Ali Kuru

Looks like Google has won their data liberation slapfight with Facebook at last. When I was checking my Facebook settings to see if there is something related to new messaging system, I found something more interesting: there is now an option to download your user data from Facebook, which includes all your data (updates, photos, posts etc.) as well as your friend list!

Facebook still says that “Your download is currently being generated. You will receive an email when it’s ready”, I will inform you once i got their zip.

Update: Downloaded the zip file generated by Facebook. Unzipping it produced a directory tree containing HTML files and hotlinked stuff in separate directories. When you browse your friend list using the sidebar navigation at “index.html”, you only see your friends names, without any other information about them, no emails! Also, no email’s in the “friends.html” page code either.

Looks like nothing is over :)

I got an invitation to Ginx recently, and want to share my thoughts about this new Twitter front-end, a webware which is currently in “pre-alpha” status.

What makes Ginx attractive is that it handles conversations in a threaded fashion. This makes easier to track people’s replies to each other, hence improving overall Twitter experience. Ginx has another usability feature which is about shortened URLs; it automatically converts shortened URLs to longer ones for preview, you don’t need a browser addon or a user script to do that. It also adds target web pages’ favicons next to the links and, especially if the link is pointing to an image, creates thumbnails (unfortunately, Ginx only takes care of the first one if there are more than one links in the tweet). (more…)

Twitter is testing a new AJAX-based interface which updates users’ time-line automatically, according to a post at RWW.

Although two places differ from each other distinctly, there is obviously a competition between Facebook and Twitter, and this competition probably increased after a recent buying offer came from Facebook.

I don’t think Twitter actually worried about Facebook. Since this attempt of adding features to its interface came after their rumored fund raising effort, they might up for creating a monetization method after almost 3 years of existence without a proper business model.

[via digg]