I am sure a few people will have known about this but its the first time i have seen it. I remember finding the Google calculator a fair few years back and this brought back some memories.

The first one is ‘population [country]‘ which will return the population of a country in GCalc style

The second one is ‘Area [Country]‘ which provides the land area.

I am sure there are plenty of other ones related, but i found these fun

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I’ll be attending some sessions and playing in the poker tournament in Wednesday night, would love to meet more people so if you read my blog and want to say hello then feel free to come over and say hi, here is a picture of me

I doubt i will be posting much here this week so will go a bit quiet.

Well now Facebook have opened up the signup process which means that you can go and register your site and hopefully get it approved. It is expected that the approval process could take a little bit of time, and also not all sites are guaranteed to be accepted.

I expect that as more and more sites come on board the process will actually become a little more streamlined just like the application approval process which generally takes about 24hrs.

Head over to the Facebook Connect signup page to err, sign up

Image from cracked.com's post

Basically they have done a post about 9 Innocent Google Searches That Get Porn On the First Page and even though i have had some very strange results from certain search terms, i never expected that some of these come back with porn.

Go check it out for a chuckle, then have a little search to see what you can come up with

So anyway since i adore Wikipedia i thought i would go an check out the latest Wikimedia annual report which can be found at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report

Everything you want to know can be found in there but basically Wikimedia cost about $5m to run, and made about $7m. This is quite amazing considering they have a little more than 20 full time staff and the rest of Wiki is run by you or I The pdf also lists the total number of pages in the English version (over 2.6m) along with information about the financial breakdown.

So here’s to Wiki, may you live long and prosper.

Well after allowing websites like Digg, and Stumbleupon to use Facebook connect it seems that the big FB are set to allow any website to use Facebook Connect on November the 30th and you should be quickly scurrying to work out how you are going to incorporate it into your site. Here’s why and how…

Firstly. The Why?

There are really three major reasons why you should be using Facebook connect on your website, and i am sure that as the platform progresses, there will become many many more.

1. Users can use their existing Facebook profiles to login to your site:
   Whilst many people may think that not having users register with you could damage your site, this probably will not be the case at all. I am sure there has been many a time that you or I have come to a website for some information only to find that you have to go through a long registration process to get the information you want. I can certainly say that i have hit the back button and got the info from elsewhere. With Facebook connect your users can simply hit the Facebook login button, find the information they want, and stay on your site.
2. You get information back about the user:
   Amongst other things, Facebook can tell you how many of the user’s friends are already members of your site. You can put a link somewhere that says, “Three of your friends already use the site - invite them to connect.” This can dramatically increase engagement of your existing users by drawing them back to your site. Not only this you can show the friends activity on a page within your site, so that users have yet another reason to return.
   Facebook also let you pull certain information about the user such as basic profile info, avatar image etc, this can save you space on your server by hosting everything in a centralised location.
3. You get to advertise on Facebook for free:
   Whenever a user on your site does an action, you can post this information onto their wall. Obviously i don’t need to tell you how valuable this is, as not only does it appear in the news feed it also encourages their friends to click through onto your site and then we are back to point number 1.

Stumble reviews posting back to Facebook

You can see a great example of how Facebook Connect is working on the Facebook Example Site

Secondly. The How?

The first thing to do is go and check out the Facebook Wiki on The Anatomy of a Facebook Connect Site then bring yourself back here, and we’ll go through a few steps incase your still unsure of how to implement it.

Back already? Gee you are a fast reader, ok now take a look at the image below to get an idea about how Facebook Connect works in the background…

So the image above explains how it all works, but how do you put it into your site?

1. Download the sample code that is provided by Facebook - This is the code used for their example site and will be a great help.
2. The code above will show you all the little neat tricks of Facebook, such as the friends selector, group links, events links, that you can implement to allow users to effectively share your site on Facebook
3. You need to go into Facebook and enable the Developers application, if you can’t find it simply do a search for Developers on the Facebook search bar.
4. Set up your application using the instructions found in the Facebook wiki
5. Insert your application API key into the test code that you downloaded above and visit your demo site. You should now see the Facebook connect login button which will allow you to login using your details.

Finally, just go and read everything on the developers wiki to get yourself up to speed with other features, and then you can start to look to implement the sections of code into your site. Start of by getting the login button working, then by getting some information back from FB about the user. Once you have mastered that you can then get onto the good stuff like writing back to users walls, and allowing them to invite friends to your site.

There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook connect will be a massive step forwarding in bringing around a centralised way of logging into websites and getting meaningful information about your users. From a search marketing perspective you can gain literally hundreds of new visitors a day to your site. If you have a login form then you should be looking at this now.

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on Facebook Connect, and if you think you will be implementing it on your site.

There is a symphony group called Play! which go around the world and perform classic tunes from video games in their amazing orchestra. Unfortunately they don’t have an amazing web designer and the music plays straight away on their site. Anyway, I have recently come across two youtube videos which made smile and my spine tingle (yes i am a Nintendo GEEK) respectively. Without banging on i’ll just put them below for you to enjoy…

Super Mario Brothers:

The Legend of Zelda:

The second video is by far the best, but then again i am a die hard Zelda fan, and just makes me salivate at the thought of a fully orchestrated Zelda game. If you have played Zelda before and don’t break down in tears around the 4 minute mark then your not human

Back to normal next week

“If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest the public will make a path to your door.”

But… if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you would better construct a highway…

William Randolph Hearst ~ American newspaper magnate

There has been a lot of messaging spam flying about Facebook recently so it doesn’t surprise me that they have brought back captcha’s, and you don’t have to put on in for every message it sends. I tried sending 10 different messages to 10 different people and was only asked to input the captcha three times so its not that bad.

Although it is a annoying to have to put in a captcha, it should cut the spam sending down dramatically, so i think i can live with it