Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 100mm f2.8 @ 100mm / f11
Lighting: Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with White Backdrop

View on Flickr

Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 24 – 70mm f2.8 L @ 62mm / f8
Lighting: Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with White Backdrop

View on Flickr

The profile photos of all your friends are displayed near the bottom of the page, you can hover over each one to see their ID and go to their profile.

Myfbid.com allows you to login to Facebook and will immediately show your Facebook User ID. No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up User ID’s and displays it on the page.

I would like to build the site into something even more useful for developers, so if anyone has any thoughts about the kind things can be added to ease the pain of developing on Facebook then I would love to hear about them.

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform released at f8 a few months ago.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

During his introduction Mark Zuckerberg talked about the interesting applications that he’d seen at the Facebook Hackathon the previous day, and reiterated what was said at the f8 conference, how important the Open Graph and Social Plug-ins are to enable social experiences across the web and how easy it is to implement. He also talked a bit more about the Instant Personalisation feature that has recieved so much critisism in recent weeks, explaining that the reason for it is to allow users to have a seamless and frictionless social expericence while browsing other sites than Facebook, removing the need for them to “Connect” or “Login” to Facebook in order to see a the site in a social context.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

After Zuckerberg’s keynote several high profile partners were brought on stage to discuss their success stories on the Facebook Platform, amongst them was Gustav Söderström, VP of Products from Spotify about how they used the platform to create a new generation of social music application.

Mike Vernal, Platform Engineering Manager

Mike Vernal spoke about all the new technology innovations in the Graph API and the Social Plugins, he talked about the evolution of the platform and a number of other things to help developers understand the latest offerings from Facebook.

Joanna Shields, VP of Sales and Business Development, EMEA

Joanna Sheilds has recently taken on the role of Sales and Business Development in Europe, she spoke about how important it was for Facebook to continue it’s expansion in the EU and talked about the ways they will be engaging with the developer community to help the platform grow.

Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard and Mike Vernal chatting in the Q&A

At the end Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard, Mike Vernal and Joanna Shields sat and answered questions from the room full of press and developers, amongst the topics talked about was the new “Credits” system that Facebook has been testing with a select number of partners such as Zynga and PlayFish, all they revealed was that they are working on fine tuning the payment methods to make it as frictionless as possable to end users and that they would be talking more about it in the coming months, they did say however that eventually the Credits platform will be open to all developers to use in their applications.

In response to a question about a Location API and a set of services built around a users Location Zuckerberg simply answered that they were working on their Location services but offered no timeframe for when we will begin to hear more about them.

Zuckerberg was also asked about the 5,000 friend limit on all Facebook accounts, to which he explained that it was not high on the development list since not very many people had over 5,000 friends in real life, and explained that the reason for the limit in the first place was due to people with high volumes of friends having a poor experience due of the sheer amount of friend data that needed to be processed on each page request.

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

Our application, codenamed “MiniPlay”, allows users to place themselves at the centre of the gameplay by giving them a number of short and engaging games using their friends as characters, the more games they play, the more games they unlock, and the more awards they get. Unfortunately by the end of the evening we only got about 75% of the way through the first game, but managed to create a framework to allow us to easily add games to the application. Whilst we were hacking away Zuckerberg came around to have a chat about what we were doing and wanted to know what we thought of the platform in general, and where they could improve.

At the end of the Hackathon we all had to present the application to Mark Zuckerberg, I drew the short straw to demo the application in front of the Facebook Executives and a room of about 60 other developers, it was quite a surreal experience having the attention of one of the industries most influential thinkers for a few minutes.

The best 3 applications would get a chance to demo their apps on stage at the Developer Garage the next day, but unfortunately, as much as Mark seemed to be really into social gaming, we didn’t make it into the top 3.

Even though our application didn’t get into the top 3 it was a great experience and gave us all some ideas about how to leverage the Graph to build better, and more social applications.

MiniPlay game selection screen

Buddy Lineup Game

The Team Miniclip Room

Ben being interviewed by the resident Developer Garage film crew

Mark Zuckerberg hanging around for a chat before the presentations

Simon and Ben relaxing before the final demo

There has been lots of hubbub about Facebook’s new OpenGraph protocol over the last few weeks, and as one might expect, the privacy advocates jumped on Facebook as soon as it was announced. However from a developers perspective, the OpenGraph API is great (despite the lack of documentation).

They have a point however, the privacy settings in Facebook are very confusing and convoluted, if you don’t know where to look or what to look for it is almost impossible to know what data is being shared, let alone lock it down. The average user wouldn’t know where to start, putting all the settings on one page would be a step in the right direction, instead of scattering them all around the place.

And of course, the issue of the “default” is a very important one, people that didn’t change the default settings should never have been made public simply due to lack of knowledge. An open profile should be opt in, not opt out.

One of the key things that many articles and comments I’ve seen about the new protocol is that the “Instant Personalisation” feature (which is on by default) is the worst thing since the last bad thing Facebook did. What many of them forget to mention is that these sites can only access your public information – that is, the information that is set to “Everyone” in your Facebook Privacy Settings.

Recommendations to turn off the Instant Personalisation feature doesn’t really solve the wider issue – turn it off and you stop a handful of sites from accessing your information, but leave millions of other applications and sites to access the same information freely, or put another way you’re stopping the fountain but leaving the waterfall.

But as worrying as the privacy concerns are – it pales in comparison to stories like the one posted on AllFacebook today titled Facebook Knows That Your Relationship Will End In A Week. The data described in the article wasn’t sourced from the OpenGraph API, nor is it anything to do with external developers or companies – it is from the data that Facebook collects internally.

“As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.” The Facebook Effect, Kirkpatrick.

The bigger discussion here is whether people should be posting so much personal information on Facebook in the first place, sure it’s good to chat to your friends, share photos, but do you really need to put your home address? Phone number? And if you do, are you really that worried about your privacy? With the level of data warehousing and data mining described in the article, the issue of public vs private isn’t just about what the API allows developers to do, it’s also about what the terms and conditions say Facebook are allowed to do and as more and more people post ever increasing amounts of personal information the less privacy there will be, But no one is being forced to join or share the information, one of the main problems is telling users when to stop sharing.

As part of that research I decided to fill a void in my development time – I’m forever trying to find the Facebook User ID of the user I am currently logged in as – and it doesn’t help when you have 10+ testing accounts, plus my own personal account.

So I threw together this:

Myfbid.com allows you to login (Using the Facebook OpenGraph API) and it will immediately show you your current Facebook User ID, you can logout and login again with a different account and it will do the same for that one.

No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up your User ID and shows it on the page.

Over time I will add some more features, the ability to see your Friends User ID’s perhaps and some other cool things that will help developers.

Hope some people find it useful!

After an intense battle in the first race the Results were as follows:

1st: Tommy Hill (Worx Crescent Suzuki)
2nd: Ryuichi Kiyonari (HM Plant Honda)
3rd: James Ellison (Swan Honda)

Hill said in an interview after his opening Win: “That was a hard race, especially towards the end as there were a lot of backmarkers and I nearly lost my head as I didn’t want to lose the lead. I have to admit I started to panic as I thought it could go wrong, but on the last lap I knew that was it. I came across the line and the team were celebrating so I am really peaking now. I knew we needed to get some good points in the bag as it is a long season but everything has been fantastic and I can’t wait for race two now to see if we can do the double.”

The Second race of the day was equally as action packed with the final results being:

1st: Josh Brookes (HM Plant Honda)
2nd: James Ellison (Swan Honda)
3rd: Tommy Hill (Worx Crescent Suzuki)

After the second and final race of the day Tommy Hill said: “That second race was great, hats off to James as he rode so well in that one and although I wanted to make a pass I just couldn’t. The Indy circuit is so hectic that sometimes you really have to make ‘do or die’ moves, so to take a second place is good for me and good for the Worx Crescent Suzuki team. Of course I wanted to beat James, but it wasn’t to be today but I am over the moon with two podiums. It is definitely the result we wanted; to come away from my home round at Brands Hatch leading the championship.

And of course, every good Motorsport event wouldn’t be the same without the Grid Girls!

To see the rest of the Photos that I took, check out my BSB Super Bikes – Brands Hatch Photoset

This was the first time I have ever been to anything like London Fashion Weekend, but this was too good an opportunity to miss! And this is why:

Over the last few years I’ve gone to quite a lot of indoor events at quite a few venues and nearly all of them have one thing in common: VERY poor lighting and VERY poor when it comes to giving photographers the opportunity & access to get good shots. Usually there are no photographer tickets allowing you to get a bit closer, no way to get a press-pass unless you’re there working for a specific publication, and there’s usually insufficient lighting, leaving no other option but to go there as a normal person and hope for the best.

From the Candy Rock Range

However, the London Fashion Weekend had it ALL right! First of all they offered a special Photographer ticket that allowed you to get into the photographers box right at the end of the catwalk, and in my case – smack down the middle of the catwalk!

From the Vintage Glamour Range

Secondly, the lighting was pretty amazing, coming from sparsely lit rooms to a full blown professional catwalk set-up was an extremely nice change – and it certainly shows in the photos, no more high ISO to compensate for dim lights, no more need to use a flash, just bright, nicely lit photos.

From the Candy Rock Range

Usually I’m not interested in Fashion – it’s not something that does anything for me, but I thought it would give me some practice shooting something different, after all, there’s only so many Motorshows & Motorsport events you can go to without getting bored of the same subject matter, and I really am glad that I took the opportunity.

Mecia Simson, winner of Britain’s Next Top Model 2009, in an outfit from Betty Jackon’s collection

From the Swallows & Amazons Range

All in all I would like to congratulate the organisers of the London Fashion Weekend for doing such a great job to accommodate photographers, If only more event organisers would put on such a good event for photographers, after all they want the publicity as much as anything. Good work!

You can see all of the photos in my London Fashion Weekend Photoset

My understanding of previous years was there was a parade with all sorts of dragons and other parade based things, however for some reason this year this wasn’t the case – despite many sites mentioning that there would be. It was disappointing that one didn’t happen this year, unless your into looking around market stalls or standing in front of a stage watching dancers there wasn’t really much else to do.

The crowds of people overlooking the stage

Met Police Balloons

A shop sign in China Town

Another Shop sign in China Town

Fireworks in Leicester Square

Fireworks in Leicester Square