The Gentleman’s guide to Facebook, Friend requests & Netiquette

March 31st, 2009, By talk

The wildcard friend request conundrum

Facebook friend requests come in all shapes and sizes, anything from a flirtatious “Hey Gorgeous” to a blast from your kindergarten past. As online friendship becomes more socially acceptable, so do friend requests from people you’ve never met or even heard of. Wildcard Facebook friend requests represent a social conundrum and raise a prickly issue: Is there a polite way to ask someone:
“Excuse me but WHO THE !@#$ ARE YOU?”

Who the !@#$ are you Takeru Kobayashi?!?

I’m personally facing this very issue with the aforementioned Mr. Takeru Kobayashi, who has requested my Facebook friendship and whom, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met or heard of before. Fortunately for me Headup can assist me to avoid this potential netiquette disaster.

Headup – more omniscient* than Deep Thought, cooler than HAL

Headup’s unique ability to identify people and collect their profiles from a range of social services makes it an ideal tool for snooping out friendship candidates, flirtatious paramours, and self proclaimed potty pals, prior to approving them as your Facebook friends.

Stalking, snooping and spying – the Headup way

Headup will often be able to show you some photos of the flirt along with some of your common friends, tell you a bit about what your former kindergarten confederate is up to, and reveal that Takeru Kobayashi, AKA “The Tsunami”, is an illustrious member of the most prestigious of clubs: former winners of Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Competition.

Armed with this smorgasbord of information I can now make an informed choice on whether to welcome Takeru into my circle of friends, or leave him out in the cold and watch the videos Headup provides of his hotdog eating antics instead.

Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi doing his thing

This ability to check out potential friends beforehand makes Headup a powerful boost to your Facebook activities, enabling you to filter out identity thieves, serial ‘befrienders‘ and other social hazards.

How you can get this:

If you don’t have it yet, download the Headup plug-in for Firefox and follow the instructions, make sure you connect the addon to your Facebook account (at least).

If you already have Headup, make sure you’re logged into your Facebook account and click the little Headup icon on your browser’s status bar (bottom right hand corner of the window).

Headup settings - bottom right of your browser

This will bring you to the personalization screen

Connect Headup to your Facebook account

Make sure that when you’re popped over to the Facebook authorization window you agree to give access to Headup.

Click the Finish button.

Finish connecting Headup to your services to save your settings

That’s it, you’re done!

Next time you visit Facebook peoples’ names will be underlined with Headup’s signature orange dashed line and hovering over them will prompt Headup to provide you with whatever details it is able to retrieve for them.

Let me know if you come up with something juicier than a hotdog…

—

Enjoyed this post?
You might like “Yo Tweeps! Check Headup on Twitter…” too.
It explains how to use Headup to boost your Tweeting…

* Thought about this after writing the post:
By definition it’s impossible to be “more omniscient”

Tags: facebook, facebook addon, facebook boost, Friend requests, Netiquette, snooping, stalking
Posted in facebook, features, mashups, usage | No Comments »

Free to use C# fix for the Seeqpod.com API

March 26th, 2009, By talk

Seeqpod pulls a fast one

A few hours ago we discovered that SeeqPod.com changed their API without notice. For us this meant that some of our audio playing capabilities were impaired. It seems they started using an authentication method that requires changing the HTTP Get request’s headers.

Seeqpod - The Headup summary

Our trusty development team, always up for a challenge, was put on code-red-alert mode to produce a quick fix so our users could resume hearing music ASAP. Half an hour ago team member Yuval Kesten finished writing the code that will enable us to utilize the new Seeqpod API and we’ve deceided to share his solution with the world for everyone to enjoy.

The code changes for the Seeqpod API

The following C# (Silverlight CLR) is free for anyone to use and enjoy (no copyrights).
Enjoy & pass it on…
: )

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace SeeqPod
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
const string apiKey = “”;
const string apiUid = “”;

string timeStamp = GenerateTimeStamp();

HMACSHA1 hmac = new HMACSHA1();
hmac.Key = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(apiKey);
string data = “/api/v0.2/music/search/nirvana/” + timeStamp;
byte[] call = hmac.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data));
string sCall = BytesToHex(call);

var wc = HttpWebRequest.Create(“http://www.seeqpod.com/api/v0.2/music/search/nirvana/”);
wc.Headers.Add(“Seeqpod-uid”, apiUid);
wc.Headers.Add(“Seeqpod-call-signature”, sCall);
wc.Headers.Add(“Seeqpod-timestamp”, timeStamp);
var response = wc.GetResponse();

// Get the stream associated with the response.
Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();

// Pipes the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format.
StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(receiveStream, Encoding.UTF8);

Console.WriteLine(“Response stream received.”);
Console.WriteLine(readStream.ReadToEnd());
response.Close();

Console.ReadKey();

}

private static string GenerateTimeStamp()
{
TimeSpan ts = (DateTime.UtcNow – new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0));
return ts.TotalSeconds.ToString();
}

private static string BytesToHex(byte[] input)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

foreach (byte b in input)
{
sb.Append(string.Format(“{0:x2}”, b));
}

return sb.ToString();
}
}
}

Posted in code, for developers, mashups, silverlight, update | 21 Comments »

Headup and the friendly Semantic Web giant

March 2nd, 2009, By talk

Ever since we launched Headup’s public beta we’ve been getting a pretty steady stream of media attention and positive feedback. Finding new articles and positive reviews in leading publications on a daily basis is fun, but in all that hype it was, of all things, one little tweet from last week that got me particularly excited:

@jahendler: “I’m rapidly becoming a big fan of @headup – very cool little app! Great example of “a little semantics goes a long way!“

So who is @jahendler anyway?

Professor James Hendler - a friendly Semantic Web giant

The reason I’m so thrilled by this particular comment is because @jahendler is better known as Professor James Hendler and he’s no stranger to the Semantic Web…

In fact professor Hendler is considered one of the inventors of the Semantic Web.

His list of accomplishments includes (take a deep breath):

Holding the position of Tetherless World Chair of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Serving as the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT

Receiving the 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship

Being a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board

Being a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

If that isn’t enough Professor Hendler is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal, and is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Getting endorsed this way by Professor Hendler is meaningful to anyone in the Semantic Web space, but as a young startup it’s particularly exciting. As someone in the team put it:

“It’s like getting a compliment from Martin Scorcese after uploading your first video to Youtube…”

Posted in feedback | 3 Comments »

Welcome To Headup – The semantic web – Blog