Personal Health Management

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Marco Barnig

Today’s healthcare system is complicated and cumbersome. Health information stored mainly on paper is scattered and disconnected. A patient may have health records with several doctors and hospitals. Medication and prescription history may be spread across several different pharmacies. Self-care information, such as diet and exercise routines, may be unavailable. And any changes or updates to these records may never reach the treating provider.

Both Google and Microsoft provide a security-enhanced and flexible solution to this challenge : Put consumers in control of their health information, store it in a central location, and make it easy to share and update.

Google Health allows you to store and manage all of your health information on the Google servers. And it’s completely free. All you need to get started is a Google username and password. Google believes that you own your medical records and should have easy access to them. With Google Health, you manage your health information, and you can access it anywhere, at any time.

The features of Google Health are :

Build online health profiles : (health conditions, medications, allergies, and lab results)
Import medical records from hospitals and pharmacies : (accurate history of your medical conditions, medications, and test results)
Share your health records : (with family members, friends and doctors)
Explore online health services : (manage your health needs)

Google stores your information securely and privately, but you always control how it’s used.

Microsoft’s HealthVault offers you a way to store health information from many sources in one location, so that it’s always organized and available to you online. HealthVault is working with doctors, hospitals, employers, pharmacies, insurance providers and manufacturers of health devices – blood pressure monitors, heart rate monitors and more – to make it easy for you to add information electronically to your HealthVault record. With a more complete picture of your family’s health, you can work with your healthcare professionals, and with all the Web sites that connect with HealthVault, to make more informed decisions.

Microsoft HealthVault provides not only a personal solution, but also an ecosystem for industries ( hospitals, laboratories, employrs, healthcare associations, doctors, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers, …).

Test accounts on Facebook for developers

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Marco Barnig

last update : March 24, 2011

One of the hard things about developing on the Facebook Platform has been testing applications. Facebook’s Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so it’s not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with.

In the past, Facebook formalized the concept of test accounts with a procedure to convert a real account to a test account with an affiliation to the Facebook Platform Developer Test Accounts network. The test account status could be removed from a Network Settings page.

My past test accounts were :

Alice Paris (français) : uid = 1589435275
Hans Berlin (deutsch) : uid = 100000006032142
Jerry London (english) : uid = 1776326306

These three users were friends.

In November 2010, Facebook launched a new concept of test users for manual or automated testing. A test user is a user account associated with an application created for the purpose of testing the functionality of that application. The test account can be accessed via a login_url which allows you to directly login to the account. The login_url expires after one hour, but you easily refresh it to get a new login_url for the same test user. An access_token for the test user is provided so that you can take actions on behalf of the test user via the api. An application can create up to 100 test users to start testing an application.

More details are available at the Facebook Test Users webpage.

A test account related to a Facebook application is created with a POST request :

https://graph.facebook.com/<app_id>/accounts/test-users?installed=true&access_token=xxxxxxx

Special permission requests (offline-access, stream-read, …) can be added to the POST message.

A user_id, a user_access_token and a user_login_url are returned. The profile page of the test-user is accessed through the login_url. The profile can be completed, modified and managed like a real Facebook profile, but interaction with real users is not possible. A fictive name is attributed to the test user by the Facebook test platform.

The token and the login expire on first use or after one hour whichever happens first. Created test users can be refreshed with a GET request asking for all test users associated to a given application.

https://graph.facebook.com/<app_id>/accounts/test-users?access_token=xxxxxxxx

A new user_access_token and user_login_url for all user-id’s are returned.

A maximum of 100 test-users for one application can be created. Existing test-users can bet associated with another Facebook application with the POST request

https://graph.facebook.com/<app_id>/accounts/test-users?installed=true&uid=<test_user_id>&owner_access_token=<app_access_token_of_current_owner_app>

Friend connections can be created manually at the profile page or by script with the POST request and accept messages

https://graph.facebook.com/<test_user_id_1>/friends/<test_user_id_2>?access_token=<token test_user_1>

https://graph.facebook.com/<test_user_id_2>/friends/<test_user_id_1>?access_token=<token test_user_2>

A test user can be deleted with the HTTP DELETE request or with a POST request

https://graph.facebook.com/<test_user_id>?method=delete&access_token=<token test_user or token app_id>

Several developpers published their scripts to handle the Facebook Test Users :

Svetoslav Marinov : php script
Rafael Dohms : php web app

Facebook Connect API

Posted on May 9, 2009 by Marco Barnig

Facebook Connect is the next evolution of Facebook Platform which enables developers to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into their site. Facebook Connect was announced on 23 July 2008 at Facebook’s annual conference for developers and made available to users on 4 December 2008.

There are four ways to add social context to a private website : Identity, Friends, Social Distribution and Privacy.

At its core, Facebook Connect is an alternative means of logging into a website. The Facebook Connect Button is best placed near the standard login flow. Once a user is connected, it’s important to provide him with an indicator that they are logged in with Facebook (for example a Facebook profile pic with the Facebook favicon (“f”) in the corner). To avoid unexpected or conflicting states, it’s best to use the auto-login and auto-logout functions. The Facebook Developer Terms of Service states that an application can only store user data from Facebook for up to 24 hours to make sure that if a user changes their data, it is refreshed across the web. To obey this rule, one way is to do an API call to Facebook for data on every page load, another way is to use XFBML, a markup language that pushes data access to the client layer.

Whenever a user creates content on a website, the API allows to publish that back to Facebook. Publication actions include forum or blog posts, calendar items, photos or albums, events and wiki articles. A tutorial to create a blog that allows user comments, a trying-out and a demonstration (The Run Around) with Facebook Connect are available on the developer website. An easy way to set up a first Facebook Connect application is the comment-box.

How to add Facebook Connect to your website using Javascript or PHP are two very usefuls tutorials with sample codes and demos to start with a Facebook Connect application.

In 2006, Facebook added News Feeds and Mini-Feeds to their application. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user’s friends. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini-Feed, a news stream on the user’s profile page that shows updates about that user.

One line stories get their point across in a single line and appear only on the Wall on the user’s profile. Short stories are formatted with templates and allow a small amount of text with media – which can be an image, MP3, video, or a SWF file. Short stories appear in the stream in a user’s and the user’s friends’ News Feeds and on the user’s Wall.

The Wall is a space on each user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see while displaying the time and date the message was written. One user’s wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see his or her full profile, and different users’ wall posts show up in an individual’s News Feed.

To integrate with the Feed system, you need to create a framework for the stories you want your application to tell. You create this framework through a set of templates that you register with Facebook. You combine templates in bundles, and each bundle contains one template for each story size. A template bundle tells facebook how to display the data that you are sending to a feed. An application can have multiple Template Bundles as well as supports ‘one line stories’, a slightly longer ‘short story’, and a more verbose ‘full story’. Links to referring descriptions are listed herafter :

Template Data
Making sense out of Facebook feeds : Template bundles
Making old feeds work in new Facebook

There are three ways an application can publish to a user’s Feed :

Through Feed forms
Through the Publisher
Through the feed.publishUserAction Platform API call

This link shows a feed form example (smiley). Template bundles can be created at the Facebook feed link. The creation of a new Template bundle is not possible (message error that id is not valid) if the developer has no friend.

An xd_receiver.htm file is necessary for cross-domain, the included XdCommReceiver.debug.js library corrects some errors existing in teh XdCommReceiver.js library. I experienced a weird [“null” is null or not an object] Javascript error when using Facebook Connect applications with IE (versions 6, 7 and 8 ) which has also been reported by other developers (Anuragsharma). Ajennings proposes a workaround solution described in the Facebook Connect Forum. His test application is available at the shoptivate website.

On March 11, 2009, Facebook released a new home page for users.

Target audience for an artgallery website

Posted on April 14, 2009 by Marco Barnig

In marketing and advertising, a target audience, or target group is the primary group of people that something, usually an advertising campaign, is aimed at appealing to. The same rules apply for a website. The target audience for the website of an artgallery are art collectors, artists and art lovers.

To design a new website tailored to the preferences of this target audience, you have to identify the profile of these people, which is not an easy task. A first approach is to analyse the profile of the visitors of the old website, assuming that it reflects the typical profile of the target audience.

The following data sources can be explored to get useful informations :

Google Analytics (if installed on the website)
Alexa (web traffic metrics)
Quantcast

The Google Analytics report for an artgallery website, operational since more than 3 years, provides data from more than 4 million pageviews, 3 million visits and 2.3 million unique visitors, which is quite impressive and representative.

The results from the analysis for the browser capabilities are the following:

Browser types:

IE : 75,6%
Firefox : 18,2%
Safari : 5,1%
others: 1,1%

Operating Systems:

Windows : 91,8%
MacIntosh: 7,5%
Linux: 0,5%
others: 0,2%

Screen Resolutions:

lower or equal 800 pixel horizontal: 7,2%
1024 x 768 pixel: 43,5%
higher or equal 1152 pixel horizontal: 49,3%

Flash support:

Flash 10: 20% (augmenté à 40% les trois derniers mois)
Flash 9: 64,4%
Flash 8 or less: 15,6%

Java support:

yes: 98,3%
no: 1,7%

Traffic sources :

Direct traffic : 58,2%
Refering sites : 40,1%
Search Engines : 1,1%

Key search terms : women in art, artgallery, digital art

Number of recurring visitors (more than 9 visits in 3 years): 31.326

Number of very loyal visitors (more than 200 visits in 3 years) : 2.891

The Web Information Company Alexa provides the following metrics (Demographics) for the website:

Age : Relative to the general internet population, 55-64 year olds are greatly over-represente
Gender : Relative to the general internet population, Females are over-represente
Education : Relative to the general internet population, people who went to graduate school are over-represented
Location : Relative to the general internet population, people browsing from home are over-represented
Key search terms : video, alice, women in art, digital art

Quantcast provides following informations : This site reaches approximately 12,614 U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a 50+, somewhat wealthy, rather female, more educated group.