Better late than never (perhaps), these are the last of the photos from my trip to Athens late in 2008. Facebook has been starving the blog of updates for a long time and I've all but lost the capability to think of anything to say that's longer than 140 characters.

For anyone keeping track, this post is a follow-on from the previous trip to Aegina.

The Acropolis is definitely the centrepiece of Athens and you catch glimpses of it from numerous streets and allleyways. It's saved from being completely swamped by the sprawl of Athens around it by virtue of the huge rock it sits on:

The Acropolis as it looks from the approaching road:

On the way up to the Acropolis you catch glimpses of the most famous of the buildings there, the Parthenon. It's "one of those buildings" that has to be on every architecture student's pilgrimage route at some point:

The entrance to the Acropolis complex, which does a good job of only offering you partial views of the temples above:

And here's the same view, but with Ann providing scale. (Hands up if you thought the doorway was really that big):

A view of the temple of Hierocles, and the surrounds of Athens, that you get from the entrance:

The steps leading up to the temples. "Steep" was a word that came to mind:

The Propylea in the Acropolis itself:

Ann enjoying the obligatory scaffolding:

The Propylea, with scaffolding. They always know when I'm visiting somewhere and scaffold it up specially. I'd be disappointed if it was any other way:

The Parthenon gets cranes as well as scaffolding. Although this is otherwise a pretty classic view, and we were lucky enough for it to be fairly empty - the benefits of a fairly early morning in December (when it was still warm):

Some pieces of Parthenon frieze that they leave around the place until they can work out how to put the 3D jigsaw back together again:

The Erechtheum:

More Erechtheum. Athens definitely excelled at blue skies too:

From inside the Erechtheum looking out. I bet the original builders never thought "this is going to look great when it falls down", but it does:

The Erectheum entrance porch:

An arty shot of an Erechtheum column:

The ceiling of the Erechtheum porch:

The Erechtheum as a whole:

The east side of the Parthenon itself:

And the whole east front of the Parthenon:

Some of the frieze sculptures that us Brits decided weren't worth carrying back to the British Museum. (Travel hint: don't make that joke in Greece. They don't like it.)

Some more Parthenon:

You can see some of the wall sections of the Parthenon behind the columns. It seems strange to think of it being a solid box inside now that we're used to seeing it as ruins:

More frieze sculptures:

Turn the scaffolding up to 11:

The classic shot (albeit with scaffolding still):

The hill outside the Acropolis where some famous Christain bloke did some preaching. (Apparently his name was Paul, but no idea what his surname was.) It's well dangerous up there, as you can see by Ann being frozen with fear:

A tree that had managed to grow itself out of the rocks:

And this is how the Acropolis looks at night. It's worth finding a cafe or restaurant with a view for a few hours at least:

From Facebook today:

We're writing to inform you of a Facebook Platform policy violation within your application, Six Degrees.

Our terms and policies are in place to ensure that Facebook Platform serves users well, allows applications to thrive, and provides a great experience for all involved. Unfortunately, we have determined that your application does not meet our terms and policies.

Specifically, your application contains "Store my friend list" and "Keep up-to-date" functionalities that imply storing data in violation of our policies on this behavior. Whether you obtain user permission or not, applications may not store data obtained from Facebook for longer than 24 hours per section I.6.1 of our Platform Guidelines (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Platform_Guidelines). This includes friend connections between two users, as mentioned on http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Storable_Data .

We request that you stop storing this data. As friend connections are crucial to your application's functionality, we recommend that you prompt users to grant the offline_access permission and then query their friend list dynamically as required. For more information, please see http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Extended_permission .

Additionally, it appears that your application pre-fills text fields in the Settings section with user data, including but not limited to first name, last name, and gender. Data obtained and stored through these means of pre-filling is still in violation of our data policies, as explained in section I.14.2 of our Platform Guidelines. We request that you stop pre-filling these fields with user data.

Finally, your application publishes a one-line Feed story when users authorize it. These stories read " has logged into the Six Degrees application" and are in violation of section II.5.1 of our Platform Guidelines. We request that you remove them from your application.

We trust and expect that all applications managed by you and your team meet our terms and policies, so we appreciate in advance that you proactively ensure that this is the case in the future.

Please make these requested changes by 1:00pm Pacific Time Thursday, 25 June 2009. When you have done so, please let us know by replying to this email.

We realize that this is a short timeframe, but it is important for the sake of our users and other developers that this issue is resolved quickly. If you cannot resolve this by the above deadline, your application may be subject to additional enforcement actions, including but not limited to being disabled.

Facebook are accepting "expressions of interest" from developers for the beta test of their payments platform. I wrote a bit more about it on Inside Facebook: Facebook Taking Signups for Developers Interested in Testing its Credit Payment System.

I just can't stop watching this:

These little videos are great. Showing the life of "Little Sydney" by some really clever techniques. And they just look good. For best results go to the site - they're much better larger.

Mardi Gras from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

See all the rest

A change of design for a site like Facebook is always a prompt for discussion and controversy. Facebook is so much part of many people’s experience of the web now that it’s like someone deciding that trees should be purple. Coupled with the fact that, in general, the reaction to change amongst the masses is negative (not always unjustly – they have a tool they know how to use, and somebody’s now making them re-learn). In general it’s also true that the negative comments are vocalised.

I was actually a fan of the last homepage design (July 2008). Not necessarily because it was a perfect layout, because I don’t think it ever quite came together in that sense, but because it was necessary due to the changing way that Facebook was working. The growth in “shared” information (or at least activity information) and the way applications that worked the system were degrading the experience for a lot of people.

This time, I’m not so sure. I think the concepts are definitely in the right area: the activity stream (even when it was called a newsfeed) was one of the most interesting things about Facebook and what struck me as a cornerstone of its success from the start. Below are a few thoughts about the new change of emphasis on positive and negative. (And I’ll just say “yes, it’s more like Twitter” and consider that the end of that comparison.)

An emphasis on who performs an action rather than the action type

The “old” Facebook newsfeed displayed a list of items each with an associated application newsfeed icon next to them. This made it easy to blank out e.g. all the news items from applications you had no interest in. The name of the user (or multiple users sometimes – there was aggregation of news items) would display as part of the story but it was easier to scan the “what” of the activity rather than the “who”.

This has all changed now. We have big, chunky photos, and at best a small application icon. It’s not about what you’re interested in it’s who you’re interested in.

There’s a lot to be said for this. The old newsfeed had a strong preference for showing me stories from Facebook’s own applications, regardless of the user involved. This didn’t always work for me, and studies have shown that we only have a handful of close contacts regardless of how big our friend list was. Emphasising the people rather than the activity helps me here.

Content creation rather than a stream of passively generated activity

This is a big gamble. The onus now is on each of us to want to “share” information, and it’s all part of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the growth in sharing. I’m not sure how successful this is going to be; time and time again the internet has shown us that no matter how easy it is to be a content creator, the majority of people are happy just to be content consumers.

Facebook’s saviour here may actually be applications and the fact that, to grow, a developer really needs to push a user to finding an action they’ve just performed interesting enough to want to tell everyone about it. As an application developer, if you can crack that then you know your message will be seen. Possibly this will lower the content creation barrier to such an insignificant level that users will be happy to click the “Post to profile” button a few more times than they conventionally do.

This also reminds me of a point I read a while back as to why people in the internet industry like Google, but a lot of the public still likes Yahoo. People like me use the internet to (mostly) find information. We go to Google with a purpose, and Google generally gives us good results. A large number of people are not like that; they go to Yahoo because they’re bored, and because Yahoo shows them things to do. In a similar way, the new Facebook has shifted emphasis slightly from “entertain me” to “help me to entertain my friends”.

User filtering (by friend) rather than algorithm filtering

Almost since the beginning of the newsfeed Facebook have had an algorithm to present the user with the most relevant newsfeed stories. There have always been lots of guesses about how this works, and although it didn’t get it right it did do the job of filtering down thousands of newsfeed stories per day into a couple of hundred.

This looks to be changing, at least in the activity stream. Everything goes in here now, and if the user gets fed up with hearing about somebody then they can put their friends into different groups and filter by those groups. Will users do this? I’m not sure. It seems like a business analysts dream, but not necessarily a tool for a casual user.

We do have a version of the algorithm now, though, in the “Highlights” section of the right hand column. At present this is rather bulky and doesn’t update very often, but it could become an interesting take on the idea of a recommendation engine.

A step in the right direction?

For me, it remains to be seen. It’s a risk for Facebook to make such a fundamental change and although there will doubtless be thousands (millions?) of members of groups with titles along the lines of “Bring back the old Facebook”, I doubt we’ll see any kind of mass exodus. If a change comes then it will happen over time, and would need a viable alternative for the non-MySpace generation. Much as the comparisons between the new design and Twitter are made, I don’t think it’s going to be there. Or maybe Facebook’s changing just as users are evolving, and possibly the future is all about content generation and sharing.

It’s too early to tell whether it’s a step forwards or backwards, but I do believe Facebook just took a small step sideways.

There were two interesting pieces of news in the internet ad space this week. Yesterday, Google announced they're rolling out behavioural targeting for Adsense. What this means is that they'll look at what types of sites you visit (if those sites are running Adsense) and then ads will be targeted at you based on those sites.

The second piece of news was that a group of large traffic websites are trialling some new ad formats. US national newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are running some huge ads. You can read more about them here.

To me, these two highlight stark contrasts in response to the problem of ad-blindness, and typifies an new media response vs an old media one. The old media response (the newspapers) is: "people don't notice ads, so we have to make it so they can't help but ignore them". Bigger ads, more movement, and an "in your face" approach.

The new media response, from Google, is: "people don't notice ads, maybe we should make them more relevant". Nick Gonzalez at Social Media thinks that the bigger ads are the way forward. "Making ads more conspicuous is one way publishers can argue they serve advertiser’s interests better". I can't argue with that, but making larger ad formats just seems to be part of a never-ending arms race between blanking attention, growing monitor sizes and advertisers. Nick's commentary on Google's announcement is "What advertising needs ... is improving the advertising experience, not targeting. Make ads better, not more targeted". (The sentence starts with

Now it may be that Nick's opinion tells us more about the direction of Social Media than anything else, but the aim of "make ads better" doesn't seem to contradict the idea of "make ads more targeted". Show me something I want to see and I'm more likely to think it's better.

While internet advertising is taking a rare dip it will be interesting to see what future the bigger, and more intrusive, ads have vs the attempt to become more relevant. It may only be part of the picture but I know which direction I'd be backing.