Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Facebook Prototypes: Facebook’s Version of Google Labs

Last week, we covered a new Facebook feature for Mac users: desktop notifications. Apparently, the feature is part of a new Google Labs-like part of Facebook called Facebook Prototypes.

The company posted a link on TwitterTwitterTwitter

to what appears to be a screenshot of the new feature, which also features experimental products like “Similar Posts” and “Enhanced Event Emails.” You can sort prototypes by “most popular” (total installs), “new prototypes,” and “my prototypes.”

FacebookFacebookFacebook

has grown to the size and scale that something like this makes sense. Rather than force functionality on users, instead let them test it out, and if it catches on, roll it out to all users. This is the process that GoogleGoogleGoogle

has used for numerous products that have gone on from Labs to “graduate” and become integrated into major Google services like Maps and GmailGmailGmail

.

We’ll update here once the feature is fully live and we can (hopefully) test out a few more experimental apps.

ooooohhhh!!!!

Posted via web from winterg1979's posterous

Monday, September 14, 2009

Facebook swipes Twitter @replies

Facebook swipes Twitter @replies: "

FacebookFacebook is starting to roll out a brand new feature to turn status updates in to public conversations online. We say new, but we’ve got an eery sense of déjà vu here: you can tag other people to your post by @Mentioning their name. Hey, doesn’t Twitter do something just like that?



Rolling out over the next few weeks, the new Facebook tagging feature lets you alert someone to your post by writing @ followed by their name. As you type, the name appears from a drop down menu for you to select. Once you publish, your tagged mate gets a Facebook notification and a link on their wall to your post. It’s not just for friends either, as you can namedrop groups, events, applications and Facebook Pages in the same way too, and you’ll eventually be able to tag from within applications.


At the time of writing, we’re still not able to access the new Facebook feature, but as it rolls out across Facebookes hundreds of millions of users this month, more and more procrastinators will be able to talk just like they do on Twitter, just on Facebook. In fact, just about the only feature of the web Twitter service Facebook doesn’t offer is the ability to view your @reply history. Now how long will it be before Zuckerberg hits the switch on that too?


Out September | £free | Facebook




Related posts:

  1. Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter coming to Xbox Live
  2. Facebook replies to redesign row
  3. Facebook syncs stream to Twitter

"

Monday, September 7, 2009

New Monopoly game is streets ahead

I last played Monopoly with my sister, her boyfriend and some friends over a year ago. We started happily enough, but it soon became clear my sibling's partner was an even more unscrupulous businessman than Cyril Sneer. His combination of a voracious appetite for property, an inclination towards punitive taxes and, crucially, control of the bank meant the game lasted about 30 minutes before I was forced out, homeless, with no business interests and entirely empty pocketed.

But when I played the new online version this morning I was free from such a driven competitor. Monopoly City Streets, a link up between game owners Hasbro and Google Maps, launches on Wednesday for a four-month period. It enables one, in theory, to buy any street in the world.

New players are given no less than 3m Monopoly dollars – a far cry from the £200 clutch of brightly coloured notes of yore – to build their empire. If you get in first, you can buy the street straight away. If you're beaten to it, you can make the owner an offer. If they don't reply in seven days, this offer is automatically accepted, no matter how contemptible it may be. (Cue the obligatory "So make sure you log in everyday!" order in the instructions that accompany the game).

Finding the main urban areas of Manchester, Birmingham and London already snapped up, I decided to be influenced by nostalgia rather than greed, and switched focus to my home town of Preston.

In lieu of the currently ailing development plans in the self-professed administrative hub of Lancashire, I immediately took the initiative in a way that real developers are failing to do and snapped up Fishergate, the main street in England's newest city. Paying $1,140,000 for this prime real estate represented solid value, and to celebrate I immediately built an obnoxiously tall skyscraper.

With that property earning $288,000 dollars a day in rental income – a variant of the online game is that a landowner is automatically paid rent, rather than waiting for some poor unfortunate to visit your street before cashing in – I turned my attention to the leafy suburb of Penwortham, or as the game has decided to call it, "Penworthamdale".

Having spent my childhood tearing up and down Liverpool Road in Penwortham(dale) on my Raleigh Wolf, it was with a feeling of immense pride that I returned to buy the street outright, and immediately commissioned the building of a castle. Liverpool Road in real life boasts 11 hairdressers and five estate agents in a 100-metre stretch, but is distinctly lacking in a fortified defensive structure. Not now.

As nice as it is to construct wildly improbable premises around areas you're familiar with, and see the structures displayed on the Google Maps format, putting up buildings and watching the rent roll in could become quite dull. Thus, the online game encourages conflict between land barons by sporadically offering "Chance Cards" where players are given the option to bulldoze properties lovingly built by other land barons, or construct sewage works or prisons on rivals' streets, lowering their rental income. Perhaps there's a place for my sister's boyfriend after all.

I was in a rather benevolent mood when I was invited to flatten a fellow player's property – how many people own a castle, after all? – but for the purposes of research destroyed a magnificent 15m-Monopoly-dollar property recently constructed in Blackpool by an erstwhile opponent.

This is all very well, and the satisfying graphic of a demolition ball swiftly assuaged any guilt, whilst cementing my position as the top property-dog in Lancashire.

But the problem is the game shows players exactly who has been trying to ruin their empire.

I now have an enemy. A rich enemy. What does that mean for the future of the castle? Are Preston and Penwortham(dale) to be beset by an evil tycoon, hell-bent on dismantling the friendly fiefdom I've worked so hard (three or four clicks of the mouse) to develop?

Scary. Very scary.

Sounds so cool !!

Posted via web from winterg1979's posterous

Dump Your To-Do List and Keep Your Sanity [Productivity]

By Rosa Golijan, 5:00 PM on Tue Sep 1 2009, 37,479 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Quickly jotted or carefully plotted out, to-do lists are a staple of many productivity methods. Yet in the wrong hands, these lists somehow morph from helpful road maps into overfilled energy-wasters. Could it be time to dump the to-do?

Photo by *_Abhi_*

Maybe you were lazy, maybe you had an emergency stop your week in its tracks. Either way you haven't kept up on your to-do routine for a few days and now you're repaying every precious second with interest. If you use something similar to the Gmail GTD Inbox, now your whole inbox might feel like that dreaded post-vacation email buildup. If you stick with pen-and-paper for your to-dos but let things pile up on your desk for a couple of days, it feels like you've been ignoring the mailman. Except that unlike your email or snailmail buildup, you can't simply take your whole to-do list and dump it into the trash... can you?

When Gina covered the art of the doable to-do list, she reminded us that a successful to-do list requires purging:

Just like you should be able to see what tasks are top priority on your to-do list, you should be able to see what items have been on your list the longest as well. Chances are you've got some mental blockage around the tasks that have been sitting around forever, and they've got to be re-worded or broken down further. Or perhaps they don't need to get done after all. Deleting an item from your to-do list is even better than checking it off, because you've saved yourself the effort.

Today I'm taking Gina's advice to a bit of an extreme and encouraging you to try the same: Rather than spending the day sorting through a flood of tasks drowning every category to find the ones which can go, I'll be dumping my inbox-based to-do list entirely and taking a completely fresh start:

That is my moment of bliss. By tomorrow, a new to-do list will be taking form gradually and I'll add the important tasks in, but today I'm saving myself a hell of a lot of time by starting off fresh. Am I running the risk of missing a task or to-do item? Yes. Will that task have been significant? Most likely not. The productive time I'm gaining by taking the risk of skipping the tasks which would be purged in a few days to begin with is worth it. And there are always e-mail archives for reference, just as there are filing cabinets for physical to-do/GTD materials.

Since I'm the kind of person whose to-do list almost always hits the over-filled, under-processed stumbling block, dumping my to-do list will become an occasional to-do from now on as a clean starting point can turn into a productivity booster and give a productivity method of choice the power up it needs. In a perfect world I'd always keep a pristine to-do list, but I'm realistic, and every now and then, this dump is exactly what I need.

If you're not ready to follow my potentially crazy approach and dump your to-do list, despite the safety net of archival methods, then keep in mind that you can at least tweak your routine to be more effective by incorporating could-do lists, did-do lists, or maybe even some paper and sticky pads. No matter which route you take, try to stick with one task at a time in order to actually get through your to-do lists.

Whether you are in fact taking the "dump the to-do" approach, just plain tweaking your routine, or not doing anything at all, I'd love to hear your to-do list methodology or general productivity horror and success stories in the comments. How do you get back into your routine after vacations, emergencies, or planned breaks? Do you start with a clean slate or do you stoically battle your way through all the build up? Does it work?

Many apologies to Gina for taking her incredible pointers and abusing them in a way she may have never promoted and many thanks to the crazy inbox-clearer who inspired me to do such a thing in the first place.

Posted via web from winterg1979's posterous

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Tetris can alter the structure of your brain

Tetris can alter the structure of your brain: "

Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.


The study, funded by Tetris' makers and authored by investigators at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, shows that playing the classic puzzle game had two distinct effects on the brains of research subjects: some areas in the brain showed greater efficiency, and other areas showed thicker cortexes, which is a sign of more grey matter.

"