So whilst doing our duty and monitoring our government’s discussions through the wonderfully open Hansard (a record of all Parliament and House of Lords discussions), we came across this beauty, and felt compelled to share it (our favourites are underlined).

House of Lords – Wednesday, 3 March 2010

Asked By Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

To ask the Chairman of Committees what measures are being considered to improve pest control in the Lords’ part of the Palace of Westminster.

The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, the administration is fully aware of the problem with mice in the Palace of Westminster and is taking all appropriate measures to minimise their numbers. We retain the services of an independent pest control consultant and a full-time pest controller. The current focus is on poisoning and trapping, blocking of mouse access points, and more frequent cleaning of bars and restaurants to remove food debris. This programme was intensified over the February Recess and fewer sightings of mice have been reported since.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: I thank the noble Lord for his reply. How many calls have there been to the mouse helpline? Has the accuracy of that information been checked, given that the staff report seeing mice on a daily basis at the moment in the eating areas? Has consideration been given to having hypoallergenic cats on the estate, given the history? Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, there are a number of questions there. I cannot give an answer to the number of calls made to the mouse helpline-if that is its title. I suspect that it would not be a good use of resources to count them up. But I am well aware of the problem of mice, as I said in my Answer. It is something that we take seriously.

As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

Lord Bradshaw: I have spoken continually to the staff in the eating places in the House and I acknowledge that there has been some diminution in the number of mice around. But could I press the noble Lord, because further action needs to be taken? I know that this is an old building, but mice are still here and we are talking about places where food is served. I have no magic solution, but perhaps the consultant who is being employed might have some answers.

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I am well aware that there are still mice around. I saw one in the Bishops’ Bar only yesterday evening. I do not know whether it was the same one that I saw the day before or a different one; it is always difficult to tell the difference between the various mice that one sees.

We believe that the problem is getting better. Cleaning is one of the measures we are taking, as I outlined in my original Answer. As I speak here this afternoon, the Bishops’ Bar and the Guest Room are being hoovered, so we can get rid of the food scraps from lunch. If you were a mouse, you would rather eat the crumbs of a smoked salmon sandwich than the bait. Therefore, we want to remove the crumbs as quickly as possible.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: Why should I and noble Lords trust the Executive to deal with mice when they cannot deal with the economy?

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was in total ignorance that there was anything of the nature of a mouse helpline until this Question Time. Can the Chairman of Committees tell us what helplines there are for Members of the House on other issues that we do not know about?

The Chairman of Committees: I rather hope that we do not have too many other ones. I was not going to advertise the existence of the mouse helpline, although it was advertised some time ago. Indeed, I invited Members of the House to telephone when they saw mice. The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere.

OMG. Suddenly a hung parliament seems the least of our worries…

With all of the announcements that have come out of the f8 conference, the one impression I am left with is that although Facebook might now be an internet juggernaut, it has not grown out of the ability to iterate quickly with new products. The volume of Facebook’s product changes are huge and incredibly important, and they step on some not inconsiderable toes.

Foursquare / Gowalla

Facebook has long been the gorilla in the location-based-networking room. Although it hasn’t previously done much, its near ubiquity means that it can leapfrog any other competitor with ease. Now Facebook has announced its first major plans in this space. And they are dramatic. Rather than simply the cellphone app (bottom-up) approach of Gowalla and Foursquare, Facebook is using RFID tags and readers (top-down) to allow check-ins.

Meebo

Meebo is a distributed Instant Messenger service which sees over 100 million uniques per month. Its Meebo Bar can be installed by any site, to allow users to chat in realtime. Its an awesome service. But now Facebook has announced a persistent Facebook toolbar that sites can install to allow users to use Facebook Chat.  Is that game over for Meebo?

Digg / TweetMeme etc

The social bookmarking space has a lot of strong players, with multiple buttons displayed by most news stories. Although each service has a loyal fanbase, their seems no reason why Facebook’s new “Like” buttons will not quickly command this area of the market. It has the largest userbase and the strongest social graph, so why wouldn’t you choose to “”Like” articles and pages using Facebook?

Glue (recommendation services)

Beyond a whole host of social bookmarking sites, there are a range of semantically-aware recommendation services, which use toolbars and buttons to allow users to rate products and content. The services, like Glue, then provide recommendations. Facebook’s new “Like” buttons really start to build up rich preference and taste data, which can be mined for user recommendations and for advertising targeting.

Social Gold (virtual currencies)

One of Facbeook’s most awaited announcements was regarding a full virtual currency, called Facebook Credits. This surely seriously undermines existing players such as Social Gold, and also opens up the pathway for Facebook to start eating at Paypal’s sandwich.

Authentication

There is no clear leader in this arena yet, with many services offering authentication, including Twitter. Facebook will basically allow third-party sites to authenticate users by their Facebook cookie, therefore removing the delicate process of notifying the user. This is a very controversial area, and Facebook will certainly have to deal with some backlash. However, they are obviously continuing to bet that the utility and ease will prove greater than the concern.

Any others I have missed?

Bowling quickly degraded into a competition of creative methodology. We had backwards bowling, sliding on knees, see who can throw it the highest, the furthest before landing, the slowest, get it as close to the TV screen as possible without hitting it, bowl the most balls in one go, knock the next-door lane’s pins over, and run as far down the alley as possible without getting caught. We learned that bowling the ball really slowly helps greatly in improving accuracy (I’ll add that to the wiki).

Eventually once all other options had been exhausted and the diminishing marginal returns commonly associated with drinking were realised, we got ourselves on to the dodgem cars. Twelve months of stress manifested itself in complete carnage on the floor. However the trick became less about trying to thrash the hell out of our fellow work mates but more to try not to laugh any sick up or have it projected out by the seatbelt pulling on impact.

thruSITES was set up in 2005, with our first clients being a couple of local primary schools (you definitely won’t find these sites on our portfolio!). From these humble beginnings, our team, services, clients, and ambitions, have changed significantly through time. We started out by delivering great customer service and great (albeit simple) brochure websites, hence the old name. By growing through word-of-mouth from satisfied clients, we slowly built a strong portfolio and client base, and a service offering that stretches beyond “websites” to include social media applications, online communities, email and search marketing, and heavy-lifting data analysis systems.

So the time has come for our name to better reflect what we do. As thrudigital, we will still build brochure sites, but our competency stretches much further. We believe in the future of the open web, distributed content, the power of data-driven marketing, the new world of social media, and in multi-platform distribution. We are also taking the opportunity to build on everything that we do for the longer term and develop our own products in-house to help address market needs and provide better value to our clients. And we will continue to deliver superb solutions, with a service built on delivering great customer service, whether they are blue-chip corporates or bedroom entrepreneurs.

The aim of the Number 10 Facebook application was to aggregate content from their existing channels into an easy digestible format for users on Facebook. In the application we aggregate three different types of media (text, photo and video) from three different sources which I will take you through.

The top of the application features the latest tweet from the Number 10 Twitter account.  This auto refreshes every minute to ensure the application features the most up to date tweet, which is necessary given the frequency of updates that are made to the Number Twitter account.

The next content area in the application features the latest news headlines from the Number 10 website. To do this we rely on the RSS feature of the Number 10 site and again refresh this on a regular basis to ensure it features the latest news. Each news item features the headline of the piece, the time it was posted and the first sentence of the news piece itself. To read the full story the user is encouraged to visit the Number 10 site. In addition to the latest news section, the app also features two other RSS feeds from the Number 10 site; e-petitions and Speeches and Transcripts.

As well as text content, the application also features the latest photo and video content. For the photo content, we pull in the latest photos from the Number 10 account on flickr. The application displays the latest 12 photo thumbnails from the flickr account and to see a larger version of any of the photos or to see further back in the Number 10 photo archive the user can follow a link back to the flickr account. For the video content we display the latest video from Number 10 TV. Originally this was a feed of videos from the Number 10 channel on YouTube, but for the final version we opted to use the Brightcove video player from the Number 10 website.

To help the application spread, we have built in two Facebook functions. The first is friend invite which allows a user to send up to 20 invitations to the application while the second enables the user to easily add the application to their profile where, being in a prominent position, it will be seen by visitors to that profile.

On the subject of profiles, the application integrates with three different parts of a user’s profile. The first is as a tab. This allows the user to add a full version of the application to their profile. The second is a box, which also allows customisation of a smaller version of the app which is displayed in the boxes section of the users profile. The final place and possibly the most prominent is the profile box which features the latest number 10 tweet and is positioned alongside a users wall.

Another new feature of the Facebook application platform that we took advantage of was enabling a user to view the application before signing in to Facebook and without installing the application. We felt this was important as following a link from the Number 10 site to the application and being asked to sign in and install an application before knowing what the application is or does wouldn’t be the best user experience.

If you are interested in other Facebook applications we’ve developed, why not check out our portfolio or have a look at the Facebook application services page. If you’re looking for more information about Facebook applications, you can also have a read some of our other blogs posts about Facebook applications. If you are looking to engage with your audience and new audiences on Facebook, why not give us a call to see what we can come up with.

To put our time (and the snow) to good use we decided to do a little bit of sno’vertising using twitter and a twitter/google maps mashup @benmarsh created.

The picture is taken of the roof of the carpark next to our office.

Once we were back in the office and our feet had thawed we posted the picture to twitpic and posted a tweet containing the hastag #uksnow, the first part of our postcode and a fraction of 10 indicating how heavy the snow was falling.

The tweet was then displayed alongside the uksnow map as you can see below.

A snowy Monday afternoon well spent we think.

nru presents the user with location based information on theatres, restaurants and bars. The app makes great use of the GPS and acceleromater features in the G1 phone in an interesting radar-esque interface to deliver relevant listings coupled with user reviews, something that I think will be really useful (especially if they release it on the iPhone too).

The reason I think this is so interesting (aside from the fact that the app is pretty handy and smart) is that lastminute.com have a team working on projects like this. In fact after visiting the labs blog I discovered that they’re working on quite a few interesting projects along with the help of external parties such as City, Imperial and Warwick universities. The existence of a labs team at lastminute.com shouldn’t come as a surprise but I think it’s great that there is one.

For me this type of activity brings a company like lastminute.com a number of benefits. Firstly, they are creating a useful product that helps people find new and interesting places which utilises their content in a new way. Secondly, this is on a mobile, so users are engaging with them on a new platform that they may have done so before.

I believe that we are going to see more initiatives like this coming out of forward thinking companies which can only be a good thing. I think tech based companies like lastminute.com can develop a labs team the quickest but I think media groups could will be pretty quick to follow. In fact I recently heard that The Guardian media group had a hack day/weekend that produced some interesting products and while they may not be publicly released like lastminute labs have released nru, it’s certainly interesting to hear that it happened.

I’m looking forward to companies outside of the tech world setting up a labs team like this or at least opening up their content and data in a way for external developers to innovate and create new products.

You can find out more about the app on the labs blog or by watching the youtube video.