I've been behind in my blogging, and I was worried that today's post might be moot before I wrote it. But logging into Facebook this morning, I see that the new interface is still there.

It's been thoroughly thrashed by Facebook users, and I'm expecting it to go away soon, but you never know.     Maybe Facebook is in The Bubble.

It's not just a subjective thing. In short time I'm seeing people report that they can't find features that you'd expect to be more easily found. "How do I find new groups"?

I'm also seeing for the first time people writing to their status messages that are obviously meant for someone else's wall.  I don't know if this is because of a change in the interface to write back on the wall of someone who wrote on yours, or if Facebook eliminated the ability to comment back to a post someone made on your wall. But a status like: "Let's check our schedules and see what works out. Meanwhile, love to you both." is clearly a one-to-one reply and not a "status". This isn't the user's fault here; I'm seeing it often enough to blame the new interface.

I'll be interested in the stats, but I'm anecdotally hearing about (and also sensing) frustration enough to drop off or away for a while.

I've seen independent versions of my suggestion that Facebook is pulling a QWERTY. A popular legend has it that the odd layout of the typewriter keyboard was designed to slow typists down so as not to jam the fragile mechanism of the newly invented typewriter. Maybe the new layout is to shed enough users or usage to allow the servers to catch up with the growth of the Facebook population.

Is the move made to make Facebook more Twitter-like, and if so this a defensive move against the migration of attention cycles from Facebook to Twitter?  Facebook could do better than to lame up its interface as a defense. Could Facebook by this type buy Twitter without ruining it?  Or could they better integrate Twitter using Twitter's APIs?  TweetDeck shows that you can integrate the two streams.  I use Facebook status to send more ephemeral updates among my friends and networks, and I use Twitter to enter my thoughts into a larger and more persistent and searchable universe.  I could see an interface within Facebook that could feed both.

On the positive side, I've appreciated better integration of messages from pages as well as friends into my newsfeed. So far.

Maybe the old Facebook interface will soon be resurfaced as "Facebook Classic",  and after about 25 years they can drop the "Classic".

In the nearly six years that I've been operating the BananaSlug search engine, I've tried to explain why you'd want to mess with Google's obviously finely-honed search results. When your Google search returns tens of thousands of pages, you need a dose serendipity to dip into the long tail of results and see some pages that include your search term but you would otherwise overlook.

This leads me to this blog post that does a great job telling the BananaSlug story, along with how this particular searcher found it useful and entertaining.

To commemorate the 2010 federal budget announced today, I have installed a new feature at the Capitol Hill in Second Life 

Using the APIs available from USASpending.gov, the Show Me the Money! piggy bank will shower $100 bills down on the Capitol Hill legislative chamber. Each bill has the name of one of the top 50 recipients of government funding during 1Q 2009. The size of the bill is proportionate to the amount of money received, at a scale of $1billion = 1 Second Life meter.

To start the shower, chat "/2009 funding" and the rain of bills will last for 5 minutes, or until you type "/2009 stop"  The money soon disappears, just as in real life.

 

While I applaud the Obama administration’s creation of recovery.gov to allow more transparency about the effectiveness of stimulus dollars, it still isn’t there in terms of mashability.  The site acknowledges this gap, and its encouraging that enough people asked the same question I did that it was added to the FAQ since I first looked. The FAQ also points us to a (without hyperlinking to?) another web site, USASpending.gov, that does have a good API for government spending information. I've aleady used that one (see my next blog post). 

I have been working with a number of APIs to governmental information including the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs APIs and Capitol Words APIs. GOP.gov also exposes interfaces to get information from the House Republican Caucus.  Dems.gov, on the other hand, is decidedly Web 1.0.

One suggestion for sites that don’t have formal APIs using access methods such as SOAP is to present data in text with some straightforward formatting. As effective as a flash presentation of information (or even a static jpg like the one above) may be to convey meaning to a site visitor, it is not useful for the purpose of ripping and reusing the underlying data.  With a little planning, your site may be scrapable by a programmer or using a service such as dapper.net.

After leaving my hometown of Boulder City, Nevada for the University of California at Santa Cruz, I came home for a holiday visit. An old classmate of mine asked where I'd been and I said I had moved to California. "California?" she snorted. "I've been to Bakersfield. You can have California - I don't need it!"

             

 I've thought of that over the years as I've listened to reactions to emerging new media:

 "Web sites? I have an 800 number and people can call and request brochures.You can have your web sites - I don't need one!"

 "Blogs? My daughter has a blog about all the drama she is going through in high school. I've seen blogs - I don't need one!"

 "Twitter? Who cares what I had for lunch?  I've seen Twitter, and you can keep it. I don't need it!"

 Web sites, blogs, Twitter. You've been to Bakersfield, you've seen enough of California.

 I sent feedback at the bloomberg.com news site.  Here's the complete transcript of the feedback and its resolution:

 Feedback Status:TicketID: W--------2271
 Status: Resolved            
 Summary: Where's the Bloomberg Twitter feed?                             
 LOG:  2/19/09 22:37:51   Your Initial Feedback
 I can't seem to find you on Twitter - that's where I get my news. You there?    
 LOG:  2/24/09 11:41:46  Bloomberg Feedback Team
 Hello: We are sorry as we are not.                                              
 Sincerely, Bloomberg Website Feedback Team