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?

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!

Mashable's Pete Cashmore has a great write up about the tornados in the Dallas area on Tuesday, and Twitter.  

Twitter has proven itself to be a great way for hundreds of thousands of people to discuss an event - live - in real time, whether it's something fun like the Super Bowl or a Royal Wedding, or whether it's something dreadful like a violent revolution.

And, of course, it's great for tracking weather events.  I'm signed up for the local radio station alerts through my mobile phone.  I think this is important, because I live in a tornado-prone area, and the phone is more likely to wake me up than the sirens are in my neighborhood.  Unfortunately, because of internet provider delays, I sometimes don't get these alerts for several minutes, however, so once I'm awake, they aren't particularly useful for keeping up-to-the minute on the location of the storm and exactly where the danger is.

TV is pretty good, but I don't  have access to that in my safe room or if the power is out.  Facebook is good (I follow all of the popular local weathermen), but sometimes those weathermen are a little busy during a storm. 

The beauty of Twitter in events like this is that it's citizen journalism at its finest.  Anyone with a mobile phone that still has battery power can tweet exactly what's going on where they are, and include an appropriate #hashtag to alert other people in their area.

In the Dallas tornados, there was absolutely devastating property damage - including along the highways, where interstate travelers are often killed because of the lack of ability to communicate - but few injuries, and as of this writing (7:30pm CDT on Tuesday night), no reported deaths.  With Twitter, however, people in this situation were able to communicate exactly what was going on, and warn everyone else - in real time.  Did this play a role in saving lives?  This is hard to know for sure, but it seems like it may have, and this is wonderful. 

Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with those who lost their homes and sustained injuries from the tornados. 

Google and Mashable vied for the geekiest April Fools Day jokes this year, with between Google's new "Gmail Tap," mobile app (which allows users to text in Morse Code), and Conan O'Brien supposedly taking over the social media news giant, Mashable.  I'm not sure who won, but both all-day long performances were pretty impressive.

All of these jokes about changes brings me to my main point, which is not a joke: A complaint I've been hearing over and over and over ad nauseum about every single change that takes place on the web from Facebook's timeline to Second Life's upgrades to Twitter's ad placement is,  "Why can't they just leave things alone?!?!?"

Really?  Most of these social networks we're using on a daily basis now have been created in the last 7-10 years.  What if we had just decided in 1999 to "leave things alone"?  Most of us would still be using those huge console "car phones," thinking we were Soooo up to date, or e-mail (just barely).

What if we had stopped in the 80s?  We would still be finding each other in the local phone directory and writing letters to our friends, delivered by snail mail. 

What if Alexander Graham Bell's wife, had convinced him to just have another cup of tea, and leave things alone?  The phone directory wouldn't even be necessary, and we really would be communicating by Morse Code and the pony express, or smoke signals, or whatever.   What if Ben Franklin had decided he didn't want to rock the boat with all of this "electricity" stuff?

Yeah, sometimes the social networks make "improvements" that are just ridiculous in hindsight, and we as humans are naturally resistant to change - especially when it comes to our creature comforts.  We're also prone to complaining.  Several of my friends (who just discovered Facebook within the last couple of years) have been complaining for several months now that the features they had learned how to use weren't working properly anymore - because they refused to upgrade to Facebook's new timeline.  Now that Facebook has forced the timeline on most of the users (after months of warnings and opportunities to upgrade voluntarily), those same dear friends of mine are complaining about the new timeline's features.  Most don't really have anything specific to say about the features or functionality, but they are instead just upset about the fact that their page "looks" different.  Sigh.

This same resistant-to-change-rut is easy to get into when it comes to web page technology.  Tim and the crew at WebRev have been rolling out new features to make their clients' websites more available by mobile and more usable for online purchases.  It's very easy, however, to think, "Hey, I just updated my website (five years ago).  I'll wait awhile.  A lot of changes have taken place in the last five years - and three years - and even the last year, and your customers and readers know it.  Do you?