a look at the new facebook

There are a number of things in the new fb that are a #Win. Here are just a few

1. The right activity bar that shows you what others are doing even thought they might not think they're being seen. Remember when I said that most people are usually online? These ones who just hide theirs activity and just don't want you to know that they've been online. Now every time they like a page, comment on their own photo, status, activity or someone else's you will know thanks to the sidebar on the left.

2. Subscribing to people's updates is a really nice idea especially when they've not put up privacy for their updates. Sort of copies twitters follow style but it's a nice way to get someone's update without them having to be listed as a friend on your profile. #Win

3. Favorites are also another thing I think will help me see what content I want to see. You don't exactly want to see a certain persons update at some time and maybe you want to see someone's updates at another certain time. A good distinction is during weekdays and at weekends. You can agree that the talk on the feed is usually different for different people on your live feed

4. Recent Stories and 'From Earlier that day' You may want to see what's latest and what interesting happened earlier that day. However I may never know what criteria they use to arrive at what's interesting for you especially now that what interests different people doesn't necessarily follow a pattern, formula or curve on a Cartesian plane

word is, anybody who writes code, design or is involved in thinking about the development of a part of an application appreciates what facebook has done to come up with the new site

#gkenya | Kosa si kosa

The other day at the g-kenya I made yet another big mistake with my tongue, brain rather.
Sorry let's introduce you to my subject then we continue flowing it.

I got an invite for day 2 and as sincere as I was I only came for that day. It's good sometimes to be sincere I must say but only for yourself and not for others.
Back to my point, KBO had a launch at the event. KBO stands for Kenyan Businesses Online. It's a free websites solution for small and medium enterprises in Kenya whereby they can create a website in less than half an hour and it gets hosted on kbo.co.ke as a subdomain.

Being a day2 attendee, I didn't know about this kbo thing but anyway there was no harm. Screen 2 was the introduction point and that's where I got to learn about it. It's a really nice idea for businesses to come online. Brilliant in fact. However there's a challenge posed on both ends.

First the people don't really think it's cool to have a subdomain for their businesses and this is the biggest fallback for the domain and for the content they want to get to come online.

Secondly website guys won't like the idea and this is the part where my mistake comes in. I asked the 'Chinese lady' how it would be should people get more people to signup and maybe charge them as a service both to set-up and maintain the websites. Needless to say we almost had a fight. She was so mad at the question you'd think we had a quarrel. A mere question. Seeing the damage was already done and now I had nothing to lose I went ahead to comment,' this is Kenya madam, you get?' now this was the last nail on the coffin. She said Kenya doesn't develop because of people like me who think it's write to do that,' it's immoral, illegal, not acceptable and just not right'.

Now that I may not dare do it, don't you think people will do that anyway?

E-Voting, is it all?

At the end of last week we had a successful conference. The 12th annual ICT conference Strathmore. among the speakers invited w

as Mr Ahmed Isaak who talked about how they went about to come up with a reliable voting system guided by integrity. The IIEC was formed in 20

08 after the former Electoral Commission of Kenya flawed badly in 20

07.

"When people vote and go home, they think they have decided but actually it is the people who count the vote who decides"

The new IIEC has implemented IT alot more than just for appreciation. To start with they've begun on electronic voter registration to replace the manual (ORM) way of doing the same. He said this is how voters for 2012 will be registered. The elections are also monitored closely with a

double updating of vote counts on line. The will be a central collection of vote counts of different regions.

So far so good, the vote has not been interfered with. However for me that is half the problem. The peoples of Kenya are yet to be taught how to vote and vote wisely. Are we going to ride on a system that is water-tight but still have our vote influenced by tribe, money, region-ism etc? This is the bigger half of the problem we have. There's an mp who was voted in passionately by the people of his constituency after literally splashing money in all the neighbourhoods and using it to satisfy the vain needs of the voters like getting drunk. Thanks to the IIEC though, the integrity of the vote count was unquestionable. Looking at that scenario in whatever angle, don't you think the IIEC ought to do thorough civic education (i don't know how) or is it that we just need prayers?

Tuwafanyenini hawa?