, I think it’s still in cinema, but if you got a nice large TV I think the movie is also perfectly enjoyable at home.

• Skittles.com: Chat the rainbow. Taste the Rainbow. – Skittles incorporated Twitter search into their main website. Interesting use of social media.
• The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist – It seems that the size of a human's social network (aka the Dunbar Number) hasn't really grown with he introduction of online social networks.
• Nodal points video from Reboot 10 –
• The Curious Case of Forrest Gump – It seems I wasn't the only one that thought these movies were a lot alike.
• How-To: Connect HUAWEI Modem with Mac OS X – Handy little tutorial that shows me how to setup my 3 (Three) 3G dongle "correctly" under OS X