I logged-in to LinkedIn this morning and notice their new “Network Updates” layout.
LinkedIn has finally figured out that lifestream’s work. This looks pretty close to the Facebook Newsfeed feature although it’s a lot more boring.
The newsfeed would be better if they would:
- Show a thumbnail when a contact adds/changes a profile instead of “has a new profile photo”.
- Provided an RSS feed I could subscribe to.
- Showed internal and external referrals to your profile. E.g. Someone coming from Google.com just viewed Mark Chew’s profile or Someone viewing Mark Chew’s profile clicked on your profile.
Let me know how I can improve the Lookery Global Feed.
I first learned of Polar Rose when I heard Scott Rafer pimp them at an Under The Radar conference that Compete sponsored back in June.
Polar Rose has a Firefox plugin that detects people in photos and uses ~crowdsourcing~ to tag and organize those faces. I’ve had their plugin installed since June but it’s been incredibly buggy and so it’s results were very inconsistent.
Yesterday they released a new version. This thing actually works now and so far it’s been impressive.
Once you install the plugin you’ll start to see a little flower icon underneath faces in photos. If the icon is orange that means this face was not recognized so go ahead and tag it if you know who it is. If it recognizes the person in the photo the flower will be red and you can click on it to learn the person’s name.
Facial recognition technology suffers from the same problems most recommender systems have, access to large enough data sets for these systems to actually “learn”. Maybe ~crowdsourcing~ will actually make facial recognition work.
I hope it does so we can all get on to working on important things like flying cars and moving sidewalks.
This Thursday Bijan of Spark Capital and Nabeel of Conduit Labs will be hosting a Facebook themed OpenCoffee Boston meetup in Cambridge, MA.
If you’ve developed or are thinking of developing Facebook Apps come down and share your thoughts. I’m also interested in talking about Google’s OpenSocial API and everything social media and data related.
Nabeel and Bijan have been organizing OpenCoffee Boston for about 8 months now and it’s been one of my favorite events because it’s informal and I always learn something.
Pictures from the first OpenCoffee meetup (March 2007) via Nabeel.
Posted By David Cancel
Comments Off
Content © 2007-2008 David Cancel. All Rights Reserved.
