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After hearing about it for weeks, I caved and decided to check out friendfeed last night [and again, ht @dpn]. In previous posts I mentioned something I like to call the information diaspora. This is the phenomenon created by posting all sorts of personal information about your likes, dislikes, thoughts, opinions, etc all over the web and your subsequent loss of that information because it can’t be managed. I can see friendfeed coming in handy for removing some of this problem. You can attach a number of different social networking sites, flickr, youtube, etc all to your friendfeed account. Whenever you post something new in one of these sites, that information will be updated on friendfeed for all of your friends (and yourself) to be able to view. It’s not the perfect solution, but it is a very big step in the right direction.
Check it out. As usual, my username there is ealdent and feel free to friend me.
Is it Hallowe’en already? A fellow nlp blogger (and twitterer) pointed me to Plurk just a few minutes ago. I have been messing with Twitter’s api over the past couple days, which hasn’t been as easy as you’d think since they are suffering from massive growing pains. Fetching the public timeline takes between 5-30 seconds. However, they just got like $15 million in funding, so maybe they’ll be able to address the issue. The even bigger question is can they turn this free advertising service (which is what it is partially becoming) into a revenue stream?
Plurk is basically Twitter with a makeover and some extra social features thrown in. It still has the 140 character status update style interface, but includes a function selection for each plurk (what they call qualifiers): you can say, think, ask, wish, etc. You can also add smileys. Rather than appearing as a series of boxes scrolling down the screen, your plurks appear as floating boxes on a side-scrolling timeline. Plurks of friends also appear on this timeline and the result is a more graphical and pleasing (to me) interface. You can reply directly to other plurks in the boxes and conversations are tracked very nicely. This is far superior to twitter, which requires you to visit the other person’s timeline and wade through their tweets to find previous tweets in a thread. With Twitter being slower than a drunken monkey with three broken legs, that’s even harder.
As my esteemed colleague pointed out, however, scaling is an issue for any service like this. Ultimately, you are bound by how fast you can access the database. If Plurk becomes as popular as Twitter (and I have every reason to believe it won’t), it will also become bogged down. Also, Plurk is just getting started and has no discernible API (unless I’m just missing it). Twitter already has quite a few third party apps.
I must say, though, I am sorely tempted to abandon Twitter in favor of Plurk just for the fact that Plurk is accessible. The massive lag of Twitter is getting to me. Of course, if no one is there to listen to my ramblings, what’s the point?
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday. He touched many lives through his writing and his ideas had an impact on me at an early age with short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” and movies based on his books like 2010 (which I saw in the theater) and later 2001 (which I saw as a young man). His novel Rendezvous with Rama is being made into a movie and IMDB is quoting 2009 as the release date. I thought it was interesting to find out he had been living in Sri Lanka for some time.
I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend and my uncle made a few interesting points. He’s an old-school spring engineer, meaning he learned coming up through the trade rather than by going to school, and he supervises a number of employees at a relatively small spring company. My grandfather used to own a spring company called, shockingly enough, Adams & Sons Spring Co. That was later bought out and a number of the employees were moved to a different plant, including my dad and uncle. So anyhow, my uncle was telling me a story, which I won’t go into, but the heart of it is that you should not wait for people to hand you “what you deserve.” If you are a leader, regardless of your job title, then lead. If you see someone who needs help, don’t wait for them to ask you. Help. Show that you have the initiative. That’s probably fairly obvious, I mean we’ve all heard it before, but it came at a particularly important time for me.
I’ve been on twitter for a while now, though I don’t update it super-regularly like some people. It’s fun and I hope more of my friends start using it, but I’ve noticed an interesting trend. Just about anything is open to potential spam. Friendster is sick with it. MySpace is abominable. LinkedIn seems fairly immune and I’ve gotten very few spam friend requests from Facebook. Twitter has so far been very good about it, but there is a new trend that I’ve found interesting. You can follow people and people can follow you on twitter. So your status updates are public and potentially seen by thousands of people. How do you increase the number of people who follow you? Follow them, of course! I’m having random people follow me left and right. It only helps me, since I don’t follow them back, but it’s interesting to note.
Become my friend on Netflix. I think it helps that you are actually already on Netflix. :P
The Roman occupation of Judea (Israel) during the first century AD was disrupted in 70 AD when the Jewish people revolted. Rome, being a kick-ass military power, put down this rebellion. However, they couldn’t let the Jews get away with this attempt at self-rule, which might encourage other provinces to do the same. The new, crushing occupation and settlement of Judea led to the beginning of another diaspora of the Jewish people (the Jews had been scattered before, read your Old Testament).
I’ve talked about my idea of the new information diaspora a couple times before. We fill up all these different social networking sites and online services with personal information about our hobbies, preferences, friends, etc. This information is separated by incompatibility between platforms. OpenSocial is a move towards removing these boundaries, but so far it hasn’t caught fire.
In Facebook’s terms of service, you are not allowed to scrape Facebook for content. They don’t want you to gather information about your social graph, since that would potentially undermine their service. Ergo, you can import information into Facebook, but can’t export it out. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (though whether it was really his idea or software is disputed), seems to be shaping up to be quite a tyrant in this realm. It’s almost daily that some news about his bungling comes over the blagoblag.
The latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that attempts to solve a small part of the information diaspora problem by consolidating your friends’ activities on different sites. Facebook, however, put down this rebellion by disabling Scoble’s account. Robert’s crime? Trying to get the names, email addresses, and birthdays of the 1800 friends he has on both Facebook and Plaxo.
I am a fan of good beer. In this post I am going to talk about my ideas for how to improve websites that offer ratings for different varieties of beer, and how I think recommender systems would improve their service.
Why I care
Whenever I’m asked what kind of beer I like, I experience a moment of awkwardness. Because I don’t just like good beer, I hate bad mediocre beer. Usually the person asking is a beer noob and I don’t want to sound too snobby by throwing beer jargon at them they probably won’t understand. So I say something along the lines of “I like the more expensive stuff, like from small breweries or imports.” The response is usually something about Sam Adams. I used to enjoy Sam Adams Boston Lager, but I can barely stomach it anymore. There are a couple Sam Adams brews that aren’t half bad, but the Boston Lager no longer cuts it for me.
Well, after many frustrating months of waiting for Twitter to finally fix their gmail contacts import feature, I have finally done it! Surprise, only two contacts were signed up — and that’s two more than I expected. However, one of those is a professor who probably only checked them out because they’re using his technology and the other was a friend who had only one update:
“nothing.”
Social pressure from me caused him to add another update. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
What is Twitter, you ask? It’s basically Facebook status updates made global. Indeed, you can even add a Facebook app that allows Twitter to update your status. Of course, it means you get “is twittering: ” inserted at the beginning of any tweet (a single Twitter status update) as your status update.
While Twitter at first seems like status updates on steroids, it’s actually evolving into something else far more useful. I’ve talked before about the information diaspora and the difficulty of keeping up with all your personal information as it flies around the web. Twitter at first adds to that mess, but it does offer interesting ways of tracking small bits of information.
Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, uses it to keep track of new words she comes across. Twitter lets you text updates from your cell phone or IM client so it’s easy to update on the go. Robert Scoble uses it as a sort of mini-blog of things he comes across or finds out about that wouldn’t really make a full-fledged blog post. So Twitter has uses for logging your web surfing, hobby, life activities, etc., which is a useful information diaspora reducing measure in my book. The only question remains whether this would be of any use to you.
Check me out and follow my updates on Twitter. If you haven’t signed up, consider it. If you do, let me know so I can follow you.
Google Reader recently added some social networking features. You can now add your friends’ shared items to your feeds. Up til now I haven’t used the shared items feature since it didn’t really make sense to send people a link to my shared items and expect them to give a crap. Now it’s easier to subscribe to it and the decision to give a crap is left up to them when they read their feeds.
As Robert Scoble pointed out, there is one major flaw with the new feature: it clutters up the rest of your feeds. This is, of course, assuming you read your feeds in the “All feeds” folder. I usually don’t since I have a number of Tech News feeds that I’m not always interested in and often has duplicated information. I only read it when I have time. You can do the same with your friends shared items, so no big deal to me.
So why not check out my shared items? As it happens, I have none at the moment. But if you use Google Reader, feel free to add/invite me so we can view each others. I’ll accept any invitations.
I’m going to officially coin the term information diaspora to mean the dispersion of individual personal preference information throughout the web. Whenever you sign up for an account, you leave a part of your personal information somewhere. Whenever you enter an address to order a book, more information. When you look through digg comments and you thumbs-up or thumbs-down a comment, more information. Whenever you favorite a video on youtube, leave a wall post on facebook, rate a movie on netflix, more information. All of this information is accessible to you as long as you can recall where you have left it. If you forget about a website you signed up for, that information is now missing. It’s not dead or gone, just missing.
Your brain is no longer the homeland of all these orphaned data. Social networking is great, but with the current Web 2.0 bubble expanding the way it is, the inherent incompatibility in the global network is becoming more and more a problem.
Probably would not be noticeably bad. Colbert certainly is attracting a massive amount of attention after declaring his desire to run as a candidate in South Carolina. Whereas Barrack Obama’s facebook group was haled as a success after gathering 384k+ members, Colbert’s group skyrocketed to over a million in just one week. So does he actually have a shot at the presidency if he decided to kick it up a notch and run in all 50? That certainly seems to be the case with younger voters at this point, but would it hold out at the actual election? On Wonkosphere, he’s got a buzz percentage of about 4%, roughly one-third of the buzz for the candidates the media is telling you to vote for (Hillary and Giuliani).
Better yet, he should run in 48 states, singling out 2 as “handicap” states to give the other candidates a fighting chance. I’m sure he could find a pair funnier than Alaska and Rhode Island, but that’s a start.
Also, for a good read about why the democratic leadership isn’t worth two farts in the wind, you should check out today’s article on Dissident Voice.
Update and note: Be sure to check out the comments. It turns out that while the MacArthur site does not list Paul Rothemund as a computer scientist, he actually is. So there is indeed at least one CS genius for 2007.
Well the 2007 MacArthur fellows were announced and it looks like no computer scientists made it onto the roles this year. The last time there were no computer scientists on the list was 2001. This is probably just a blip, but if the trend continues, it might be a warning sign that computer science is producing fewer visionaries. In a time when the intertubes are booming with social networking activity, this seems odd. Perhaps the problem is that there are too many players and no one stands out, even though as a whole the products are changing the world. At least two of the geniuses are doing some work that appears to draw a lot on computer science but deals more with computational applications of DNA. That is, the DNA is the computer. Maybe this isn’t such a bad sign for CS, but a sign that CS by itself is diminishing and interdisciplinary applications of CS are on the rise. I know I’m not the first person to say that, so if you have a quote or a reference, please leave a comment.
My picks for top geniuses are:
- Paul Rothemund - Caltech - DNA computation and nanotechnology. Awesome stuff. He has used
algorithmic self assembly methods with DNAscaffolded DNA origami to construct images like a map of the western hemisphere (see picture). - Saul Griffith - Squid Labs - One of his inventions could bring cheap eyeglasses to poor communities throughout the world. Another was a handheld human powered generator. He’s also into nanotech, so we could see some cool stuff there.
- Michael Elowitz - Caltech - More algorithmic coolness with DNA and DNA circuits.
So Twitter still has not fixed the problem with importing gmail contacts. They responded to my email once, asking which browser I was using and if the problem happened for other browsers. I replied that it was cross platform and on IE and firefox, but that was the last I’ve heard from them. That was three weeks ago. Blerg.
So being generally interested in the whole social networking thing lately, I decided to try out Twitter a couple weeks ago. Twitter does 24/7 what Facebook status updates were meant to: allow you to keep your friends updated on the minutia of your life. Facebook status updates have degenerated to being a sort of contest of cleverness (perhaps to make interesting the boring crap of your life). There are a few classes of Facebook status updates (FBSU) I have categorized:
- Life status — indicating tiredness, boredom, anxiety, desires, location, etc.
- Temporary fandom — showing in some way that you’re a fan of a group, tv show, movie, politician, sports team, product, etc.
- Pissed-offedness — invective-splattered status updates, often employing various symbols (%!$#@)
- Pseudo-philosophical gibberish — for those who want their friends to think them deep
Twitter does all of that but by its nature also allows the minutia reports to be more natural. On Facebook, no one uses status updates to tell people they are at home or at school or at work. I tried, believe me. No one cared, oddly enough. So I stopped and have resorted mostly to #1, #2 and #4 on the list above.
So anyhow, for the past two weeks, I have tried to use my gmail contacts to find friends on Twitter, which are probably few. Over twenty failures. And now today, Twitter is down and has been down for a while. Supposedly it is being upgraded, and I’m hoping that will mean the problem is fixed. I emailed them yesterday about it after many, many failed importing attempts. Currently, I’m enjoying the thought that Twitter’s downtime is their way of saying, “this update’s for you.”
Update
As of 5pm EDT, Twitter is back up. But, I still can’t import my gmail contacts to find friends.
I must be in some sort of funk today, because I’m seeing doom everywhere I look. Right now, I see the next dot com bust hiding just beyond the crest of the Web 2.0/social networking wave. VCs are dumping money into startups left and right and piece of crap companies like Club Penguin are being snatched up by major corporations for insane gobs of money. Or maybe what’s depressing me is the fact that once again I am seeing dozens of sites spring up that offer very little new except an interesting idea, but the product just isn’t there.
