As of May 14, 2008 Facebook is available in a variety of languages, not the least of which is Polish. I really appreciate how community-supported the whole translation process was:
More than 450 Polish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort to translate the site from English to Polish. Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. The community then approved all translations through a voting system.
My first thoughts are that the results of this translation are very natural and usable, even for a non-native speaker like myself. Congratulations to the team! The selection of terms for words like “poke” and “wall” feel right, much like they do in English.
Unfortunately, a some of my Greasemonkey scripts that depend on Facebook content stopped working, including a cool script that highlights todays birthdays. Facebook developers, including those making apps and scripts, are going to have to deal with internationalising (i18n) and localising their applications.
If you’re curious what it looks like, scroll to the very bottom of your Profile page or Newsfeed page (if you’re an American or Canadian user), and you’ll see a little link that says “English” with an arrow beside it. Click the arrow, and behold the available options: Norsk, Deutsch, Francais, and more.
Why not use English?
My cousin and I changed the language to Polish just for the novelty of it. So far, I have kept it the language setting simply because it’s a nice, daily way to interact with elements of my culture that I otherwise have little access to. Only after a few days use, Facebook in English feels a little less comfortable, and a little less interesting.
Introducing Flickr Search Tagging!
It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:
- Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
- Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
- Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.
If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.
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Sometime around when I was 14 years old the World Wide Web showed up. and it seems that I have been developing with it ever since. So never, ever did I expect to be as lost on the Internet as I currently am: it feels like the one domain where I should be competent. With the help of an anonymous invite donor, I signed up for grono.net, a Polish social networking site akin to Facebook or MySpace. I thought the transition would be simple enough, and within an hour or so my profile would be set up and I’d be arguing about the merits of European hip-hop in no time. Boy, was I wrong.
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If you’re interested in the state of the art of large domain (internet) image search, then undoubtedly Google comes up over and over again.
Google Image Search, with its simple interface and reasonable results, is the de-facto consumer-grade image search engine. Offerings from competitors are actually a little more feature rich, especially the MSN Live Image Search, but don’t resonate as loudly in academia or popular usage.
As an example, compare search results for “red corvette” from the big three: Google, MSN, Yahoo. MSN nails the exploratory task: no-refresh scrolling, quick access to filters such as “photos”, “black and white”, and image size options that feel a little more usable and natural than Googles. Yahoo! attempts some categorising and support for ontologies in their interface; while not perfect, it’s a direction highly praised in cutting-edge research.
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It seems that the most interesting up-and-coming web applications go through a private, invitation-only beta phase before being launched to the public. This was certainly the case with Google Mail, the Yahoo! Mail do-over, and one service that I’m particularly interested in: grono.net. Unfortunately, none of my friends or relatives use that service, so getting an invitation isn’t likely.
There’s obviously a need here that needs to be filled: begging strangers for invitations to web beta’s. I’ve found a few places to share invitations, but by far the most beautiful and appealing is InviteShare.com. What a gorgeous, well-thought-out design.
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Courtesy of friend who runs My Yacht is Too Big: you can get a free Angus burger at Harveys before April 28th, 2008.
Image from Photobucket.
I’m trying to wrap my head around all of the information I’m reading about image search. Search, retrieval, information, data, all of these terms are loaded, and used differently depending on whether I’m reading an HCI paper, a text analysis paper, or a blog post about search engine optimisation (SEO).
In hopes of simplifying things, I’ve settled on a human-centred, conceptual definition of search:
Search refers to the process of a user developing a need, defining a query, retrieving information, viewing result(s), providing feedback, and refinements of those steps.
The end result does not have to be finding a single result. Occasionally, other steps in the search process, such as seeing a result set, can satisfy the users need. For example, if the need was to gain information (”What does a ‘87 Oldsmobile Toronado FE3 look like?”) rather than find a specific image (”I need a picture of a black ‘84 Cutty!”), viewing the result set may be enough.
Figure 1 is an illustrates the definition of search, in the human and interface context.
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In the next few weeks tuition for Graduate students at the University of Guelph is probably going to go up again. As a student, this obviously bothers me. What is that, 14% in three years? 120% in the last 12 years?
Since many of us know the tuition increase is imminent, and aren’t really willing to protest against it publicly out of fear of reprisal, skepticism, or ignorance, we say:
Hey at least we’re not in the U.S. … tuition is like $<xx>,000 per semester!
There is a prevailing belief in Canada that American tuition fees are completely out of reach for the average lower-middle-class student; thus in Canada we have it a little better, and shouldn’t complain about 4% tuition increases.
This is a popular theory amongst students in times when the Administration corrects budget shortfalls with student money rather than public money, and raises tuition. In hopes of affirming the “at least we’re not as screwed as the Americans”-theory of public education management, I decided to do some research.
The results were surprising: tuition at Guelph is definitely not less expensive than at similar U.S. schools.
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