Haiti quake relief: How tech helps
Posted on January 15, 2010 by Budi Putra in Nature
Over $5 million had been raised through text message, thanks to a texting campaign spread on Twitter and Facebook [want to help Haiti people who lost homes, friends and family members in the 7.0-magnitude earthquake? Check-out here]. People around the world also can see the earliest pictures and videos of disaster through TwitPic and YouTube or even satellite photos via Google Earth.
Now Facebook Fellowship, then Facebook University?
Posted on January 9, 2010 by Budi Putra in Education
Facebook announced the Facebook Fellowship Program to support Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year, to help the Palo Alto company in dealing with the social web and Internet technology challenges (and maybe, a way to find future hires?). Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in the following topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships.
Specifically:
- Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
- Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
- Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
- Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
- Systems: Hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
- Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval.
[via Inside Facebook]
Seesmic acquires Ping.fm
Posted on January 5, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
Get ready to update 50 social networks from Seesmic! Seesmic, a social software application site offering Seesmic Desktop for Twitter and Facebook updates as well as browser based client for Twitter, just acquired Ping.fm. Actually, Seesmic originated as a short social video sharing service, founded by European entrepreneur and LeWeb conference founder, Loic Le Meur.
Your friends are not all in one social network, but we want to help you stay in touch with them anytime and from any device. That is Seesmic’s vision and to deliver this faster, we have acquired Ping.fm. You can now update 50 social networks using Seesmic+Ping.fm from email, chat, sms, Blackberry, Android, web, Windows, OSX and much more soon.
Ping.fm has more than half a million active users who post daily from any device just by sending an email, a text message or chat – simple tools that existed since the early stages of the Internet are available on all connected devices. This is why Ping.fm is extremely easy to use and access -just send an update and it can touch on 50 social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer,Status.net and many more. Ping.fm is compatible with every single Internet device in the world, which is why it has become so successful among thousands of users.
Good move, Seesmic!
[via RobinMalau]What did Facebook users say in 2009?
Posted on December 22, 2009 by Budi Putra in Tech
Facebook revealed top status updates for 2009. “Facebook Applications” tops the list, meaning that the Facebookers keep sharing what applications they used on their status updates, although it’s automatically noticed to their networks. Others top keywords were coming from the actual news and events.
Status updates on Facebook help people understand their friends and the people around them–how they’re feeling, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. In the United States alone, people on Facebook are sharing hundreds of millions of words every day, thousands per second, in status updates. When taken as a whole, these words offer a unique barometer into the issues, world events and thoughts that are connecting people.
In the tradition of year-end lists, we’re introducing Facebook Memology. “Memology” refers to the study of how “memes,” or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year’s list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009.
