Flour Power

The image above shows the closest I could get from the WiFi service on board of a gobus coach… That was after accepting the terms and conditions and answering questions about my opinion about the service. Yes, they did ask my opinion about it before I even used the damn thing…

Now it’s safe to say the service wasn’t that good, don’t you think?

I got all hyped up when I got the news that Gobus would start providing free on-board WiFi and was eager to test it. And now that I actually get to do it, it just doesn’t work. Big fail.

Well, at least I do have an opinion now, if they ask me again.

UPDATE: On the way back I tried to use the Citylink service, and didn’t work either. And it seems they’re both using the same system (fleetconnect). Well, considering that I have friends who managed to get it working, I’m wondering if it’s some kind of operating system incompatibility.

The Iran election has been all over the Internet in the last few days, due to the post-election protests over a suspicious (some say statistically impossible) landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president.

With the Iranian authorities blocking a lot of web sites, like Friendfeed, and major news outlets like CNN failing taking a lot of time to report what’s happening (it’s now finally the top story), Twitter has proved to be the most active news source for the post-election protests.

Recognising this, the Twitter team postponed the scheduled maintenance to try and minimize the impact in Iran:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

This is a very significant step by Twitter and a great way to show that they’re serious about becoming a source of real time news. The #IranElection hashtag marks this as the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, and hundreds of tweets per minute keep flowing.

Earlier today Facebook started offering the possibility for everyone to get their own custom URL. This means that you can change your cryptic profile URL (mine was facebook.com/profile.php?id=690301786) into something more easily identifiable, in the form of facebook.com/username.

Now, these vanity URLs have been around for some time in most modern web thinguies, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. What took Facebook so long? To be fair, this shouldn’t be such a big deal. Other than making it easier to remember the URL, there’s really not a lot more to it. Some say it will help your search engine rating, but that’s irrelevant for most people. Anyway, I managed to get mine before anyone got to it first. My Facebook URL is now facebook.com/farinha.

I’m just wondering why are they doing this now. It’s not like users have been clamoring for it. And why all the hype and press around it? They even gave early access to journalists.

Allow me to try and start a rumour. What if Facebook is getting ready to launch an email platform? Everyone knows that the Facebook messaging system is pretty limited and could use a overhaul. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a whole email platform came out from there, already with 200 million members to kickstart it.

Blind Search is a very simple website that does just one thing. Given a search query it presents the search results returned by Bing, Google and Yahoo and displays them side by side in 3 different columns, presenting them with the same styling, to remove any identifiable properties. The user chooses which results are the best, votes for that search engine by clicking the corresponding button and then the source is revealed.

At the time of writing, the page that shows the voting results has been taken down because some “douche is gaming the system”, but while it was up there were a lot of changes in the classification, which indeed suggests some kind of manipulation.

So far my results have been spread around the 3 engines, with Google and Bing very close and Yahoo bit behind the other 2. But, as the author (Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee, although he claims Microsoft has nothing to do with it) points out, the site is still an experiment, and very limited, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt:

The system has many flaws that I know about already, the primary one of interest is the lack of localisation. So, all searches are going through the US as US searches. The other deficiency worth noting is that there is much missing from the actual experience of using these search engines eg, image thumbnails, suggestions, refine queries etc.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how search engine branding has an impact on the perceived quality of results. I would expect my choice to be Google most of the times, but it seems the search results from both Bing and Yahoo are not very different. But still, Google was the only one to return this blog when I searched for “Flour Power”, so they still have my loyalty.

Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

The Pirate Party has scored a major win in the 2009 European Parliament elections and is sailing on to Brussels. With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament (two if the Lisbon Treaty goes into effect). A total of 214,313 swedes voted for the pirates, placing the party as the 5th biggest in Sweden. This is a huge increase compared to the national elections of 2006 where the party got 34,918 votes, and the Pirate Party owes some of the success to the Pirate Bay case.  After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

From TorrentFreak:

When we asked Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge about the outcome, he told TorrentFreak: “We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen” What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything”

“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.

The German branch of the Pirate Party (site in German) wasn’t as sucessful as its Swedish counterpart, but managed to get 0.9% of the votes (229,117 voters), which is also a good result for the party, which had 0.5% as the goal.