In case you ever find yourself in a friends-with-benefits situation (especially if the other party is a lawyer), check out this contract template.

Eat your heart out Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

As always, looking forward to your suggestions and comments.

FQL Console just got a new feature: email notifications when new people appear on lists (query results).

This works for all queries involving people.

For instance, you can get notified when girls from your social network go single or in open relationships

It may take so time (less than an hour) to get the notification, but after that it will be waiting for you in your inbox.

To subscribe to a query notification, just click the “Subscribe to Change Notifications for this Query” big red button on the query page.

This is a movie project I worked on together with some friends during my senior year in high school.

Although it’s been more than 4 years since then, I’ve only now put it online.

The story is surreal, fragmented and fragmented. In that period, I was being strongly influenced by the work of David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks).

I remember that shooting it took more than 4 month. It’s about 60 minutes long. Unfortunately, our technical and artistic experience didn’t quite match our vision, but it was a great experiment that I’m really proud of.

Without further ado, I give you:

CRACKWHORE

(also, here’s the link to the Pirate Bay torrent)

If you download it, let me know what you think and seed it and share it.

FQL Console is a simple Facebook application allowing you to learn more about your friends, by answering questions like:

• Who are the single girls from my friends?
• Who are the single guys ?
• What girls are in complicated relationships?
• What girls are in open relationships?
• Who among your friends in an open relationship?
• (…)

Of course, you can ask questions completely unrelated to relationship gossip, including:

• Show me all my posts from youtube
• Show me all my friends’ posts from TechCrunch

Of course, if you’re a little bit geeky – you can write your own queries: just click the green button on the right reading “Advanced: Write and execute your own query”. There you can type in your own query, modify existing queries and execute them. Moreover, if a result is returned without error, you can save the query so others an use it too!

If you think relationship gossip is boring, you can tackle other subjects, including words appearing in post, photos, tags. I haven’t explored all the possibilities myself , so feel free to try queries, share them over with your friends. I would say sky is the limit, but actually FQL(Facebook Query Language) is the limit – Facebook decides which queries are valid, depending on their syntax, complexity and your friends’ privacy settings. I won’t bore you with all the techee details, I’m sure you’ll dive into them if you feel like it. Let’s just say FQL is a simplified, underfeatured version of SQL.

All the information returned by FQL Console is subject to Facebook privacy policy. FQL Console is not an application developed by Facebook, it is our pet project (Bogdan’s and Radu‘s).

The “Who”

I put in about 12-15 hours into the concept & development of FQL Console.

On top of that, my good friend Radu (@Contes) added another 10 hours into creating the sleek intuitive design.

So it was pretty much a weekend project for both of us.

The “Why”

Four reasons why we built it:

• It was fun, a great opportunity to better understand the Facebook API.
• I wanted a simple way to view stats about my 500+ friends (i.e. relationship gossip unleashed)
• I wanted to unleash the power of FQL to users who aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to get their hands dirty with code.
• Social experiment

The Privacy

FQL Console needs access to some of your data (especially your friends’ data) so it can run queries.

Any information obtained by FQL Console will not be shared with third parties and will not be used for commercial/marketing purposes. Some information may be temporarily stored on our server to improve performance of the application.

We ask for your email and permanent access to your data because we plan to unleash an email notification feature for query changes (“Notify me if there are new single girls on my profile”). We won’t spam. Any email we send you (if any) will have a click-once unsubscribe link.

Sharing a query does NOT mean sharing the answer to that query. So for instance, the query “Who are the single girls from my friends?” returns Mary, Ann and Carol on my profile. But if I share the query (the query link) with my good friend, Radu, he will just see the answer to the same question for his profile (let’s say Hannah, Beatrice and Joelynn). FQL Console does not facilitate or encourage sharing or otherwise publishing the info from your profile with others.

Last but not least, FQL Console is not a hack, it respects Facebook ToS and it does NOT give you access to additional information. It is just a way to get a different perspective on the Facebook info you already have access to.

If you enjoyed it…

Tell your friends to tell their friends about FQL Console

Try your own queries. Share them.

Drop us a line. Or a comment.

For the past few days, I’ve been spending my spare time working on an simple and fun app that allows everyone to browse their Facebook friends in a more interesting fashion and find out new things about their friends.
While the app is functional, I’m still crushing some usability bugs.
I’m not a designer, so don’t expect anything too breath-takingly eye-catching.
I am however a very curios person, so do expect something that satisfies your curiosity.

And don’t worry, it’s nothing against the Facebook ToS.

Will make it public within the next week, I’m very excited to know what you think.

This is the slide support for my diploma project presentation, Monday 11th of July.

Let me know what you think.

This article describes my personal vision of the top three hot topics in technology in 50 years. If part one of the article focused on nanotech and the two development branches for it (electronic and biological), this part will focus on a particular high-impact application of nano-tech: neural interfaces.
Neural interfaces (i.e. brain computer interfaces) are the destination of our technological journey which brings people and machines closer together. Computers were initially programmed by manually rewiring components, then by keyboard and mouse and nowadays by touch and gesture. However, the interface begins to be more and more the bottleneck in man-computer processing. In other words, people think faster and computers tend to work faster than you can type or touch.

In the diagram below, I’ve listed the basic action the human mind and the computer need to perform when a user thinks of looking up the entity that performs a “meow-meow” action.

(click to enlarge)

The colors are meant to both link actions on the vertical and to highlight how much time they take (warm color = takes a lot of time).

As you can see, actually moving your fingers over the keyboard/touchscreen takes up the most time. Also (subconsciously) processing how to move the fingers is quite a lengthy process.

Be that as it may, the purpose of neural interfaces is to remove the need to think about moving the fingers and to actually move them and send the information directly to the machine via a much faster interface. This would make all querying and commanding processes a lot faster, by bringing them from a several seconds to under a second. It may not seem like a significant gain, but it builds up over a lot of commands.

Of course, this is not the only advantage. The other one would be being able to convey more information directly to the system. In the example above, consider you weren’t looking for cats, but for cute, white cats with black spots. Typing this would take a lot longer and it probably wouldn’t yield all the relevant results – because the more complex an idea is the more ways there are to express it (in natural language).

The sum it up, the point of neural interfaces is to make the communication process between humans and machines faster, more complete, more reliable. Of course, the same way even the communication process between humans and humans would benefit from the same advantages (if language is by-passed).

I know, I know – this whole thing sounds kind of like science fiction. But there is one piece of the puzzle, one technology needed in order to ignite the development in neural interfaces.

And that is – pam pam – nanotechnolgy.

Nanotechnology is the tool needed to physically build these interfaces between biological and digital. These interfaces would be extremely complex in structure, very fine and very small (think nano). With present technology, we have no way to build such fine connections, with complex structures to fit neural pathways. But hopefully with the help of nano-bots, this will start being possible in 25-30 years.

Once the hardware is available (even in a crude form), data will be collected and software will emerge. Unlike most fields, the problems posed by neural interfaces are more on hardware than on software.

Moreover, some crude experiments already exist, such as Lateral Geniculate Nucleus Cat Vision – allowing the transmission of a video feed from the cat brain. Also, similar projects exist for capturing the vision feeds of rats and insects. But all of these attempts are more or less like attempting brain surgery with slaughterhouse equipment. And, just to emphasize, the equipment is hardware.

Needless to say, there are countless ethical considerations to these future development, including consent, privacy, mind control, challenging our very sense of self and identity. This will probably be the 2060 equivalent of web privacy concerns.

The applications however are endless:

• Neuroprosthetics
• Artificial telepathy
• Shared empathy
• (hang on for this one) The World Wide Mind

However, until this science fiction even begins to approach reality, we need to develop nano-bots able to build complex, microscopic structures – such as neural pathways. Nanotech alone will take another 25 years to reach this point, so I expect the first generation of neural interface to emerge 30-35 years from now.

Hang on for part 3 of the series.

Until then, I’m looking forward to your thoughts, as always.

Embedded below you can find a copy of my diploma project.

Let me know what you think

There’s been a lot of chatter regarding the web’s need for a better search. That makes sense, since the current system developed by Google is ten years old (if you count from when AdWords was launched). Of course, there have been tweaks, but the basic concept has stayed the same.

But as Vivek Wadhwa pointed out in his article a while back, the reason why Google doesn’t improve search isn’t lack of technology, scaling problems or difficulty in building new algorithms. No. It doesn’t improve it’s search results because better results would decrease revenue.

That’s right. AdSense accounts for around %30 of Google’s revenue. And a considerable part of that 30% is generated by content farms. You know, the kind of publisher which doesn’t care about how crappy content is, as long as it drives traffic, keywords and comes in gigabytes per day. Like DemandMedia.

The situation is really simple: Google sends organic traffic to some content farm. The content farm displays ads, including via AdSense. If the user clicks on a Google ad, the content farm makes 10 cents. Google makes 5.

Cutting out content farms from search results (either algorithmically or by crowd-sourcing this process) would come at a cost for Google. It would negatively impact revenues. And don’t imagine a catastrophe, but losing up to 5% of the revenues because of a cleaning out search results could start a chain reaction for the company. Let’s not forget what happened when the company missed the analysts estimated earnings by 3 cents per share (at this year’s first quarterly earning conference call). On that morning, Google stock took a nose-dive of over 8%.

How about making search social?

How about integrating more social signals with the PageRank algorithm?

How about delivering more information and less noise in search results?

How about filtering out content farms?

Well, they could. But it wouldn’t pay off on the short term.

And if you’re a corporation, the price of your stock tends to be more important than user experience, web democracy and other liberal fantasies. Of course, on the long run, this kind of decision-making slowly and invisibly erodes the value of the company

Google’s challenge right now isn’t to figure out how to improve search. Or how to make it social. That’s a technical problems which is either solved or easy to solve considering the talent they hire. For that matter, even Blekko, a search company with under $25 million in funding and with less traffic than the most popular site in Romania (around 200K per month), has some better ideas on how to make search a lot better.

The problem isn’t how to make it, but how to milk it.

The challenge for Google is to figure out a way of monetizing this social-next-generation search. Find a new business model is something startups do (or try to do). And once you go all corporate and IPO-ish, rolling back to the startup cocoon isn’t quite that easy.

Having products like Buzz or Wave flunk the market test is an affordable risk – after all, they were just a few million in development costs. But when it comes to search – the bread and butter of Google, providing 98%+ of their revenue – they can’t afford to gamble by “fixing it” just because some upset users say they should.

What do you think? Does Google actually want better search results?