Scoble Loses Interest in Facebook – 5,000 “Friends” Will Do That

April 3, 2008 by Leave a comment

In social networks, bigger is not necessarily better. Robert Scoble, famously with 5,000 Facebook friends, recently posted this on Twitter.

Spent some time cleaning off my Facebook Profile. Stripped it way down. Much nicer now, no crap. I haven’t been into FB for months. Sigh.

Normally this may not rate as important news. In fact, Scoble had a Feb. 22, 2008 post up on his blog titled Is Facebook Doomed? But there, his issue is primarily one of limits on the number of friends and messages. He still liked Facebook fundamentally.

But then came his recent tweet. While many technorati are expressing their ennui with Facebook, with Scoble it’s significant for two reasons:

  1. He’s the living embodiment of Web 2.0 openness and try-it-all, push-it-to-the-max gusto
  2. He’s argued passionately that 5,000 friends is just fine for Facebook

Let’s start with the idea that 5,000 “friends” is appropriate for a social network. It can be…but not for Facebook.

Facebook Is for Social Interactions, Not One-Way Communications

Let’s imagine having 5,000 friends on Facebook. What must that be like?

Newsfeeds. That newsfeed must be constantly in overdrive. People’s statuses updating. New groups they joined. Apps added. New friend connections. Friends compared. Blah, blah, blah…! A 5,000-friend newsfeed must be like a stock ticker. Hit refresh every second and a new set of newsfeeds displays.

Inbox. When you have 5,000 friends, your Inbox and Notifications are probably largely untouched. How do you go through the sheer volume of messages? Inbox from hell is what that is.

App invites. How many times has Scoble been invited to try every inane app out there? Especially since its Scoble. Get him to try your app and mention it on his blog or Twitter, and you’re on your way. Not enough hours in the week to try all the new apps.

Reaching out to friends. How do you figure out which of your 5,000 friends you interact with each day? Assume Scoble attempts a meaningful exchange with 13 friends each day, on top of all his other duties. That translates to contact with each friend once per year.

Here’s what Scoble said in his blog post defending his decision to have 5,000 friends:

In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.

See, I have this theory about social networks: different ones are good for different types of social interactions. What Scoble is looking for is something different than Facebook. His interactions have more of a one-way quality to them. He’s really good with discovering and analyzing new things, and is eager to share them with the world. And that’s really cool. But he really doesn’t want to know that you just joined the Austin networking group, posted your child’s picture or that you’re working on that report for your boss. Nothing wrong with that – I don’t either. But I didn’t add you as one of my 5,000 friends.

Different Social Applications for Different Purposes

I believe Facebook is fundamentally tuned to be an interactive lifestream social network. That means it wants to be the place where all parts of your life are captured and shared. It’s built around that goal. Which makes it terrible as a large-scale broadcasting platform.

So it’s no surprise that Scoble has tired of Facebook. I assume he’s still getting to broadcast his life to the 5,000 friends. I’ll bet a lot of those updates occur as apps connected to his various preferred social apps: Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, etc. For him, Facebook is more of a broadcasting server, not a place for true social interaction.

For Scoble’s social networking style, he’s already got what he needs: his blog. He talks about what interests him. He responds only to comments that interest him. To complete his lifestream, more widgets for his favorite social apps could be added.

FriendFeed is emerging as an app to satisfy the social network needs of power users like Scoble. Unlimited (well, theoretically) numbers of people can subscribe to his feed: blog posts, Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, Flickr photos, etc. Anyone can comment on his lifestream. But he doesn’t need to subscribe to these same people. No app spam, inbox overload, etc. However, I notice he already has 1,700 “friends” there.

I suspect Scoble will probably find a better home for his mode of social networking on FriendFeed. And Facebook is just fine for what it wants to be: lifestream platform for interacting with your actual friends.

Scoble Is Great for Analysis

This post is not meant as a criticism of Scoble. Quite the opposite. He pushes the boundaries of all these social apps, and does so in a very public way. He’ll give you his take on his own actions. But by pushing things to the extreme, he also provides a great lens for analyzing Web 2.0. That guy’s got a cool life.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , ,

The First 20 Blog Posts Are the Easiest

April 1, 2008 by 7 Comments

A few random thoughts on blogging after writing 22 posts and hitting 4,000 views.

Blogging is fun. I’ve enjoyed this more than I realized I would. Writing really is its own reward. I guess a paper journal might be a good outlet, but the social aspect of this is great. You get to join the conversation at large.

Blogging is work. Figuring out what to write is an ongoing activity for me. Seth Godin said, “I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.” I wonder when I’ll hit that stage.

Long-form blogging. Most of my posts are long form. I enjoy writing through and around a subject. But others seem to be quite talented at delivering posts that are short and a good read. I may have to mix some of those in here.

Spamming Marketing your blog. I’m experimenting with ways to get the word out about this blog. Just the act of publicizing my blog was a hard thing to take on. I don’t like a lot self-promotion, but if you don’t do it, who will? Of course, one could ask, “why do you need to market it?” I’ll answer that a bit more below. To get word out about my blog, I do the following:

  • Add posts to del.icio.us, LinkRiver, StumbleUpon, reddit
  • RSS on FriendFeed
  • Share posts, which turns them into news feeds on Facebook via Feedheads
  • Twitter
  • Comments on other blogs

Marketing via Twitter. The 140 character limit of Twitter requires a bit of creativity. But I try to avoid just putting the blog post title and tinyURL. How do you capture the blog post in a way that makes someone want to read more? This is actually kind of fun.

Marketing via comments on other blogs. This is one that must be done with care. I’ve seen godawful attempts to spam blogs. My favorite poster over at TechCrunch titles himself “I’m not commenting to spam my blog” (or something like that). Here’s my philosophy on this:

  • Your comment should be able to stand alone. The comment should be such that it adds to the conversation, not just link to your blog. After all, you’re a guest on someone else’s blog.
  • If your comment is relevant and useful, someone might actually want to click on the URL you include to read more on your blog.

Karma. Share the blogging love. Add new blogs to your RSS reader. Add links to interesting posts on other blogs. Post on others’ blogs. Add others’ posts to LinkRiver, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc. And do it for the smaller bloggers, not just the A-list. This is something I need to improve on.

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play. You never know how things will turn out when you blog. This blog continues to get a lot of hits off the search term “peanut butter“. My post about writing a farewell email is the most-read post on the blog. Pay By Touch had a following out there, and this was one of few blogs talking about it. I’m sure there will something in the future that will surprise me. Marketing the blog is a great way to figure out what people are interested in, and I treasure every comment and link to this blog.

No clue how to land on Techmeme. This is apparently a big deal for bloggers. No idea how that happens. May not ever for this blog. I’ll sleep at night.

Don’t put a period after the TinyURL. I use the TinyURL service to shorten the URLs for my blog posts. This is handy for putting a link to a post on Twitter or on a comment at some other blog. Well, it turns out if you put a period at the end of the TinyURL, you get a 404 page. Quite embarrassing, to tell the truth.

That’s it for now. Gotta think about my next blog post.

Filed under geek Tagged with , ,

Improving Search and Discovery: My Explicit Is Your Implicit

March 24, 2008 by 1 Comment

Two recent posts on the implicit web provide two different takes. They provide good context for the implicit web.Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb asks, Aggregate Knowledge’s Content Discovery – How Good is it, Really? Aggregate Knowledge runs a large-scale wisdom of crowds application, suggesting content for readers of a given article based on what others also viewed. For instance, on the Business Week site, you might be reading an article about the Apple iPod. Next to the article are the articles that readers of the Apple iPod article also viewed. MacManus finds the Aggregate Knowledge recommendations to be not very relevant. The recommended articles had no relationship to Apple or the iPod.

Over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern writes that Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like. Toluu lets you import your RSS feeds and friends who have also uploaded their RSS feeds. It applies some secret sauce to analyze your friends’ feeds and create recommendations for you. Stern finds the service a bit boring, as all the recommendations based on his friends’ feeds were the same.

In the case of Aggregate Knowledge, the recommendations were based on too wide a pipe. The implicit actions – clicks by everybody – led to irrelevant results because you essentially the most popular items. In the case Toluu, the recommendations were based on too narrow a pipe. The common perspectives of like-minded friends meant the recommendations were too homogeneous.

Both of these companies leverage the activities of others to deliver recommendations. The actions of others are the implicit activities used to improve search and discovery. A great, familiar example of applying implicit activities is Google search. Google analyzes links among websites and clicks in response to search results. Those links and clicks are the implicit actions that fuel its search relevance.

Which leads to an important consideration about implicit activities. You need a lot of explicit activity to have implicit activity.

Huh?

That’s right. Implicit activities don’t exist in a vacuum. They start life as the explicit actions of somebody. This is a point that Harvard’s Andrew McAfee makes in a recent post.

Let’s take this thought a step further. Not all explicit actions are created equal. There are those that occur “in-the-flow” and those that occur “above-the-flow”, a smart concept described by Michael Idinopulos. In-the-flow are those actions that are part of the normal course of consumer activities, while above-the-flow takes an extra step by the user. A couple examples describe this further:

  • In-the-flow: clicks, purchases, bookmarks
  • Above-the-flow: tags, links, import of friends

Above-the-flow actions are hard to elicit from consumers. There needs to be something in it for them. Websites that require a majority of above-the-flow actions will find themselves challenged to grow quickly. They better have something really good to offer (such as Amazon.com’s purchase experience). Otherwise, the website should be able to survive on the participation of just a few users to provide value to the majority (e.g. YouTube).

So with all that in mind, let’s look at a few companies with actual or potential uses of the explicit-implicit duality:

Google Search

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer talks about two different forms of social search:

  1. Users label search results and share labels with friends. This labeling becomes the implicit activity that helps improve search results for others. This model is way too above-the-flow. Labeling? Sharing with friends? After experimenting with this, Mayer states that “overall the annotation model needs to evolve.” Not surprising.
  2. Google looks at your in-the-flow activity of emailing friends (via Gmail). It then marries the search histories of your most frequent email contacts to subtly alter the search result rankings. All of this implicit activity is derived from in-the-flow activities. For searches on specific topics, the more narrow implicit activity pipe of just your Gmail contacts is an interesting idea.

ThisNext

ThisNext is a platform for users to build out their own product recommendations. They find products on the web, grab an image, and rate and write about the product. Power users emerge as style mavens. The site is open to non-members for searching and browsing of products.

ThisNext probably relies a bit too heavily on above-the-flow activities. It takes a lot of work to find products, add them to your list of products and provide reviews. It also suffers from being a bit too wide a pipe in that there’s a lot of people whose recommendations I wouldn’t trust. How do I know who to trust on ThisNext?

Amazon Grapevine

Amazon, on the other hand, has a leg up in this sort of model. First, its recommendations are built on a high level of in-the-flow activities – users purchasing things they need. This is the “people who bought this also bought that” recommendation model. Rather than depend on the product whims of individuals, it uses good ol’ sales numbers (plus some secret sauce as well) for recommendations. This is a form of collaborative filtering.

Amazon Grapevine is a way of setting the pipe for implicit activities. The explicit activity is the review or rating. These activities are fed to your friends on Facebook. One possibility for Amazon down the road is to use the built-up reviews and ratings of your friends to influence the recommendations it provides on its website. Such a model would require some above-the-flow actions – add the Grapevine application, maintain your account and connections on Facebook. But these aren’t that onerous; the Facebook social network continues to be an explicit activity that has high value for individuals.

Yahoo Search

Yahoo bought the bookmarking and tag service del.icio.us back in 2005. It’s hard to know what, if anything, they’ve done with that service. But one intriguing possibility was hinted at in this TechCrunch post. The del.icio.us activity associated with a given web page is integrated into the search results. Yahoo search results would be ranked not just on links and previous clicks, but also on the number of times the web page had been bookmarked on del.icio.us. And, the tags associated to the website would be displayed, giving additional context to the site and enabling a user to click on the tags to see what other sites share similar characteristics.

This takes an above-the-flow activity performed by a relative few – bookmarking and tagging on del.icio.us – and turns it into implicit activity that helps a larger number of users. But with the Microsoft bid, who knows whether something like this could happen.

The use of implicit activity is a powerful basis to help users find content. Just don’t burden your users with too much of the wrong kind of explicit activity to get there. Two factors to consider in the use of implicit activity:

  1. How wide is the pipe of implicit activities?
  2. How much above-the-flow vs. in-the-flow activity is required?

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

FriendFeed Will Make Switching Social Networks Easier

March 18, 2008 by 4 Comments

There has been quite a lot of coverage for the FriendFeed service. FriendFeed aggregates updates from a variety of other social networks and Web 2.0 apps, such as Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that FriendFeed just added a search capability, making it “suddenly feel like a destination site”. The service is growing and improving.

Aside from aggregating your feeds, you can subscribe to the aggregated feeds of others. You “friend” others the same way to do with Twitter. Just subscribe to their FriendFeed. They don’t approve your subscription, you just do it. FriendFeed is essentially a social network in its own right, allowing users to post comments and share feeds amongst friends.

Which got to me thinking…the emergence of FriendFeed and other “networks of social networks” is going to make switching services a lot easier for individuals. And that’s going to make life harder for the social networks.

Here’s what I mean. I signed up for FriendFeed. I added several other services to which I belong: Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Pandora and del.icio.us. Suddenly, I see my updates all in one place. That, by itself, is pretty cool.

I then subscribed to the FriendFeeds of others. Robert Scoble is an active FriendFeed guy, by virtue of his involvement in every other social network and Web 2.0 service out there. It’s pretty interesting to see what he’s up to and what he’s commenting on.

Then I notice something. I’m seeing Scoble’s Jaiku updates (Jaiku is a competitor to Twitter).

Jaiku? I don’t belong to Jaiku!

And this is how these social network aggregators are going to change things. On Twitter, I can subscribe to others’ Twitter posts. For example, I subscribe to Scoble’s Twitter updates. But to subscribe to Scoble’s Twitter updates, you need to join Twitter. Through FriendFeed, that’s no longer the case. You can follow anything Scoble puts up on his FriendFeed: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and others.

So here’s how this unfolds. You and your friends join FriendFeed. You’re all on Twitter. You love the ease and carefree way you can post updates to Twitter. Your friends on Twitter see your updates, either on Twitter or on FriendFeed. But after a while, you decide the features of Jaiku are even better – you make the switch to Jaiku.

Normally, the switch to Jaiku from Twitter would be disruptive. Your Twitter-using friends no longer see your updates, and you can no longer see theirs. The pain of this disruption is a form of lock-in, as the value of switching does not equal the costs of doing so (see In Praise of Inertia: MyYahoo #1 for more discussion on this topic).

But with FriendFeed, the cost of switching social networks nears zero. Whether I post updates on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or Google Talk, my friends will see them on FriendFeed. There is a loss of the the ability to talk back to your friends directly on their different service, but FriendFeed lets you post comments on any update of your friends.

This is great for the individual, expanding the choices for different services. And it puts more pressure on social network and web service apps to continually improve their features and user experience. Otherwise, users will easily switch to a better service.

Lookout social networks and web services – the lifestream aggregators are coming.

UPDATE: Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has a March 20, 2008 post up entitled “The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere“.  In it, she observes that blog comments may ultimately migrate to lifestream aggregators, such as FriendFeed.  This thought is another variation on the idea that the lifestream cloud becomes the community, replacing the apps-based communities we know today.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Search Smackdown: Mahalo – del.icio.us – Google

March 10, 2008 by 3 Comments

I was reading the Crowdsourcing vs. Expertsourcing: A Misleading Comparison post over at Mashable. In it, Paul Glazowski analyzes a Newsweek article that suggests the bloom is off the Web 2.0 rose. Too much junk is enabled via everyday people logging on, and there’s a movement for more professional, expert information sourcing.

One example of expertsourcing is Mahalo. Mahalo was started to be a guide to Web content. Paid professionals own a topic, they research a number of sites related to that topic, and post the links that provide the best information. In their opinion, that is.

I’ll admit to some skepticism here. Google has been so good at revealing information and letting me see what’s out there. The idea of limiting my results to what someone deems worthy seems so incomplete. I’m afraid I’d be missing something that’d be really important to me.

But Mahalo has gotten some traction, so there’s something there.

I decided to run my own simple test of Mahalo, pitting it against two other ways to find relevant web content: del.icio.us and Google search. Quick backgrounder on those. del.icio.us is a bookmarking/tagging app that lets you save websites you like, and give them terms that have meaning to you. You can also find content on a given subject by searching tags, and seeing what others have bookmarked. Google is, of course, the preeminent Web search engine.

I tested three separate search terms, going from broad to specific:

  • Running
  • Marathon training
  • Tempo run

My scoring system is simple. For each search term, gold, silver or bronze will assigned based on my own subjective view.

SEARCH TERM #1: RUNNING

‘Running’ is a fairly broad topic. There are a lot of areas that may apply, making it a challenge to return results that are relevant . With that in mind, let’s see what the three search apps returned.

Mahalo: SILVER

The foundation of Mahalo’s search results is “The Mahalo Top 7”. These are the seven best links for a given topic. It is the Top 7 where expertsourcing proves its value.

The ‘Running’ Top 7 provide links to two running publications and wikipedia’s entry for running. Another link is to About.com’s page for running, itself a form of expertsourcing. A little uninspired, but a serviceable offering.

Mahalo also has several other sections in its running page. These include health-related topics, oddball sites, web tools and user recommendations. The web tools include MapMyRun.com, which lets you map a run or view others’ running routes. A user recommendation includes LetsRun.com, which is the best site for the competitive runner.

One other thing that’s good. All the links relate to the physical exercise running.

del.icio.us: BRONZE

This search shows both the power and the weakness of bookmark/tagging sites. On the plus side, I love the running results that are returned. Very interesting variety. The downside? A lot of sites that aren’t exercise running-related. Things like “Running a Windows Partition in VMware” and “Internet Explorer 7 running side by side with IE6”. In fact, 26 of the first 50 results were not related to exercise running.

There are interesting sites that del.icio.us users have posted related to running. MapMyRun.com is here. How to Select a Running Shoe by eHow.

Several, but not all of the Mahalo Top 7 appear in the first 50 del.icio.us results.

Google: GOLD

You can see how Mahalo picked its Top 7 websites…they’re all the top results in Google search! Google also returns the fun stuff in del.icio.us.

Then Google offers a plethora of other sites, and only 6 of the first 50 are not related to exercise running. Pretty much everything on Mahalo is there, plus other interesting sites. A site listing running movies. A company that sells the running skirt! Ultrarunning.

SEARCH TERM #2: MARATHON TRAINING

‘Marathon training’ is not nearly as wide open as ‘running’. This search is for someone who has a a goal in mind.

Mahalo: BRONZE

First, let me say that the bronze here is a very strong showing. If there was photo finish, you’d have a hard time telling Mahalo hadn’t won this test. The presented sites are all good and worty of consideration for anyone contemplating a marathon.

There are a variety of programs available here: Runners World, Running Times, marathontraining.com, etc. And to Mahalo’s credit, there’s no listing for Galloway’s training program! Editor bias there, I’ll admit.

I was disappointed that Pete Pfitzinger’s program isn’t shown. It’s my own favorite. But I liked the CrunchGear site, listing stuff marathoners would want.

del.icio.us: GOLD

One thing that immediately struck me this time is that all 50 of the del.icio.us results were related to marathon training. The greater specificity helped del.icio.us here. Also, “running” has several meanings, but “marathon” has few.

Several of the Mahalo Top 7 are in the first 50 results. Missing are the Running Times program, the AIDS national training program and the Boston Athletic Association program. But Team in Training is included (if you’re offsetting charity-related programs).

Several other valuable sites are here. For example, there’s McMillan Running, which includes running pace calculators and marathon time prediction workouts.

Unfortunately, Jeff Galloway’s site is bookmarked here. But…Pete Pfitzinger is included as well. Bonus points for that.

Google: SILVER

Google does its usual excellent job in its results. 6 of the Mahalo Top 7 are here; Running Times is missing from the first 50 results. Surprisingly, Team in Training is not in the top 50 results.

Google gets dinged for no race calculator in the first 50 results. No Pete Pfitzinger. But Jeff Galloway is there! Noooo…

SEARCH TERM #3: TEMPO RUN

A tempo run is a specific training technique in which you hold a fast pace over several miles. It’s a tough workout, but it can advance your performance dramatically. Obviously, we’re now in the technical weeds of running.

Mahalo: DISQUALIFIED

Mahalo has no entry for tempo running. We’ve gone too detailed for Mahalo here. DQ’d.

del.icio.us: SILVER

Use of the term “run” again confuses poor del.icio.us here. 34 of the first 50 results are not related to exercise running. But there are several good sites related to the tempo run. Runner’s World has Learn How To Do A Perfect Tempo Run. Running Times has A Tempo Run by Many Other Names.

And this is one of my favorites…a LetsRun.com post/discussion about Tempo run length vs. speed from 2003. One would have to go pretty deep into the LetsRun site to unearth that one. A true credit to the power of social bookmarks & tagging.

Google: GOLD

Incredibly, all of the first 50 results were related to exercise tempo runs. Very impressive. Lots of good info about the temp run. A LetsRun post/discussion, but different than the one on del.icio.us. Bloggers describing their tempo runs. Formal programs that advise on the pace of the tempo run. Just really good stuff.

Recap: Broad, Narrow, Technical

Broad search: Google, Mahalo, del.icio.us
Narrow search: del.icio.us, Google, Mahalo
Technical search: Google, del.icio.us, (Mahalo DQ’d)

Conclusions that I draw from this admittedly small, subjective test:

  • Mahalo is a good starting point for finding information on something that’s not familiar to you. It only covers broader, more popular categories. It does appear that the Mahalo expert just skims the top results from Google. But the clean interface and human filtering makes it a decent place to start your search.
  • del.icio.us is challenged by results that are not related to the search topic, which is consistent with its user-generated chaotic nature. It’s also a really good place to find hidden nuggets of valuable information not easily found elsewhere. And for a narrow topic with words that do not have multiple meanings, del.icio.us really shines.
  • Google still makes sense as the first place to look. Breadth and depth of results, and it takes on all comers. It also does an exceedingly good job of figuring out what sites relate to a search topic.

One final note in favor of Mahalo. There is research that shows consumers are actually better off with fewer choices than more. Give me 7 good choices, and I’ll be able to begin my journey to learn more about a topic. Give me 50 choices, some great, some terrible, and I’ll be flummoxed as I try to read them all.

Mahalo does have the advantage of providing a simple, limited set of good results to get beginners going. There is value to that.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

A Moment of Silence for Atari

March 7, 2008 by 1 Comment

I’m going to wax a little nostalgic here. Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka has a post up about French company Infogrames buying the rest of Atari that it doesn’t own. Kafka’s take is that the plan is to ultimately shutter Atari, the company, and to use the Atari name as a brand for several of its games.

Atari is a relic now. But once, it was so mighty. I came of age during the Atari Supremacy (early 1980s). And it really was an obsession for my friends and me.

Atari 2600 was the bomb. I mean, you had to have it. I think we paid something like $120 for the 2600 console. That was too high, you would get it for less. If you could find it. We found one and by God, I was going to have it, no matter the price. I also bought a small black & white TV to use it.

You got Missile Command and Combat with the 2600. Those were just fine for getting started. I played the heck out of that Missile Command game. Combat was OK, but could get a little boring after a while.

So you had to get new games. Man that was the best. Atari had all these great games in the pipeline to keep you salivating. They also drew from their successful line of arcade games, and those of others.

And it wasn’t just Atari making games. Activision too.

What were those games that had us kids so excited?

  • Space Invaders was one of the first big hits. It started in the arcades, was hugely popular for the 2600 console. I liked it, but it was not a huge favorite for me.
  • Asteroids was hugely anticipated. Big blobs moving up and down the screen, with your little triangle spaceship shooting them. Clifton got this game first in our neighborhood, so we all went to his house.
  • Frogger was just fun. I can still hear the sound of that frog making its way across the road: “boip” “boip” boip”.
  • PacMan was like a movie blockbuster. It had been huge in the arcades, and we couldn’t wait for it to come to the 2600.
  • Defender was another arcade crossover. I liked the 2600 version better than the arcade game, because I never got the hang of all those buttons.
  • Donkey Kong was my personal favorite arcade game. In the arcade, I got to the third pie factory. The 2600 was disappointing, because it didn’t include the pie factory.
  • Adventure was fun, if only for tapping into the geeky Dungeons & Dragons wave that was afflicting us dorks.
  • Centipede was eagerly anticipated, as it had been a big arcade hit. The 2600 version was a faithful reproduction.

Other things have fond memories for me. The original joystick. I really like the simplicity of the joystick and the red button. The Nintendo Wii brings back some of the simplicity. I also loved the little manuals that came with each game. Fun graphics, and little hints for the game. I loved that was in Sunnyvale, CA. “Sunnyvale” sounded funny to my Virginia ears. There was an Atari gaming magazine I used to read, Atari Age. It would include playing tips and reveal the “easter eggs” planted in the games.

Atari really was an important part of my generation’s growing up. Eventually, new game consoles supplanted Atari’s 2600. Atari came out with the 5200 (twice as good!). Coleco came out with ColecoVision (played 2600 games and had Donkey Kong with the pie factory!). Mattel had Intellivision.

Today we have some of the most amazing game consoles. Makes the Atari 2600 look so quaint.

I never had another game console after the 2600. I lusted for the ColecoVision, but alas never got it for Christmas. I moved on to other pursuits (TRS-80 anyone?). But the Atari 2600 had a permanent home in my memories.

I got the Atari Flashback II as a gift a couple Christmas’s ago. It’s got a few of my favorites: Adventure, Asteroids, Haunted House, Yars Revenge. It’s still a satisfying experience.

And still sitting in my storage closet? My original Atari 2600. Old faithful. I play it from time to time, and it’s still fun. That’s going to be someone’s inheritance one day.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

Welcome to My ‘Peanut Butter’ Visitors

February 19, 2008 by 2 Comments

WordPress provides some nice basic stats about activity on your blog. Total number of visits, specific posts clicked, referring websites and search engine terms that caused someone to arrive to your blog.

A couple of days ago, I noticed a significant uptick in visitors clicking on the post, Pay By Touch & the Peanut Butter Manifesto. They seemed to be arriving from the search term “peanut butter”.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that these visitors were really interested in my post. The post uses a Yahoo executive’s exasperated email comparing Yahoo’s efforts to spreading peanut butter too thin, and applies that to Pay By Touch’s situation. All well and good.

But I’m not quite sure that’s what my “peanut butter visitors” were looking for. In fact, I’m not sure what they’re looking for. I didn’t realize there that many people searching for information on peanut butter every day.

And the other confounding thing. What search engine are they using? I’ve tried to search for “peanut butter” on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The post doesn’t show up anywhere in the top 100 results.

So if one of my peanut butter visitors happens to read this post, please leave a comment. Tell me what search engine you’re using, and why you clicked on my blog post for “peanut butter”.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

Semantic Web = Tagging on Steroids

February 17, 2008 by 1 Comment

I read a nice list of “11 Things to Know About Semantic Web“, over at ReadWriteWeb. “Semantic Web” is an intimidating term. “Semantic”…hmmm, that’s something to do with words, right? Don’t people say, “he’s just using semantics” in a pejorative way?

I’ve researched it a bit, and here’s my initial attempt to put it in layman’s terms. The semantic web takes a document of unstructured data (say, this blog post), and renders it into a set of tags that are readable by both humans and software programs. Not just any tags, but really powerful tags beyond what you or I would use.

Now, at this point, that sounds sort of redundant. Don’t a lot of pages already have user-created tags? Can’t search engines find the words that are in the web page? If you know a little HTML, aren’t there metadata tags?

Well, it turns out those various methodologies are great for humans, but do little for machines. That kind of makes sense, right? I mean, we all get that machines’ ability to interpret our written words is limited. Google doesn’t really make a connection between your search term and the pages it serves up. It just looks for instances of your search terms and then applies all that special magic it does (number of links to a page, number of times the page was clicked previously, etc.).

The key to making these unstructured web pages readable by a machine is something called…RDF. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. Here’s RDF from Wikipedia: “The RDF metadata model is based upon the idea of making statements about resources in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions, called triples in RDF terminology.”

That “triples” thing (or, I’ve seen it as “triplets”). The idea of casting unstructured web data into subject-predicate-object is apparently quite powerful. Again, from Wikipedia: “In the English language statement ‘New York has the postal abbreviation NY’ , ‘New York’ would be the subject, ‘has the postal abbreviation’ the predicate and ‘NY’ the object.”

At this point, people much more versed in these technologies can explain how computers will use these triplets to better serve up content for a given search. For instance, Reuters has come out with its Open Calais initiative. They aim to “make all the worlds content more accessible, interoperable and valuable.” I will do some more research and write a follow-up post on this subject.

But I do want to note a few of the points provided in Bernard Lunn’s post over at ReadWriteWeb:

  • Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from “structure upfront” to “structure on the fly”. The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront, despite the tremendous skills brought by data modelers. Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content.
  • Don’t look for a killer app. That implies a client/consumer win. This is much more likely to be a server/platform/enterprise win.
  • Semantic Web could slow the Google steamroller. This could be like the PC for IBM or the Web for Microsoft. The steamroller’s momentum carries it forward for a very long time and it can build all kinds of wrapper systems around it, but something new always does come along. Google mastered how to give some structure to countless unstructured HTML pages. Semantic Web will gradually make that less critical as the underlying content will be more structured.
  • Tagging is the quietly disruptive technology. Everybody tags. It is the most basic human urge to mark what we find.
  • Semantic Web will leverage the “community” to add structure and this will use some techniques from first generation Social Networking. But it is very unlikely that Semantic Web will emerge from the walled gardens of current social networking sites.

Final note. I ran this post through a free website that employs Reuters’ Open Calais protocols, “Calais Text Tagger“. It returns a lot of text chock full of semantic tags. I won’t repeat that here. But I did like this little output:

IndustryTerm: unstructured web, search terms, relational database technology, software programs, wrapper systems, given search, unstructured web data, search term, semantic web
Company: IBM, Reuters, Microsoft, Google
Person: Bernard Lunn

Gotta say, that was pretty slick. And it’s more tags than I’m applying to this post.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , ,

Whither mashups…beyond Google Maps?

February 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Mashups are a tantalizing concept. Put together two different apps, link some data and voila! A new hybrid app that doesn’t something incrementally valuable to either app individually. A good one that I recently enjoyed was the Super Tuesday Twitter map. It was one of two Twitter-related mashups covering Super Tuesday.

I will note that the Super Tuesday Twitter mashup used a Google map. And that’s not surprising. It seems that when people think of mashups, they automatically think of something grafted onto a map. Craigs List apartment listings. Megans Law sex offenders. Flickr photos of wineries.

It’s like that’s all anyone can think of. Now that’s actually overstating it. I took a look at the top 50 most popular mashups listed at Yahoo Pipes. Here’s my admittedly rough count of the categories (3 omitted from results):

  1. RSS management (14 mashups)
  2. Flickr service stuff (8)
  3. Online retail shopping tools (6)
  4. News search apps (6)
  5. YouTube stuff (4)
  6. Map (3)
  7. Persistent search (2)
  8. Combined search (2)
  9. iTunes (1)
  10. Upcoming.org (1)

So, obviously, there are some things beyond maps. RSS-related apps are showing good uptake.

However, it still feels like mashups are in their nascent stage. I think there are a couple reasons for that.

First, folks are still trying to get their minds around ways that they can be used. Web users are not all programmers. They aren’t thinking that way. They like to try out the things someone else has made.

The other reason is that tools themselves aren’t yet built out to allow more interesting apps. Or, it’s hard as hell to figure out how to use the tools if they are indeed there! For example, here’s a mashup I’ve tried to build both on Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. Terraminds provides a nice search function for Twitter posts. You can convert the basic search function into a more persistent RSS feed for a given term. For instance, all tweets related to “enterprise 2.0”. I want to get the Twitter search results for “enterprise 2.0” posted to a page. The tweets include the Twitter author. I want to see the associated blog site of that author, listed right beside his tweet. That way, if the person says something I find interesting, I can click through easily to his personal website to see what else he talks about.

I have had no luck in figuring out how to use Pipes or Popfly to make this mashup a reality. It’s just too hard, or not even possible. Mashups still have a ways to go before they’re ready for wider usage.

So instead, maybe I’ll put all the Starbucks locations in San Francisco on a Google map…

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Confessions of an Online Video Luddite

February 9, 2008 by 1 Comment

comScore says that consumers are watching 3.4 hours of online video per month as of December 2007, a report highlighted in this post on Silicon Alley Insider. That’s a 34% increase in time spent viewing since January 2007. Apparently we’re enjoying online videos more than ever.

Except me. I’m not a fan of online videos. Three reasons:

  1. Too long for the videos to load
  2. If I get impatient and start the video immediately, I get annoying latency
  3. Investing 2, 3, …10 minutes of my time is too much

#3 is the one that gets me most. After waiting for the load time or enduring the pauses in the video as it loads slowly, the payoff better be good for my time. And generally, it isn’t. I’m not talking watching episodes of Lost on my iPod. Rather, I’m referring to these home-built efforts. They just aren’t worth the effort.

The comScore survey indicates that average online video duration is 2.8 minutes. The shorter time for the videos makes sense. Longer videos will exacerbate the issues above.

Reading, on the other hand, is a great experience. With RSS, I can pretty quickly size up the article and determine how much time I care to invest in it. I learn more in 10 minutes of reading/scanning my RSS reader than I do with 10 minutes spent on videos.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

Super Tuesday with Twitter/Twittervision/Google

February 9, 2008 by 1 Comment

Enjoyed using the Twitter mashup for Super Tuesday. Some algorithm (Google-created?) identified Super Tuesday-related tweets. Twittervision mapped these to Google maps. So you’d see comments pop up alongside someone’s picture, with their location on the Google map. Very entertaining.

There were plenty of Europeans and Australians chiming in that night. A few Latin Americans and a decent showing of Canadians. Demonstrated for this insular American how engaged the rest of the world is in our politics.

Also, by the end of the night, there seemed to be a 43-minute lagtime between posting a tweet and seeing it show up on the map. The typical comment display plus move around the Google map may have been ~10 seconds. So that’s roughly 258 tweets at any given time waiting to post.

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →