Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

So imagine for some reason that you wanted to know if tourists really rode horse-drawn “carriages” through central park. Google Maps with a new Street View option lets you do just that, and even hyperlink it:

I was wondering when the footage of the streets was taken, so I decided to look for signs in Times Square. I found a tickertape that read Aaron Carter Breaks Off…, a piece of news that came out on 9/25/2006, or almost exactly 9 months ago. Their data supplier is quite old!

TechCrunch reports that Immersive Media is Google’s provider, while BoingBoing hilights privacy concerns, some of which are real. For example, would you want a truck taking pictures of you while sunbathing?

Perhaps, perhaps not. When these photos become high-resolution, and closer to real time, with a viewable history, then the privacy angle will become more important. Here’s a page on Immersive Media and their weird, but cool, 360 cameras. They claim to have “40,000 miles of storefront images for 25 cities.”

455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2 is our new favorite number. Albeit, a very long one.

So, we know that Facebook launched a generic application platform that modularizes what users can do on Facebook, basically taking the idea that “everything is widget,” even Facebook core features, and lets users mix and match them to create their own profile pages. Companies like Amazon, Feedburner, Forbes, Hot or not, Microsoft, Photobucket, Twitter,Warner bros records, and the Washington Post have signed on to develop Facebook applications, according to Mashable.

But none of this matters to users. What matters can be described better with a picture than with words:

What matters is that we users can now put content where we want it. This is the first step. Facebook has to be eying Virb and Myspace’s level of customization, and making plans to copy their features. Once they introduce tasteful styling options for your profile page, they’ll have exceed every other social networking website in ease of use, customization, features, and uniform look. Facebook Applications is a great way to offload the work of adding new features–why add a feature when there are people out there who can do it for you? Now it’s all about the platform and API.

You can read more about what this means for Facebook’s long term vision at Techcrunch’s They are the Anti-MySpace.

This fark thread called You can has contest: LOLPRESIDENT!!!1 has some pretty funny lolcat interpretations of America’s greatest. Here are some highlights, mostly not offensive, but there’s definitely some dark, internet humour here:

“They see me rollin, they hatin”

“I has a presidency … NOoo dey be stealin mah presidency”

“BOOM!!1 HEADSHOT!!1″

“Im crossin the delawarez to kill ur doods”

“Do not want”

“I can has a cheeseburger?”

“It’s a trap”

“Hey painter wtf, come back and finish lol”

“Oh hai, I invented ur interwebs”

Good Wordpress theme are hard to find now that the market it deluged with sponsored-link bearing crap. A search for “wordpress themes” in Google brings up advertisements to the max, most of which seem to be created by color-blind SEOs looking to get link-love and a buck with Google. Still, there are truly great new themes being made, you just have to be able to separate them from the noise.

Why? I want to add something to the WP Theme Community, which is my selection of the best themes. This post is intended to cut down on the noise.

It looks like Wordpress’ default theme should have. Simple, with three columns, nice blue colors, and big text. It’s also got the Kubrick inspired top header image for your customization or monetization delight.

The thing that got me about this one is the brilliant use the left and right column whitespace to put up a patterned background / extra-wide border.

Iceburgg, dogg. The one thing that can be said about this cute, blue, cold, colorful theme is that it suits–and only suits–a winter season. If you were to use this as your general theme, you should probably customize and genericize all the graphics to taste.

The only thing I don’t like about gridlock is the large, grey right hand column, which seems out of place with the rest of the theme. Overall it has a very magazine-style text-based approach that works well.

Unique, this theme is thick. It’s got Web 2.0 written all over it, with big regions of text and color. The innovation is in the massive right-sidebar and header which wrap the content with text, rather than widgets or images.

Yep it’s the same theme directory again, but this one gets a nod for its well-done colorspace and menu bar. The image overlay hovers are beautiful, and the blue colors make it look as good as Windows Aero.

Bartelme, again, shows us how it’s done. I thought I’d end this list with BIG BANG, and here it is. This is the theme that powered his site until he recently redesigned it into a sleeker, sharper look. If you like wide, you can’t get wider than this. And, it’s professional–this guy’s a web designer by trade!