NUS ACM Student Chapter

Google's track record in the social sphere has not really been that impressive, to say the least. Orkut, Buzz and this have all come and stayed but none of them have been able to make an impact; at least not as much as Facebook. Maybe it is because their approach has always been content-driven. Anyway, if rumors are to be believed, Google is going to bring out yet another social product soon called Google Me which will supposedly be a direct competitor to Facebook. 

Now, why is Google really keen on controlling the social domain? Okay, maybe not controlling, but why is it keen on being one of the major players at least?

Ever since we started in January 2008, our objective has always been to make the chapter a hub for technology-related news and activities. However, our focus thus far has been primarily on the offline events that we conduct through the year. 

We did have a newsletter that we sent out to members every month. With four articles and a simple theme, the IT Bytes seemed to serve its purpose quite well by keeping students informed of updates in the tech world in that month by presenting it in a no frills-manner that people liked and appreciated.

It was only much later that we came to realize, however, that a problem with our newsletter was the fact that it was not real-time; A term that people seem to have fallen in love with, post-Twitter. 

To summarize, students are willing to read a peer's take on a tech event or news story but only expect it to reach them on time when the news is still hot. Even with that understood, we were reluctant to start this blog then as we were not sure if it would work out the way we hoped it would as the concept of an online community or a web-based interest group was quite new to NUS.

The widely publicized Facebook privacy row in May has not really stopped users on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms from connecting to new applications and games.

Two things however, are clear from the issue - One, users are increasingly concerned about the privacy of their data on social networking websites and two, users are also frustrated that they are not being told enough.

So I decided to pull together some privacy-related facts about these applications so that you know exactly what is going on the next time you connect to one of them.

By connecting to an app on Twitter, you are giving it full control over your Twitter account - ie both read and write access. Simply put, you are authorizing the application to be able to perform any action that you can do on Twitter without your permission - eg post a tweet, follow a tweep etc.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook never gives any of its apps write access by default. This permission is granted only if you as the owner give access to the application explicitly or if your account gets compromised.

If you use more than one browser, then you would have probably found out by now that the Dodge app is much faster on Google Chrome or Safari than Firefox. Yes, that is the unintentional cheat code. The game is just simply easier to score on Firefox!

The reason for this is the difference in the processing speed of the Javascript engines used by these different browsers. A difference in performance across browsers, which was never a problem with Flash as all apps ran from the same Flash runtime environment, does seem like a setback for HTML5-driven games as of now but it is believed that it will become negligible going forward. For instance, Dodge seems to be faster on the latest beta of Firefox 4 already!

Take a look at what other developers are saying about this issue on Stackoverflow.