The Danosphere.

:emerges from abyss:

Hey everyone! I’ve been on leave but wanted to post a lil update here. Code samples should be up this weekend, along with a more complete version of the “AS3 Node Network” complete with XML saving.

I also have a pretty awesome BitmapData writeup coming that really stretches the limits of Flash and Bitmaps, including an optimized Async JPEG Encoder- which allows you to encode JPEGs 4x faster than the default adobe lib, and also allows you to monitor progress of the process and merge multiple BitmapData objects seamlessly.

So what I’m trying to say is good stuff is coming, so stick around! Hoping to post this stuff over a series of posts, the first of which should be up tomorrow til then…

Hey guys, I haven’t forgotten you!! Sorry it is taking me so long to post the code examples [node network, tooltip flex components] but I have been super busy. As soon as this new site I’ve been working on [for months and months] is done and released [late May] I will be posting up all the code examples people have been requesting and will be more than happy help guide you through them should you require assistance!

Until then please accept my apologies, I know it’s been a while but I haven’t forgotten. For the time being I must focus my resources [time] on getting this new site live/to market, once that’s done the code postings will be the very next thing I do, promise!

Thanks everyone for you continued patience!

Oprah is now on twitter. Oh, my, gurd.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!

One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps,  no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil

Facebook, the monolith social network currently in charge of the social networking scene, needs to make money… like… really needs to make money. With an impressive 200million users you’d think the site would be churning out profit hand over fist, but it’s not. In an attempt to monetize and keep up with the explosive growth of Twitter, Facebook redesigned last month to look more like twitter, or did it? 

When you look closely at the redesign, the real emphasis is more about ‘pages’ and less about ‘trying to be like twitter’. But Facebook doesn’t want to shock it’s userbase with this new emphasis, it wants a slow dip in the pool, as opposed to a splash. 

And so it begins. If you haven’t noticed yet, your “highlights” column is probably about 50% page-based activities… your friends liking brands, ‘fanning’ brands, commenting etc. Facebook’s next move was relocating ‘People You May Know’ above the fold… previously it was underneath the ‘highlights’ column, generally below the fold. While the location change didn’t seem to be a big deal, the next move certainly is- “People You May Know’ is now ‘Suggestions’. These newfound ‘Suggesstions’ extend beyond freinds… to brands. Finally the Facebook vision is coming full circle, as it actively ‘pushes’ brands at you based on the activities of your friends. It pulls this off in a cunning way, by mixing in the brands with your friends.

Here is a great example of this, Facebook’s ‘Suggestions’ for me (and a bunch of people I don’t know):

Don’t get me wrong I love the office, but for me Facebook is about connecting with friends NOT about beomcing a poster child for a brand just because i may use/like them. I like “The Office” I watch it every week, but I am not a Facebook Fan of the Office. 

As Facebook pushes forward with it’s plans to monetize the question becomes “at what cost?”. Is Facebook alienating users by putting so much emphasis on brands and activities centered around brands? What do you think?

This week Digg released their “Diggbar” which also seconds as a URL shortening service. What this means for the end user… or more importantly the content generating users whose content is submitted to digg by other people is that- now Digg is stealing your traffic!

Mashable was quick to give Digg the ole’ reach-around, making it sound so soft and cuddly! But the truth is that Digg is milking traffic from other sites, without their permission at all. How much traffic are they stealing? Enough to boost their 20million unique visitors by about 20%. On top of all that (as if that isn’t enough) they also inject ads into the diggbar frame, so they are stealing views AND revenue from the sites that are shared via their shortened URL.

I could go on for ages about how much that sucks for the sites losing traffic and ad revenue to digg, or about how crappy shortened URLs are for the web, or about how the diggbar is killing SEO for sites framed by it, but luckily someone has already done that for me.

Want the truth? Here is it:

The Truth about Digg’s DiggBar