Create a mosaic of pictures

How can I put a picture into a picture? No, it’s not an Inception meme!

Let’s say you want to generate a mosaic image starting from:

• a main picture
• many small pictures

I’m currently doing a little contest with AAF and I need exactly this. So I took one picture of mine:

It’s a former amusement park in Coney Island. This is my main picture.

Then I went to the not-so-good looking web app Pictosaic.Here you can generate mosaics in a few clicks and you can choose which pics you want to use. You can upload your own gallery in a zip file or pick some existing ones. You can also decide the merge rate and the number of images you want in the final result.

In the end you get something like this, click to enlarge:

Great tool! Thanks to… well, I can’t find a Contact page. The Twitter account looks abandoned as well. Too bad.

Facebook Garage in Milan

This is the translation of a post I wrote for Mikamai.

Two events took place at Palazzo Mezzanotte in Milan, on Nov 22. The Facebook Developer Garage, for developers, and the Platform Marketing Bootcamp, for marketers. The main goal was IMO to show a few new things presented at the past F8.

The key concept is always user experience: developers are supposed to let users have as much control as possible in their apps. Transparency is greatly appreciated, Facebook guys said.

Thus users are supposed to decide which permissions allow to apps and to keep control of their actions, such as publishing updates or tagging friends.

Much more was going on: policies for apps and contests, new APIs to improve adv targeting, but I loved Q&A the most. Someone said something about fake profiles and a rude debate started.

My two cents: we’re talking about advanced features and most of us still have no clear vision of Facebook for business. Moreover, many small businesses and associations find more useful fake profiles, as they allow more interactions. I think tools are defined by the way people use them. Ignoring or deleting such expressions can’t be the answer.

If THIS then THAT

Ifttt is a tool is based on a simple structure:
when something happens (THIS) then make something else (THAT).

The THIS part is a trigger, the THAT part is an action. When you link a trigger with an action, you have a task!

You can use one of these services of yours:

For instance, you can create tasks like these ones.

When you’re tagged in a Facebook pic, send the pic to your Dropbox.
When I mark a tweet as “favourite”, save it on Evernote.
When January 1 comes, tweet “Happy new year!”.
Wether it will rain tomorrow, notify me on GTalk.
When I check in on Foursquare, add the place and time to my GCalendar.

Useful, isn’t it?

A link in my tweets – but WHERE?

Is there a position into a single tweet with higher click rates? Which is the most efficient position of the link in the 140 characters of a single tweet? The aim, of course, is to get the most clicks.

Dan Zarrella did a research on “200,000, random, bit.ly-link-containing Tweets”. Here’s the result:

CTR means click-through rate, which is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.

So, the best place for the link is about 25% of the way through the Tweet.

I’m looking forward further analysis on this =)