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Saturday, August 15, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
The two best websites for connecting with your friends have suddenly connected with each other.
Facebook has acquired the life-streaming website FriendFeed, the companies announced Monday. The sites will both continue to operate independently for the time being until the companies can decide the best way to integrate their products.
The integration will be delicate work: While the two sites have much in common, there are several hurdles relating to privacy, feature redundancy and the big question of what to do with all that FriendFeed data that need to be overcome.
“The exact plan for how the integration is going to be handled is something we’re still discussing,” FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit tells Webmonkey. “In the short term, nothing changes.”
Friendfeed and its API will both remain working normally until further notice, the company explained in a blog post Monday. Also, according to the official press release posted at Facebook, FriendFeed’s employees will join Facebook, and the site’s four founders will take on new roles within Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
At this point, details are slim: Both FriendFeed and Facebook folks have made it clear that the long-term plans for merging the products are still being ironed out.
Webmonkey’s biggest question is what this means for the “stuff” currently residing on FriendFeed’s platform. Right now, the default is that all posts are published publicly, and there are millions of comments, files and links stored on FriendFeed that will need to be forklifted over to Facebook. What changes will we see when that data is moved over, if any at all?
Buchheit says long-term issues such as that one are still being resolved.
“We want to look out for our users,” he stresses, “so obviously we want to make sure everything is preserved. But as far as the long term and how those integrations will happen, we’re still working on it.”
It’s not surprising to see these two companies come together. Both Facebook and FriendFeed offer easy ways for friends to connect online, share links, photos, status updates and other socially relevant media. Both sites also emphasize the importance of providing real-time updates. The big difference is that, while some users publish exclusively to FriendFeed, the site is more broadly used as a funnel — an aggregation tool that pulls in data streams from a plethora of social websites using streams.
Facebook has a much more fleshed-out platform. Granted, you can set up your Facebook profile to pull in activity streams from other sites like Flickr and Twitter, but most Facebook users prefer to just post everything to the native publishing platform provided by Facebook.
When Facebook updated its site design about a year ago, it brought the two products closer together visually as well.
But it’s the differences that are going to stand out. Both Buchheit and Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, to whom we also spoke, say that there are some particularly difficult challenges ahead, like the fact that many of FriendFeed’s features, such as Groups, don’t correlate exactly with any of Facebook’s current features. There are some features that come close, but the rest present headaches the companies will have to cure down the road.
And what about FriendFeed users who are not Facebook users? Will they have to sign up for Facebook to continue using FriendFeed?
Again, both Buchheit and Schroepfer said that their teams are working on the long-term details for transitioning user accounts.
One thing that should make the integration easier is that Facebook supports the emerging Activity Streams standard, a way of structuring data streams that standardizes the way events are announced. For example, “Scott posted a photo” or “Heather commented on a video.”
One point we didn’t get to ask about is the fact that FriendFeed recently added a file sharing component to its service that lets users pass MP3s to one another, and to publish them for streaming and download on the public web. It will be interesting to see if this will be integrated into Facebook, and what shape it will take if it is.
Developers who are working on apps that push to or pull from FriendFeed can watch for developments in the FriendFeed News group. Likewise, Facebook developers can keep up to date with changes at developers.facebook.com.
See also:
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Behind the Scenes at Harvard's Museum of Natural History
Go behind the science of Harvard's natural history museum and see the world's biggest egg and other treasures.
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Another Court Deals Major Blow to DVD Copying
Two different courts in two different days deal a death blow to companies producing DVD-copying ware. The courts rule that licensing agreements with the Hollywood studios prohibit such copying tools, and that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlaws such devices.
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Google Helped Twitter Fend Off Attack
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells PBS that Google assisted his company during recent DoS attacks that brought Twitter to a standstill for a couple of days. The vulnerability of Twitter, the origin of his nickname and other heady topics are discussed in the Tavis Smiley interview.
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
G.M. Claims Volt Will Get 230 MPG
General Motors says the range-extended electric vehicle will be the first mass-produced car to achieve triple-digit fuel economy.
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Monday, August 10, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares
You wake up and realize you can’t move a muscle. Lying in bed, you’re totally conscious, but you can’t move and you realize that strange things are happening. There’s a crushing weight on your chest that’s humanoid. And it’s evil.
You’ve awakened into the dream world.
This is not the conceit for a new horror movie starring a ragged middle-aged Freddie Prinze Jr., it’s a standard description of the experience of a real medical condition: sleep paralysis. It’s a strange phenomenon that seems to happen to about half the population at least once.
People who experience it find themselves awake in the dream world for anywhere from a few seconds to 10 minutes, often experiencing hallucinations with dark undertones. Cultures from everywhere from Newfoundland to the Caribbean to Japan have come up with spiritual explanations for the phenomenon. Now, a new article in The Psychologist suggests sleep researchers are finally figuring out the neurological basis of the condition.
“This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep onset,” write researchers Julia Santomauro and Christopher C. French of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths, at the University of London. “Shift work, jet lag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis; this may be because such events disrupt the sleep–wake cycle, which can then cause [sleep-onset REM periods].”
In other words, you experience just a piece of REM sleep.
As David McCarty, a sleep researcher at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center’s Sleep Medicine Program, explained it, humans tend to think about the elements of the different stages of sleep as packaged nicely together. So, in REM sleep, you’re unconscious, experiencing a variety of sensory experiences, and almost all of your muscles are paralyzed (that’s called atonia).
“But in reality you can disassociate those elements,” McCarty said.
In sleep paralysis, two of the key REM sleep components are present, but you’re not unconscious.
Narcolepsy, which can be linked with sleep paralysis, has a similar pathology. For narcoleptics, some of the elements of rapid eye movement can “come out of nowhere,” he McCarty said.
Sleep paralysis was first identified within the scientific community by psychologist Weir Mitchell in 1876. He laid down this syntactically old-school, but accurate description of how it works. “The subject awakes to consciousness of his environment but is incapable of moving a muscle; lying to all appearance still asleep. He is really engaged in a struggle for movement fraught with acute mental distress; could he but manage to stir, the spell would vanish instantly.”
But the condition lived in folklore long before anyone tried to subject it to even semi-rigorous study. The various responses have fascinated some researchers and they were cataloged in the 2007 book, Tall Tales About the Mind and Brain. In Japan, the problem was termed kanashibar. In Newfoundland, people called it “the old hag.” In China, “ghost oppression” was the preferred nomenclature.
A study released earlier this year found that more than 90 percent of Mexican adolescents know the phrase “a dead body climbed on top of me” to describe the disorder. More than 25 percent of them had experienced it themselves.
Having an element of REM sleep mix with your consciousness is scarier than it sounds. I experienced sleep paralysis on several occasions when I was in college. I can testify: It’s run-to-your-mama scary.
In my case, it would happen right as I was falling asleep on the two twin beds that I had taped together. The most vivid time, I “woke up” with the uneasy feeling that something awful was to my left, on the border of my peripheral vision. I couldn’t really see it, but I knew that it was evil and coming closer to me. I felt true terror, like you experience when you are about to get in a car crash. I was sure it was going to hurt me.
After a few minutes, I could finally move and took the opportunity to run across campus to a friend’s house and asked to sleep on the couch. With the lights on. It happened a few more times.
Then, it just stopped. It hasn’t ever happened again.
The good news, McCarty said, is that my experience is actually pretty standard. Sleep paralysis rarely persists or causes serious life damage.
“It’s very common, way more common than people realize, but usually it doesn’t recur,” he said. “It’s not frequent enough to make people come in and ask the doctor for help.”
via Mind Hacks
Image: John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare
See Also:
- The Uncertain Science of Sleep
- Heated Snoozing Suit Boosts Deep Sleep
- Sleep Hacking Produces Results — For a Time
- Sleep Drug Makers Say Americans Need More Sleep
- To Sleep, Perchance to Learn: The Mind’s Mysterious Nocturnal
- Without Time and Sleep, Facts Are Fragments
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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