No one is sure what Google has up its sleeve, but it could be something you’ll have at home in years to come.

Google applied for a Federal Communications Commission experimental license to test an unnamed prototype entertainment device in its employees’ homes. The company says the device will connect to home electronics through wireless Internet and Bluetooth.

The main reason for the testing is to see if the device works properly and to “reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks,” the company said in its application. Google says the device is still in early stages of development and will be modified after reviewing test results from the 252 devices Google would like to place into employee homes in New York; Cambridge, Mass.; Los Angeles and Mountain View, Calif.

Google asked to test the devices from Jan. 17 to July 17.

SEE ALSO: FCC Grants Google Access To “Super Wi-Fi” Broadband Spectrum

“From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience,” the application — submitted by Richard Whitt, Google’s director and managing counsel for Telecom and Media — says. “Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly.”

Little has been disclosed about the what the device actually is, but GigaOM and tech bloggers are wondering if it could be related to Android@Home — Google’s technology to control light switches, alarm clocks and other home appliances through Android devices — or wearable Google Goggles.

Watch the video to learn more. What do you think Google is testing?

More About: android, Entertainment, Google, technology, Video

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Original Source

That’s too bad, especially because this is the first opportunity to hear firsthand how last year’s budget cuts have affected agencies’ abilities to do their jobs, and learn about agency and congressional priorities for the upcoming year. It’s also the first time we’ll hear from the new acting Public Printer  (the head of GPO); and perhaps the newly appointed head of the Congressional Research Service will be presented and introduced by the Librarian of Congress.

Only the House and Senate Legislative Appropriations Committees regularly hold annual public hearings on the workings of these agencies; the oversight committees (Committee on House Administration and Senate Rules) generally do not, and the Joint Committee on the Library and Joint Committee on Printing no longer holds substantive meetings in public.

The new House rules require that all committees provide “audio and video coverage of each hearing or meeting” that “allows the public to easily listen … and view the proceedings” “to the maximum extent practicable.” All of the House committees have at least one hearing room that is equipped with a camera, and the House Recording Studio will provide a camera upon a committee’s request. Unfortunately, this hearing is being held in a room without a camera, and I’ve been informed that the Committee has not requested one. The Appropriations Committee has not scheduled any other hearings for Tuesday, so the room with the pre-positioned camera should be available.

We ran into this problem last year, when the Committee’s justification for holding the meeting in the same  tiny, camera-less room (HT-2) was that it was more convenient to hold the hearing in the Capitol than in one of the legislative buildings. Even if convenience were more important than  the public access rule, the House Recording Studio could still provide a camera, and there are rooms in the newly constructed $600+ million Capitol Visitor Center (i.e. in the Capitol) that already have cameras installed. We would send a video crew ourselves, but only organizations accredited by the House Radio-Television Correspondents’ Gallery can ask permission from the Committee to record the event, and the Sunlight Foundation doesn’t qualify for membership.

Another change from last year is that members of the public are not invited to speak at the hearing, although they may submit written comments. Along with several others, I took the opportunity to speak last year, where I called for bulk access to THOMAS data and public access to CRS reports. I will submit comments for the record, but written comments are much less effective than speaking directly to the Members of Congress. It’s too bad, especially because one of the major lessons of last Thursday’s House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference  is that the Library of Congress and GPO have apparently been ignoring their legal obligation to make progress on public access to bulk data. Ironically, it was this very Committee that imposed the obligation upon them in the first place, 3 years ago.

As with everything in Congress, things could still change for Tuesday’s hearing — its time, date, location, and whether it will webcast or covered by the media. I plan on attending, and if I can make it into the room, I’ll post an update.

Original Source

For the first time, a new Sunlight Foundation analysis has ranked members of the U.S. House of Representatives by their staff retention rates. Our analysis, based on House disbursement data, is a snapshot that compares the staff of House offices between the third quarter of 2009 and the third quarter of 2011.

In this two-year period, office staff retention rates ranged from a low of 19% in the office of Betty Sutton (D-OH) to a high of 94% in the office of Michael Capuano (D-MA). Across all members who served in both 2009 and 2011, average retention rate was 64.2%. At this pace, we would expect the average House office to turn over fully within three sessions of Congress. (Within this sample, the average member will have served 7.3 sessions by the end of this year).

To find your member, click here. (For more details how we calculated these numbers, please see our methodology section at the end.)

Retention rates affect how well members of Congress can do their job, since they rely so much on their staff. And as any manager in the private sector knows, high turnover undermines organizational effectiveness. Hiring and training new staff takes substantial time, and institutional knowledge is frequently lost in the process.

Offices with less experienced staff and less institutional knowledge will generally be less competent. This makes it harder for members to execute their legislative priorities and makes them more likely to rely on lobbyists and special interests for guidance. It may also make it more difficult for offices to adequately serve constituent needs.

Our analysis finds that offices who wish to retain more staff can pay better. Additionally, more senior members have slightly higher retention rates than junior members, and Democrats have slightly higher retention rates than Republicans – although Republicans do hold into people in policy positions at a slightly higher rate.

Table 1 shows the offices with the 20 lowest overall retention rates. The list leans slightly Republican (12 Republicans, 8 Democrats), and includes one former presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Bachman also shows up as a “Showhorse” and “Clueless” on the Washingtonian’s “Best & Worst of Congress” list. Often, though, it is difficult for outsiders to know who are good bosses and who are bad bosses, since many staffers are tight-lipped and loyalty is often a perquisite for being hired.

Table 1. Offices with the lowest retention rates

Table 2 covers the 20 offices with the highest retention rates. This list tilts Democratic (14 Democrats, as compared to 6 Republicans).

Table 2. Offices with Highest Retention Rate

Of course, in assessing these offices, we should note that this is based on only two years, for which House disbursement data is available. A longer time frame would likely reveal different patterns.

COMMITTEES

We would expect higher rates of turnover on committees, since the majority turned over from Democrats to Republicans in January 2011, and the majority party typically gets two-thirds of the staff on House committees. Given that staff are generally partisan (with the notable exception of the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Ethics Committee), we would expect a retention rate of at least 67% on all committees. With the exception of JCT (which held onto 82.4% of its staff), all other committees have retention rates of less than 67%.

Three committees (Natural Resources at 35.9%, Education and Labor at 38% and Intelligence at 38.9%) had retention rates of less than 40%. These committees are chaired by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), Rep. John Kline (R-MN), and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), respectively.

Table 3. Retention rates by committee

DETERMINANTS OF STAFF TURNOVER

Looking more closely at the data on turnover, a few patterns emerge. Offices that pay their staff more have higher retention rates. Senior members have higher retention rates. And Democrats have slightly higher retention rates than Republicans.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between average staff salary and staff turnover rate. As we can see, there is a positive relationship, and it is statistically significant. Our analysis (see below for the full model) estimates that for each additional $1,000 the member pays the average staff, the predicted retention rate goes up by 0.5%.

Figure 1. Retention rates and average annual salary

Figure 2 shows the relationship between member’s seniority and staff turnover rate. Again, there is a positive relationship, and it is statistically significant. In the full estimation (see below again), each additional session the member has been in Congress, the predicted retention rate increases by 0.4%.

Figure 2. Retention rates and member seniority

Table 3 (below) shows that Democrats have a 3% higher retention rate on average. It is small difference, though it is a statistically significant predictor of retention rate. Controlling for salary, seniority, and extremism (as measured by ideological voting scores), being a Republican predicts a 4.5% lower retention rate.

Table 3.  Republican and Democrat staff retention rates

Table 4 (below) shows the results of a multivariate linear regression that estimates the retention rate based on four variables: Salary (in $1,000s), Member Sessions in Congress, whether the member was a Republican, and member’s extremism (a measure of ideological polarization squared). As described above, each additional thousand in average salary increases the predicted retention rate by 0.5%, each additional member session in Congress increases the predicted retention rate by 0.4%, and being a Republican reduces the predicted retention rate by 4.5%. Extreme members are no more or less likely to retain staff than moderate members.

Table 4. Multivariate regression estimating retention rate by office

N = 328; Adjusted R-squared = 0.1024

These factors are not significant in explaining variation across House committees. Higher salary is associated with higher retention rates for committees, but since the sample is much smaller, the relationship is not statistically significant.

POLICY STAFF POSITIONS

To the extent that we care about Congress’s policy capacity, we might care especially about the turnover of policy positions in member offices. These are senior staffers who can often be crucial in helping lawmakers draft legislation and formulate positions. We also calculated the retention rate for policy staff positions (for a list of positions, see the methodology selection below)

The (slightly) good news is that the retention rate for policy positions is slightly higher than non-policy positions. The average retention rate is 76% (as compared to 64% for all positions).

There were, however, a dozen offices where at least two-thirds of the policy staff departed between 2009 and 2011.

Table5. Offices with the lowest policy staff retention rates

There is some overlap with the highest overall turnover offices (Reps. Sutton, Terry, McDermott, Lee, Hensarling show up in both lists). Interestingly, Rep. Kucinich shows up in this list, even though he has one of the highest overall retention rates.

None of the same factors that predict overall staff turnover predict policy staff turnover. There are no statistically significant correlates for the variation we observe in our data. The only pattern we see is that Republicans on average hold onto to their top policy staff at a slightly higher rate.

Table 6. Republican and Democrat staff retention rates

CONCLUSIONS

As far as we know, this is the first time anybody has calculated turnover rates for House offices. We believe this is important data for citizens to have. Members of Congress cannot do their jobs without staff, and members who preside over high-turnover offices are likely to be less effective as legislators and may have a more difficult time performing efficient constituent service. Moreover, offices with higher turnover are likely to be more reliant on lobbyists to help them analyze and draft legislation, since there will be fewer experienced staff.

Some turnover in all offices is certainly healthy and natural. New blood is always good. But too much turnover can be a dangerous thing, too.

To the extent that members might wish to improve their retention rates, the data do tell us that offices that pay more do a better job of retaining staff, and that more senior members retain staff better. Democrats do a slightly better job of retaining staff over all, but Republicans do a slightly better job of a retaining policy staff.

We also note that this analysis covers a time when the House reduced its own budget by 5% in 2011 and will be reducing its budget again by 6.4% this year. This has already led to a 7.4% reduction in staff positions across the board. The House will be facing an additional 6.4% budget reduction this year, which will likely lead to further cuts in staff.

METHODOLOGY

The results are based on a comparison of House disbursement data from third quarter of 2009 and third quarter of 2011. To get a roster of staff in the office in third quarter of 2009, we limited our search to only individuals who received more than $4,000 in the third quarter ($16,000 annual salary) reasoning that anybody who got less money was probably an intern or in a temporary position.

To construct our list of policy staff, we added up anybody with the following as part of their title: Legislative Director, Legislative Assistant, Senior Legislative Assistant, Senior Policy Advisor, Policy Advisor, Policy Director, Legislative Counsel, Counsel, Senior Counsel. Since some offices may have other names for their policy staff positions, it’s possible we undercounted the number of policy staff for some offices.

To find your member, click here.

Our data come from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives. That means we are dependent on what the House reports. The biggest challenge in aggregating the data is that different House offices classify expenses in different ways. We must in good faith disclose that the underlying data are messy. At best, the data are approximate, and higher levels of confidence in it can only come when the House of Representatives makes a better effort with respect to how it normalizes and releases the data to the public. To dig through the data yourself, visit our House Expenditure Reports Database.

Special thanks to Eric Mill and Daniel Schuman for their help in preparing this piece.

Original Source

Presidential candidates have raised $186 million up to now, according to the Federal Election Commission. The New York Times lets you compare the amounts raised by each candidate, over time and space. Simply select a candidate on the left, and another on the right to see how they match up. Fundraising by candidates from previous elections, at the same time of year, are also included for context.

While not the focus of the interactive, the distributions for donation size at the bottom seem to be especially telling.

[New York Times via infosthetics]

Original Source

Does it deliver on its promises, or does this app get too much “hype” for its own good?

The state of animation on the web

Lets be honest: unless you have been living under a rock for the past 15 years (in which case it would be surprising to find you reading this), you will know very well that Flash has been the tool of choice for most animation on the web up until relatively recently. For over a decade now it has been (and continues to be in many cases) the de-facto standard for animated content on the web. The reasons for this are many, including the wide install-base of the Flash browser plugin, and the fast that Flash as a platform has a relatively low barrier to entry, (it is possible to learn the basics very quickly for most people), and is very flexible (you can build everything from a simple button up to full, interactive, websites).

It is only within the past year or two that CSS3 has reached a stage where browser vendors have been interested in starting to support the burgeoning standard, and even now support is far from universal. The latest builds of Safari and Chrome carry the best support, with Firefox and Opera shortly behind. IE9 has added some CSS3 support, but any version prior to that will see no love for your animated creations.

CSS3 brings with it the possibility of animating elements individually using nothing but the same kind of code web developers generate daily anyway (albeit with some new syntax to learn), and these animations will work on iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone while Flash, famously, will not.

Javascript also has a part to play in this equation, too. It is possible to leverage Javascript’s control over the page to animate elements, but for most people the code needed to do this is simply too arduous to write. jQuery makes things a great deal easier by including a framework that you can build around (basically allowing you to set end values for CSS attributes such as position or opacity and doing all the work in-between for you).

Up steps Hype

The main problem with the use of CSS3 and/or Javascript to achieve your animation goals, though, is that you have to know (and write) a lot of code if you are hoping to achieve anything but the most simple of animations. Secondly, the lack of an immediate visual representation of what you are doing will make this a difficult approach for many people. For example, you might want to move an image from point a, to point b. Point a is easy – that is probably where the image starts, but where is point b? How many pixels do you need to move it to get it in just the right place?

This is where Hype comes in. Hype is essentially a WYSIWYG front-end to all of this coding, allowing users to produce the same effects using the same techniques (and theoretically producing the same code) as described above. The main advantage with this is that it takes away the high barrier to entry that CSS/Javascript animation presents to most people. With Hype, you never have to write a line of code (if you don’t want to).

Hype's user interface should feel instantly familiar to anyone who has worked with, or seen, Flash in the past.

Hype will seem instantly familiar to anyone who has had even passing experience with Adobe’s Flash authoring environment. Sure, the pallettes and toolbars are different, but the essence is the same. You drag elements to a stage and animate various properties including their position and opacity using keyframes. Sound familiar? That’s because it is. Just about every time-based media application, including video editors, effects packages, and Flash itself, operate using this method, or a variation thereof.

Using Hype

Whether or not you have had any experience with animation or time-based media before, Hype should not be a hard application to pick up and learn. On the whole, the interface is remarkably intuitive. It feels rather like a cross between Apple’s Pages and a WYSIWYG web editor, which in actuality is quite similar to what it is.

Hype's scenes bar makes it easy to add and rearrange the scenes in your project

The main focus of Hype’s user interface is the stage, onto which you place images, text and other elements to compose your design. Above this is the scenes strip – Scenes allow the user to compose more complex animations composed of multiple separate compositions, similar to the different shots in a video project. At the bottom of the window is the timeline, which lists all the elements in which ever scene the user is currently editing. Separate to this window is the inspector pallette, which houses all the controls and settings for the elements placed on the stage, including text formatting, sizing and positioning, color and animation.

Hypes timeline gives users a quick view of their keyframes, and the attributes that are animated

To animate an element, it is a simple matter of placing it on the stage and creating a couple of “keyframes” to animate between. With the timeline scrubber on a keyframe, any settings you change for that element will be changed for that frame, and animated to from previous keyframes. It is a simple matter to set up a couple of keyframes and fade an element in or move it from point a to point b, or to rotate an item over time. Set your starting state with one keyframe, and your end state with another, and Hype does the rest.

You can even set a keyframe and hit the “record” button and move elements around, and Hype will record all the animation in the meantime and automatically set up the options for you. What Hype does not do, however, is offer any easing options (which would allow a user to have an animation “ease” in and out, meaning that the animation starts out and ends at a slower pace than in the middle, which often looks more natural than a purely linear animation such as those Hype generates).

After about 30 minutes playing with Hype, you will likely have a fairly good handle on the bulk of the WYSIWYG portion of the app, and you may be ready to try exporting your first basic animation. Before doing that, you should probably preview your animation in a browser, and here Hype has you covered.

If you have Google Chrome installed, Hype allows you to preview a temporary version of your composition in one click. If all looks ok there, then it is time to export your animation. It is worth noting the document settings tab in the inspector at this stage, which allows you to set your target browsers (which dictates what warnings Hype will show you when exporting).

Hype will display warnings about your content based upon what browsers you tell it you are looking for your animation to work in. This is particularly useful for the less experienced user, who likely will not know about the various capabilities and shortfallings of different browsers. Hype tests against a good range of common browsers, including Safari (both mobile and desktop versions), Chrome, Firefox and, importantly, Internet Explorer from the current version 9 down to the antiquated but rapidly dying version 6.

Hype's browser warnings will be useful for novices

It is my feeling that hobbyists and beginners in the web-world will benefit hugely from the ease of use and built-in compatibility checking that Hype offers, and that helps make it a compelling choice for those users. Backing this up is an ability to dive under the hood and manually edit the Javascripts that lie underneath, allowing a greater amount of control for those who want or are able to take it.

The Problem

The problem with so much Hype is that it is often extremely difficult to live up to. This, sadly, is also the case here. Hype has a number of problems that to some may be no big thing, but to others will be deal-breakers.

First, and lets make this very clear, Hype has at most a “fleeting” relationship with HTML5: Yes, it is possible to add video to your Hype projects and this will be added using the HTML5 <video> tag, and yes, Hype will use the new HTML5 shortened doctype declaration for the documents it exports, but that is about where the relationship ends.

What Hype actually exports, on the whole, is good-old HTML4, CSS3 and Javascript. This is fine, but why tout HTML5 when HTML5 actually has so little to do with the product itself? Hype makes no use of any of the new semantic elements provided by HTML5 (such as header, footer, nav, section, article etc.), nor does it make use of any of the other useful things HTML5 allows you to do. This means no web-workers, no local data storage, and perhaps most importantly, no history API.

That Hype is lacking in ability in these areas may seem like a small concern, but the fact that the History API is totally absent means that animations made with Hype “break” the browser’s back button; Imagine you wanted to create a set of slides to go with a presentation using Hype. That’s fine, but good luck if you want to be able to link anyone to a particular slide, or to allow users to page back and forth between said slides using standard browsers controls, such as the back and forward buttons, keyboard shortcuts or mouse/trackpad gestures. None of this will work with a Hype animation unless you delve in to the script yourself and add the features in. Whilst there will undoubtedly be some potential users of this app who are skilled enough to do this, does it not kind of defeat the point of having a WYSIWYG app in the first place, if it leaves you having to fill in holes after you have used it?

Hype also makes no use of Canvas elements, meaning that each element placed in your animation will be wrapped in a div. This is not only a semantic nightmare, but fails to make use of a powerful feature available in most of the browsers that the technology Hype uses targets. I can understand not supporting new, untested, poorly supported features such as WebGL, but Canvas is supported natively by each of the major browsers at their current versions, and plugins are even available for IE8 and below to enable support there.

The final significant problem with Hype is that instead of leveraging any kind of existing framework such as jQuery or Prototype, the developers have chosen to create their own animation Javascript library. This is great, in that it places no dependency on outside scripts, but the downside is that even on a very short animation with only a couple of transitions, the Javascript weighs in at over 95Kb. That’s one large script file!

I can only imagine how this might end up with a 10-scene masterpiece with 50 animated elements in each scene. The main problem here is that this file will be served to users viewing your animation regardless of whether their browser needs it all or not. Many users with up-to-date browsers will have support for CSS3 animation, and so won’t need a lot of what is contained therein, but the server won’t know that so will serve it anyway. This has the potential to be quite a drag on your server.

The Verdict

I really wanted to love Hype because it represents an alternative to Flash that was based around technology natively supported by web browsers rather than by a plugin that, let’s admit it, has never been very good on Mac. There is no doubt that Hype is easy to use, and you can create some nice looking results relatively quickly. The interface is, on the whole, intuitive and responsive and the app itself behaves very well.

However, there are just too many shortcomings for my liking when it comes to the actual content that Hype generates. For an app that markets itself on building “HTML5″ web content, the lack of any kind of support for the history API is baffling. I understand that this is not supported by older browsers, but there are workarounds. The fact is that Tumult just haven’t implemented them. This is particularly surprising when you consider that they paid enough attention to detail to implement “old-fashioned” Javascript animation for those browsers that don’t support CSS3.

With that being said though, Hype is a perfect choice for those wanting to get started with animation on the web without the expensive entry point of Flash, or the necessity for an encyclopaedic knowledge of code. It is easy enough to pick up and use with a very limited learning curve, and does produce good results visually.

Its interface is mostly very polished, and the app itself seems very reliable. At a relatively low price point of $29.99, Hype does constitute a good entry point for most people. Experienced web professionals, though, may find the many short-fallings mentioned here more of an issue, and may want to learn to do things the hard way, instead.

As a professional web developer myself, this puts me in a quandary in trying to come to an overall opinion about Hype. On one hand, Hype is an easy, relatively inexpensive entry point to the world of animation on the web for a great number of potential users. On the other hand, I personally would prefer that the code that came out the other side was of a higher quality, and that accessibility and usability of the exported product weren’t second class citizens here. I’m a huge advocate for a better quality websites, and I have felt over the past 10 years of development that Flash is a prime culprit of exactly this kind of sin: low-quality websites produced by all because an application made it too easy.

It’s a toss-up for me between whether to encourage users to give Hype a go and hope that it leads them to learn more about the platform they are developing for, or whether to discourage them from picking up a piece of software that could lead them down much the same road as Dreamweaver or similar WYSIWYG applications, leaving them with bad websites and no deeper understanding of how things work under the bonnet than before they started.

What do you think about Hype? Have you used it? Are you a hobbyist or a professional? Let us know in the comments!

Original Source

All that’s required is your name, email address, a message describing why you’d be a great fit and an array of URLs. Oh, and be sure to set the Content-Type as application/json, but I’m sure you’d have done that by habit, right?

In a highly competitive market for developers, is Parse making it harder for people to apply? For the right fit, the company might be making it easier.

For those interested, you can see the details of the application process or read our overview of Parse.

Via Luis Abreu

Sponsored by

Original Source

Advertise here via BSA

Bootstrap 2.0 has just released with a lot of new features, rewritten documentation, and use cases to test with the addition of media queries.

They have also added some new components like progress bars, customizable gallery thumbnails and split buttons. Another great new feature are the new glyph icons, that you can use to style your buttons and menus.

Now there are total 12 custom jQuery Plugins for you to enhance Bootstrap. It includes, Modals, Tooltips, Dropdowns, Scrollspy, Carousel and more. All in all a huge update with many exciting features.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
License: Apache License v2.0

Sponsors

Professional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications

Original Source

A common question we get from developers is how to keep information of Users or Pages using their apps up to date. We wanted to share some of the best practices that can improve the reliability and performance of apps you write on Facebook.

We often see developers querying the Graph API each time a User logs in to their apps to fetch information and update their records. This presents several issues and has a huge hit on performance.

Instead, we encourage you to use the Real-time Updates API that we designed especially for this purpose, allowing developers to subscribe to changes in data in Facebook. Rather than polling Facebook’s servers, your app can then cache data and receive updates whenever the data changes.

For example, many apps rely on a User’s location to fetch and display relevant information, it is very important that this data stays up to date on the app’s backend.

Real-time updates allows you to set up a subscription on the location field of the User object, whenever that field changes, Facebook will make an HTTP POST request to a callback URL you specified by with a list of changes.

You can currently subscribe to updates for these types of objects:

• User – Get notifications about particular fields and connections corresponding to User objects in the Graph API.
• Permissions – Get notifications when Users change the permissions they afford your applications. The fields are like those in the corresponding FQL table.
• Page – Get notifications when Pages that have installed your app as a Tab change their public properties.Note that the page topic is only used for subscribing to changes to public attributes of the page (like name, category, picture etc). This is the same information that is returned by the Graph API call https://graph.facebook.com/. However, you can subscribe to the page’s feed in the same way you subscribe to a User’s feed – the subscription topic should be User and the subscription field should be feed

Below is PHP Sample code that sets up an endpoint that will receive both GET (for subscription verification) and POST requests (for actual change data).

<?php

  $verify_token = 'YOURVERIFYTOKEN';

  if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'GET' && isset($_GET['hub_mode'])
    && $_GET['hub_mode'] == 'subscribe' && isset($_GET['hub_verify_token'])
    && $_GET['hub_verify_token'] == $verify_token) {
      echo $_GET['hub_challenge'];
  } else if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
    $post_body = file_get_contents('php://input');
    $obj = json_decode($post_body, true);
    // $obj will contain the list of fields that have changed
  }

?>

Once this endpoint is set up, you will need to make a POST request to the actual Real-Time updates API to subscribe to a field.

<?php

  $app_id = 'YOUR_APP_ID';
  $app_secret = 'YOUR_APP_SECRET';
  $app_url = 'http://YOURAPPURL';
  $fields = 'location';
  $verify_token = 'YOURVERIFYTOKEN';

  // Fetching an App Token
  $app_token_url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id='
                   .$app_id.'&client_secret='.$app_secret
                   .'&grant_type=client_credentials';
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $app_token_url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  $res = curl_exec($ch);
  parse_str($res, $token);

  if (isset($token['access_token'])) {
    // Let's register a callback
    $params = array(
      'object'
        =>  'user',
      'fields'
        =>  $fields,
      'callback_url'
        // This is the endpoint that will be called when
        // a User updates the location field
        =>  $app_url . '/index.php?action=callback',
      'verify_token'
        =>  $verify_token,
    );

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://graph.facebook.com/'
                                  .$app_id.'/subscriptions?access_token='
                                  .$token['access_token']);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);
    $res = curl_exec($ch);
    if ($res && $res != 'null') {
      print_r($res);
    }

    // Fetch list of all callbacks
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
    $res = curl_exec($ch);
  }
  if ($res && $res != 'null') {
    print_r($res);
  }
  curl_close($ch);

?>

The code above should return a similar object listing current subscriptions:

{
   "data":[
      {
         "object":"user",
         "callback_url":"http:\/\/YOURAPPURL\/index.php?action=callback",
         "fields":[
            "location"
         ],
         "active":true
      }
   ]
}

It’s important to note that for security reasons, the POST request made by Facebook’s servers to your endpoint will never actually contain the data that changed but only the field.

This is what a query from Facebook’s servers to your endpoint may look like:

{
   "object":"user",
   "entry":[
      {
         "uid":"499535393",
         "id":"499535393",
         "time":1326210816,
         "changed_fields":[
            "location"
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Once your endpoint gets called you can either query the Graph API immediately to fetch the new information or schedule it for a later call (next user login for example).

You can find more information about the Real-Time Updates API here.

Original Source

Advertisers trade in adjectives and adverbs. Campaigns and creative executions are filled with them. However, with all content increasingly filtered through social networks, it’s what people do with advertising rather than what they say about it that will make all the difference this year. Guaranteed.

The change started last September when Facebook revealed that the ubiquitous “like” and “share” features will soon be joined by all kinds of verbs. Two of these — “read” and “listen” — are already live. Others are coming soon with the debut of Facebook Actions. “Buy” and “watched” are likely to be two.

Facebook users who install certain news and music applications such as Spotify and The Washington Post social news reader can opt to share their actions. In other words, read news or listen to music on the social network and it gets broadcast to friends friction-free.

The arithmetic, therefore, is simple. The more marketers can evoke social actions, the more likely it is that their wonderfully crafted narrative will stick to people’s screens.

The empirical evidence is already there.

Increasing Traffic

Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow estimates that sites that simply add an optional Facebook share capability to common online applications, such as an online poll, can increase traffic 12.98%. (Yes, he’s done the math.)

Media early adopters have already seen strong results from their embrace of verbs. The Guardian has garnered 1 million additional monthly page views since it launched a revamped Facebook presence last fall. Yahoo is so pleased with its early results that it has expanded its relationship with Facebook to 26 more sites. The social network is already deeply embedded into Yahoo News.

It’s not just Facebook though. Technology companies have long understood that pointing and grunting are arguably the most innate human gestures. It’s something children do at a very early age. Cavemen basically invented both. So they’re building these natural interfaces at the core.

Siri on the iPhone and Kinect on Xbox* are two early implementations: users talk or point. But soon similar gesture-based media will show up everywhere. These will drive a lot more frictionless sharing. The social networks and search engines will gobble up the data and use these signals to shape the algorithms that already guide so much of what we pay attention to.

Here are three strategies to consider:

Build verb hooks everywhere

You wouldn’t think that people want to share that they completed an online poll or registered to enter a contest, but data prove the contrary. A small percentage will, and this generates a network effect that pays off big. Look for ways to attach social verbs to even basic online features.

Here’s why this matters to marketers: If they adopt the verb structure and API’s into their assets, they are more likely to surface through Facebook’s algorithms. For example, Ford should consider adopting the “watch” API for any video content on its site.

Consider the lens of friends

Content finds us though the lens of our friends. This means no two people see the same web. It’s all personalized. Execs need to think hard about their audiences and pay particular attention to psychographics. This can help guide decisions about the language and creative that will generate verbs, not just awareness.

Prioritize media that think in verbs

When making a media buy, look for partners that get the power of natural gestures and have started to build it into their armada. Insist that they add social functionality to even basic banner ads and rich-media executions.

Your mission this year is not just to be heard but to inspire action. Tapping into the network effects of verbs is a must in a social digital age.

Image credit: sAeroZar

*Microsoft is an Edelman client.

Original Source

Startup Virginia, part of the privately-funded Startup America Partnership that President Obama helped to launch last year, promises to “support entrepreneurs and help startups drive job creation” in the Commonwealth. Organizers say Northern Virginia in particular is fertile ground for startups, with the numerous corporate headquarters in the area and with the area’s focus on science and technology.

“It’s about time this region got the recognition it deserves,” said a panelist at this morning’s launch event, which was attended by several hundred business leaders, academics and other attendees. Another panelist suggested that entrepreneurs can help pick up some of the economic slack that will be caused by expected cuts in defense spending.

Among the speakers at the event were Aneesh Chopra, the outgoing Chief Technology Officer for the White House, and Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, Chairman of the Startup America Partnership and a prominent local investor. Chopra cited Courthouse-based Opower as an example of a Virginia startup that’s making it big.

“Right down the street here in Arlington, Opower didn’t exist five years ago,” Chopra said. “[It has] over 300 employees to help compete to bring down your energy bills.”

Chopra made some news at the event when he hinted at a new bipartisan legislative package that’s expected to be announced by the White House later today. According to Chopra, the legislation would cut taxes for small businesses and entrepreneurs, would reduce barriers to accessing capital markets for high-growth companies, and would seek to reduce administrative backlogs for high-skill immigration.

Case said entrepreneurs helped to build the United States into the world power it is today.

“We didn’t become the leading economy by accident,” Case said. “It was the work of entrepreneurs creating companies, and really creating entire industries, that in the last two centuries has propelled us to the position we now have globally.”

Case cautioned, however, that other countries are trying to catch up with America in the realm of entrepreneurship. The U.S. must focus on “winning the global battle on talent,” he said.

Original Source