Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'facebook'

Pandora brings music to Facebook

Adam Kinney — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:46:00 GMT

I know iLike has been there for awhile now, but I'm a big fan of Pandora. So once I read they had come to Facebook, I thought what great fodder for another drawing. I really enjoyed the pirate Rory run in ArtRage last night, so here is another one using the same technique.

Sketch in pencil
New Layer
Ink with a thin pen
New Layer
Ink with a thick pen
New Layer
Paint the base colors
New Layer
Paint the Shadows
Drop Opacity
New Layer
Paint the highlights
Drop Opacity
Export

Messy but quick, which can be fun especially when you're rocking out to Chemical Brothers on Pandora.

From the Facebook Dev Garage back to campus

Adam Kinney — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:12:00 GMT

Last night, I headed out with Erik Porter to attend the Facebook Dev Garage in Seattle. Now as a disclaimer we did get there an hour late, but when we got there we ran into a wall (pictured to the right). A wall of 3 people deep just to get into the standing room only room where the actual presentation was going on. I could feel the heat flowing out of the room like I was standing behind an air conditioner.

To be fair, we did show up an hour late, so getting a seat was not too big of a surprise. Although after talking to Karsten, I'm wishing we showed up about 2 hours late when the presentation was over and the open discussion and drinks began.

We went the geek route though and went back to campus and jumped into planning out an App of our own. Once we had a plan on how our App would leverage the FB platform in a smart way, we started hacking out an App. Actually there wasn't much hacking, it was more like pushing or tapping. We reviewed the API, the docs and figured out how to create a Hello World App. More on the App as it progresses, not much to show now.

One highlight of the night was finding the <fb:silverlight /> FBML tag. The element is undocumented and after searching, I found a link that led me back Kartsen's post on Flitterbook where he slightly hinted at its existence.

After testing the tag in our own App, it was clear it had been written using the MIX bits of Silverlight and was not currently functioning and our App dreams were dashed. Or at least currently put on hold.

I spoke with Karsten about this today and offered to write up how at least in initial implementation could work similar to the current <fb:swf /> tag. It takes a preview image which once its clicked (activated) it becomes a player. And waa-laa you have WMVs playing in your Facebook App.

Two upcoming Silverlight events in Second Life

Adam Kinney — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Brad Abrams posted last month about events taking place in Second Life on Visual Studio Island. After hearing about these, I added them to the Upcoming Events page on the Silverlight wiki. Then it got it a little weird.

Looking to spread the word about these unique events a little further, I jumped on to the Silverlight Group page on Facebook and added Related Events to let Silverlight Facebookers know about events going on in a different virtual world.

I guess its not completely odd. Its a bit like posting an announcement in one building to advertise a party going on in another building. It was just all so virtual.

Anyways, if you're interested the upcoming events are as follows:

Visual Studio Island presents: Silverlight and VB.NET
Amanda Silver
Tuesday, July 31, 2007 4:30-5:30 PM
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Microsoft/147/213/27/

Visual Studio Island presents: Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX
Brad Abrams
Thursday, August 30th, 2007 3:00 - 4:00 PM
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Microsoft/147/213/27/

Furries welcome.

Facebook Developer Garage, Seattle, Tuesday night

Adam Kinney — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:16:00 GMT

I am planning to go to the Facebook Developer Garage event on Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

I've seen a few interesting Apps built on the Facebook platform and I can see the potential of the concept. Beyond testing and studying, I have been hung up on the Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex described by Jeremiah Owyang.

I can deal with leaving my aggregator and visiting my Facebook homepage, just to get a picture of my life through navy (#3b5998, the "Facebook blue") rimmed glasses. My time in Facebook has been fun and rather interesting. I even find out about cool events like the Facebook Developer Garage (thanks go to Beth for attending first).

But then when I want to check on Groups I am a member of, I have to open another page to see updates. My mini-feed spoils me with everything else, but only shares group info when someone joins or leaves a group. From my point of view they appear to be adjectives people are labeling and de-labeling themselves with.

I think there's more you could do with groups. Notifications about discussion threads and photos might be nice, maybe a Group info panel for Group Admins, a list of shared links.

This sparked my initial interest in FB App Development. I was cut short, though, by the fact that the API exposes little Group info.

As a workaround it was suggested by someone in the Developer forums that you could still leverage the Group info to build a SuperGroups App which could then offer more custom functionality. But then you're stuck rewriting existing functionality, doing more work then you should have to be.

I also think it would be interesting to add Apps to Group Profile pages. I wouldn't mind having an App that uses Silverlight on the Silverlight Group page.

So this is one of the reasons I thought I'd attend the Facebook Developer Garage event. I'm guessing others may have ideas on Groups and Apps and RSS and blackholes.

The other reason is because of their snazzy logo.

Flotzam mashing up Twitter, Facebook and Flickr in WPF

Adam Kinney — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:11:00 GMT

In a recent Channel 9 video, Charles interviews Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin about Flotzam.

Take a spoonful of Twitter, add some Flickr and a dash of Facebook, optionally flavoring to you own taste with custom RSS support and you have an application that doubles as a screensaver flowing data on and off your screen. Better yet, remix the app by grabbing the source code and customize the whole experience.

Kartsen and Tim talk about their development experience especially focusing on the flow of between designer and developer. Tim designed the elements within Blend, handed them off to Karsten who would then write the C# code which reach out and grab the disparate data and display it leveraging Databinding.

Not only is the application mashing-up data, its built on foundation of mashed up code, including libraries such as, Facebook.NET, Flickr.NET and Karsten's own Twitter API built in 4.5 seconds.

Karsten blogged about his experience here, but I would expect to see more from him about the Designer/Developer workflow in the future.

No 301 love from Facebook

Adam Kinney — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:00:00 GMT

After recently changing my feed over to FeedBurner I was happy to see that my latest "Note" had been imported into my Facebook profile.

(In case you're not aware, Facebook has a cool feature which allows you to import posts from your blog into your profile which then become "Notes". They reprint the whole article but they do link back to the original permalink. This way your Facebook friends can read your blog without actually having to leave the realm of Facebook. And perhaps a more interesting feature, you can link who is in the Note. A way of tagging the post with a person's name but a strongly typed tag that links back to their profile. This activity alone can possibly warrant a one-liner in their news feed and even their friends news feed. Now your syndicated post, which is now a Note, could be read by people you don't know looking for information about one of their Facebook friends, thus expanding the reach of your words or possibly even providing some useful information worth sharing to people who are interested.)

The new note was there and it got me thinking about my redirect issue with FeedBurner. To support my RSS URL changing, I was now returning a HTTP status of 301 when my past URL was requested along with the location of my new URL. I thought it would be nifty of FaceBook if they had made the request for RSS, received the 301, recorded the new location and modified my setting in profile. They didn't. They still had my old URL listed.

If I knew what a 301 was and I had set it myself, which is the case here, then I would hope they would change the URL in my settings to be imported.

And if I didn't know what was going on and my blog vendor modified my URL, then I would likely be unaware of anything changing unless my Notes had stopped importing.

I poked around in Facebook's Terms of Use and I found this:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Maybe changing the URL based on the 301 would be considered translating or reformatting?

This was not such a big issue to me as a user, but more as a site developer. We added the blog post import feature on Channel 10 where I don't believe we are recording changes sent via 301s. Feed URLs are actually discovered and recorded via auto-discovery links once a blog URL is given, so there is even more freedom for the system to respect the 301 since the user never manually entered the original URL.

Funny, you wouldn't think being on vacation would turn out a post on HTTP status codes...