One of the biggest selling points for Drupal is the ease with which cool web design tricks can be integrated into existing sites once they're available as reusable modules. The jQuery Quicksand plugin, for example, gives site visitors a fluid, easy-to-understand way of sorting and filtering the items on a page. Wiring it up to work with your Drupal site, though, used to require some heavy duty theming tweaks to make your site's markup match what Quicksand expected. Now, easy integration is available via the Views Quicksand module: just install it, set up your view,

Sadly, screenshots don't do the Quicksand plugin justice: it displays the items on your page in a simple grid, and when the filter or sort options you've selected change, the items drift into new positions, vanish in a puff, or re-appear depending on the new filters. As demonstrated by this Quicksand demo page, it's especially impressive when the content you're displaying uses similar images like screenshots or thumbnails.

Views Quicksand integrates that fluid reshuffling effect with Views' native support for AJAX-powered sorting and filtering. Change the Views sort options, and items smoothlyreflow into their new positions.

Have you ever create a really good looking interactive map using HTML5 and jQuery? MigrationsMap.net allows you to see for every country X in the world either the top ten providing countries of lifetime migrants to X or the top ten receiving countries of lifetime migrants from X.

On top of that, when you let your mouse hover over a country, you can see the total population, the GDP per capita, the HIV and Tuberculosis prevalences and the death rate of children under five. All the code of the site and the scripts used to produce it are available on github.

Requirements: HTML5 and jQuery
Demo: http://migrationsmap.net
License: MIT License

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Is that a ripple in the fabric of the universe I just detected? The iPhone 4S with its Siri personal assistant faces off with Furby, and mutual misunderstanding rules the day. Perhaps Google Translate could lend a hand.

Excuse me, but I think my head is going to explode.

BONUS: 10 Absurd Questions for Siri

The classic question

Click here to view this gallery.

[via Buzzfeed]

More About: Furby, siri, viral video

A little over a year ago, we at Centresource made a pretty significant shift in the way we evaluate the job performance of our staff by introducing The Merit System™, a great way to help our team know how they're doing on a bi-weekly basis. One big part of the merit system is our Badge system, which allows our staff to make a little coffee money by doing a variety of items that are above and beyond their job description. We have over twenty badges that range from blogging, to volunteering, to leading internal education sessions, to simply doing something that knocks our socks off.

Each badge has a small monetary value attached to it -- typically between $25 and $100, that is awarded a few times a month. This is a great program that we love, because it helps get our team more involved in the company and our community, and that our staff loves -- well, because who doesn't love a little pocket change?

We're excited to announce that as of this past month, we've handed out over $10,000 through the badge payouts! This is great news for us: it means that our staff has really embraced the idea -- something that is always a sweet relief for managers who are always trying to throw out ideas to excite and motivate their team; just hoping that something can stick.

Congrats to our team, and all of their hard work!

So how about you? What ideas have you found that have worked to motivate your team? Please share in the comments below!

Tilt represents a new way of visualizing a web page. This tool creates a 3D representation of the document, with the purpose of displaying, understanding and easily analyzing the DOM.

It will take advantage of the great tools Firefox has to offer, as it is an extension which contains a WebGL implementation, providing rich user-experience, fun interaction and useful information, while taking full advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, GLSL shaders and what OpenGL ES 2.0 has to offer.

The implementation consists of a Firefox extension containing a 3D representation of a web page, as both a fun visualization tool and a developer-friendly environment for debugging the document’s structure, contents and nesting of the DOM tree. Various information besides the actual contents will be displayed on request, regarding each node’s type, class, id, and other attributes if available. The rendering will be dynamic, in-browser, using WebGL and GLSL shaders.

Requirements: Firefox
Demo: https://github.com/victorporof/Tilt
License: Mozilla Public License

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Steve Sande and I have been collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that just recently hit the Kindle store. It's a how-to that will help you get the most done with your Siri intelligent assistant. We're sharing some of our favorite tips with TUAW readers.

Today, we're looking at Siri's Wolfram Alpha integration. You can force Siri to use Wolfram by prefixing your request with "Wolfram." For example, you might say, "Wolfram, what is the square root of 2?" or "Wolfram, graph x-squared plus three."

But there's a lot more that you can do with Wolfram than just math. Here are ten of our favorite Wolfram searches. These highlight the flexibility of this amazing information resource.

1. Roll a Random Number. Say "Wolfram, random integer." Wolfram returns a random value between 0 and 1000. "Wolfram, random number" provides a 0 to 1 floating point value.
2. Look up nature facts. Say, "Wolfram, what is the scientific name of a mountain lion?" It's Puma concolor. Rabbits are Leporidae, and Peacocks, Galliformes.
3. Check upcoming holidays. Say, "How many days until Thanksgiving?" This returns both the number of days as well as a helpful calendar so you can chart out the time until then.
4. Create a secure password. Say "Wolfram, password." Wolfram generates a difficult-to-crack 8-character password. Scroll down for alternates. If you need a longer password, you can append these together.
5. Convert text to Morse code. Say, "What is Morse code for horsefeathers?" You'll see the entire sequence laid out for your tapping pleasure.
6. Check your diet. Say, "How many calories in a small apple?" Wolfram will tell you that there are 75.
7. Ask out about time zones. Say, "Wolfram, what is the local time in Jakarta?"
8. Query about your chances. Say, "Wolfram, what is the probability of a full house?" For a random five-card hand, it's apparently 1 in 694.
9. Have fun with pop culture. Say, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" or "Wolfram, who shot the sheriff?"
10. Visualize colors. Okay, I've saved the best for last. If you work with colors, this can save you a lot of time. Say, "Wolfram pound sign E 9 7 4 5 1" (for Burnt Sienna / Tangerine) or "Wolfram pound sign 2 9 A B 8 7" (for Jungle Green). This will also convert the colors to RGB values and look up closely-matching brand colors from Benjamin Moore. Make sure to scroll down to catch all the helpful information.

10 cool things you can do with Wolfram Alpha and Siri originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Shared by Travis
BOOM. Fuck you, stupid picture.

Apple has a page dedicated to Steve Jobs that displays messages from friends, colleagues, and fans. Neil Kodner downloaded those messages and extracted overall themes:

I wanted to see what how people were speaking about Steve Jobs and especially what terms were being used to describe him. There was no point in performing sentiment analysis on this text as all of the texts were not only obviously positive but were also vetted by Apple for content. Using NLTK, I performed part-of-speech tagging on every word in each tribute message and then wrote some code to total the adjectives and adverbs used in the tribute messages.

The top descriptors? Not surprisingly: great, many, first, sad, better, best, and visionary. About one in five messages referenced an Apple product.

The message data and Kodner's code is available on github.

[Thanks, Guy]

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub is the best way to collaborate with others. Fork, send pull requests and manage all your public and private git repositories.

Have you ever you can have GitHub-like system on your own server? GitLab is a lite app for projects or repositories hosting on your server. It is Fast, secure and stable solution based on ruby on rails. And it is free for download and distributed under the MIT License.

Requirements: Ruby on Rails
Demo: http://gitlabhq.com/
License: MIT License

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But once the novelty has worn off, will you really use Siri in your everyday life — or will she fade into the background, an unwanted extra like Apple’s previous iPhone voice control feature? After using the 4S for more than a week, I think Siri will enter our lives in small but vital ways. Most of these are things you could do before, but that required too many cumbersome steps that Siri can easily overcome.

Here’s my shortlist of ways Siri really works for me. If you have an iPhone 4S already, how are you putting her to work? Take our poll and let us know in the comments.

1. Siri, Wake Me Up. When you’re ready to crash, the last thing you want to do is fiddle with an alarm app. It’s much faster and more satisfying to hold down the home button and say “Wake me up at 7:15.” This also works well for power naps — “Wake me in 40 minutes.” — or the weekend, when you don’t have a specific appointment but don’t want to oversleep: “Wake me in eight hours.”

2. Siri, Find Coffee. Likewise, typing on a small screen is something you just don’t want to do when you’re caffeine-deprived, especially in a strange town. For more complex restaurant requests later in the day, you’ll probably want to go straight to the Yelp app — but if you just need a java jolt to get started, she can point you at the nearest coffee place. Chances are it’s a Starbucks.

3. Siri, Do You Know The Way To San Jose? Here’s another area where typing takes too damn long (and if you’re doing it on the road, where most of us need directions on the go, typing can kill.) Siri is an effective and reliable shortcut to Google Maps directions. She’d be a lot more effective if she offered to read the directions out ahead of each turn; that would give GPS device manufacturers like TomTom a run for their money. But Siri hasn’t steered me wrong on any city name I’ve tried yet. And yes, putting your question in the form of a song title works too.

4. Siri, Play A Random Song. I’m pretty fastidious about organizing my tunes; setting up a new “most wanted” playlist every month is only the beginning of it. I thought nothing could ever stop me from scrolling through them to choose the playlist I wanted — but Siri did. What’s more, instructions that match my spur-of-the-moment musical tastes — like “Siri, play some Queen” — have come in very handy, especially on my morning run.

5. Siri, Send A Text. Here’s where Siri’s lift-to-talk feature comes in handy. No more texting and walking! Just turn the phone on, put it to your ear and say “Siri, text my wife and let her know I’m going to be late.” No muss, no fuss, and anyone walking past will simply think you’re talking to your personal assistant. Which, of course, you are.

6. Siri, Will It Rain Today? Apple made a big deal of Siri’s weather prediction capabilities, so it’s no surprise that she understands all manner of meteorological questions. But I never expected to be asking so many of them as I stand and stare at my closet, hat rack and umbrella stand.

7. Siri, Remind Me To Do This Every Day. Here’s another area where I had my system all thought out — a to-do app called Things combined with Google Calendar. Siri hasn’t replaced this system, but she has lessened my need to put stuff in it. Best of all, she can set repeating items with ease: try “Siri, remind me to brush my teeth at 10pm every night.” That may sound like micromanaging, by the way, but it’s the most effective way I’ve found to get me to wind down at a certain time.

8. Siri, Remind Me When I Come Back Here. Siri’s location-based reminders aren’t perfect — it’s hard to get her to understand location labels other than “home” or “work,” for one thing. But one location she definitely understands is “here” — your current GPS coordinates. This can be useful in all sorts of small ways. For example, the other night I walked past a beautiful house I really wanted to take a picture of during the day. A quick note to Siri, and she reminded me when I passed that way a few mornings later. Good Siri.

9. Siri, Settle Our Argument. No, Siri doesn’t know it all. But she is plugged into Wolfram Alpha, a two-year-old “computational knowledge engine” that can give you everything from the height of Mount Everest to the size of global GDP to quotes from Pulp Fiction — all in response to questions in natural language. She just might be able to give you the last word in that spirited discussion of yours faster than Google can. Besides, Google doesn’t give you the satisfaction of asking, holding the phone up, and smiling smugly.

10. Siri, Send a Tweet. Going to Twitter.com to post your update? Launching the Twitter mobile app? That’s so last month. Twitter and Siri were made for each other — you just have to do a bit of work to get them together. Follow our step-by-step instructions here.

More About: apple, iPhone 4S, siri

From the moment we tried Siri on our shiny new iPhone 4S, we knew we had to teach Siri to add tasks to Remember The Milk.

A few caffeine-fuelled days later, and we're super excited to announce that we've done just that! You can now ask Siri to remind you (e.g., "Remind me to pick up the milk"), and that task will be magically added to Remember The Milk.

Check out the demo:

Want to add tasks to Remember The Milk with Siri, too? Just follow our quick set up instructions:

The latest full-length trailer for The Muppets is now online.

It’s no secret that we’re excited about this movie. Really excited.

The film hits theaters this Thanksgiving and stars Jason Segel and Amy Adams, along with Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppet gang.

In the second trailer, Disney finally gives us insight into what the film is all about — a nice break from the parodies that Disney has peppered across the net for the last four or five months.

In an effort to save the Muppet Theater from being put out of business by an evil oil man, ultimate Muppet fans set out to reunite Kermit and the gang to stage The Greatest Muppet Telethon Ever.

Disney is smartly targeting older audiences for this film — playing up the nostalgia that many adults in their twenties and thirties have for the series and characters. The studio is also running active social media campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and various Muppet websites.

Segel co-wrote the script with Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller. Fans of Marshall know that Segel is a big Muppet fan. Flight of the Conchords co-creator James Bobin is directing the film and Conchords star Bret McKenzie acted as music supervisor.

In short, it’s a hipster dream come true. We can’t wait.

More About: disney, muppets, the muppets

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OpenBible quantifies the ups and downs of the Bible. Red is negative and black is positive.

Things start off well with creation, turn negative with Job and the patriarchs, improve again with Moses, dip with the period of the judges, recover with David, and have a mixed record (especially negative when Samaria is around) during the monarchy. The exilic period isn’t as negative as you might expect, nor the return period as positive. In the New Testament, things start off fine with Jesus, then quickly turn negative as opposition to his message grows. The story of the early church, especially in the epistles, is largely positive.

The Viralheat Sentiment Analysis API is used to assign a probability that each verse is positive or negative, and several translations are used to find a moving average.

Those who know the Bible well want to chime in on the accuracy?

[OpenBible]

"new line" - move to the next line
"all caps" - make the next word all uppercase
"all caps on/off" - turn caps lock on or off
"smiley" or "smiley face" or "smile face" - :-)
"frowny" or "frowny face" or "frown face" - :-(

Yesterday, Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs passed away, following a lengthily battle with pancreatic cancer. Today, dedications to the genius responsible for bringing us the iPhone, iPad and Mac have been hitting the Web hard and fast. Below, we’ve outlined a series of them for you to read through.

We’ll keep updating this article as more are published. In the meantime, feel free to leave your own thoughts on the Apple visionary in the comments.

Apple

If you head over to Apple’s website, the above image is displayed and visitors are presented with the following message on a special “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011″ webpage:

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

Apple also has a “rememberingsteve@apple.com” email address, to which fans can email their own personal dedication to Steve Jobs.

Google

Google has added a simple, sweet dedication to Steve Jobs on its homepage, which reads: “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011.” The dedication is linked to the above Apple webpage.

Apple’s Board of Directors

Apple’s Board of Directors issued a statement yesterday, which read:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

The statement was published at 07:34 p.m. EDT.

Steve’s family

Following the above statement, Steve Jobs’ family also published their own statement:

Steve died peacefully today surrounded by his family.

In his public life, Steve was known as a visionary; in his private life, he cherished his family. We are thankful to the many people who have shared their wishes and prayers during the last year of Steve’s illness; a website will be provided for those who wish to offer tributes and memories.

We are grateful for the support and kindness of those who share our feelings for Steve. We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief.

It’s easy to forget that the man behind Apple was clearly also a loving father and husband, and our thoughts are with Steve Jobs’ family.

Tim Cook

Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, published the following tribute to his former boss:

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Laurene and his children during this difficult time.

President Barack Obama

President Obama, who owns an iPad and who has met with Steve Jobs before, published the following tribute, in which he notes that “the world has lost a visionary.” It reads:

Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.

The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.

Below, we have included more tributes to Steve Jobs that have been circulating online.

Eric Schmidt

Steve Jobs is the most successful CEO in the U.S. of the last 25 years. He uniquely combined an artists touch and an engineers vision to build an extraordinary company… one of the greatest American leaders in history.

Bill Gates

I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work.

Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.

The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.

Mark Zuckerberg

Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.

Bob Iger (Disney President)

Steve Jobs was a great friend as well as a trusted advisor. His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed, and the culture he defined. Steve was such an “original,” with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era. Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started. With his passing the world has lost a rare original, Disney has lost a member of our family, and I have lost a great friend. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Laurene and his children during this difficult time.

Michael Dell (Dell Founder)

Today the world lost a visionary leader, the technology industry lost an iconic legend and I lost a friend and fellow founder. The legacy of Steve Jobs will be remembered for generations to come. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and to the Apple team.

Rupert Murdoch

Today, we lost one of the most influential thinkers, creators and entrepreneurs of all time. Steve Jobs was simply the greatest CEO of his generation. While I am deeply saddened by his passing, I’m reminded of the stunning impact he had in revolutionizing the way people consume media and entertainment. My heart goes out to his family and to everyone who had the opportunity to work beside him in bringing his many visions to life.

Also, don’t forget to look up to the very top of our website – I assure you, every word is true.

Journalists from around the Web have been publishing obituaries.

First, there’s John Markoff’s obituary from The New York Times. There’s also a piece in Time written by Harry McCracken, and another article that appeared in Wired.

Walt Mossberg, of All Things Digital, has also written a piece on his relationship with Steve Jobs.

Also, if you remember that lost iPhone 4 prototype (which Gizmodo got its paws on), you may be interested in reading Brian Lam’s account of the escapade, and his dealings with Steve Jobs before, throughout and after the lost-iPhone 4-gate.

Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo also put together a nice “Think Different” video, which is dedicated to Steve.

Furthermore, our friend Alex Heath published a piece for Cult of Mac yesterday regarding a reserved seat at the iPhone event, right at the very front of Apple’s Town Hall auditorium. It’s assumed that the reserved seat was for Steve Jobs.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball talks about Steve’s grass-stained trainers, which he wore to his last keynote, and how he believes they are evidence of limited time acknowledged.

Also, be sure to read through the transcript of this super-interesting interview with Steve Jobs, which took place back when he was with NeXT Computer. In the interview, he talks about his childhood and about the upcoming release of a little computer animated picture called “Toy Story.”

There have also been a variety of tributes made in Apple Stores across the world (and even at Apple’s HQ, in Cupertino), and several images and videos of Steve Jobs have also been circulating online. In particular, Apple’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store has become a memorial site for Steve Jobs, as Apple Insider notes.

[Thanks to MacRumors]

Related Posts

• Buy Instapaper Now – In Steve’s Memory
• Steve Jobs Biography Release Date Brought Forward To October 24
• Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs Passes Away At 56
• All Things D: Apple To Hold October 4 Event On Apple Campus
• Tim Cook Also Responds To Emails

In 1937, mathematician Lothar Collatz proposed that given the following algorithm, you will always end at the number 1:

1. Take any natural number, n.
2. If n is even, divide it by 2.
3. Otherwise, n is odd. Multiply it by 3 and add 1.
4. Repeat indefinitely.

Developer Jason Davies puts it into reverse and shows all the numbers that fall within an orbit length of 18 or less. Press play, and watch the graph grow. Mostly a fun animation for nerds like me.

[Collatz Graph]

Google Maps adds 3D bird's eye route previews for high-flying navigators originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

PressPausePlay, an award-winning documentary about our new digital culture, premiered at SXSW earlier this year. It is playing at film festivals and you can buy it on iTunes, Amazon, and other digital pay sites. If you don’t want to pay for it, you can now download it via a torrent for free. This free option was essential to the filmmakers. As Seth Godin says in the film, ideas that are free spread faster.

The movie examines the impact of today’s technology advances on our culture and the digital artists, musicians, and filmmakers who create it. In the film, Godin says “there has never been a better time to be an artist.” Taking a completely different view, technology pessimist, Andrew Keen, host of TechCrunch TV’s “Keen On“, says “we may well be on the verge of a new dark age… where the creative world is destroyed.”

Watching parts of the movie, I thought I was watching an Apple promotional video, showing the power of what a Mac can do. The music and videos that can be produced on computers, almost exclusively Apple computers in this film, is simply amazing. As the musician Moby says, because of software, “now any kid … in about 5 minutes can do what took 6 months or years, 20 years ago.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s any good. See Rebecca Black. Moby adds “If everyone is a musician and everyone is making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered with mediocracy.”

As the filmmakers say, “the digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunities.” But, Keen questions whether a young Hitchcock or Scorsese would make it today, as they “slap up their early stuff on Facebook, on YouTube, it would get lost in the ocean of garbage.”

The movie also addresses the troubling dichotomy that the same technology artists use to create their work also allows for easy pirating and destroys existing business models. The documentary doesn’t provide any easy answers, but it raises important questions about the impact to our culture.

You can find the free download options at presspauseplay.com, including an interactive Adobe Air version with deleted scenes and additional and longer interview clips. For the standard downloads, you get a .torrent file and use a free software like BitTorrent to get the movie file. So far, there have been 4,000 downloads.

Why have both a free version (with even more interactive content) and paid version at the same time, with links just inches away from each other? When the filmmakers signed their distribution deal, they say it was always their intention to eventually give the film away for free online. The goal was never to make money, but instead make a film people would share and think about.

Andrew Keen was interviewed for the film, but he got to turn the cameras around on the filmmakers in Austin. Here’s the interview Keen did with the Swedish co-directors David Dworsky and Victor Kohler, at SXSW:

Here’s a movie trailer:

Editor’s note: Facebook timelines are only the beginning. In this guest post, Jim Pitkow and Adrian Aoun sketch out what timelines could look like if they applied to everything. Auon is the CEO of stealth startup Wavii, which is working on a subset of the problems outlined below, and Pitkow is an advisor.

Last week Facebook made history. After collecting data about its users for years, Facebook turned to designer Nicholas Felton who decided it was time to take that data to the next level and visualize it — and the Timeline was born. But what about what’s going on with the rest of the world, and not just my friends… why doesn’t Facebook have timelines for that?

We’ll answer that in a minute, but first, why does it even matter?  For the same reason you are reading this article, people like to stay up to date on a wide spectrum of information—social, topical, local, national, global—and we all hate to miss an important new story. With information so readily accessible we feel obligated to process more information than ever before. Facebook is pioneering the way we get information about our friends, but unfortunately, the tools for the rest of the world’s news haven’t yet caught up.

But we’re not telling you anything you don’t already know.  The billion-dollar question is what to do about it?  We believe that information consumption today is poised for an upheaval—the technology is evolving to match our behavior. So how will this transformation occur?

Battling Information Overload

What was once a simple exercise of scanning one or two newspapers a day for interesting headlines and articles has escalated into repetitive scans throughout the day of multiple online news sources (Facebook feed, tweets, RSS feeds, online newspapers and blogs). And in many cases, different sources merely repeat the same story over and over again, making the apparent abundance of options misleading. So while more choice is often better, here it is simply overloading us.

For example, when Kate Middleton married Prince William, you could read a thousand articles about it. Oddly enough, reading traditional print media is actually more efficient than this, because the story is mentioned only once per paper. In the current state of “overload”, you see the same article tweeted, shared on Facebook, pushed to your RSS feed, etc. And in many cases publishers bend to the perverse incentive of sensationalized headlines to differentiate their cookie-cutter content and drive more clicks. This makes it difficult to avoid bias and understand what’s actually happening, or even know if you’ve already read the story before clicking the headline: e.g., Kate Middleton gets coat of arms, It’s Official, Their Perfect Day.

Studies show that people increasingly just scan headlines to keep up to date, and only occasionally read articles to get more depth. They prefer the atomization of content — smaller bites of useful information. If we decompose today’s headlines and articles to see “What’s Happening?” we get down to the building blocks — the events, details, opinions, interactions, analysis, context, and discussions that matter. This decomposition organizes everything for faster consumption and unparalleled visualizations and analysis. Thus, we believe that news will be more easily consumed via timelines arranged by actors and verbs. For example:

In this case, the headline was distilled down to just the event, categorizing what’s happening into the actors (i.e., Prince William, Kate Middleton) and the verbs (i.e., married), displayed with a universal icon.

But wait, there’s more… the event is merely an anchor. You can use it to kick-start social discussion, discover related events, and even organize the details (i.e., where was the wedding, who attended, etc.). Over time, all of this information leads to engaging timelines for just about anything you pay attention to in the world.

Implementing the Revolution

Timelines fundamentally change the nature of information consumption by taking it to next level of efficiency. Facebook is pioneering this revolution in our everyday lives by automatically structuring the events of “What’s Happening?” for many types of status updates.

Wouldn’t it be great if the rest of the world’s events were just as easy to scan as the events pertaining to your friends?

So why can Facebook do this, and the rest of the world can’t? Simple — users. Every feed item on Facebook is generated by users, whether they realize it or not. Users definitely post their thoughts, locations, etc., but they don’t often write, “I broke up with my boyfriend.” Instead, Facebook elegantly reports this changed profile setting as an update on their feed. Facebook has this data for your friends, but they don’t have it for all the celebrities you care about, the movies, cities, sports teams, politicians, products, and companies.

Many startups have tried in the past to get this data via natural language processing (NLP) or crowdsourcing. Whether it was because the technology wasn’t ready or the approaches weren’t pragmatic, nobody has been able to realize the vision to date. Fortunately, using big data machine learning approaches coupled with today’s news and discussion around the web, the technology is on the cusp of being realized.

What does it all mean?

Facebook’s feed keeps you returning daily to find out what’s new, start up a conversation, give your opinion, and more. You would benefit just as much from this being applied to the rest of the web, so let’s do it.

But what happens to everyone else when this revolution occurs?  Do newspapers die tomorrow? Do services like Flipboard or Google News become irrelevant? Absolutely not. Users will always want variety of sources and interfaces to understand the world around them. Instead of focusing on aggregating and consuming individual articles, these algorithms will create a new personalization layer that weaves together the context and elements of each event. Being able to rapidly understand the world’s news and its context changes the game… aside from merely creating opportunities for existing players, new entrants will analyze the data for prediction, forecasting, and the like.

Facebook is reordering your timeline, but what about the world’s timelines?

Being Elmo is a documentary about the puppeteer who performs Sesame Street's Elmo. It looks fantastic.

(via unlikely words)