facebook – JayAre

Eat, tweet and make money

How about this one? You are going out for lunch and decide to have a quick burger or a healthy salad. You end up at 4food in New York where you can create your own personal menu from hundreds of ingredients (the combination of ingredients makes it possible to compose up to 200.000.000 different menus). You order your personal menu, eat your lunch and if you are satisfied with the combination, you give it a name and you share your own personal menu to your friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare.

“4food, de-junking fast food“

And now the really smart part: if someone else comes in to 4food and orders your menu, you get a 25 cent credit for your next lunch. So the more popular your menu creation, the more lunches you can have for free…

“You are what they eat!“

Now that smartphones are becoming more and more mainstream, we can see new initiatives like this pop up every day. They tap into the possibilities of mobile internet access combined with geolocation services, and we must admit some very good ideas have already seen daylight. I personally like this one a lot because of the viral effect and the fact that the target group of young professionals looking for a healthy and fast lunch intersects exactly with the early adapters of mobile technology (They all own iPhones, don’t they? And their friend too…).

Great initiative in my humble opinion, hope 4food will make it work…

To end, the complete 4food story:

via

25 things I hate about facebook

Facebook, don’t be evil!

“Don’t be evil“, the informal corporate Google motto, doesn’t seem to count for social networking website Facebook. While (online) privacy is becoming a bigger concern day after day, Facebook changed their Terms of Use in favor of, yes you guessed it, Facebook.

Most people don’t seem to know (or recognize) they give up the rights to everything they post on Facebook:

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.“

But nothing new so far. The really new thing in the Facebook Terms of Use is that deleting your content or even your account is no longer preventing Facebook from using it. These lines were removed during the last revision:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.“

In other words, everything you post, share and upload to Facebook will be Facebook property… FOREVER…

Puts things in a whole different perspective, doesn’t it? If you don’t like the new Terms of Use, join the People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS) group on, indeed, Facebook…

Facebook hits the 100 million users

Earlier today Facebook was proud to announce its 100th million user. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social networking site announced it himself on the Facebook blog:

We hit a big milestone today — 100 million people around the world are now using Facebook. This is a really gratifying moment for us because it means a lot that you have decided that Facebook is a good, trusted place for you to share your lives with your friends. So we just wanted to take this moment to say, “thanks.”

We spend all our time here trying to build the best possible product that enables you to share and stay connected, so the fact that we’re growing so quickly all over the world is very rewarding. Thanks for all your support and stay tuned for more great things in the future.

Trends indicate that Facebook is now growing faster than rival MySpace that counts more than 200 million users. It took Facebook four and a half years to hit the magic number of 100 million users while MySpace did it in just 3 years.

The new Facebook design that was launched a few weeks ago seems to be a big success (?) since more than 20% of the users has already adopted the new interface.

Is Facebook dangerous? Protect your privacy…

Collecting personal data through the popular networking website Facebook is a piece of cake. At least that’s what the BBC tried to prove. And they succeeded… Using a small program it’s easy to list private data that other users have not decided to share.

Making your personal data only visible to direct friends is not prohibiting the application from getting all your personal information. It’s clear all this information can be misused to close a loan, apply for credit cards and so on.

Continue reading Is Facebook dangerous? Protect your privacy…

How the big ones implement their 404 page not found error pages

Yesterday while browsing on YouTube I ran across a 500 Internal Server Error. Never happened to me before on YouTube, but I didn’t mind. The YouTube 500 Error page seems to contain a funny message, and if there is something I like it is funny errorhandling.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Please report this incident to customer service.

And that reminded me of something I learned when I started SEO : one of the first things you should implement when setting up a new website are user friendly AND search engine friendly errorpages. Especially the 404 Page Not Found error page is one that should be perfect. For the search engines it should return a 404 status code. For the users it must contain a clear message that says their browser asked for a non existing page and they should be able to click through to the home page or search for another page. You can find more on The Perfect 404.

So I decided to take a look at the 404 error pages from big guys like Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Live Search, LinkedIn, … And what I found wasn’t always exactly perfect on the usability side …

Continue reading How the big ones implement their 404 page not found error pages