Facebook buys FriendFeed and now we have FaceFeed

So Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, here is the press release.

Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

I really don't know what to say about this, I really like FriendFeed and just hope that Facebook will not disable twitter inside FriendFeed because that would really suck. On the FriendFeed blog Bret Taylor writes the following

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team

Mmmm, that doesn't sound reassuring does it?

What do you think?

BingTweets launched

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing

BingTweets enables you to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter by fusing Bing search results with the latest tweets. To get started, click on a trending topic, or search for anything that's on your mind in the search box below.



Check it out: http://bingtweets.com/

Example Of The Gimp Predator Filter

I was playing around with the Predator filter in the Gimp

So I took a pic of this little kitty



I applied the Predator filter and here is the result




What do you think?

Sandokan and Westworld, Two Movies/Series I Want To See Again

For some strange reason I was thinking about Sandokan and Westworld today.

Westworld

Westworld is a movie I last saw when I was probably about 10 year old. The main actors in the movie are Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin. Here is in short what the movie is about (from Wikipedia)

It is sometime in the near future, in a fictional high-tech adult amusement park called Delos. The park is divided into three zones: WesternWorld, MedievalWorld and RomanWorld. The entertainment in all three areas consists primarily of interaction by the guests with androids programmed to act in character (the Old West, medieval Europe, and pre-Christian Rome, respectively). The androids are indistinguishable from human beings, apart from minor flaws in their hands, and guests are encouraged to indulge in any fantasy, including killing the androids. The androids are programmed to respond positively to guest requests, specifically including requests for sex. Delos's guests pay $1,000 a day for the experience.

Here is a trailer for the movie

So as you can probably guess one of these androids goes a little crazy and starts to shoot back. This android is the Gunslinger and he is played by Yul Brunner.


I will never remember the scene when The Gunslinger gets splashed in the face with acid, and the skin starts to melt and you can see the inside of his robotic head, very much like terminator.


Spooky stuff for a 10 year old at that time.


Did you know that Westworld was the first major feature film to use 2D computer generated images (CGI)? Di you also know that Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crichton?


Update September 2016

So here we are 7 years later..and my wish came true. HBO is premiering the first episode of  Westworld this weekend. It looks really good. Here is the trailer for the HBO series Westworld

Sandokan

Sandokan is a fictional pirate of the late nineteenth century, Sandokan first appeared in a publication created in 1883 by Italian author Emilio Salgari.
He is appeared in 11 novels and is known as "The Tiger of Malaysia".

There are two scenes that I will never forget, the first one is when he jumps up ans slices the tiger to death, The second scene is when he takes the poison before they throw him into the ocean

I watched Sandokan when I was 7 or 8, this was a HUGE hit in Europe, you could catch it on any channel. It was played on Ned 1, ZDF, RAI, BBC etc etc. I remeber lots of people having a shirt with Sandokan on it, I did not have one but my cousins did. As a matter of fact i don't think I ever had a shirt with movie/music stars except for Superman
Here is the trailer for Sandokan

The actor that played Sandokan is Kabir Bedi and if you watched Dynasty in the 80s then you might recognize him since he was in a couple of episodes. I just hope that somehow we can get Sandokan on DVD soon, I would love to watch it again.

When it rains, it pours. When it pours you get tons of mushrooms

This has to be the most bizarre June in New Jersey ever. Usually I will have my air conditioning blasting by now. Not this year, this year I has rained I think for 20 days straight and it is not warm at all. Weather like that is not untypical in Holland where I grew up. But I left Holland; one of the reasons was that the weather sucks in Holland. April and May are actually quite nice but the rest of the year it is more miss than hit. You will get that nasty drizzle that will last for days or it will just rain cats and dogs for a day straight.

When it rains a lot you will see that suddenly mushrooms pop out of the ground everywhere. The last couple of days I have taken a couple of pics. Click on the picture to get to the flickr page and you can leave a comment or look at the bigger size (if you are into that kind of thing)


The first mushroom is the bizarre looking Stinkhorn. Some people might think they look like some alien penises. I think this variety is the Mutinus caninus.



According to Wikipedia some parts are edible

The Dog Stinkhorn is probably edible at the ‘egg’ stage, but it is not recommended. At least one report from West Virginia in the eastern United States strongly recommends the 'eggs' peeled and fried as a tasty dish

No thank you.


Next up is the Amanita muscaria. This is a poisonous and psychoactive basidiomycete fungus.



From wikipedia

Amanita muscaria is now primarily famed for its hallucinogenic properties with its main psychoactive constituent being the compound muscimol. It was used as an intoxicant and entheogen by the peoples of Siberia and has a religious significance in these cultures.

Some late day sun gives the mushroom some 'warmth'

Into the wild a great movie

I was flipping channels on the tv (this is something every man should do to annoy his wife) and saw that into the wild just started on showtime. I read the brief description and decided to watch 10 minutes or so to see if it is any good. My wife and I loved this movie; we were not going to watch the whole thing because it was getting late but of course we couldn’t just go to bed without watching the end. Of course we paid the price the next morning when the kids got up before 6.

The movie has a 8.2 rating on IMDB so that is pretty good.This movie is based on the book Into the Wild written by the author of Into Thin Air John Krakauer

Here is what the movie is about, I made only the first sentence visible because I don’t want to spoil it for you, you can highlight the text to make it visible.

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods

Now that I saw the movie I want to read the book……don’t tell my wife I know, but something tells me that I will get the book as part of my father’s day gift this Sunday.

If you have showtime you can see when it will be on again here http://www.sho.com/site/schedules/product.do?episodeid=133208&seriesid=0&seasonid=0

Remember! True Blood starts in 2 days

One of my favorite shows in the last couple of years

Here is the coundown clock