Stritar's chronolog

Tweet my Foursquare check-in, and I'll change your relationship status

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:05:01 GMT

Why? Because changing your relationship status on Facebook is so last year. Because all the cool kids are on Twitter and Foursquare. Because you want to discover all the possible ways of saying something. Because you like to play. Because a tagged picture just doesn't cut it anymore. Because you like to speak ambiguously. Because you want to leave people in the dark. Because you want them to read between the lines. Because you don't intend to make it a big deal, but would still like to tell the world. Because that's simply the newest way of doing it. Tweet my Foursquare check-in, and I'll change your relationship status.

There aren't that many relationship status changes on Facebook as there once were, at least in my world. People probably work around it, make their relationship status private, change it, and then make it public again to bypass the mini-feed and avoid too much buzz in their timeline. Don't know why, but I guess having too many birthdays on Facebook made people crave for a bit of anonymity. Attention - good. Center of attention - too much.

Photos were the next step, where two random people accidentally appeared tagged together, preferably only a part of their body (feet), with a beach or some other scenic situation in the background. An implicit relationship status change is way more interesting than the explicit one. Some get it, some don't, the puzzling bit makes it more spicy. What does this picture mean? Will anybody dare to ask?

All good, but obsolete. Here's what happens today. The cool newly appointed couple travels to an exotic place far away, or a romantic spot too significant to be mistaken, and tweets their mutual check-in. Something that undoubtedly signals a thing. Most people notice, but not that many flinch. This is usually followed by an Instagram picture of the other person, which confirms the previous assumption, and the second person retweets it. At this point, the relationship status has pretty much been changed, even though it's documented only by a few tweets somewhere very far away down the timeline. And from there on, people who are supposed to know, know.

True story, I've already seen it a few times. Loving the way how people and culture evolve in the social age.

Putting 'people who look at you' to your Facebook profile would be the smartest thing to do

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:50:34 GMT

Are you one of those people who are wondering how Facebook decides which friends they put on your profile? I admit I am, both out of programmer's curiosity and of course, there have been rumors that those individuals are the ones who look at your profile. While LinkedIn offers this "who looks at your profile" insight to its (premium) users, Facebook is still very mysterious about it, denying this is how this particular algorithm works. But there is a simple reason I don't believe them: if I would be Facebook, I would design it exactly like this.

EdgeRank

Facebook uses EdgeRank to calculate the connection between two people, determined by the amount of mutual friends, interactions, tagged photos, attended events and other parameters in a time period. Besides other things, the EdgeRank influences which posts get displayed in your news feed. It seems Facebook is saying that a similar algorithm is used for the friends on your profile, but is it really?

The exploit

Some time ago, someone managed to find a way inside the EdgeRank results. This guy noticed that Facebook caches the list of your friends, together with the level of proximity you have with each one. This stored part of the social graph helps search and other lists on Facebook to work faster and be sorted better. He was nice enough to write a script and made it public, so everybody can see who their Facebook BFFs are. The results looks like the real deal, and it's actually quite fascinating that Facebook hasn't patched this potential abuse yet, it's been available for almost a year.

Bottom line: the list of friends in your EdgeRank and the list of friends on your profile are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike each other.

Comparing my closest friends to those that are showing up on my Facebook profile

Why bother?

Facebook needs to constantly drive your engagement, and they have infinite data about you. They are trying to seamlessly integrate their experience into every pore of your life and make you even more connected. They are saying they can predict when hookups and breakups will happen. Who do you think they would put on your profile?

It would work

Adding "people who look at you" to your Facebook profile would act as the poke that never got clicked. The most basic (inter)action, something that wants to lead to something bigger. The invisible act of someone longing for engagement. Potential connection, potential partnership, potential relationship. The beyond EdgeRank scary social experiment, which holds infinite possibilities, positive and negative. An almost godly algorithm. Why would anyone even think of doing it differently? It simply doesn't get much better than this.

I would do it, I believe Facebook would do it as well, but even if they did, it's pretty clear why they can't tell us. This feature would work only as long as we wouldn't really believe it's being used. That's why you need to forget about all of this and simply enjoy your virtual life.

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Evolution of men and its representation in James Bond movies

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:11:18 GMT

If you didn’t notice, things have changed quite a lot in the past 50 years. The perception of the world changed and so did the people. One species that went through extremely significant metamorphosis is the human male. Once strong, rough and commanding, now cute, femininine and emotional. A term used more and more often for urban men is metrosexual, representing someone that looks a bit gay even though he is heterosexual, taking care of his looks and appearance.

The mass media and pop culture have been giving people representations of stereotypes since the dawn of television. People have been giving it back. It doesn’t matter who was more influential, the fact is that this evolution of society has been documented and can now be studied. In our case we will focus on a figure of a man. To make things easier, pop culture brought up a perfect case study, represented in a series of films about one perfect alpha male, detective James Bond.

Since Dr. No was filmed in 1962, the mentioned 50 years passed. In more than 20 films, James Bond was portrayed by different actors representing different ages. If you compare all the different looks and different behaviors of actors representing the same character, you can perhaps get a clearer picture on how the society of each time was perceiving a perfect male. Amongst other things, James Bond definitely got less hairy and more buff. You could say he’s not that handsome anymore, now he’s a bit beautiful.

Comparing Sean Connery and Daniel Craig we can wonder in which novel James Bond actually thought about shaving his armpits and waxing his chest. We can also wonder in which novel he’ll start to pluck his eyebrows and wear a bit of mascara. Perhaps he and his Bond girl can then do it while they are getting their legs waxed. It may seem far fetched, but cultural changes between consecutive Bonds are massive, so don’t get surprised when something like that happens.

Another important thing occurred in this feminization process - James Bond became a bit less charming. The old school acts and seduction methods the original used have been replaced by modern ones, quite boring and lame. A simple task of ordering a drink could once be made legendary, but now such things are loosing it’s appeal and look weird. Today it’s more important which telephone someone has and which brands he wears, because wits are not that appreciated anymore. All in accordance with the figure of a modern male, looking good with not much smart to say.

The way the future man will look is probably up to the women and their expectation of men. This will probably manifest in the form of which pop star they will idolize the most. Seeing the hysteria over that vampire guy, it looks like it’s futile to resist. The ultimate question, is James Bond imitating a stereotypical cool guy or is a stereotypical cool guy imitating James Bond was probably answered with that thought, so I might as well go put on some hair conditioner.