Facebook Group: Reject Religion

¡Congratulations! it is time to swing the pendulum back. One of the most appealing facts of the US election results, at least to me, is a sharp division between the future and the past. Old people always vote conservative (¡duh!) but in this presidental election this was really evident.

I have seen change and happiness arrive before. In my case it was October 5th, 1988 when a referendum stated that we wanted democracy and not dictatorship in Chile. It was all joy and happiness, but actually very little changed: those who proposed change became the stronger advocates of the past.

It does not have to happen this time. The fact that young people gave the US Democrats their victory is a great reason for hope. But change will not come for free, and this is just a first step. A quote by abolitionist Frederick Douglass is perhaps appropriate:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others. (Frederick Douglass in 1857)

Via: Ateología.

I was puzzled in Amberes when I saw this musician in the street playing this weird instrument. It has strings and it is played like a violin, but it has a kind of amplifier like a trumpet.

Do you know which instrument is this?

Today I was playing with a few social networking applications that offer location services. Why? I want to stop posting only cryptic status messages in Facebook and sometimes really say what am I doing as my friends do (real friends, not only facebook friends), plus I also want to post some location information in my profile and keep track of trips.

One of the most important features to me was compatibility with FireEagle, which is a broker of location information to be used by other applications and social networking sites, that will give me a low entry/exit barrier. I also wanted something that can write to my Facebook profile, as I use Facebook a lot. The resulting setting was a non-trivial data flow that I had to draw to understand:

There are a few sites that are designed to handle location information in a social networking setting. The one I liked the most, from the ones I visited, is Dopplr which is a place for frequent travellers to boast about how many places they have been and where are they going next. Dopplr can read/write from FireEagle and has a nice application for Facebook. The Dopplr site is also pretty neat, I must say, and the Raumzeitgeist has a very cool look.

Then there is Plazes in which you can name a place, put it on the map, take a photo of it, etc. I like the "radar" function that can scan places around your location (it found that stupid club down the street the "Macarena" which is a tourist trap like many others in Barcelona). Now, Plazes has only write access to FireEagle, and that is too bad, BUT it can write to Twitter, which I found very good, given that I know a lot of people use Twitter, even some friends who are subscribed to my feed, but I haven't used it much. If I start using Plazes, then I will start using Twitter, that is 2 for the prize of 1.

To tame a bit all this mess I also "use" Plaxo. I say "use" with quotes because I really do nothing there, just register a set of data sources, I like it a lot because it can aggregate very well from different sources: it reads the RSS feeds from my blogs/sites and also has hooks for delicious, Amazon, Flickr, last.fm and many other sites I use and like. It integrates very tightly with Twitter, as it can read/write the status line, and it reads the "posted items" in Facebook which are useful -- I usually see ~45 clicks briefly after posting an item.

With respect to Facebook, Twitter and Dopplr have Facebook applications. The Twitter application can read Twitter status feeds and post them on Facebook, and the same with Dopplr.

A priori, I do not dislike complex stuff, I even like complicated things, but I do not want to spend a lot of time on this. Looking at the data graph to find if there is any source that can reach all the nodes, I see that if I post my location to Plazes it should propagate to the other services. I will try that, and after playing a bit, I will tell you how it went. Perhaps I can post an update to Facebook.

Or Twitter? Or Plaxo? Or somewhere else? :-)