Yesterday I came across an interesting experiment, it appears some kind fellow has publicly released a loaded Starbucks card, and he’s just letting people use it at their convenience. People can get free coffee, people can give free coffee. It’s pretty intruiging, and it’s called “Jonathan’s Card“. The guy (Jonathan Stark) even set up a website, twitter account and API around the idea. For all the details check out the site: http://jonathanstark.com/card/.
As much as I hate to admit it, I drink Starbucks… rather often. So I went to try and use this experiment at my local ‘bux, but everytime I got there, the card was empty! Not only that, but it took so much time to check the balance (via the twitter stream) and then flip over to my photos app, find the photo of the card, and scan it- by the time I had done everything what little balance was on the card, was gone. So I thought, this can be better.
Using the APIs provided by Jonathan, I’ve created “Coffee Check“. Coffee Check is a bare bones web app designed to do one thing, check the balance of Jonathan’s card. If there is cash- you get the card image right there, and don’t have to fumble through switching apps, swiping through photos and so on. If it’s empty… it’ll let you know, and may just prompt you to add some cash to it . Very bare bones, but functional, and targeted toward mobile users (should work on any browser though). Make sure to add it to your home screen (it has a pretty iOS home screen icon and everything). Now all you need to do it press the icon from your home screen and voila! Enjoy
Yesterday I was inspired after reading this post on techcrunch. So inspired in fact, that I dropped all dev on my current project (http://snipt.org) and began hacking away at a new one, a tool that would allow you to export your Facebook data. Less than 24hrs later, its done.
FacebookExport.com is a simple tool that exports the majority of your Facebook data to an XML file. My hope is that other sites will create parsers that allow you to import the data into other services like wordpress, posterous, flickr, etc. I’m calling the format “FBE”, short for “FaceBook Export”. I’m not sure how long the tool will be live so hurry and reclaim your datawhile you still can!
Here is a small sample of my personal profile exported, as you can see by the scrollbar on the right, there is a TON of data not shown in this image, but its all there in the export file.
The company I work for, Decision Lens, is getting into the social media game [finally, somewhat... ok just a little]. Anyways, we have a youtube channel now, it’s pretty sparse at the moment but if you are a “youtuber” it never hurts to follow the Decision Lens YouTube Channel to keep up to date with our new videos.
In the meantime checkout this vid, it’s a little long but in all fairness it’s pretty hard to describe what the Decision Lens Suite does in a succinct way, it’s a very powerful software platform with a wide range of uses-and the video goes a long way in explaining that. Check it out, for more info visit the Decision Lens website.
The College Blog Network is changing, and they want their users to influence these changes. In an effort to tap into their users needs TCBN has opened a feedback system to gauge what features users want the most. Are you a TCBN user? Got an idea? Head to their feedback site to have your voice heard!
. Very bare bones, but functional, and targeted toward mobile users (should work on any browser though). Make sure to add it to your home screen (it has a pretty iOS home screen icon and everything). Now all you need to do it press the icon from your home screen and voila! Enjoy 
