The Danosphere. » social networking

Now Export Facebook Messages, Events, and Status History with FBE

Dan — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 04:32:19 +0000

You can now export your Facebook inbox, outbox, events, and status history all through FBE. I was going to just set it aside my for a while after releasing it just a few days ago but after receiving feedback from several people with requests for more data points in the export, I couldn’t resist but to roll up my sleeves and improve the tool. In addition to the new data points you can also customize the export so it only includes the information you want (a la carte if you will).

The customizable export was a nice addition, and certainly makes the tool more user friendly, but it was actually something I was forced to add just because the export was becoming so large that it was taking forever to test exporting ALL the data points EVERY time. So, a small developer aid proves to be a boon for the end user too! Anyway check it out, and if you’re one of those people using the tool to export and archive your data to your harddrive, make sure to update your FBE file with the new data points (the export format has changed slightly as well). Enjoy!

Twitter + Oprah = [pic]

Dan — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:24:26 +0000

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

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Poll: What do you think of the new Facebook redesign?

Dan — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:57:05 +0000

8 Ways Tweetdeck Could Be Better

Dan — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:24:02 +0000

While I was having lunch with my buddy and fellow twitterer @wittyphrase we got to discussing twitter, and that naturally led to discussing tweetdeck, one of the most popular twitter clients to date. Tweedeck is a great tool for organizing and managing your twitter life, but it could be better, here are a few suggestions.

Replace “Mystery Meat” Navigation

What do these buttons do? Can you tell? I couldn’t, and it took me about a week to get used to the fact you have to roll over each button in order to discern its function. I think useability would increase by making the functions of the buttons more apparent, even if that means adding a label to the right of the button or whatever (or replacing the icon with a label).

Time Format

I am not in the military, and thus 24hr time does not instantly correlate to 12hr time for me. Also, I don’t like doing math. It would be nice if the time format were configurable so I could choose between 12 and 24hr time formats.

Group Memory

I use tweetdeck both at home and at work. It is pretty annoying that when I get home, I need to “regroup” all the tweeps I had seperated into groups at work. If there was some persistence of the groups across machines that would be incredibly useful.

Drag and Drop

Because I am a Flex Developer, I can tell you right now tweedeck was built in Flex, which is cool. I can also tell you drag and drop is very easy to implement in Flex and would be a huge useability plus for tweetdeck. Being able to drag columns around and drag users to and from groups would be much easier than the current process which involves clicking alot of buttons and checking a lot of checkboxes.

Filtering

If I have created a group and added tweeps to it, I don’t need to also see their tweets repeated in my “All Friends” column. If a person is in a group, omit their tweets from the main timeline, or at least make it an option, its rather cumbersom seeing the same tweet in different columns.

More About Me

Tweetdeck doesn’t tell me much about myself. It would be nice if it showed my avatar in the top right along with my API stats. Information on following/followers for my account would be nice as well, especially if it were realtime updated along with the rest of the UI. Right now I have to switch to the Twitter web interface to see new followers and that to me is a nuisance.

Make Tweetdeck Web Accessible

Tweetdeck is built on Flex and AIR, so it should be pretty easy to implement a straight web interface without the AIR wrapper. This would be especially useful if they implemented persisting groups, that way i could use tweetdeck from a webpage at the library and still have all my tweeps neatly organized into groups, and I wouldn’t have to download any executables or runtime environments!

Conversation View

It would be nice if tweetdeck allowed you to break conversation out of the main column somehow. Not really sure what the best way to implement this would be, but tracking back through a converstation using tweetdeck is not always the easiest thing. Showing a conversation similar to the way twitter search does would be very useful.

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That’s all I got, if you have more ideas please post them up in the comments. I really like Tweetdeck, but its the lil things that keep me waiting for “the next great client” that will address all these issues and truly serves as my one stop twitter shop.

Oh, Kevin Rose told me to do this: Follow me on Twitter!

Social Networking Sites – Speed Test

Dan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:11:30 +0000

I use alot of social networking sites, and most of them load pretty fast. I decided to run a little test to see which sites loaded the fastest (this is a gotta-have-it-now culture right?). The results are pretty interesting, here they are, with the screen captures of the full tests.

I performed these tests on a weekday around 4:40pm- I figured that’s when everyone would be browsing the web while awaiting the end of the day.

Summary:

Fastest: Linkedin.com

Slowest: Digg.com

Google.com – 0.7s – Control
Linkedin.com – 2.7s
Myspace.com – 2.8s
Facebook.com – 4.6s
Reddit.com – 4.6s
Stumbleupon.com – 6.1s
Twitter.com – 11.5s
Digg.com – 12s

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Google.com – 0.7s – Control

Linkedin.com – 2.7s

Myspace.com – 2.8s

Facebook.com – 4.6s

Reddit.com – 4.6s

Stumbleupon.com – 6.1s

Twitter.com – 11.5s

Digg.com – 12s

Snipt.org – Share code snippets and large text via twitter!

Dan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:11:42 +0000

Snipt.org is a nifty little tool for developers / everyone. It’s like twitpic but for code and long text. Punch in some code or a long paragraph, select the language type (“text” for long text), and then snip it! Snipt will give you a short URL to share your content with people via twitter.

Here’s my little snipt for you: http://snipt.org/63