Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Europe versus Facebook, round 1

I was reading Olivier's blog post urging us to request our data from Facebook backed up by European data protection law and started to craft my comment:

Olivier, I understand where you and the source article writer are coming from. Law is law even for the new online behemoths.

I don't believe though that sending request letters to Facebook and acting like a shadow boxer will change anything. How about trying to persuade them with friendlier approach? Instead of trying to get a (pretty much useless) bunch of PDF pages, what about trying to get FB (and others) improving their export functionalities? The ones which give us our data in format whereby some clever coders in new startups can create corresponding import functionalities to visualise and utilise the data.

In fact FB already has such a functionality. They call it download and it works quite nicely...

But prior to posting my comment I started to think about all the data which is NOT in the downloaded XML file. I browsed through the site Europe versus Facebook and got interested in the datamodels, requests, those PDF's and everything. The debate, initiated by some Austrian students, is really heating up and the initiative getting more public - so far mainly in german speaking parts of our continent (no wonder...)

Interesting to see what happens. Facebook will not withdraw from Europe nor re-work their approach, but if the debate moves the behemoth(s) at least slightly towards transparency, better export functionality and control over deletions, I am ready to like, +1 and (heart) the outcomes.


Angry Birds everywhere. On top of the next birthday cake as well?

There seems to be Angry Birds popping up everywhere. Some of them are pure jokes only but then there are serious attempts to sell something as well. I wonder what's the revenue share deal or license payment model between Rovio and Sweetdreams on the Birthday Cup Cakes? I will definitely suggest these to my kids!

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While waiting for the Angry Birds movies, there is room for creativity on the story of the birds. Why are the Angry Birds so angry? Read Hilary Curtis' hilarious answer - the Angry Birds are like Dodos.

Have you seen the bird below in nearby forests?

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Will Visual.ly real.ly help me?

Visual.ly promises to be THE site for creating, sharing and exploring great visualizations. Bold statement. Sounds great!


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The above punchline includes "Create". Will visual.ly be an online tool to CREATE visualizations? I am eager to see as the promo video does not include creating vizualisations and if yes, how? At one point the video only talks about exploring, sharing and promoting.

They say: Story + Data + Design = Vizualization. Makes sense.

I only wonder, whether data visualisation and infographics the very same thing as it seems that visual.ly is putting it. I would say that:

Infographics = 40% Story + 20% Data + 40% Design

and

Data vizualisation = 20% Story + 50% Data + 30% Design

Same elements but different proportions.

Let's see, what visual.ly will provide when the curtains unfold!

What's going on Apple? Why do you store my where-abouts?

Quite amazingly the iPhone is storing the location history in a file according to the recent revelation. And the history of my where-abouts is then passed on to my Mac in the normal iPhone backups as Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan explain.

The key question is: Why? The gentlemen have asked it from Apple's product security team with no answer so far.

It is slightly disturbing that the tracks are available on my phone and computer - perhaps uploaded to the servers in Cupertino as well, who knows?

Part of me is angry at Apple - while the data-enthusiast part of me is thrilled to see this level of detail available under my keyboard!

With a visualisation software (iPhone Tracker) available to unveil the tracks, it is easy to see that I have travelled to UK, India, Sweden and Finnish Lapland recently. 

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And that my Indian footprint is pretty much limited to Gurgaon area and the outskirts of Delhi:

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The London hovering is a bit more central.

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This is all straightforward. But the interesting questions start to appear when I look at my home areas. Why are there no major dots around my suburban area on the map?

What is actually the algorithm to store the dots?

It seems that the location is based on cell network based location rather than built-in GPS. Why is that? GPS would be more accurate and easy to be obtained.

Is it storing only the locations I have used cellular data at? This could solve the home-area mystery as I always use WLAN at home. But the theory fails in India, where I switched off the data roaming.

What is the interval of the data storage? Maybe I should do some detail level investigations on the actual data. Interesting.

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