WebRev Blog

If you have updated to the new Facebook timeline, you've probably noticed that there is now a big space across the top of your profile or page to put a very short and wide photo.  This is a little awkward to deal with at first, because we've become accustomed to making our photos for our social networks either square or cropped to "profile" view (slightly taller than it is wide). 

This one, however, is meant to be 850 pixels wide x 315 pixels tall - or it can be cropped to those dimensions after it's uploaded to Facebook.  Basically, it's going to either be a panoramic photo, a collage, or a true "header" like you might have on an older-style personal blog.

If your page or profile is public, it needs to be appropriate for all audiences (i.e. keep it "G" rated), and you can only include "advertising" type material on a page (not on a personal profile).  Pages are meant to be more for businesses or organizations or non-profits.   The photos should not include any text that is meant to be hyperlinked, because at this time there is not a way to do that in the profile or page headers.

If you're looking for ideas, Honkiat.com (Part 1 and Part 2) has the best collection of timeline covers I've seen so far.

The important thing to remember is that this space is OPTIONAL.  There's a lot to be said for the simplicity of just letting your profile image stand alone in this space (this will happen automatically), and leaving white space at the top of the page, like Tim and the gang at WebRev are doing right now.  This strategy will achieve a much more professional look than just hastily sticking ANY old photo you can find in that space. 

Also see Facebook Timeline - well done! and Why we can't just leave things alone.

If you want to atte,pt to design a Facebook Timeline cover for yourself, be sure to check out the resources in our Web Rev Photos archive, especially Open Source (Free) Graphic Art and Graphic Design Software, and Image Resolution Made Simple, as well as Merging Photos for your Wallpapers and Web Themes, and Three Quick (and Easy) ways to Hand-Tint Photos for your Wallpapers and Web Themes.

This week, we're honoring the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, an important lesson that humanity recieved that even our most "modern" technological advances are no match for nature.  No ship is unsinkable, and no technology is infallible.

Also over the weekend, the National Weather Service had an opportunity to test it's new warning system, which it believes may have saved lives, which is a good thing.

I live in Oklahoma, which is part of what is known as "tornado alley."  People here have been dealing with this phenomenon for as long as there have been people here. My grandparents headed for the cellar (which did dual duty as a storm shelter and a place to store jars of fruit and vegetable preserves) as soon as the sky clouded up.  This happened a lot, and they kept the place stocked for overnight stays.  Because we're so close to the water line here, and technology has given us monster-sized refrigerators and freezers, most people have traded in their in-ground cellars for a "safe room" in their house.  A safe room can be a room that is built specifically for storm protection (basically the equivalent of the black box on airplanes) - these are expensive.  Most of us have opted to simply find "safer" rooms, which are rooms in our homes which don't have windows - as close the interior of the house as possible.

Knowing exactly when to get into that safe (or safer) room is the tricky part, of course.  For a lot of us, the safer room is our bathroom, and you can really only spend so many hours in there without losing your mind.  And, of course, it's tempting to want to go outside and watch or photo  the spectacular funnel clouds.  The most dangerous time is late at night, when people are sleeping.

For this, many of us have gone from depending on radios, to TVs and now our mobile devices.  There are also sirens in many neighborhoods, which have been successful in waking people up to alert them to move to a safe or safer room.  Unfortunately, in Woodward, OK, last night, those sirens failed due to a lightening strike and then the sirens were hit with a tornado.  Tragically, there were injuries and fatalities in those tornados, and the siren failure is believed to have contributed to the toll.

In my neighborhood, I'm usually not able to hear the sirens, so I don't rely on them.  I've come to rely on my mobile phone.  The tornados did not hit in my city last night, but if they had, I might have been in trouble.  I forgot that I had turned the notification signal down a couple of days before while I was in a meeting. When I received the tornado alert in the early hours of the morning on my cell phone, it didn't make a loud enough sound to wake me up, and I slept right through it. 

No matter how great our technology is, we need to always remember to have a life boat - or a back-up.  It's an important lesson to learn and never forget.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the tornados - those who have lost family, and those whose homes have been destroyed.

Also see:  How to Track Severe Weather from your Safe Room, and Can Twitter Save Lives?

Make Use Of has an excellent post this week on the 9 Types of Facebook Status updates that your friends will like, explaining how to generate conversation. We covered several of these topics in detail a couple of years ago in our series, Types of Blog Posts.  This is very good information for promoting a blog for your website, a Facebook page, or Twitter feed - particularly for your business.

But all of this got me thinking. About 2 1/2 years ago, Miley Cyrus took a break from Twitter, partially because she felt she had stopped living for moments and started living for people.  She got over that at some point, apparently because she's back on Twitter, but I've seen comments from friends on both Facebook and Twitter from people who have confessed that instead of really experiencing some incident in their lives, they found th few themselves distracted by how to explain the moment in a 140-character Tweet, or a short Facebook update. 

If you've ever found yourself in the position of being the family photographer, you might be able to appreciate those rare family gatherings when you leave the camera in the case, and just sit around and have a conversation.  I've found recently that I have benefitted greatly from not really posting updates to my own social networking profiles for a few days at a time, and just enjoying reading, liking, and occasionally commenting on other people's updates and photos.  It has helped me on my offline (sometimes known as my "real life"), too.  I'm rediscovering the joy of just enjoying, as Miley said, the "moments," instead of focusing on trying to capture everything I find funny or interesting in a photo or one-liner to post somewhere.

Taking these brief social-media breaks has helped me rediscover my own voice, and remember what is most important - actually LIVING my life, not just logging it. 

How do you maintain that important balance of staying involved with your online friends while still enjoying personal contact with your family and friends off line?

Here's a little trip down memory lane, when Miley Cyrus was younger...and wiser?

Once of the hallmarks of our generation has come to be that about once every couple of months Facebook does something, and the entire Internet revolts.  Sometimes the Internet has a good reason to revolt - especially in the cases in which Facebook has made changes that affected its users privacy or security without adequately informing them first. Facebook seems to have learned its lesson in this regard, however, as evidenced by the fact that it took several weeks to roll out the new "timeline" format for profiles and pages.  This, of course, didn't stop the Internet from revolting.

This revolting every time Facebook makes a move has become a tradition - or a bad habit, depending on your perspective - as evidenced by this week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook.  Remember Instagram? Just last Friday we were exploring this site, which allows users to create artwork out of their mobile photos before uploading them to their favorite social networks. 

While the real news of this acquisition is that it was reported for One Billion Dollars (with a "B"), which is HUGE for a start-up application that just finally rolled out to (Google's) Android devices last week.  Previously, it had only been available on (Apple's) iPhones.

Why was Facebook willing to pay so much? My guess is that Facebook wanted to get it before Google scooped it up. Critics are concerned that Facebook primarily wanted the user data from Instagram.  This seems unlikely, however, because although Instagram had its own social network, its primary purpose to be used as a tool to filter photos prior to uploading to Facebook and Twitter.  Ergo, most of the users probably already had Facebook, and were already sharing their photos on Facebook or another social network.  And, of course the Twitterverse is going nuts - as per usual.  Even the reaction among Facebook users is mixed, and hysterical.

OK, here's the deal.  Facebook is a for-profit company, and so is (was) Instagram.  So are all of their competitors.  They are going to make business decisions that they hope will make them as much money as possible, and keep them in business as long as possible.  This is how business works, and that's what this acquisition was - a business decision.  I think it was probably a good one all of the way around, and I'm very happy for the folks at Instagram who has the business acumen to develop a great program that turned out to be worth $1B. 

Now, let's all calm down, and save our energy for the habitual outrage that is sure to ensue as soon as one of these media giants buys the other photo-related time-sink, Pinterest.

When I first started reading about this story, I thought it was another of Google's April Fools Day jokes.  Does anyone remember Georgi LaForge, on Star Trek?  These look a cross between those glasses and the technology used in The Minority Report.

Although I have to hand it to Google for usually being out front in the world of technology (their numerous failed attempts to recreate the social network notwithstanding), I'm afraid this one is just plain dangerous.  Even more dangerous than robot-driven cars. 

I know I would find having "helpful" information popping up in front of me very distracting. And as for putting "helpful" information in front of me at the right time, it's not as if the glasses are actually going to know what I'm THINKING (I hope).  I may be looking in the direction of a woman who has a Gucci handbag (which may be advertised, conveniently on Google), but I may actually be focused on a set of restroom signs, to figure out which one is the girls room (and please, please, Google - don't even TRY to help me with that). 

But one really great thing that is likely to come out of this is that the technology is likely to be used in making our mobile devices intuitive in a way that we've never seen before.  Better assistance with street-level directions, and special offers for restaurants and retail stores I'm actually walking into would, in fact be appreciated.  We're already getting there with applications like Google Maps, and Foursquare. 

If Google really wants to make bring this technology into the Star-Trek age, I hope they ditch the eyewear, and focus on developing a great projection screen for their Androids.

You may have noticed that digital photographic art is all the rage these days.  If you're unfamiliar with this trend, it's where you take photographs, then enhance them digitally to make art out of them.  People have been doing this with software like Adobe Photoshop and Gimp for a long time.  This usually requires uploading your photos from your camera or phone to your computer, then working on them, then re-uploading them to whatever photo-sharing site you're using (Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, etc.).

However, now that so many of us are taking photographs on our mobile phones, applications are being developed to do the digital artwork right on the device, then upload it directly to our photo-sharing site (almost instantly).  A couple of months ago, I highlighted an application called Scalado, which will allow users to remove objects from a photo - I'm still waiting for that one to be available on my Droid.

Another application that has been getting a lot of attention lately is Instagram, which has been available on iPhones for a while, and just became available on the Android devices this week. 

I've tried it out, and I think it's a great option for folks who just want to give their photos a little artistic flare before sharing them on your favorite photo-sharing social network.  Basically, you snap the photo (either using the "advanced" features in the program, or your camera's features), and then run it through one of several "filters" available.  The filters are the equivalent of merging a filter in Gimp or Photoshop, to make your photo look distressed, or like an oil painting, or like an old photograph, or whatever.

Instagram has its own voting system and the most popular photos are available for viewing by the community.  You can use the site to network with your friends who are in your contacts lists on your phone, in Facebook, or in Twitter.  The Instagram blog has tips and tricks for using other available marketplace apps to improve your composition, create collages, or get more creative with your photography and mobile art. 

Flickr has a massive compilation of photos created using Instagram, mostly on iPhones, because the app just became avaiable on Android this week.

Have a Happy and Blessed Easter weekend with friends and family, everyone!