The world as frankps sees it!
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Facebook Cards
Tired of dull business cards? Thought so! MOO is a great company specializing in doing great looking business cards. A friend of mine has already gotten her personally designed cards from them and they are looking smashing. In fact, they have the best prints I’ve ever seen for business cards.
Now MOO has come up with the great idea of doing Facebook cards. Well, they are just business cards pulling information from your Facebook page, but to get these cards you must have activated the new Timeline functionality (a blog entry I did in Norwegian).
To get the Facebook cards business started MOO is doing a promotion of 200,000 free packs of 50 cards is on a first come, first served basis. However the offer is capped at 5,000 orders per day (that’s 250,000 cards per day) in order, Moo says, to ensure a “strong ethos of customer service and to make it fair.” They even pay for postal fees. After the promotion the cards will cost £10/€15. Yesterday I managed to order my free pack:
I’ll be getting the set of cards beginning of February.
A 500px Review
1Development of Flickr seems to have more or less stalled. Another problem with Flickr these days is that it takes hours to find good pictures. Flickr is becoming more like Facebook. Lately I’ve seen lots of photographer migrating to Google+ with Picasa. What’s cool with Google+ is that there are lists of Google+ registered photographers. And there’s lots of them and it’s easy to subscribe to their feeds and pictures are presented in a nice way. Google+ has so far not become the success Google wanted it to be, but it fast became the preferred social network for photographers.
But there’s now a new kid in town, a online portfolio site called 500px.com. It’s only aiming for your best photos, and is in my opinion not aiming to store your family or holiday photos. Nor does it have privacy functionality, like only letting your friends/family see a photo set. But except from that, I am really impressed. 500px has nearly mastered the essential features that I am looking for as a photographer wanting to share my work and explore the work of other photographers. It’s design makes it pleasant to browse through, and isn’t overwhelming by keeping features to a minimum. The vast majority of work displayed on 500px.com is high quality, similar to photos you would see in magazines or art galleries. Because they are targeting a professional level audience they are able to stand out from competitors.
500px is a company based in Canada so they are bound by Canadian Copyright law which is very close to US Copyright law. In other words, the terms of use is pretty much the same as for Flickr.
I’m for now only using their free account, and they are letting me upload 20 photos a week free of charge. The system is easy to use and works well, so long as you have a supported web browser. Safari and Internet Explorer work fine, but I have some issues with Chrome when it comes to navigating the portefolio view. The images are presented in a beautiful way, and there is great rating system for those who want to use that.
I have not had the chance to look at the PRO version of 500px (Awesome account), but you upgrade to many more services including unlimited everything, personal domains, etc. for US$50 per year.
The social nature of 500px will attract many people. The images posted on 500px are available for rating and comment. The rating system could be better in that you should be able to see who rated your images. You should also be able to disable ratings or block people that you don’t want to interact with.
500px has a basic search functionality, but this could probably improved to include search in the EXIF metadata. I would like to be able to search after photos taken with specific cameras and lenses. I also miss that you cannot add location to the photos you have taken.
I’ve saved the best for last. The reason why I started looking in to using 500px, was it’s iPad app. I have never seen photos been presented in a better way on a tablet. The first week I was only browsing through others photo, but the last days I have started uploading photos. Only bird photos for now. There is also unofficial 500px apps for Android.
Facebook snart med nytt utseende
1I går skrev jeg om at Facebook de siste dagene hadde lansert både et nytt utseende og noen nye tjenester. Facebook har imidlertid en større endring i utseende på trappene. Et utseende basert på en tidslinje er under utvikling, og dette utseendet er foreløpig kun tilgjengelig for utviklere.
Jeg brukte et par minutter i helga på å få aktivert dette nye utseendet, og synes det er strålende! Med den nye oppbygningen får man lettere tilgang til vennelisten, bilder og hva en person liker.
Du finner en veiledning for hvordan du kan aktivere tidslinje-grensesnittet på det amerikanske nettstedet TechCrunch. Men det bør sies at grunnen til at dette grensesnittet bare er tilgjengelig for utviklere, er at det er uferdig og at det derfor fremdeles kan ha noen feil. Det nye grensensittet introduserer også et cover-bilde på toppen, og jeg fant ut at best passende bildestørrelse er 815×315 piksler.
Merk også at det kanskje bare er du som ser din presentasjonsside med tidslinje de første dagene, før Facebook gjør visningen tilgjengelig for alle dine kontakter. Men det er også mulig å sette at din nye presentasjonsside skal være offentlig med en gang.
Spotify og Facebook
0De siste dagene har Facebook lansert et nytt utseende og noen nye tjenester. Ikke alle har fått dem enda, men alle vil fortløpende bli oppdatert.
I går annonserte Facebook sitt samarbeid med Spotify, og allerede i dag fikk jeg aktivert funksjonaliteten. Spotify publiserer lenker til all musikken jeg spiller på min Wall i Facebook. Nyttig? Eller vil de fleste av mine venner skjule min “musikkprofil”, akkurat som de har gjort med min “treningsprofil” fra Endomondo?
Tanken er god, jeg får se hva mine venner lytter på og får impulser til ny musikk jeg kanskje liker. Allikevel tror jeg personlig at Facebook er inne på et feilspor når de prøver å høste all data om oss ute på de forskjellige tjenestene på Internett. Dette gjør Facebook for at brukerne skal tilbringe mer tid inne på nettstedet og eksponeres for mer av deres reklame. Jeg liker ikke tanken på at de samler inn så mye data om meg, men samtidig har min musikkprofil vært offentlig tilgjengelig gjennom Last.fm i årevis allerede. Kanskje deaktiverer jeg snart igjen den nye sammenkoblingen mellom Facebook og Spotify, men foreløpig er den på. Sammenkoblingen kan du enkelt skru av, altså at Spotify skal publisere hver eneste sang du hører på. Du skal jo kunne høre på Justin Bieber i skjul! I Spotify gå til Edit →Preferences, under Facebook, deaktiver valget Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook’s Open Graph.
Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap
0I have long been looking for an alternative to Google Maps, and I have found one: Bing Maps with OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap support is added as layer for Bing Maps and the newest Bing Map App in the gallery. Lots of layers are available.
The solution is absolutely awesome, as Bing combines (mashup) OpenStreetMap and Flickr. On the screenshot you can see photos that I have published on Flickr from Mindszent and Mindszent on OpenStreetMap. I fast opened an OpenStreetMap account and added quite a few streets today.
I have also bought the iPad/iPhone application OffMaps, and it combines maps from OpenStreetMap with information from Wikipedia. So take that Google, one less service I use from you!
So why is OpenStreetMap getting so important? People, like you and me, gather location data across the globe from a variety of sources such as recordings from GPS devices, from free satellite imagery or simply from knowing an area very well, for example the area where they live. Maintaining maps cost a lot of money, so user input is very important to keep maps up to date. I for instance brought my geotracker on my trip to Rondane National Park in Norway, and would like to contribute the data to OpenStreetMap.
For more information, please visit the Bing Community blog.