Facebook falls directly in these three categories (although the news in there are mostly random status updates from your friends), so everyone was looking for the day when this app would be released; and the day has finally come. There have been rumors for months about it: today’s announcement looked like another, a sort of “yes it’s coming soon” announcement, since the AppStore was still showing the old version 3.5 for iPhone only. However, after a few minutes, the store got finally updated: the app is around 10MB big – not so long to download it even with my superslow connection – and the very first impression is very good.

Created using HTML5, Facebook for iPad allows you to do everything you could not do before using the iPhone version (which also looks ugly on the tablet, if I can say): the main screen shows you the News Feed with the new sections as in the website and a right column for the chat; the bar on top gives you quick access to Friends requests, Messages and the so-loved Notifications; additionally, a new button is used to open a left column which looks very similar to the one you have on the website, with your Favorites, Pages, Groups and Apps.

Browsing Facebook with the new app is way faster than the website, although you don’t have all the features: you can for example share with your Friends Lists, but you are not able to edit them (e.g. I can’t add someone to Close Friends or Restricted). According to the official page of Facebook you are also able to run your apps, but right now I do not see any except Friends and Photos.

Browsing photos is very nice: you’ll see something similar to the galleries you are used to on the iPad and you’ll see high resolution pictures that you can easily comment. Notifications are also there and looks to use push – but we’d need iOS 5 to really appreciate them. One thing I am not sure I like is the way notifications are handled: when you click on the icon on top, a list of notifications appears – so far so good; however, clicking on one of them shows the post in the right column instead of opening it in full screen; I noticed even that if the left column is open, the right one doesn’t shop up correctly.

Considering this is the very first version, I’d globally say I like it, at least as a first impression; of course, there are more things they can do to make it really great – and they could probably have everything ready, with all the time they had to release it – but it’s a good start. Now, let’s just wait Google’s reply: hope they won’t forget the tablet world so long. The social network war goes on.

The big day came after months of rumors: anyone was forecasting different things, from the voice recognition to the new camera, from low end devices to a full integration with Facebook; what almost everyone was sure of, however, was that Steve Jobs Tim Cook would have shown to the World the new iPhone 5. Now, the device is called iPhone 4S, and it’s still better than the previous one; I agree that calling it “5″ would have been too much for what they introduced new, but I also believe that many people are disappointed; most of them just because of the name, unfortunately.

The device is definitely a great one: its voice recognition (named Siri) looks amazing from the demo (well, my 1995 Nokia’s seemed great as well from demos, so should see it in action) – although it won’t be available in Italian for a while – the camera is impressive with an f/2.4 aperture and a set of software/hardware enhancements that would make it one of the best on the phone-market, the CPU has been upgraded.

So, what? This time the word innovation was definitely not on the plate; the new iOS is improved a lot - taking lot of features from Android, yes, but this is part of the game – but you don’t need a new device to run it; I was quite impressed when they started to talk about a new greeting card service: come on, we’re talking about amazing features and you propose me a 25-year-old idea? Totally disappointed this time, Apple. I always preferred Android, but it’s good to see new features coming out, since the more Apple innovates, the more competitors create great devices to win the war.

But what do we have now? This interesting comparition table from Talk Android shows a comparision with the device I currently own – a Samsung Galaxy SII – with the new iPhone 4S: there’s really nothing particulary amazing in the new device. The voice recognition is amazing, but Android’s is great too and supports even more languages; also I do not think it’s a feature most of the people would really use in real life: a wonderful support for people who can’t easily use the phone otherwise, but would everyone else just going around arguing with their device? The same I can say about the camera: yes, specs are impressive, but the quality of my phone is impressive as well. And Apple-fans’ usual comment is: “this device came out X months later, that’s why it is (almost - they can’t admit it) better than the iPhone”; what’s your comment now? This came out half a year later, what does it have to scare Samsung, which is ready to release their next model too?

I’ve already seen lot of disappointed comments about this last announcement; if you love Apple and do not have an iPhone, this is definitely a great device and it’s worth buying; if you have an iPhone 4, I believe the only reason to upgrade is to throw away money (in that case, I can give you my PayPal account); for everyone else, take a chance to look at the Google Episode event next week, where Samsung and Google promise great announcements. Hoping they won’t disappoint us as well.

This morning I posted something on my Timeline, using the mobile client first, then the computer and at last even a complaining post on Twitter: none of those appeared in the profile. However, clicking on View Activity I could see, edit and featuring all of those. I then noticed that the date was October 1st - correct – but… hey, just below those 3 posts there was a Today with the post I actually wrote yesterday.

Having worked argued with timezones quite for long, I’ve immediatly thought it could be the case: my computer is set on the Italian timezone, 9 hours ahead of Facebook’s in California; I tried to change it to the Pacific one - back in time, September 30th! – restarted the browser and bang, here are my posts stories.

Yep, it looks like Timeline doesn’t show anything in the future and, for Facebook, October 1st was the future: was my Timeline an alternative one, as a consequence of time paradox?

It was a long time Facebook did not introduce any new feature on its platform and the new Google+ certainly gave a speed-up to their usually slow development cycle. Although they say all the changes were already planned – and probably most of them really were – I think they were much inspired by the new Big G’s creature: it is now easier to share with the people you want, even if not as easy as with Circles, to follow people without being friends and even translate posts - only from pages and only if you have the Translation app installed - as you can do with a popular extension on Google+.

The biggest change, however, it’s their new Timeline: if you are a developer you can test it out already, but only other developers can see it once you publish. I’ve been using it for a few days and I must say it is the best innovation they introduced on the social network since I started using it in 2007: right now your profile has become a diary of your present and past events, giving everyone a better idea about you.

You can add photos and life events any time on your Timeline: the day you got a diploma, when you get married, there is even a “lost a loved one” option; you can add single pictures in the Timeline, but no albums – a limitation from my point of view, since it would be nice to add a bunch of pictures back in the past; but, most important, you can check all the posts – now called stories – you wrote since you joined the site. And here it comes the dark side of the moon.

Although it was indeed possible to check previous posts, by clicking on the Older Posts button on someone’s Wall again and again, it is now incredibly easier to do it: you have a list of years on the right, you can simply click on them and immediatly see the most important stories – according to Facebook’s ideas – for that year; the more you go to the past, the less posts you see, but you can always click on a link to see more and more stories.

The real problem here is the privacy then: if you can survive your jealous girlfriend, looking at the messages you wrote to your previous one before you met, you might find uncomfortable that everyone could watch out what you were doing years ago. Yes, you can always decide who can see what, but changing all your previous posts is a long task and most of the people are still not even used to change the privacy for new stories, keeping posting publicly without probably know they’re doing so.

I was also wondering about one other aspect: what would people do if Facebook would start asking money for using the service? There have been a lot of hoaxes about it, of course all fake – side note: do not believe a post saying such thing, since Facebook will tell you directly about any of their changes - and it is something that probably will never happen, but if it will be the case, would people be able to leave the site and jump on another social network? Once you have all your life’s pictures saved up there, would a few dollars per year - $1 per user would means over $500M for Facebook every 12 months! - make you abandon it all and start over again?

Isn’t our life too much connected to the social network? Or are we still able to decide on our own?

I like how the Google team is adding features and talking to the users.

More info on: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/making-most-of-improvements-to-1-button.html

5 Days of War

During the Olympic Games opening day, someone was busy watching something definetly less nice than the amazing show in China: it’s in that day, in fact, that Russia entered Georgia space and a war started between the two. Someone says Georgia begun the fights and Russia was just defending people living in the separatist region of South Ossetia; others believe the opposite: it’s the giant Russia the one who started everything, while Georgian soldiers were just doing their best to avoid an invasion. There have been quite a lot of talks about that and I’m not going to say more: I just don’t know what exactly happened those days, but I definetly know people who really had awful time.

5 Days of War - named 5 Days of August in Georgia – is a movie about that August; there are words that the movie was financed mostly by the Georgian government and watching at the result you might believe to them. I had plans to go to Georgia that August, but then I decided to move the trip a bit later; however, I was there during the shooting of the movie. In fact, the only thing I’ve seen – and partecipated to, although I can’t see myself in the crowd – was the scene of the president talking to people in front of Parliament in the end of that 5-days war.

There was a prime in Tbilisi in early June, 2011; then, I suddently saw a few days ago my friend’s status on Facebook, saying her friend almost cried when she saw 5 Days of August. The movie came back to my mind, although I read and heard not very good things about it, and I decided to finally look for the DVD and to finally buy it.

The movie

I read posts somewhere on the internet of people congratulating the camera crew for the work and I must agree: in the beginning of the movie we’re in Iraq, where the American reporter Thomas Anders (Ruper Friend) is saved by a Georgian contingent after his car has been attacked. The scene is really well done, with camera following soldiers and people and making you feel the fights.

One year later Thomas Andres is going to Georgia, where there are voices about a possible conflict in the separatist zones; when he arrives to Tbilisi, the movie turns into a sort of commercial about Georgia: I don’t personally think this is bad, since in every movie we see an initial scene with wonderful landscapes or skylines of American cities; however, it might seem too much if you see it.

It’s during a wedding party not far from the buffer zone – on the border of South Ossetia – that the fights begins: it’s the night of August 8 and Thomas Rupert is at the restaurant with his cameraman Sebastian Ganz (Richard Coyle); there’s a typical festival for the marriage of one Georgian couple, with (amazing, as in real) dancers that reminded me of the nice country, when an air strike ruin everything: many people at the restaurant gets killed, with huge explosions in real American-style.

With the help of Tatia (the beautiful Emmanuelle Chriqui), a Georgian girl sister of the bride, the reporters move towards Tskhinvali, the capital ot South Ossetia, to document what’s happening. During their trip they film how bad Russian soldiers behave with civilians – a group of Cossacks even execute without any real reason an old woman in front of the whole village; as in every real-American-style movie, they are captured, they are able to hide the memory card with everything they reported, they are going to be tortured to reveal where they hide it and at last they are saved by Georgian soldiers who arrive at the last second. Typical; of course, many other things happen, but it’s all the same stuff, until they are somehow able to send out their report.

Again, everything is shot in a beautiful way, even though explosions and kills look multiplicated by a 1,000,000 factor; many weird things happen: for example, at some point Tatia, just because her father is kinda pro-Ossetian, prefers to leave him with Russian soldiers instead of bringing him with her and the Americans; also, Russian planes are shooting everything that comes in front of them, not caring if a building is full of civilians or not. Now, this might have been really happened, but it still feels quite exaggerated in the movie.

Crowd gathered in front of Parliament during the shooting

The scene I partecipated to is in the end of the movie: the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili (Andy García) is talking to the people gathered in front of the Parliament, where some members of EU arrived to support the end of the ostilities; I think Andy García did a great job, since knowing a bit about Saakashvili I really imagine him saying exactly the same things in the same way. Just between the end of the movie and the begin of credits, you might see some Georgian people showing photos of their loved ones who were killed during the war.

That’s all: a poor story, nice views of a beautiful country, bad Russians, outstanding explosions and a good filming.

If you’ve never been to Georgia, you might like the movie because of camera crew’s good job; however, you won’t really get that much from the movie itself. But if you’ve been to Georgia and – as most of the people who did – you fell in love with that tiny country in the middle of the World, you’d feel strange to think that all those happened just 3 years ago in places you’ve visited maybe even more than once; and where you’ve probably felt safer than the city you live in.

http://davide.cassenti.it/+

 Looks nice and it’s easy to remember; and even easy to create. The only thing you need to have is your own domain (well, of course) and access to it: the easiest way is by using an FTP client, which most of the hosting companies provide; if you’ve no idea about FTP or your provider doesn’t allow you to use it, they will probably provide a webspace explorer that allows you to view and update your files within your browser.

There are several ways to achieve the result, but the easiest one is by making a file that redirects to your Google+ profile and put it inside a directory called +. So, first of all you need to find out your Google+ profile URL; to do so, simply login with your account and click on the profile button: the URL you will see in your browser will look like:

https://plus.google.com/12345678901234567890/posts

You should now create a file called index.html on your computer and write this inside it:

<html>
  <head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
        url=https://plus.google.com/12345678901234567890/posts" />
  </head>
  <body>
    Redirecting...
  </body>
</html>

Replace the url inside the index.html file to be the one you found above.

Last step is to upload your file in the proper place: if you are using an FTP client you should be familiar, otherwise your provider might allow you to see the content of your online web space directly from your browser. My provider calls this tool webspace explorer: using it will be very similar to creating files and folders on your own computer.

So, the only thing to do is to create a directory called + and upload the index.html file you created before inside it. That’s all and you’re done: you can now open your website adding /+ in the end and you’ll be redirected to your Google+ profile.

[PRO] Circles

This is so far the best thing, compared with the more famous Facebook. A circle is something like your Facebook’s friends list, but you can have as many as you want: friends, co-workers, poker club and whatever you might want. There is no more need to set everyone as your friend: the can just be people you want to share with or you want to get updates from.

[PRO] Sharing

Connected with circles, it’s the way how you share on Google+: again, no need to add any friend and, especially, no need to accept someone as a friend to share something with them. I can create a circle with anyone I want, even adding their email address: they don’t need to add me to their circles, but they will receive my update if I share with them; if they are not on Google+, they will get the update by mail: perfect. Of course, people can choose not to receive updates from you if they want to.

This is quite nice: a mix between Twitter – where you just send out shares without any connection with people – and Facebook, with its privacy settings. The difference with the first one is that everything there is public, so you can shoose whom to read from, while on this new service you choose with whom to share. Anyway, you can filter by circle to read only the posts that people in that particular circle has shared with you.

Last good thing about shared posts is the possibility to close comments and avoid resharing.

[PRO] Notifications

The notifications are similar to the ones you get on Facebook, but there’s an interesting feature: you can reply directly in the notification window, without need to click on it and open the original post. I find this very helpful to quickly reply. Another nice thing is that you see the Google+ bar wherever you are around Google’s websites, such as in GMail.

[PRO] Mobile

Another nice thing: the Android client is very nice, fast and there are pretty much all the features. The application also includes a chat-system called Huddle, which allows you to talk with one ore more people or circles. The other useful feature is the Istant Upload – that you will find on Funambol client as well: when you shoot a photo with your device it will be automatically uploaded in a private album and you can then easily share it from the site; you can share from the mobile client too, thought.

[MISS] Events

This is probably the most useful missing feature: planning a meeting would be perfect (perhaps integrated with Google Calendar?). Most of the people are using social network(s) – well, the social network – for this feature, so I believe it would be a great addition to the project.

[MISS] Gmail and Wave integration

This would be another cool feature: from Gmail you can already see the notifications, but it would be nice to see the mail system more integrated. You could get notifications for incoming mails too and read/reply from Google+ itself. Definetly something that will help increasing the traffic.

Another nice thing – that might be quite confusing however – would be a Wave-style comments: the possibility to reply to a particular one before the last one. Oh, by the way it is possible to edit comments after you send them, which is a great feature.

[OOPS] Some bugs

As all the new systems, also this one has some bugs. The biggest one is related to profile pictures: there’s definetly a caching issue in the system, because when you change the photo it is not updated correctly in the different thumbnails; it happened often that some pictures are missing or there is still the old one: I remember a similar issue on Google Wave, so they definetly need to check this.

Another thing I noticed – but this happens on Facebook too – is that sometimes the stream is not updated: you need to refresh it to get the last posts or comments.

So…

I tested the service very few, since I got an invitation only this morning, but I can say the service looks very nice and it has a possibility to become something important; they cured the interface very well and everything looks easy and clear. It is not easy to overcome Facebook, but I definetly like this and hope for some more features. And especially some more people.

The concept is simple: everyone could create a team and propose an idea; it had to be something to build on top of our platform, but there wasn’t any limit except one: providing a demo of something working a week later. And finally, today was the day of the demos.

My opinion on the experiment is absolutely very positive; today I have seen really cool ideas, something that just works – even if not perfect, but we just had a week. I believe the success of this coding week is most due to the way the teams were built: not based on the knowledge or the component, but based on the interests; people that usually work on different part of the product could now share a single idea and develop something together.

Another good thing is that we could see all these ideas in a real demo; some of the projects were sharing similar features, all done in different ways: you can spend days on meetings to discuss which one is better to implement, while with this coding week we could see them live and really have a clear idea on which is better in which situation. And we can then show the new features to the project managers, who can decide to take them – maybe with the appropriate changes – into the product.

And last but not least, we’ve seen how many amazing stuffs everyone’s creativity could bring into life in just few days. Looking forward to repeat such experiment!

The last thing to do is verify if it’s my problem only; the best way to do this is thanks to twitter, which confirms it is a general issues: every minute tens of new tweets with the hash tag #appstore pop out to my timeline. Good, at least it is not my problem!

Well, good? Not sure about this: looking at the tweets, looks like the problem is not on iPads only. No, there are users complaining about iPad, iPhone and even Mac. Wow: a simple problem on a “website” puts everything down? It’s incredible how much dependent on a single source all these devices are. In fact, it is not the only thing we are so dependent on: just few days ago my gf had her gmail disabled for a few hours and she was desperate (don’t want to imagine if it’d happen to me).

But who cares? The AppStore seems to be back online while I am writing this; we are safe. At least till the next outage.