Facebook announcement pricing

One of the few ways that Facebook makes money, as far as I know, is through their announcements panel. I clicked on an announcement to make an announcement, and found out that it would cost me $15/day to announce something at Stanford. It's variable depending on the school. What determines this rate? The most expensive school is Penn State ($22/day). Does that mean it's based on the number of registered users?

Nass

By the way, MarsEdit is not free. My 30-day trial expired recently.

One of my professors this quarter, Clifford Nass, is the best lecturer I've ever had. Maybe I should say he's the funniest ever, but funny is good, and thereby he's the best. His impression of a rich, white, educated male is even better than Dave Chappelle's. I need to bring in my camera to class and tape this guy. Some of you might've heard him on NPR yesterday. He said he was going to be on one of the programs.

Email is so popular, despite what I think is a pretty bad way of doing certain things it frequently is used for between people. Obviously the social interface is great, but isn't there a way to improve group discussions via email? Something like a temporary news group... to figure out tonight's dinner plans... or decide which color shirt we want to go with for the intramural basketball team.

Update: The NPR bit I talked about showed up in my ITConversations podcast feed. He's not nearly as entertaining as he is in lecture.

Trivia

On Friday we had Trivia Night with the CS graduate students. Out of categories such as history, art, computer science, science, the only category our team won (or even placed in for that matter), was TV. Also, I think I must've nailed Madonna's Die Another Day a good 10 seconds before anyone else while the intro was played back. That and accurately guessing CHiPs theme song were my lone contributions for the night. What.

Nokia N70

I show up for a mobile prototyping tutorial series and they hand me a brand new Nokia N70 phone to play with. The the camera is impressive:

Ning

Ning is a neat idea but its components are pretty incomplete for being a mash-up "playground." For an example, I put together swivel, which is a silly app to explore the squared circle pool. except I wasn't able to use Ning's own implementation of the Flickr API because you can't retrieve tags. Wtbad. Also, is it just me or is the site sloow?



Update: I switched out the API I was using (phpFlickr) to a new one (phlickr), and it was still rather slow. I've found it much faster to query all photos, instead of a specific group. I don't have any hard evidence that this is the source of the lag, but it's better now. I wanted to try to speed things up since I got a couple of responses from some friendly Ning people. I suspected it was my app rather than Ning itself because other pages loaded fairly fast. Try it again.