Mark has been busy this Christmas break redoing his social media sites. Here are his new online coordinates if you are inclined to give him a follow.
I guess it is time to make some New Year’s Resolutions for 2012. Here are mine.
So what are your plans for 2012? Jordon’s resolutions are over here.
Jordon went out and bought me a Samsung Galaxy 550 today for an early anniversary gift. I have had my Samsung Link/Freeform for over a year and I really liked it but it’s time to upgrade to a HSPA phone to take advantage of SaskTel’s network. After looking around, I wanted to stay with Virgin Mobile. They have been great to deal with and they are pretty inexpensive for what I need. Plus their technical support is absolutely amazing to deal with.
While Jordon is in love with his Blackberrry Curve, he decided to get me an Android phone. While BBM would be fun, it’s not that much more useful than texting for me. What I am excited about having is my email, synchronized calendar, address book, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, and Foursquare all on my phone. It’s not the fastest smartphone out there and isn’t an iPhone but it’s good enough for me. I can’t wait to play with it for a while.
While I am talking about Virgin Mobile, Visions Electronics is giving away free Virgin phones with no contracts. You can cancel a month into it if you want. They have the LG Rumor 2, the Samsung Gravity 3, and some others.
Oh yeah, you can find me on Foursquare at foursquare.com/wendycooper
Wired has a great profile on Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake.
Connecting people to one another is not just Fake’s hobby — she has made it her career. As the cofounder of Flickr, the landmark photography site, Fake provided a place for shutterbugs to share their work; they have uploaded more than 4 billion pictures. It was a seminal service that helped launch the era of user-generated content, spurring entrepreneurs to build Web sites and businesses based on volunteer contributions. In addition to influencing sites like Facebook — which allows members to post, share, and tag photos — Flickr’s impact can be seen in services like Twitter and Foursquare, which rely heavily on the kind of group dynamics that it helped popularize. And Fake herself became a Silicon Valley celebrity before selling Flickr to Yahoo for an estimated $35 million back in 2005 and receding from the spotlight.
Now, with Hunch, Fake is back, and she’s using her social skills to tackle one of the most vexing problems in computer science: online recommendations. The smartest engineers at the most innovative companies — Amazon.com, Pandora, Netflix, Google — have spent years trying to perfect algorithms that will suggest the perfect book, song, movie, or product. Dozens of other companies have claimed to have discovered the magic formula for driving consumer behavior online, only to find themselves stymied. They have tried everything from tracking customer purchases to psychological profiles.
I just checked out the new Royal Family’s website as well as 10 Downing Street. I don’t know about you but I think they are substantially better than the Prime Minister of Canada’s website and the Governor General’s site. Now that I think about it, the Government of Canada could use a web facelift. The top navigation bar looked good in 1997 but it is looking a little long in the tooth now.
While the Whitehouse.gov has gotten a lot of attention, I think I prefer the design an implementation of 10 Downing Street a little bit better. The interesting thing is know that 10 Downing Street, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, and the Whitehouse are all using Twitter and 10 Downing Street and Harper’s office are also using Flickr.