Arun Stephens

I hadn’t checked into my home office with Facebook Places for a few days, so I decided to fire up the proxy server and check in tonight. I was pleasantly surprised as what I found.

It appears that a lot of local landmarks (bridges mostly, and the Battersea Power Station) have been added to the Facebook Places database. Does this mean that Facebook have been busy populating their database, ready for the launch? Or has some other geek gone and added all these landmarks just for fun?

I’m guessing the former. Where did Facebook source these locations from? Wikipedia. The descriptions (and titles) match articles on Facebook, which has been geocoding articles for a few years now. Facebook has been using Wikipedia content for some of its “community” Pages since their launch at F8 earlier this year.

Conspicuously on my list is a pub, the Calf, which is about a mile away. Someone has checked in there already, which suggests that I’m not the only one in the area who’s been experimenting with Places.

But back to the Battersea Power Station. Currently, already 129 people like the power station. But none of them have checked in. This suggests that Facebook may well just be converting location-based Pages into Place Pages.

Central London has the same places that I noticed last time, but a few more people seem to have checked into their offices, and Broadcasting House is now listed. Further north (by 0.1 degrees) Ally Pally is there. To the east, we’ve got the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Spitalfields.

Further afield, if I put the Wikipedia-provided coordinates of the Beehive in Wellington, the only nearby place is the City to Sea Bridge, complete with Wikipedia description.

So it doesn’t look like anything international-specific is happening with Facebook Places, just that they are now beginning to add places from other sources to their database. But you never know, maybe the feature will go live soon!

Right now, Facebook Places is only available in the United States. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s only available to United States IP addresses. And they are not that difficult to come by.

Facebook Places has been in development for around 8 months, but I’ve found evidence (for want of a better word) that it has been working, outside the US, at least since June, when several Facebookers were in London, for a hack day and a special edition of the Facebook Developer Garage.

I’ve been working out of TechHub [Facebook Place] this week, and there were four Places in the area. One was the Barbican Centre, which was where the Facebook Developer Garage was. Another was labeled “Wimbledon” but was in fact probably a pub near Tower Hill. Whoever was at that pub that day was watching Clijsters versus Zvonareva, which puts it a week after the Facebook event at the Barbican. The South Bank Centre was also visited (spelt with English spelling, rather than American, too). Another was anjunabeats.

Moving further west, towards Oxford Circus, there are a few eating establishments, but there were a few other Places that (to me, at least) prove that the feature was being tested in June. The first was Facebook London. The other was Dare Digital (now simply known as Dare) which was the location of the Facebook hack day. Mark Zuckerberg was at that event for some of the day. And he probably checked in.

Zuckerberg probably visited the Spotify Office (he spoke about Spotify at his talk at the Barbican – he spoke as a longtime user, which is interesting, given that Spotify is not available in the United States – but who am I to talk? I’m using Facebook Places!)

There were two hotels listed: Courthouse Doubletree Hilton and Le Maridian Hotel (I’m assuming that’s supposed to be Meridien).

He also mentioned visiting Number 10, but that doesn’t appear to be a Place. So, wisely, he did not check in. (Maybe he had to surrender his phone a security checkpoint?)

So it looks like that without the visit from Facebookers in June, London would have been a blank canvas for Facebook Places. That makes sense, seeing it has only launched in the United States. But even in some locations in the United States there are no Places. I assumed that the primary reason for a delayed international rollout was because Facebook had acquired a list of Places for the United States, and needed time to do the same for international locations. It turns out that’s not the case, and that the database will be more crowdsourced. So that must mean that the delayed release is for infrastructure reasons. Or perhaps it is because Facebook needs more time to deal with privacy issues in other countries.

There have been privacy concerns (as with everything Facebook does) surrounding this feature, and my little investigation appears to prove their validity, but really, once a few more people start using it, it will become harder to trace who exactly went where. But when only a few (and in this case it looks like it’s probably no more than two or three) people are using the service in a particular location, it becomes easy to paint a picture about where they went and, in some cases, who they are.

To update, a Facebook spokesperson has contacted me this afternoon to say that Facebook Places has been in beta testing to all employees, not just ones in/from the United States.

Apart from the early flight, I was taking a look at their cabin baggage policy:

We reserve the right to cancel your reservation without refund and to deny you boarding if you arrive at the boarding gate with more than one item of cabin baggage or if that item exceeds the maximum dimensions.

Cancelling your reservation without refund? So if you turn up with too much baggage, and offer to throw it out, they could still cancel your ticket.

I don’t understand how they can get away with it! Why do people keep flying with them? Having said that, I still haven’t booked but they are one of only two airlines that fly to where I need to get!

I just moved my blog to a new server.

I also installed WordTwit, which is supposed to send blog updated to Twitter. And this is a test of it. And in theory, the update will go out to Facebook as well.

That is all I have to say.

In my (it seems) continuing series on things that work in the US but not in the UK, Apple’s new iAd network doesn’t seem to be serving ads to people in the UK.

I am not sure if Apple are actively selling inventory in the UK, or if they even have plans to in the short term.

I really wish these American-based companies would clarify when things are U.S. only. Apple said that they had a lot of ads, but I haven’t seen one. So if I had created an app with a primarily non-U.S. audience, hoping to monetise it with iAd, I would be very disappointed.

Apple aren’t the only ones that have a habit of forgetting 6.3 billion people. At Google I/O, they said that everybody attending would have access to AdSense for mobile (which was in closed beta) but on signing up it said U.S. only. There was also a big press release saying that Google Voice was open to everyone. But it was still limited to the U.S. Funny definition of everyone. They did correct it later, but still, it’s not on!

Today is 4th of July. There’s a Google doodle for it, but you wouldn’t know if you’re from the UK. Google.com is completely different if you are coming from a UK IP address. There is no 4th of July doodle, and what’s worse, you will get entirely different search results, with UK sites having more prominence. The results are slightly different from google.co.uk, as well.

I think it would be better for the regionalised Googles to be the same no matter where you come from, and that includes the US Google.com. What’s the point of the “Go to Google.com” link if going back there isn’t the real American Google?

I haven’t taken a look at Google.cn or Google.com.hk!

Rant over!

I have been wondering what the actual build number of Froyo (Android 2.2) on Nexus One was. It is the FRF number that you can read under “About phone” in Settings.

It’s FRF91.

Not FRF83, and not FRF85.

It arrived this morning (Sunday 4 July) on the Nexus One in the UK. So, if you haven’t got that build yet, it is coming soon!

For some strange reason, the Ubuntu people decided that the latest release should mimic Mac OS as much as possible. The default background is now purple, eerily similar to the Mac OS default. And they decided to move the buttons to the left hand side, just like on a Mac. Which is annoying. Not because I am used to Windows, but because if you were used to previous versions of Ubuntu, you’d be very annoyed.

Rant over, here’s how to fix it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/

I have decided to switch to Linux my equal-primary platform, as I am going to be developing my next project using open source tools. I may as well use an open source operating system as well. Also it was an excuse to buy a bigger, better, faster (but probably not stronger) hard drive.

That is all.

An avid reader of this blog (i.e. no one) will have noticed that lately there have been quite a few posts about iPhone development.

Well, I am pleased to announce (on behalf of Zemobo) that Zemobo Rugby has now launched on the iTunes App Store. It ties in with Zemobo’s Rugby Picks app on Facebook.

You can download it from http://bit.ly/98xEo3. It’s free!

Ironically, it was this post at Stack Overflow that helped me solve this problem!

There appears to be a bug (either in the iPhone SDK or my understanding of it) that if you dismiss a modal view controller with animation using UINavigationController’s dismissModalViewControllerAnimated, it will cause some sort of weird recursion that causes a stack overflow (over 4000 frames were in the stack when it crashed, and it took a split second for it to fill up in the Simulator) if you then want to display the modal view controller again using presentModalViewController.

It turns out it’s the animation on dismissal that’s causing the problem. If I have dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:NO instead of YES, the subsequent redisplay of the view works fine.