Monday, February 11, 2008

Facebook phones

Not yet. But soon. In the meantime, these plugins make your phone Facebook aware:

CityWare, was launched last summer. If you get close enough to another person who is also running the plugin on their phone, you are provided with a link to their profile the next time you login to Facebook. It was developed as part of a research project also called CityWare, partly funded by HP, Nokia and Vodafone.

Kostakos is working on more plugins, one of which really brings social networking and phones together.

Called Little Bird, it gets your phone to update you with information from your friends’ profiles whenever you meet them. “When you walk into a room, a message on your phone tells you what events your friends in the room are attending in the near future,” explains Kostakos.

Via Andrew Sullivan, “Online cruising just took a quantum leap forward.”

On deleting your Facebook profile

It’s easier than you might think. An email statement from Brandee Barker at Facebook in response to my post last night reacting to the piece in the NYTimes:

“There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook.  The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information—such as name and all email addresses associated with the account—is deleted from Facebook servers.  If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers.  Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5”

Next thing you know we’ll learn that Mark Zuckerberg makes a habit of going to restaurants with his girlfriend.

Are earmarks pork?

I have this sneaking suspicion that, much as we object to them, we really don’t even know what earmarks are. In the February first edition of On The Media they had a piece explaining How Earmarks Became Pork:

BOB GARFIELD: The word’s ascent into the political spotlight was mirrored by a change in meaning. Earmark used to refer only to how a program’s funds were procured. It was about the procedure. Now if someone uses the word “earmark,” it’s implied that they’re talking about federal money spent on wasteful or even ridiculous local projects. The word “earmark” has become synonymous with that nasty old pejorative, “pork.”

Jonathan Weisman, staff writer for The Washington Post, says there could certainly be more transparency surrounding earmarks in that we could do without bridges to nowhere. But earmarks, he says, aren’t altogether useless.

JONATHAN WEISMAN: Most members of Congress would say, hey, I know better than some bureaucrat at the Department of Transportation what roads in my district most need attention. I should have the right to be able to allocate money that way.

If you as a lawmaker suddenly don’t have the ability to put an earmark into a bill, it seems like the job that you wanted [LAUGHS] to do in Washington is taken away from you. [...]

BOB GARFIELD: But it is, historically and ultimately, a legitimate legislative mechanism, isn’t it?

JONATHAN WEISMAN: Absolutely. You know, the Iraq Study Group, that bipartisan group, was earmark. It was created as [LAUGHS] a little, what we would call a pet project by a congressman from Virginia, Republican Frank Wolf. Most research into breast cancer is done through earmarks.

Earmarks are the method by which members of Congress can exact policy.... If you didn’t do these earmarks you’re probably going to have little to no effect on the federal budget. It’s not that the Congress is piling on additional spending. It’s just carving out the spending that would already be there.

It used to be that a huge pot of money would just go to, say, the Department of Transportation. Then the Department of Transportation would farm that out to state Departments of Transportation or local road authorities and they would decide how to spend the money. It simply would give the bureaucracy more power in deciding how to spend that money.

There’s a balance here to be struck between the prerogative of Congress and the ability of bureaucrats, basically, to set their own their priorities.

The issue popped to mind because local conservative congressman Paul Broun won praise today in the Athens Banner-Herald for setting good example on earmarks. 

Obama the Google president

On 60 Minutes last night, Obama likened himself to Google:

“I mean, one of the problems that you have, still, is the question of experience. And you’ve done a lot of remarkable things in your life. But when you sit down and you look at the résumé - there’s no executive experience. And, in fact, correct if I’m wrong, the only thing that you’ve actually run was the Harvard Law Review,” Kroft pointed out.

“Well, I’ve run my Senate office. And I’ve run this campaign,” the senator replied. “One of the interesting things about this experience argument is that it’s often posed as just a function of longevity. You know, ‘I’ve been here longer.’ Well, you know there are a lot of companies that have been around longer than Google…but Google’s performing.”

The comparison is a good one but has a downside. We all know he meant the ”do no evil” Google; but some out there fear Google as Big Brother.

Aug. 17, 2007 - As The World Turns

The kiss seen* ‘round the world…

Read about it here. Follow the Noah and Luke ("Nuke") storyline in sequence here.

* It’s the most viewed selection in the history of YouTube.