Facebook, the social network that is no longer social.

Over the last month or so I’ve seen a few articles going around about the most recent changes Facebook has made to it’s fan pages, and especially to who sees the updates. There’s two good articles about it on the New York Observer (Broken On Purpose) and on Dangerous Minds (Facebook: I Want My Friends Back). Both of these focus on the impact to fan pages for small businesses, blogs or similar, but mention in passing that the “promote” button was starting to show up for ordinary users as well.

A couple of days ago I noticed that I could see it, got curious, and decided to do an experiment to see what difference promoting a status actually had.

Yesterday lunchtime I posted two status updates, which both read:

Testing something. Can you ‘like’ this post if you see it?

(may appear more than once, please do same for both)

Set privacy settings on both to friends only, paid the money to promote one of them, and then say back and waited a day. What happened is after the break.

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Emergency Ice Cream

The website has this down as wedding gifts for guests and the like, but I think the entire idea of emergency ice cream is outstanding in any situation. Basically you store all the ingredients in a plastic bag in a mason jar, mix them when you want ice cream, and shake with ice between the jar and bag to freeze it. Awesome.

Details here.

Help map your network’s coverage

Ever switched mobile phone operators and then realised you get Sweet Fanny Adams in the way of reception at home, despite the network insisting that they have good coverage there? A lot of what they map is based on theoretical coverage from various masts, rather than the actual coverage you can expect. Root Metrics do crowdsourced maps in the USA, and they’re starting in the UK. Download the app, and you can map around your area. Shame your network into sorting out duff coverage or similar. Obvious thing that the more people use it, the better the maps become.

Here’s what it currently looks like for T-Mobile UK around Weybridge.

 

Download the app/browse the site here.