tzlee.com/blog

Tag: Facebook

  • Writing reinforces knowledge

    I haven’t been blogging for a while. A lot of blogging activities actually shifted to Facebook. The same goes for many of my friends who used to blog; their blogs have been deserted and their last posts date way back to 2011.

    I think that my writing is starting to suck. I can’t seem to form grammatically correct sentences or write complete paragraphs without going back to edit them again and again. I actually spend a lot of time looking through and editing my blog posts. The art of writing is starting to fade.

    I think that writing stories or articles reinforces knowledge. It helps people put ideas into words, and in turn help people verbally articulate an idea or transfer a piece of knowledge, for example when giving a presentation or when teaching/guiding a colleague.

    So to my friends who are reading this — if you haven’t blogged in a while, do find some time to do it.

    However, don’t just blog for the sake of blogging; the difference between a diary and a blog is that the former is for your own consumption, but the latter has a public element. Blogs are better used to share ideas and thoughts than one’s daily experiences, or, aheem, sexperiences.

    If there’s no intent for public sharing, then just write a diary. If you want to write a public blog then you must find pride in your writing, be willing to share knowledge and accept criticism.

  • Blogging Revival

    Haven’t been blogging for some time, maybe I should revive it.

    Also trying to figure out how to have this RSS feed on Facebook.

  • Causes App Critique

    Before I joined the CS3216 class, I promised Prof. Ben I will do his homework, so I decided I should really do it. Here’s my critique. To save him the agony, I have decided not to write a thesis and keep it short. 😛

    Anyway…

    So what is Causes?

    Technical description. It’s an application in Facebook that allows a user to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Non-technical description. It’s something in Facebook that allows people to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Hokay, enough of rubbish. So Causes aims to solve some problems, and in my opinion it is well positioned to solve what is known as the Social & Economic Injustice.

    Socially and economically, we have created great disparities of wealth. A minority of the world’s population (17%) consume most of the world’s resources (80%), leaving almost 5 billion people to live on the remaining 20%. As a result, billions of people are living without the very basic necessities of life – food, water, housing and sanitation.

    If the top 20% of the world’s population is 1.2 billion, then I am quite confident that Facebook users are amongst the top 5% (~300 million).

    The problem with traditional forms of donation

    The problem with traditional forms of donation are that they lack public visibility and transparency on a global scale. NPOs depend highly on volunteers to do all sorts of things like donation drives to keep them alive. There aren’t many self-sustainable foundations like Bill and Melinda Gates around. And if you haven’t forgotten the NKF saga where the infamous quote on peanuts came about, it’s obvious that we don’t really know where the money goes.

    Basic Concepts

    • The Power to Make a Difference as a Social Media. This app basically demonstrates the power of social media and that it should not be underestimated. As of this writing, the Hope for Haiti Now cause has raised US$42,930 (S$60,617).
    • The Power to Make a Difference as an Individual. Unlike traditional donations (I’m referring to the tin-can school boys and girls at MRT stations), this app allows you ample time to search for a cause that you think really matters (than somebody preaching some unknown cause to you), read all about it before you donate. The best part is that it shows you the total amount (transparency) and others who have donated (confidence).
    • Transparency. This app seems to have done a good job by naming the beneficary organization (usually registered in the US) and by reflecting the total amount donated. However, the same old problem still exists – we don’t know where the money goes.

    Technical Concepts

    • Main Navigation. Simplicity is the key. The adaptation of the Facebook UI is great, making it look clean. If you haven’t realized, clicking on Best Of brings you out of Facebook to www.causes.com which completely copied Facebook’s top bar.
    • Front Page. It seems like the front page of the Causes app has a similar concept to BOOMZcart. It recommends you potential causes and also shows the causes that your friends are participating in, but there’s some issues I observed.
      • The recommendations don’t seem to match any of my profile interests. Is it a targeted recommendation, or a random recommendation?
      • I see four causes, but they’re all the same person. It should show four unique friends instead.
    • Individual Cause Page. In my opinion this has been very well executed by mimicking Facebook’s user profile page. It provides user interaction (via Home tab), sufficient details (via About and Impact tabs), network information (via Members tab).
    • Browse Causes. Under the Find Causes navigation menu. It’s broken (returns empty page).

    Food for Thought

    • Show me the money. Beneficiary organizations should provide detailed breakdown of where the donation money went. I’m not sure if this information is easy to obtain as I’m not a US citizen.
    • Real People, Real Responses. What if somebody from the Haiti earthquake came in and said, “Thank you for your donations. My family survived the ordeal.” I would hope this to happen.

    P.S. Sorry I wrote this post in a rush and it looks abit random with broken sentences and such. Hope you can understand what I’m writing 😛

  • First Meetup for Facebook Assignment Costs $6! WT*!

    OK, so I went to NUS to meet with my FB Assignment group and parking my car outside COM1 costs me a whopping $6! This is serious daylight robbery. So where should I park? I’m not exactly familiar with NUS and am probably more suaku than the year 1s.

    I think my team has a good mix. We have a business guy, an electrical engineer, two partially geeky students (I didn’t make this up – they told me) and one kaypoh (busybody – that’s me). So “good” a mix maybe I’m getting a bit stressed out that we might be technically lacking. But don’t worry. I have faith in you guys. 😛

    As a consolation, let me say something. Ugly (probably) sells. Yes, the crappiest, ugliest of all things usually sells well. Don’t ask me why. Here’s my observations.

    • Google is ugly, but we use it over Yahoo or Bing.
    • Gmail is ugly as hell, but we rather use it over Hotmail. (Sidenote: I’ll give some credit to Yahoo mail here.)
    • Ebay ain’t the prettiest of all sites around, but heck it sells like mad.
    • Facebook is kinda ugly and doesn’t allow me to customize a hideous pink background like Friendster, but it is the most hit site on the Internet today (don’t ask me why I know, I’m not supposed to tell, but I am certain of this fact).
    • Most blogshops are ugly as hell. If you think they look nice, you need to see doctor. But the funny part? They sell too!

    So here’s my takeaway point. Ugly (probably) sells.