Open graph apps on Facebook: more than music and videos

After the announcement some half a year ago, January saw the introduction on even more open graph apps on Facebook and impressive figures about the engagement with the original launch partners, especially Spotify. I’m still very weary of the idea of sharing everything you do on Facebook, from music to food to every article you happen to click on; it’s not just that I don’t want to deal with the noise from others, but I feel most of this isn’t at all relevant, neither for my friends, nor for me on the longer run. Let’s not forget all this activity from frictionless sharing is stored in your Facebook Timeline and theoretically accessible years from now. The only open graph app I don’t find creepy so far is goodreads; and that’s mainly because it’s avoiding both of these caveats: since I don’t usually read more than one book per week there will be a very low noise level for others. Also, picking up a book is not something you do casually, it requires a longer time commitment and conscientious effort, much more so than playing 3-minutes long songs that can simply pop up automatically from a playlist. And, as such, the reading habits will tell you much more about that person than the stream of music she or he plays and will stay relevant for far longer.

As with any app, it’s probably a good idea to check the privacy settings to insure random people don’t get access to your intimate tastes – or to make them all public, if you prefer. You can find them under ‘Account settings’ ► ‘Apps’; there you can specify the default visibility for individual apps. While open graph updates are normally clustered together as a ‘recent activity’ box on the Timeline, you get additional finer-grained control over the display in the ‘Activity log’: filter the updates by app from the top-right drop-down menu, then click on the empty grey circle on the right side to either hide stories from the timeline or ‘show’ them, effectively making them stand out on their own as a regular status update.

Troubleshooting Blogger’s threaded comments

Earlier this month Blogger introduced a long-awaited feature, native threaded comments – with only one level, but still pretty nice to delimit conversations. The instructions sounded easy enough, just a couple of settings to change and the new reply system should kick in. Unfortunately in practice both myself and many other have stumbled across a couple of problems…

If you have Blogger’s commenting feature enabled, “Blog Feed” set to “Full”, and are using “Embedded” comments, then you’re ready to start a discussion with your readers. To check, or change your feed settings, select: “Settings” > “Other” >, and then “Full” from the “Allow Blog Feed” dropdown.

Site search for top-level domains on Google search

Restricting search results to a particular site can be a very effective way to narrow down your results, but unfortunately it’s not very easy to use, requiring you to either go through the ‘Advanced Settings’ or manually add the site: operator to the query. It looks like Google recently made some changes to make the feature more prominent. For some top-level domains – I saw it first for YouTube and later for a number of news organizations like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian and the German Deutsche Welle and even NASA – the one-box triggered by a search for their name now contains a small search box at the bottom; from there the user can immediately start a search inside that particular site. It’s probably safe to assume that users searching for the name of an organization would want to find content from the site and this saves visitors a trip to the home page and the time it takes to track down the native search. There doesn’t seem to be a clear rule for which site this new site-search box is triggered; maybe it’s a feature that is still being tested or it is rolling out to more in the coming days.

Kazuo Ishiguro - Rămășițele zilei

E greu să vorbești despre Kazuo Ishiguro fără să amintești dubla lui moștenire culturală, japoneză prin naștere și britanică prin adopție – mai apropiate decât ai putea crede la prima vedere – care îi marchează atât stilul cât și subiectele romanelor sale. Povestit din perspectiva unui majordom autentic la Darlington Hall, „Rămășițele zilei” se situează evident la capătul extrem de british al spectrului său.

Romanul ia forma unui jurnal de călătorie, un tur cu mașina de câteva zile prin provincia engleză recomandată de atlasele de călătorie The Wonder of England. Dar ca orice jurnal care se respectă, din el aflăm mai mult despre posesorul lui decât despre regiunile pe care le vizitează. Stevens se lansează în lungi monologuri despre profesia de majordom, rememorează cele mai importante reuniuni la conacul Darlington Hall și munca diplomatică în care se implicase lordul Darlington în urma Primului Război Mondial pentru a ușura povara despăgubirilor cerute Germaniei și contactele din ce în ce mai apropiate ale lordului cu ambasadorul nazist, Herr Ribbentrop.

Primul capitol în special este dedicat concepției lui Stevens despre propria meserie, un subiect căruia i‑a acordat o mare atenție de‑a lungul vieții, atât în propriile gânduri, cât și în conversațiile cu ceilalți membrii ai profesiei sale. Deși nu e cea mai palpitată lectură, ideile care se conturează aici ne dau o imagine foarte bună despre Stevens, despre idealurile sale de demnitate și profesionalism; iar în restul romanului avem ocazia să‑l urmărim punându‑le în practică, ducându‑le până la ultimele consecințe. Găsim la el o dedicare admirabilă, dorința de a se pune în serviciul unui adevărat lord, contribuind astfel indirect la facerea istoriei, și o etică a muncii de admirat, care cu greu se mai regăsesc astăzi. Un exemplu extrem ar fi încercarea lui de a răspunde ironiilor noului stăpân american de la Darlington Hall în aceeași manieră, deși pentru asta va avea nevoie de mult exercițiu, după cum singur constată. Într‑un fel, el se ghidează după un cod propriu similar cu cel al samurailor din țara natală a lui Ishiguro, axat pe demnitate, ierarhie și onoare; dar ca și aceștia, este prins nepregătit de schimbările radicale ale primelor decenii de secol XX.

Google Search, plus (some of) Your World

After experimenting with social results for months – sometimes with less than perfect results, the integration of Google+ into Google’s search results became official earlier this month. The reactions have been understandably strong and varied; for some it’s awesome, for others it’s a breach on the integrity of Google Search and as such is breaking the implicit promise to users that search will always be unbiased; and of course, there is the feeling that you are forced into using Google+, otherwise you will find yourself devalued in the search results. Competitors in the social game, especially Twitter, have also complained, seeing the move as anticompetitive, unfairly promoting Google+ in detriment of more established networks.

Hide Blogger’s default message box

I’ve written a series of articles on how to add a label page to the native ‘Pages’ widget in Blogger, essentially transforming it in a sub-blog, which can even have it’s own RSS feed. There’s just one small detail missing from this setup: a way to hide the message box that Blogger displays by default on label and search pages – which doesn’t look very good – a tweak that even my readers requested. There are two methods to achieve this, depending on your necessities:

First method – easy, but non-customizable

The easier and safer way is to simply add a small CSS code snippet to the blog template. On the plus side there is no need to manually edit the HTML template and this wont break future features released from Blogger. But the disadvantage is that it will remove all messages indiscriminately, both from label pages and search results, which could confuse some users. If you choose this method, follow these steps:

• From the Blogger Dashboard go to ‘Template Designer’ (under ‘Design’ in the old Blogger design or under ‘Layout’ in the new design);
• Navigate to ‘Advanced’ ► ‘Add CSS’ and paste the following code in the text box:

  .status-msg-wrap { display: none; }

• Click ‘Apply to Blog’ to save and return to the dashboard.

If you later want to remove this customization, follow the same steps and delete the line of CSS code mentioned above.

Notification emails about weekly activity from Google+

It’s been a while since I actively visited Google+ – actually since about the time Google decided to force Plus in weird ways on perfectly functional apps; I only visit it through links on Twitter or search results. It’s hard to say if my preference reflects an overall trend, because the reports about the adoption of Google+ are conflicting at best. Last week I got a small ‘push’ towards Google’s social network: a notification email containing a weekly digest of recent activity from my circles. It’s the first time I saw such a mail from Google+, so it’s hard to say if that’s common practice or just directed at users like me, who more or less abandoned the place. You could certainly see reminders like this as a small indication that the social initiative isn’t getting enough engagement or returning users. I receive similar daily digest emails from Quora and I didn’t see them making many headlines lately.

Looking through my account settings, I noticed an option to turn these digest emails off: it’s under “Manage email subscriptions” ► “Occasional updates about Google+ activity and friend suggestions” – funny, I don’t remember enabling it and I am usually very thorough about these things. Another setting – this time fortunately not enabled by default – lets Google automatically add a Google+ page to my circles if I search for + followed by the page's name – hmm, I’m not sure I would ever want do do that…