If you weren’t lucky enough to be there in person, Newspepper have released the video of my presentation at the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage London.

Unfortunately the video is almost useless unless you can see the slides that I am presenting, so here they are again:

Again, I would love to know what you thought of it, so please let me know!

Last night I spoke as a guest speaker at the Facebook Developer Garage in London, the topic of my talk was how we at Miniclip have integrated the Facebook Platform to help engage our 20,000,000 registered users while playing our games. I also took the time to post a few problems that we have encountered while developing on the platform and the things we have done to overcome them.

Slides from the presentation can be seen below….Enjoy!

I would love to know what you thought about the presentation so please let me know!

Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of senior Facebook Executives attended a special edition of the London Facebook Developer Garage on Monday.

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.

In a previous post titled Recovering your Memory Card I discussed some of the steps you can take to stop your cameras Memory Card failure from being too much of an issue.

No matter how hard you try there is still going to be a chance that at some point a card will fail and you will have to try and recover the photos on it. Thankfully in most cases, this is possible. I won’t go into the boring and technical details but because of the way hard drives and memory cards store data, even if you delete a file, you can recover it until something else is stored in its place. Whenever I’ve had to recover a failed card (when you’re the family & friends tech support guy it’s more often than you’d think) I’ve found one tool that has so far never let me down – PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is a command line utility that allows you to recover files from all types of memory cards from SD and XD cards to CompactFlash, it can do them all, and the best thing is – it’s free!

Step by Step

To start off, you will need to download the tool from the downloads page of their site. It’s a small utility so it should only take a minute or so to download. Once downloaded, install the application, insert your memory card and launch the PhotoRec application. The exact steps will vary depending on a number of things, but these are the options that have so far always worked for me.

1. Select the corrupt card from the list, this usually is the smallest sized drive in the list.
2. When asked to select a Partition, select Intel/PC Partition
3. When asked which partition you want to recover, select No Partition (Whole Card).
4. When asked which file system, select Other – FAT/NTFS/HFS+/ReiserFS
5. When asked what space you want to be analysed, select Whole
6. You will then need to specify a place for the recovered images to be copied to before the recovery process is started.

Once it has completed scanning the card you will see this:

Depending on the size of card recovery can take quite a few minutes, once done, you can navigate to the folder you specified in the previous step and see what photos were recovered.

Hopefully all being well this will have recovered all of the photos that you lost!

With so many of us now using “Cloud” services to share and store data, one of the key things to remember is that just because it’s in the Cloud, it’s not always guaranteed to be safe. I’m not talking about the security implications of using cloud services as much as I am the possibility of the service disappearing or a massive data loss down the line that makes it almost impossible to get your data back – something that is even more important since the T-Mobile / Microsoft Sidekick fiasco a while back.

When using services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter it can be a nightmare to get to your data, you may find individual applications that do it, but it can be a laborious task.

This is where Backupify comes in, Backupify is an easy way to backup all the popular cloud services in one place using the API’s provided by each service, simply sign up, configure the backups and Backupify will do the rest for you – all from one central location.

I was first introduced to Backupify on Net@Night where the founder Robert May was interviewed. After listening, I signed up for an account and set it up to backup Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Blog and Gmail account, the process was surprisingly easy, some of the services require you to login and authorise the Backupify service, others require you to enter your user name and password, but I had it all set-up within about 5 minutes.

The best part about Backupify is that until the 31st January 2010 you can sign up for a FREE account, after this time there will still be a free account but it will have limitations unless you pay for a premium account. Personally I recommend signing up now and setting it up – just in case!

It’s a story I hear quite often from all sorts of different people; One day they were out happily taking photos, then suddenly, out of the blue their memory card fails.

Of course this isn’t something that happens all the time, but when it does it’s usually at the most inappropriate of times, either you still need the card to work so you can take more photos or the ones that are already on it are important and you can’t take them again – this goes for the casual photographer as much as it does the hobbyist / professional.

To some people the idea of trying to limit the impact a card failure has is an alien concept, they just expect things to work forever, but the more technically aware know that this is never the case, so the best thing to do is try to stop or reduce it from being a big problem.

Carry a Spare

It may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people only carry around 1 card, or perhaps even more worryingly, only own one card.

Having a second (or third) card will present you with an option if your first card fails during a crucial moment - you just swap out the failed one and replace with the secondary one – leaving the data on the first in a better position to be recovered and allowing you to carry on shooting.

Small but many

With the cost of memory cards so low these days it can be tempting to buy the biggest card you can get, and while this is good for situations where you will be taking a lot of photos – it’s not very good if it fails since all your photos are going to be lost.

The solution is to buy multiple, smaller cards. Yes this does mean that you will have to change them more regularly, but it means that if one goes bad, you haven’t lost all your photos.

Backup on-the-go

Although not exactly an exciting task – it does pay to backup your photos as you go.

You can do this using a Laptop / Netbook, or even using a dedicated device, each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

A Laptop / Netbook will allow you to see the photos that you have taken on a nice display as well as being able to back up the photos, but is less convenient, it takes time to boot up and can have limited battery life – which once depleted can be difficult to recharge on the road, not to mention having to carry it around all the time.

A dedicated device such as the Epson P-3000 Multimedia Storage Viewer or the Nexto-eXtreme (and there’s many more) will allow you to plug in the memory card and copy the photos onto its internal hard drive. Some of these devices come with a small screen to view the photos on but it’s going to be no way near as good as viewing them on a laptop for example. If you don’t really care about reviewing them at this stage then this is probably the type of device to get, and it’s going to fit into your camera bag better than a laptop.

Out with the old

Memory cards don’t last forever, and the older they are the more chance there is of them failing. If you have had a card for a few years and used it quite a lot, then maybe think about replacing it. Or maybe even get a new one and use the original as your backup.

If all else fails…

Not really a mitigating step – more of a last ditch attempt to salvage the wreckage is using a recovery tool such as PhotoRec to recover the photos on the failed card – it’s not guaranteed to work all the time but does present you with a final option.