LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Alternativen

By Dominik Schwind

Butter bei die Fische

Im Krieg

Week 3

By Dominik Schwind

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you – in fact, most of the days were so uneventful that I don’t even remember them now, just a couple of days ago.

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Alfred App

I have (finally?) switched from Quicksilver to Alfred. Since I just use those as application launchers and mostly ignore their advanced features, the change was completely transparent to my daily workflow. In fact, someone could have changed them for me and I would probably have not noticed. Except that Alfred yet has to close itself at random times, something that Quicksilver was prone to do to lately.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Moo Facebook Cards

I got my Facebook Moo cards. Fun!

Alcatraz

I have given Alcatraz a chance – it’s the new TV series by J.J. Abrams and has the pretty interesting premise that the last batch of prisoners on Alcatraz somehow vanished in 1963 and now return one by one, going back to being murderers. The first two episodes weren’t bad but nothing too special – I’ll keep watching, in the hope that the “murderer of the week” type of episodes weave a nice mythology arc.
Oh, and it has Parminder Nagra who I’ve liked since Bend it like Beckham.

Oh, and Sam Neill.

Sam Neill

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The day Wikipedia went black.

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Or: The nerds are back in town

For the last two weeks I’ve had blissful solitude here at the office – the three guys who share the room with me were in Munich to do Munich stuff. As someone who snaps out of the zone pretty easily working two weeks without any real distraction was a pretty good thing which ended on that Friday when they came back. 1

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Ladies

I don’t know.

I bought Onigiri again and fed one to my sister, who was crashing at my place, as she tends to do when she goes to her courses in Düsseldorf.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

The Minecraft bug bit me again, so I basically was digging around on our server all day.

  1. And as I said in my inception post a couple of weeks ago: it’s nothing personal, I just prefer to work in solitude, with random breaks of socializing (which does include proper meetings, not just watercooler stuff) in between. (See also.) ↩

Graffiti

By Dominik Schwind

You’ve created graffiti, but are keeping out Banksy.

Fred Oliveira’s comment on Why Mixel Requires Facebook Login

The secret of how to make awesome online communities

By Dominik Schwind

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long – image, timestamp, text.

The Social Graph is Neither

OHAI New Facebook

By Dominik Schwind

Classy. [Teymur took that picture.]

Museum of Me

By Dominik Schwind

Intel built this rather pretty visualization of Facebook Data: Museum of Me. I enjoyed having me ego stroked by a virtual fly-through of a museum exhibition of myself.

Worldwide connections

By Dominik Schwind

If anyone should ever ask me why I’m online and still on Facebook – this picture is all the explanation. Facebook’s Paul Butler used some user data to map international friendships:

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Sociocultural Ignorance

By Dominik Schwind

As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see.

Anil Dash in The Facebook Reckoning, a blog post both a response to and an elaboration on the quote within this article in the New Yorker The Face of Facebook

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

Mike Elgan wonders Why is Google so condescending?

It’s quite a socio-cultural dilemma isn’t it? Privileged kid builds something with major consequences but quite possibly unintentionally overlooks the possibility that harm may be done by people who have things to hide.

Clint Boulton wraps it up: Facebook, Google Arrogance Points to Sociocultural Ignorance and closes with:

Imagine if these companies tried to be evil.

Flickr + Facebook!

By Dominik Schwind

Flickr + Facebook!

"Yahoo! Updates platform" just sounds nasty.

Fast and Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.facebook.com

By Dominik Schwind

Fast and Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.facebook.com

This is incredibly clever. An optimized and free mobile experience with quite a bunch of mobile operators worldwide.

IS ILSE AIGNER STILL ON FACEBOOK?

By Dominik Schwind

IS ILSE AIGNER STILL ON FACEBOOK?

Well, is she?

Facebook Social Plugins

By Dominik Schwind

Facebook Social Plugins

Scary stuff.

“Fear and Loathing in Farmville”

By Dominik Schwind

“Fear and Loathing in Farmville”

Nice summary of what has happened at the Game Developers Conference 2010.

Cultivated Play: Farmville

By Dominik Schwind

Cultivated Play: Farmville

"So we cannot simply dismiss video games and Facebook as mere ‘wastes of time.’ Instead, we are obligated to educate ourselves about them, and to try to understand what they mean, and what it means that we use them."

Filter

By Dominik Schwind

There is one really big problem with Google Buzz and it’s not all the privacy kerkuffle or that it is in integrated into Google Mail. And it’s something that is really good in Facebook and even better on Friendfeed: Output filters.
Buzz lets its user filter who gets to see which kind of content – for example I could set my Flickr photos for friends and family only or only annoy a certain part of my followers with my old Twitter updates. But it does not work the other way around. I can’t set which input channel from which user I want to see.
And the filter on the reading site is actually way more important than the filter on the writing side. I (and I guess many other people might think the same) would just like to plug almost every feed that I in some way or another produce into Google Buzz. As far as I am concerned, it’s a good place as any to aggregate my crap as any.1 But yes, I can see where this can get very annoying very fast to those people who are already getting this here in their feed reader, follow me on twitter, read my shared items or see my stuff on tumblr.com. So that’s why I think that content readers that distinctively allow their users to import stuff need to have a way to filter pretty precisely. I might want to see the shared items of some people in my Buzz stream and not those of some others. I might want to hide certain weblogs – up until the moment there are comments on Buzz.
Basically I want Buzz to be a Friendfeed in my Gmail. Can we have that? Pretty please?

  1. Well, my NoseRub profile is still the place to go, by the way. [↩]