It looks like Google is getting ready to deploy a framework that will allow website owners to capitalize on the social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.  I kind of figured that such a framework was in the making but was a little surprised that Google was the one that would bring it to fruition the most, I guess this friend connect framework they are releasing in a limited market this week is going to increase their visibility and allow them the opportunity to get more ad impressions somehow, it’s a great idea if you just think about it.  Here’s a snippet from the story that broke earlier this month:

The effort to make it easier for Web surfers to connect with their friends is attracting a crowd. Following similar moves by the two biggest online hangouts, Internet search leader Google Inc. is introducing tools that are supposed to make any Web site more sociable. The service, expected to be available on a limited basis Monday evening, provides a framework that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks like Facebook and Plaxo even when they aren’t visiting those sites.

Google’s initiative, called “Friend Connect,” follows pledges by MySpace and Facebook last week to allow their users to transport their personal profiles and applications to other Web sites.
News Corp. s MySpace and privately held Facebook - the Internet’s two largest social hubs - announced their plans for wider accessibility late last week.

“Social is in the air,” said David Glazer, a director of engineering for Google.
Only about two dozen Web sites initially will have access to Google’s Friend Connect code to start. The trial run includes a site devoted to musician Ingrid Michaelson and another site providing recipes for guacamole. The coding is expected to become widely available during the next few months.

Without providing specifics, MySpace and Facebook have said it will be several more weeks before their users can transplant their personal information to other Web sites.

Google hopes its latest social tools will encourage people to spend even more time online, giving the company more opportunities to show the advertising that generates most of its profits.

Source: On Your Side | ABC 7 News

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I have to admit that I saw this coming a while back.  One day while looking for directions to a place across town from me in Conway I discovered that much of Conway, Arkansas had already been cataloged in Google’s Street View.  While showing a friend this cool service we noticed that we were able to detect people’s faces as they were standing in their yards or driving down the road.  We also noticed you could easily see people’s license plate numbers as you scanned past their homes.  This doesn’t really bother me too much but I know how privacy advocates usually like to enjoy jumping on these types of things.  Here’s a snippet from the story that broke yesterday out of Boston.

After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however. Although Google’s Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing - everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity.

Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View’s goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View.

Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things - things a computer erroneously interprets as faces - but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said.

Yu said Google was responding not only to privacy complaints in the U.S., but also trying to head off legal or cultural objections that might emerge as Street View expands into other countries.
Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, praised Google’s decision, but she added that “it’s just a shame it didn’t happen before the tool launched.”

Written By BRIAN BERGSTEIN

Source: On Your Side | ABC 7 News

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A combination of high winds, hail, and a tornado ripped across Eastern Arkansas this past weekend and found it’s way onto our farm.  My folks have been sending me photos off and on today of the damage and I have been posting them to my photo gallery as I get them.  Fortunately our home place wasn’t in the path of the storms although neighbors said it got kind of scary just before the storm moved out into Mississippi.  Check out the link below, notice the rail cars that were sitting on the track that were all knocked over, amazing…

Picasa Web Albums - Cotton Rohrscheib - Farm Tornado …

The pressure in the air was also strong enough to cause some of these large grain bins at our grainery in Oneida, Arkansas to  just collapse inward, I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before, click here to see the rest of the photos…

The winds also flipped over a couple of our Irrigation Systems as the storm passed through, I hope to get some shots of those added to the gallery soon, after speaking with my folks I found out that Highway 44 is closed to traffic due to debris, airplanes, and cotton pickers being scattered across the roads.  Ironically nothing has been mentioned on any of the Arkansas news networks about the damage in Phillips County?? 

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Wow, talk about a bank note!  Facebook just got a $100 million dollar loan from a venture capital group out of California so they can add additional servers to their infrastructure.  Get this, they were able to pull off this deal without tying up any equity in the company.  I think in some ways this lends a lot of credibility to the social networking side of the web. 

All of this news also comes amidst more rumors that Microsoft is entertaining purchasing Facebook again. I have said many times that I think Facebook is the top Social Networki on the web right now in terms of it’s mechanics (software and functionality) as well as it’s quality of users even though MySpace still continues to have a lot more users.

The company has already said the entirety of the new money will be used to acquire servers to help accommodate the swiftly increasing numbers of new users and popular plug-in applications that have made the site one of the big success stories of the social networking world.

The new funding is in addition to $360 million already raised by the company in the last seven months.

Recent reports put Facebook’s user numbers at over 35 million in the US. Estimates have put the company’s current data center capacity at roughly 10,000 servers. The new money will give it the means to add approximately 50,000 more servers, leaving plenty of room for expansion.

Facebook reportedly secured the loan without giving up equity in the company. The loan was provided through a venture deal with TriplePoint Capital, a lending company based out of California. This is reportedly TriplePoint’s largest deal to date.

According to reports, Facebook has not disclosed which vendor or vendors it intends to tap for new servers, but the company has been a major customer of Rackable Systems in the past. That company reported in recent statements that 17 percent of its first quarter revenue, $11.5 million, came from Facebook.

Web Host Industry News | Facebook Gets $100M Loan for Servers

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Pingdom did a recent report on downtime for social networking sites and determined that Twitter has had way more downtime than other popular social networking sites that are out there like MySpace and Facebook, etc.  This didn’t come to me as a huge surprise, I have been using Twitter for about a month or two now and I have personally seen the service go down from time to time. 

Being in the industry of web-hosting I can sympathize with the folks at Twitter a little bit, they have probably seen rapid growth in their service that exceeded their expectations.  I am not ready to call Twitter a failure by any means at this point, in fact, I think it’s a little harsh for anyone to criticize a service that’s FREE…  Just my two cents, here’s a quote from an article I spotted on WHIR this morning:

According to a recent report posted to website and server uptime monitoring service Pingdom’s (pingdom.com) Twitter has been offline for more than 37 hours since January, twice as long as the outage total for the next worst performing website, Reunion.com. Pingdom says Twitter was the only service with uptime below 99 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, popular social networking site MySpace (myspace.com) had the best overall uptime at 99.96 percent with blogging network Xanga showing the next best uptime at 99.95 percent.

Popular social networking site Facebook (facebook.com) was sixth on the list at 99.91 percent uptime and had around two and a half hours of downtime over the four-month tracking period.

Source: Web Host Industry News | Twitter Leads Social Site Downtime

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Ran across this Man Cave story on CNN.com and thought it was pretty funny.  It’s amazing to me that no matter how old we get, we never truly outgrow the need to have a clubhouse!

Granted, right now I don’t have a Man Cave of my own, typically when my friends come over we usually migrate to my home office and we sit around the plasma’s and check out videos on break.com and ebaumsworld.com but if I am ever able to have a Man Cave of my own (which my wife has vetoed), it will definitely be along these same lines, maybe add a high speed connection and lan, haha.

(CNN) — During the week Ryan Samuel, 30, is a married man working in the energy market in Richardson, Texas. But on the weekends he lures men away from their homes, wives and children with beer, camaraderie, power tools and “The Ponderosa.”

Three years ago, Samuel, his cousin, his brother-in-law and a host of friends started building a cabin on some family land in Oklahoma. They named it “The Ponderosa.”

By Samuel’s admission, it’s more like a shack. It has no power, no plumbing, a leak in the roof and it’s already been set on fire once.

Struggling to find the allure? Samuel admits it’s not for everyone. He’s never shown the place to his wife.

Every time he and his friends go to the cabin, they have to chase hornets, snakes and other varmints out of the building. Once a cow died in the creek behind the cabin and it stank for weeks.

“You want to talk man caves, this place is a total cave,” said Samuel.

CNN.com and iReport.com got an overwhelming response when we asked readers to send in photos and stories of their man caves — spaces that foster men’s hobbies, decorating skills and technological needs.

Samuel caught our interest when he explained that almost all the building materials and labor used to create “The Ponderosa” were paid for in beer, so we had to give him a call to find out more.

It turns out building a cabin wasn’t entirely Samuel’s idea. He and his cousin Jeff used to own a 1963 Winnebago camper they kept on their family’s land in Oklahoma. One day Samuel got a call from Jeff asking if he wanted “the good news or the bad news.”

“The good news was, ‘I’m building a cabin where our camper is sitting right now,” said Samuel. The bad news: Jeff sold the camper for spray-foam insulation. By the time Samuel arrived to survey the situation, Jeff was already laying the floor. Their adventures continued from there.

They got creative with construction techniques and building materials: The one window in the cabin isn’t actually framed in. Samuel said he and his friends used a saws-all to cut an opening and then leaned the window onto the hole. “I have no idea where that window came from,” he said.

Samuel’s cousin Jeff lucked into roofing materials driving down the road one day.

“My cousin was driving down the highway in Oklahoma. He pulls over and there are 10 rolls of roofing paper on the side of the road,” Samuel said. His cousin was driving a car that day instead of a truck, so he was only able to fit four of the rolls in the back, but it was more than they needed, he said.

“And right now there’s a tarp over [the roof], because obviously we didn’t do it right.”

The cabin’s back yard got a facelift after a rainstorm: “We left a bunch of sacks of Quickcrete out on the porch, and they got rained on,” said Samuel. “They turned into perfect blocks of concrete,” he said, which they used to build a fire pit.

For years Samuel, his relatives and his friends bartered for, borrowed or found the building necessities for their getaway cabin.

Samuel said his cousin knew a lot of people who could help them build or help them get building supplies.

“You get some guys who are married, maybe have children or not, and are looking for any excuse to get away from the house, and have access to or actually have the building materials .. It’s not hard to talk someone into doing the manual labor, because they’re accomplishing something that they wanted to also. They’re having a few beers with some buddies. If they’re hammering some nails or screwing some screws at the same time, that’s fine too,” he said.

This was typical of user comments in reaction to the images and stories we received about man caves.

Many women wanted to know what was so terrible about the man cave-owners’ families that they had to retreat to a cave to get away from them. Many men piped up in the comment section as well, explaining they felt their wives had reign over the entire rest of the house, and that men deserved at least one space to call their own.

So we asked Samuel what he thought.

“The whole point of it, it’s just guy time,” he said. “There’s no rules, there’s no bathroom. It’s just getting away. … Most of it is just relaxation and having a good time. Nothing ever happens out there that can create any extra stress.”

“Half of it is about hanging out with guys, your buddies and the other half is being out where nobody can see you. Nobody can find you. You’re way out there — there’s no city lights hiding the stars. The time that you can spend out there getting away from it all, doing what you want to do, that’s the reason behind building the thing,” he said.

“When you leave on a Sunday evening and it’s time to go home, you can face all the things that you have to do for that next week. But for the entire time you’re out there hanging loose, you have no deadlines, nothing else you have to do but just go hang out.”

Beer, free stuff lead to ‘man cave’ - CNN.com

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