Facebook version of QuizSender.com

I was reading an article on Facebook's strategy in Wired, it talked about the recent changes that allow any 3rd party to make a Facebook application.

I felt like giving it a go and have put together a Facebook version of my website; QuizSender.com. To use it go to http://apps.facebook.com/quizsender/.

Let me know what you think.

TAS game videos

Recently I have been getting slightly addicted to TAS (Tool-Assisted-Superplay) game videos. Basically people with a lot of spare time on their hands play console games within emulators, they use the emulators ability to take snap shots in order to produce a perfect run and complete games in record times. It can be quite fun to watch a game that you spent ages completing many years ago completed in ten minutes!

There are lots of videos available at NESVideos. These have to be downloaded using BitTorrent though. Plenty of videos can also be found on YouTube (search for "TAS ").

Super Mario 64: (the 120 star version at NESVideos is more fun though)

Super Mario World: (again, the full 96 level one at NESVideos is more fun)

Thoughts on Freebase

I have been evaluating Freebase a fairly new site that is aiming to create an open database of everything. Think Wikipedia, but with user definable relational structure.

Here are my thoughts:

Weaknesses:

• Permissions too lapse.
  Not extendible for uses such as a social network, could not easily be used to store private data for a website.
• No notion of functions.
  Wouldn't it be really cool if users could submit functions as well as types, e.g. a function from post codes to latitude and longitude.
• Can Metaweb Technologies be trusted?
  This is a lot more complicated than Wikipedia for other organisations to replicate. If Metaweb goes bust or bad is all the data lost?
• Needs more data.
  It will be interesting to see at what rate the size of the database grows and what the typical method of inserting data will be. Many users will not go as far as learning the API but the current user interface is a bit too clunky for contributors. Refactoring using the Freebase site is currently more-or-less impossible, and a lot of refactoring should be expected for an openly writable database of everything in such an early stage!

Cool:

• Users can create HTML only data driven web applications.

Possible (Mis-)uses:

• To store low sensitivity, yet private, data (using cryptography).
  Think of it as a replacement for Amazon S3.
• A truly open social network.
  At some point soon Facebook, Myspace, etc. have to face the openness interrogation that awaits most successful technology companies.
• Free hosting with unlimited bandwidth.
  When the site is out of alpha anybody will be able to query the database.

Snap

I have added Snap Preview Anywhere to my blog. What a great idea! Whenever you hover over a link you get a thumbnail of the URL it leads to.

Amazon must be upset too because these are thumbnails of the exact page, not just a domain home page and they are captured very soon after being queued -- much better than Alexa.

I have some quibbles from a business point of view though: They appear to be marketing themselves as a search engine; that isn't going too happen there is way too much competition and their results aren't even taken from one of the top three (Snap adds a great new level to this cryptic linking technique doesn't it?) The behaviour is added by webmasters themselves by adding a JavaScript to their page, I think the decision to see these previews should be a user decision and not a content provider decision; this means the realm of browser add-ons.

Paint By Icons

I've made a new website!

You upload a JPEG photo and it returns a mosaic version of your photo made up of a subset of the 'favicons' of a mixture of 1000 currently popular websites, similar to this.

Give it a go at www.paintbyicons.com.