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Klout logoI’ve recently succumbed to peer pressure and registered myself in the vanity game called Klout.
What it does is basically tell you how “influential” you are across several different social networking channels (mainly Twitter and Facebook) and how far your “reach” is.

I have to admit, it is kind of fun to see your own scores progress over the weeks. I couldn’t say if this is actually a deterministic way to tell if somebody is a person you should listen to (at least for the topics he’s listed as influencer on Klout), or if this is just another way beyond follower-/friends-counts to stroke ones ego, but it provides some nice insights about the topics you converse about online.

Klout features two more interesting things I’d like to point out:

  • Topics: Pages about different topics, who talks about them and who are the top influencers in that field.
  • Perks: Depending on your score, you can get gifts or discounts from numerous companies around the world. Now that’s what I call motivation to communicate online 🙂

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Facebook has released their new “Send” button that lets you share content all over the web with selected groups or individuals.
I wrote a little plugin that will insert this button under every post in your blog including the correct permalink.

This is version 0.1 and very basic. Head over to the project site to download.

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  • Google released an Apache module that auto tunes performance
    Google has announced that they are launching a module for the Apache HTTP server called mod_pagespeed, that will automatically tune several properties to optimize page load speed. I haven’t tried it out yet, but will definitely do so.
    Amongst other things, mod_pagespeed will:

    • recompress images
    • modify cache lifetime for static elements
    • make changes to pages built by CMS

    I don’t know if I’ll see a great performance on this server, as I already took care of a lot of speed improvements myself, but this module is a great way to implement common best-practices without having to dig into Apache’s configuration too much.
    Read more and download the module on the Page Speed Google Code website.

  • Facebook Mobile Announcements
    Just a short summary of what Facebook announced yesterday, there’s already tons of coverage out there:

    • Facebook for iPhone updated (as I hoped in my tweet just minutes before the event started).
    • Facebook for Android updated.
    • Single Sign-On for mobile platforms.
      So you don’t have to deal with entering your password in every app that uses Facebook connect.
    • Facebook Places API Update. Full read and write access for third parties.
    • Deals. This sounds kind of like Groupon mixed with Foursquare.
      Could be very interesting, once it reaches the critical mass of user adoption.
    • No dedicated iPad App in the near future.
      Although I’ve read about speculations of a HTML5 based website/app that could offer the same experience on multiple tablet based platforms.