Toluu

everwas

you may ask yourself, how do I work this?

Facebook virtual currency now realSeptember 1

USA Today reports that Facebook Credits will be available as gift cards at Target.

The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target’s 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.

The article goes on to report that cards for online games such as Farmville are already available and that the overall market for gift cards was $80.6 billion last year.

I wonder how the gift card economy works. Does facebook get to book revenues for gift card sales before they are re-deemed? How are gift card sales classified for taxes? If you sell gift cards in other currencies, does the gift card revenue get counted towards the US GDP?

Pokémon Breeding and the Masuda MethodAugust 29

The depths of Pokémon gamer knowledge are beyond my reach. My kids, on the other hand, have gone deep and are using the internet to expand their learning further. I helped connect their Nintendo DS to Wifi so they can explore virtual worlds. Now they are connecting with other players around the world to trade characters. We have conversations around their gaming world but I am totally lost at sea.

Today, my son pointed me to Serebii.net which is, as far as I can tell, the wikipedia for the Pokémon fan. Here’s an entry for Shiny Pokémon and how one might obtain one.

You have probably heard or seen a picture of them. Pokémon that are different colors than normally seen with. An example of that could be a Metagross with a silver coating and a golden X on it, a dark green Zubat, or a black Rayquaza. The Torchic you may have obtained from Professor Birch may be a lighter colored orange and you may think the game is glitched up, but it isn’t

Miss Universe National CostumesAugust 28

Miss Kazakhstan is always easy to find at a crowded party.

I had no idea that there was a National Costume portion of the Miss Universe pageant. I need to tune in next time. Excellent collection of snarky one-liners over at Tom & Lorenzo’s blog. Part One & Part Two.

Getting Down Finnish StyleAugust 27

Hope you all had a chance to tune into Radio Helsinki at 4:30 pm and boogie down. For some virtual fun, click play on all three links below at the same time.

It’s all part of Happy Helsinki and the Helsinki Festival.

EdgeRank, the Facebook Newsfeed AlgorithmAugust 25

Michael Berstein, a researcher at MIT, posts a snapshot of the algorithm used to calculate what is shown to you in the Facebook Top News feed.

The algo is called EdgeRank and he describes it as such:

I’ll cut through the math using words. Whenever somebody interacts with a news feed item, they create an edge to that item. So if I comment on a friend’s new puppy photos, I’ve created an edge to your photos. When trying whether  to show the photos in your news feed, Facebook looks at how closely you interact with everyone who has an edge to the item. So, with the puppy photos, it considers your affinity to the friend who created the photos, and then me because I commented on them.

This all comes down to — initialization matters. If my high school friends are the first to comment on a news feed item, the EdgeRank of that item for other high school friends is high. So, other high school friends will see the item. If grad school friends are the first to comment, then other grad school friends are likewise going