Facebook gets frightening

After a couple of months holiday from Facebook after a severe bout of 'Facebook Fatigue' (an increasingly common complaint?) I decided to try and get back into it a little and a new feature caught my eye.....'People you might know'.

Basically PYMK 'triangulates' social relationships by identfying Facebook members that are known to me and one or more friends, but haven't been added to my friends list yet. There were a couple of dozen potential friends in my PYMK list, most of them either people I knew but just hadn't bothered to 'friendify' or people that were friends of friends that I have never met.

So far, so good but one particular PYMK caught my eye - someone I had never met that was a friend of a work colleague and a friend of a friend (who had also never met). In other words Facebook had indentified a person that linked together two apparently unrelated social groups (a sort of social conduit). Initially this was pretty impressive, but then I wasn't so sure because it brought to mind a scary thought that had occurred to me when I recently applied for a new passport. A process which involved a professional colleague signing my passport photo which had to be accompanied by that person's passport number (thereby uniquely identifying that person to the UK Immigration and Passport Service). It's not much of a leap to see how a similar approach to PYMK could be applied to this information, thereby giving the authorities (assuming that they had the motivation and are unhindered by privacy laws) the facility to triangulate individuals to identify who they are associating with both directly and indirectly......

Another accessibility checker

Those of you that have read our previous posts about SharePoint accessibility, the disappearance of Bobby or my recent whitepaper on accessibility should appreciate that issues around accessible web design are close to the hearts of everyone here at Futurate, and in our never ending quest to find the perfect web-based automated accessibility testing tool we have found Wave.

What's nice about Wave is that rather than generating a somewhat impenetrable list of what's wrong with a site, it displays the page itself with problems (and good stuff like accesskeys) linked to specific page elements. You can see an example here - http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=www.futurate.com (rollover the icons for additional information).

For people who prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer a Wave toolbar is available which allows you to check the page you are on, at the click of a button.

It works rather well, but in order to try and determine whether a Wave report page is accessible don't try Waveing a Wave page......

The Human Interface

RedTacton technology turns the human body into a data transmitter. Users carry a RedTacton card somewhere on their person and data identifying the individual is transmitted by touch. This new tactile user interface technology from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp has wow factor and a whole lot of potential. See these articles on theage and engadget websites for more:

New technology turns your body into a swipe card

NTT's RedTacton enables "human area networks"