Posted on

Facebook Poke-A-Thon Friday

Facebook - Application Requests & Pokes - Screenshot

If there is one feature on Facebook that I just don’t “get”, it’s Poking. You can poke a friend or a non-friend and that person will see a notification in their sidebar the next time they sign in. It would be a cool feature if Facebook did not have the “news feed” that displays your friends’ recent activity, because the poke could represent an unobtrusive way of saying “Check out the changes I made to my profile.”

I don’t know if I have as many application requests as Clintus McGintus (I caught a glimpse of his flooded Facebook sidebar at PodCampAZ). I used to clear out my requests every time I signed into Facebook, but realized that those seconds add up and only served to distract me from going in there and doing what I really wanted to do (check my FB fanmail*). I stopped clearing out the requests and noticed that the sidebar filled up quickly. With 10,000+ Facebook applications available, you can imagine how your Facebook sidebar could end up looking if there are not measures in place to limit the number displayed (and provide a link to show the rest). After 40 applications piled up on my sidebar, I started thinking about the 7 pokes I had below that.

It is a simple experiment and perhaps I am the only person who wonders about this. How big can that sidebar get? Application requests come naturally as your friends install and use them. If you ask for more of those, you are asking for a lot work from your friends (go to application page for each application, find invite utility, select my name, send invite). However, with pokes, you can provide a link and anyone (friend or not) can poke you in a matter of a few seconds.

I grabbed the link to my profile and sent it out to my friends on Twitter, asking them to poke me. I discovered that, unlike the application request list, the poke list does have a limit to the number of items displayed at a time. After 20 pokes, a link appeared to “see all” on another page. With almost 80 pokes, I had 4 pages of pokes to view. 

For the sake of an interesting visual, I used Photoshop to piece together the 4 pages of pokes to show how they would look without the “see all” functionality. Only the top 20 pokes are actually appearing on my Facebook home page.

* = That “FB fanmail” remark was a joke ;–)

Posted on

Bubble Talk

As the dot-com bubble had just begun to burst, one could hear a faint whisper that the next bubble forming.

A booming industry experiencing rapid growth usually appears to be on the verge of a major collapse. With an industry that is constantly growing at a wild pace, bubble talk follows you where ever you go.

A few years later, Myspace sells for half a billion dollars. After that, YouTube sells for $1.65 billion. Each new astronomical valuation breathes life and vitality into the bubble talkers.

Talking about bubble talk can get pretty boring. Luckily, we now have bubble videos!

This reminds me of “The Internet Stars Are Viral”

via brand flakes‘ RSS feed

Posted on

Photography Video Tutorial: Light Speed Escalator

Earlier this year, in February, I took a fun photo at a Refocus Phoenix outing. Within the next 48 hours, that photo attracted more views (140,000+), received more comments (161) and favorites (608), and was talked about on the internet more than all of the rest of my photos combined.

Josh Gomez on the “Light Speed Escalator” — February 2007

With all the excitement around the photo, I wanted to share with everyone how simple and easy the effect is. I also wanted to show some non-believers that the effect was actually achieved without computer enhancements.

Tonight, I finally took the time to drive back to the Brickyard in Tempe and shoot a video tutorial. I took my cheap JVC camcorder ($300-$400), cheap Canon Digital Rebel XT with kit 18-55mm 3.5 lens (currently under $500), and two reeeally cheap tripods and made this cheap video!

The Result: Brian Shaler — November 2007

Let me know what you think in the comments here (general feedback), on Viddler (feedback on the video), or Flickr (feedback on the photo).

Posted on

Photography Video Tutorial: Head-Spinning Cars

Last year at the LA Auto Show, I tried out a new photography technique. I placed a small tripod on the edge of a car’s rotating platform and took long exposure photos. The result was a static car with a blurred background. To the left is a Ford Edge (crossover SUV) from last year. The auto show’s anti-photo lighting (small, bright sources of light) actually helped add quite a bit of pop to the photo.

I have a photo set on Flickr called “Head-Spinning Autos” that currently contains nine photos using this technique, with a few more to come.

This year at the LA Auto Show, I decided to revisit the effect and show how it was done. To the right is the final photo from the video, a Mazda CX-9 (another crossover SUV). Below is the video showing how the effect was accomplished, including settings, tripod placement, and environment.

Camera: Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D)
Settings: 3.2 seconds, f/29, 28mm, ISO 100.

Posted on

Collective Creativity

Technology changes the way we do things. The fact that it does is not an astounding revelation. However, it is always fascinating to see how it does.

When we think about “creativity” from a classical perspective, we might picture a person creating a piece of artwork, whether it is a painting, a piece of music, a novel, etc. In the past, creative collaboration occurred on a very small scale, if at all. Today, the creativity landscape is shifting, thanks to the tools we have at our disposal with modern technology. One of the key ways technology has changed the world is communication. This opens the door for a type of collaboration that was not possible before.

How does this impact our view of “creativity”?

Unlike the past, where a creative, highly-skilled individual — or a small group of highly-skilled individuals — would develop a work of art, we can now develop tools that allow millions of people to contribute to a single project.

One example of this is Drawball.com. Drawball, which launched in late 2005, allows anyone to pick up a virtual airbrush and paint graffiti on one giant digital wall. While the majority of users contribute little more than a mess of scribbles, there is a “hall of fame” area that showcases some of the best drawings spotted on the wall.

Another example, though on a much smaller scale, is BrainFuel.tv‘s Caption Contest Fridays (with spin-off site Caption Fridays). Every week, there is a new photo that begs the question “What’s going on here?” and visitors are encouraged to make up a caption to explain what is going on in the photo. It is great to go through the comments at the end of the day to see what the blog’s readers had written.

This concept is fascinating and motivated me to start small, for-fun projects like Crappy Graphs (where visitors can draw their own ‘crappy graphs’) and TwitLibs (where visitors choose words or phrases to fill in the blanks in my sentences). I am constantly surprised by how great (or how terrible) the visitor submissions are.

Crappy Graphs started out as a blog where I drew and posted my own graphs. After releasing the user submission tool that allows users to draw graphs in my design/template, the best visitor-submitted graphs found their own way out onto the internet and now draw in more traffic than the main blog itself. That means collectively, Crappy Graphs’ visitors are funny than the original Crappy Grapher, me.

It is clear to me that none of us are as creative as all of us.