Facebook just announced a new feature that probably should have been obvious for a long time: the ability to “like” comments that people post on Newsfeed items. Users were always able to signal text-free approval of shared items, but now they will be able to offer quick support for subsequent parts of the conversations they see as well. This isn’t threaded comments and it’s not an unlike button – there are many other things that Facebook could do for commenting – but it’s a smart little move that users will find easy to understand and that could lead to some interesting new capabilities for developers. Sponsor Imagine the addition of “people whose comments you liked” as a metric by which to measure future content for prioritization or other analysis. There’s no indication that this stream of liked comments will be available to developers today (no update has been posted yet to the developers blog) but it seems safe to assume that liking peoples’ comments in a thread will at least influence the determination of who is displayed in a user’s all-important News Feed of high-priority contacts. Any time a social interaction can be instrumented – turned into data and made measurable – that opens up new opportunities for cross referencing it with other data points, for illuminating more connections between people. Imagine being able to see who from your high school gets the most comments liked, or to see a stream of books liked by people whose comments you liked more than once. There are many possibilities. The fact that this data point is so easy for users to contribute to and understand makes it all the more a win. Facebook’s support for the Activity Streams protocol for social activity data, including the proposed standardized way to mark up ” likes ,” bodes well for the larger ecosystem that would analyze these activities across other websites. Facebook says that few developers are using its Activity Streams feed today, but that it hopes that will change with the introduction of a JSON version. The new Likes on comments will roll out over the next few days and will be subject to the same privacy settings as Likes on shared items. Discuss

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OCWSearch , the search engine for OpenCourseWare classes, reached a milestone today, now indexing the OpenCourseWare content from ten major universities: the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, MIT, Notre Dame, The Open University UK, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, Delft University of Technology, University of Massachusets Boston, the University of Tokyo, and Yale University. These universities all offer courses online for free, under the OpenCourseWare Initiative . Sponsor OCWSearch also released an API today. The API provides access to the full OCWSearch index, including course name, instructor name, and course description. Launched in late April, OCWSearch indexes not only course titles, but course content as well – now boasting information on approximately 2600 course offerings. The search engine began as founder Pierre Far’s personal project, created in response to some of the difficulties he experienced trying to find accurate information about online statistics courses. But as it’s a personal project, Far admits he has limited time to invest in the development of the project. And so, according to Far, “The API is a way for other programs to access the OCWSearch index. The objective of this API is to help spread the use of OpenCourseWare by enabling other developers to integrate OpenCourseWare searching capability into their apps.” Far hopes that the API will allow other developers to create mobile and web apps using the information at OCWSearch and take advantage of what he describes as the “big opportunity in open education.” Discuss

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Have you ever walked the streets of a historic city such as Boston or New York and recognized famous buildings from old photographs or movies? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to view those various locations through the eyes of the past? History fans undoubtedly have considered this, and now thanks to an iPhone app from the Museum of London , looking into the past has never been easier – at least not in London. Sponsor Using augmented reality, the museum’s app, named Streetmuseum , contextually places old and historic photographs around London in 3D space. With the app in hand, people walking the streets of London can now view these photos in a live AR view from the perspective at which they were taken. “Hundreds of images from the Museum of London’s extensive collections showcase both everyday and momentous occasions in London’s history, from the Great Fire of 1666 to the swinging sixties,” says the app’s homepage . This fun and education application is a great example of augmented reality being used in a practical and useful manner. Rather than simple pointing out historic locales around the city, the integration of historic photos into the live AR view is both engaging and entertaining. The app also works as city-wide mobile marketing for the Museum of London, which encourages users to continue the journey at the museum’s galleries. The app was developed for the museum by brothers and sisters – a London-based creative agency with an impressive resume. Past clients include Adidas , National Geographic , Discovery Channel and Nintendo . AR enthusiasts like myself with a historic itch to scratch can only hope the developers partner with more museums worldwide to create additional compelling applications. Discuss

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Although the popularity of games like Farmville has caused social gaming to be associated primarily with Facebook , UK gaming startup Failbetter Games demonstrates that Twitter can also be a viable platform for game developers. In early April, investor Fred Wilson wrote on his blog that Twitter was at an ” inflection point ,” and pointed to the potential for “killer apps” to emerge in several areas, including social gaming. Dan Porter, CEO of the gaming site www.omgpop.com responded in an article in Business Insider, arguing that “Twitter is not (yet) a Game Platform.” Sponsor Failbetter Games proves otherwise, recently winning the Escapist Magazine ’s award for Best Browser Game of 2009 for their game Echo Bazaar . Echo Bazaar: The Game While some people are highly critical of social games, arguing that they don’t really contain much “gameplay” at all, Echo Bazaar takes that click-then-wait-then-click grind and transforms it into something very entertaining and compelling via the game’s complex storytelling. Echo Bazaar takes place in a post-apocalyptic Victorian (Fallen) London. Your character can develop major stats like Persuasiveness and Watchfulness, alongside attributes like Scandal and Nightmares. You get 10 “actions” at a time (these refill over the course of the day), and these actions that move you through the story. And it’s quite a story – an experiment according to the developers, in storytelling and coding. As artist and content developer Paul Arendt notes in a blog post , ” it’s fair to say that the majority of RPG browser games run on this simple hierarchical system: do a mission, succeed, do another mission, succeed, and so on. There’s little in the way of branching narratives for the player to follow, less still in the way of flavour. ” Instead, Echo Bazaar embraces a “coalescent narrative structure,” a phrase that makes more sense to the non-literary minded, perhaps – until you see their pretty awesome flowcharts. These charts point to the elaborate series of repercussions that might occur with any particular choice made in the game. The content of Echo Bazaar is impressive, and while the game has been described as “mostly beige, mostly text,” undoubtedly the artwork and design adds to the game’s steampunk atmosphere and appeal. Echo Bazaar on Twitter: The Platform In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Failbetter Games “Chief Narrative Officer” Alexis Kennedy explained how the startup has utilized Twitter and talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter as a platform of gaming. According to Kennedy, the advantages of Twitter as a game platform involve the ease of authentication and messaging (both between developers and players and as players themselves spread word of the game via Twitter). Although the company did have some problems last week with the Twitter API, the advantages “massively outweigh” the disadvantages, says Kennedy, “in viral growth alone.” Currently the game utilizes the hashtag #ebz to designate game-related tweets, and Kennedy says that the company will likely implement annotations, a feature announced at Chirp , to the gaming experience. Kennedy says he can imagine annotations allowing game-related tweets to become both more conversational and more instrumental to the gaming experience – “an extra layer of gameplay on top” – but notes that much is still speculative. Unlike other social games that are often accused of “spamming” social networks and news feeds, Kennedy contends that Failbetter Games are “polite” and contends this is key to their viral growth. “We are gentle in the inducements we offer to encourage people to tweet,” says Kennedy. “We’re scrupulous about not abusing our access to the Twitter account, and we allow players to edit the tweets” they send in relationship to the game. Failbetter Games: The Startup Failbetter Games is a self-financed startup that runs very lean, with a core team of Kennedy, Arendt, and Richard Johnson, as well as a handful of freelance writers. Echo Bazaar is still in beta and is a “research project” for the company’s next game Prisoner’s Honey. Although other developers have started working on gaming projects using Twitter as their platform, most recently the “trading card” game TweetTrumps , Failbetter Games is clearly leading the way for both Twitter and RPG gameplay. But with the potential for Twitter as a gaming platform, there does appear to be plenty of room for other startups. Discuss

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If you thought a puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting was bad, wait until you try out the next step – reality. XMG Studios , a gaming company that won a “Best App Ever” award for its last augmented reality game Pandemica , released yesterday its next entry into the AR gaming field, Jigsaw Live . Sponsor For the jigsaw puzzle addict, Jigsaw Live seems like the perfect solution – an puzzle with an ever-changing image. The app is for the iPhone 3GS and uses the phone’s video camera capabilities to create the puzzle’s canvas. While puzzles are certainly nothing groundbreaking, it is interesting to see live video scrambled and made into manipulatable bits on the iPhone’s touch screen. The company writes about this technology in its blog: For Jigsaw Live the development team extracted raw image data from the iPhone’s camera and spliced the live video feed into multiple channels – one per puzzle piece. To accomplish this at a real-time frame rate, the developers utilized the programmable graphics pipeline with both vertex and fragment shaders. This off-loaded many intensive mathematical operations to the GPU and freed up processing cycles for additional features. Notably, they implemented real-time lighting (with a bump-mapped bevel), a platfom independent input system, and a scene graph to organize and manage relationships between objects. These elements will be incorporated into XMG’s AR Engine for use in future games and applications. As with most things AR, we are obviously at a beginning point. We don’t see puzzles doing anything earth-shattering to technology as we know it, but the ability to work with live video in this way could be used in many other ways. That might be the part we’re most excited about – rather than simply overlaying a game on top of reality, having the visual of reality actually be altered as part of a game. The app, shown in the video below, can be bought in the App Store for $2.99. Discuss

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