Skyalert Facebook group

[Rob Seaman]

Hi Roy,

> There is now a Skyalert group on Facebook.

Cool!  Looks swell!  To the peanut gallery, note the distinction - one  
may be a "member" of the VOEvent group (since we are a WG), but one  
may choose to be a "fan" of SkyAlert - as I most certainly am.  We'll  
have to figure out the most effective way to cross reference the two  
(and other related dohickeys like grandpa eSTAR).

> It delivers events in real time from Catalina Real Time Survey, NASA  
> SWIFT, and NASA Fermi.

Delightful!

> For more specific choices of event delivery, you can build a custom  
> alert trigger at http://skyalert.org. Also from there, you can see
>
> -- Each event in context of archival and follow-up data
> -- How to contribute your own events to Skyalert
> -- Recent events in Worldwide Telescope
> -- Recent events in Google Sky
> -- Twitter stream of recent events
>
> Your comments and questions would be most welcome!

Facebook (it seems to this shark-jumper) is about building community -  
which is to say that it's where people already have chosen to  
congregate.  It is certainly appropriate to use it to redirect  
interested parties to external resources that provide more fully  
featured services such as you describe.

In addition to the nifty notes and comments you have implemented  
through the page-based front-end you are announcing here (and quick  
work, too!), I wonder at the capabilities of the Facebook application  
framework.  Clicking through the application tab at the extreme lower  
left hand corner of the browser window reveals a whole bunch of pretty  
pointless apps - but some with interesting UI features.  Perhaps it  
might be worth investigating the utility of such for implementing  
actual scientifically useful features?

Rob

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20091021/1262babc/attachment-0001.html>