Carrot Creative Blog

New data has come to light that pins the success of Facebook’s new visual overhaul with a dismal 20% approval rating. According to Mark Zuckerberg, “Around 20% of our users have now migrated to the new platform and it has been received well after people get used to it.” ¹

As with other novel features on Facebook the redesign has clearly been met with massive opposition. Now the real question is, what should Facebook do? That’s easy, think of the user.

The latest in a “must have” service, and very much like the internets themselves, I cannot believe I existed two days ago without this. Maybe we didn’t exist, maybe what we perceive as a lifetime was really some facade and misperception of reality controlled by advanced machines bent on human enslavement…. but I digress- that’s a post for another day.

Facebook’s biggest event of the year is now history, but all the exciting changes made to the Facebook platform aren’t the only thing the >carrotCrew are buzzing about. We’re thrilled to announce that Challenge, a project lead by one of our good friends, has received a fbFund grant; the nerd equivalent of an Emmy.

Congrats to Blake Burris and the rest of the GoalCamp team on a job well done, and much continued success making the social web more useful. We look forward to helping them in their continued success as masters of the Facebook platform.

Some of the folks in the office last week were playing around on Facebook on Flock browsers when we discovered that the site was using SSL. Our own Mike Germano broke the news on Twitter, and this was followed by a great write-up by Nick O’Niell on the AllFacebook blog. We all figured that Facebook was getting ready to launch a new payment platform.

The news was so big that once it was published on AllFacebook, TechCrunch featured the story on their blog. The interesting thing about it is that you can see (if you clicked the previous link) that the story was taken down only hours after it was posted.

I will be attending the Numenta HTM Workshop in Palo Alto, CA this June! The workshop explores Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) and the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC). Not only will I be soaking up the newest developments on HTM and NuPIC, soaking up the summer Cali sun, but I have also been asked to discuss “Neuro Computation in the Cloud” during the Lightning Talks on June 24 at the workshop. This is a result of the 2nd place finish Christopher Laan and I received from this year’s Numenta Game Challenge.

I attended the Google Appengine Hackathon yesterday and was quite impressed with appengine as a platform for developing web applications.  Some of the benefits our engineering crew will appreciate are: python is much lovelier than php, the development environment is quite simple, and deployment is a breeze.  Say goodbye to Apache.

Benefits that clients will enjoy? Increased server reliability and easier scalability.

If you’re interested in working on a bunch of projects built on appengine, twitter @kortina.  We’re always looking to meet new engineers and have lots of work to do in the coming weeks.