Steve Kaplan

John Battelle's Searchblog had an interesting post today on Stalkerati. It's basically a mashup of MySpace, Facebook Friendster, Google, Technorati and Yahoo/Flickr. You can type in one search box and get results from all the sites in one place.

Stalkerati

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It's been a pretty busy week since I started at Microsoft. Lots of stuff to get going on. I'm gonna try to get in a post or two over the weekend and then keep doing posts every couple of days starting next week.

-Steve-

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I got into Seattle last night. Microsoft really hooked me up with housing and stuff. I even get to drive this clown car for the summer!

I'll be going into town today with another one of the interns I met on the plane. We'll probably check out the Experience Music Project which looks pretty cool.

On a sidenote, Robert Cringely had a pretty interesting column this week. Predictibly about the inevitable demise of IBM/Microsoft and victory of Google...worth reading as usual.

"Google is about generating custom data based on applying proprietary algorithms. THAT's their theory of business, no matter how that data is ultimately paid for or by whom.

"I'm counting on Google and eBay to save America."

"It is great for Google to buy-up these little firms making millionaires along the way, but Google's obsession with reinventing the wheel might hurt them over time. I hope they are smart about this, but I fear that they aren't, and that Google's own vertical obsession might hamper their growth."

May 11, 2006 - Google-on

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This story has been sprouting up all over the web. Apparently there is an effort in congress to block sites such as MySpace and Facebook in schools and libraries. From the Washington Post:

"The bill known as the "The Deleting Online Predators Act" introduced by Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., aims at protecting minors from online child predators."

This is another BS bill put fourth by our elected officials that just don't "get it." I'm not going to go on about how much I disagree with this bill.

I'd like to see what these guys try to do when social networking sites are readily available on mobile devices. Helio just launched and provides MySpace access via their phones. Facebook is already available for any mobile phone via SMS. AMP'D Mobile is likely on the radar.

What's gonna be next? Blocking cellphones in schools and libraries to "protect our children?"

Congress may clamp down on MySpace (Washington Post)

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In case you haven't seen it, check out Stephen Colbert's speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.

Colbert Roasts President Bush - 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner

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I stumbled upon an interesting post today where a guy explains how those online flight trackers actually work.

It's a pretty technical article (this guy clearly knows what he's talking about) but worth a read. In a nutshell, he says that the way online flight trackers work is by tracking a plane's proximity to the satelites they use for in-flight phone calls and internet. This is similar to triangulating the location of a cell phone based on signals from radio towers.

Tracking Plane Flight on Internet

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Yes, I read Valleywag and think its hilarious.

There's a pretty funny interview with the man-behind-the-magic, Nick Douglas, today on bitemarks.

Turntable: Valleywag's Nick Douglas parties like it's 1999

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Lifehacker had a post today about Harvest. Harvest provides an online application for tracking time spent on projects.

This is a great tool similar to Blinksale (which I blogged about earlier). Harvest provides a great tool to small businesses that need to bill customers at an hourly rate. Among other features, it allows managers to track how much time different people are spending on projects as well as remind them to keep logging their time. The manager can also sign off on time sheets and get an easy dashboard view of where time is being spent on a project.

I'd like to see Harvest have some integration with Blinksale. With this, a customer would not only be able to get quick, online statements but they would also be able to drill down into where time is being spent on their project.

Check out Harvest here.

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Not too much to write about today, but I did stumble upon the new Superman trailer. How can you resist?

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John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) brought their new advertising platform live today. It was hard to really find a concise description of what this platform does from their website but it is trying to bring the traditional CPM model back to the web via the blogosphere.

The platform looks pretty cool from what they show in the site. There is a network of first-run blogs such as Boing Boing, Digg, Fark, 43 Folders and TechCrunch (insert Michael Arrington joke here). Once a user creates an account, they can essentially look through set prices for advertising on different blogs. You can then select the advertisement size, number of impressions desired and "check-out."

For all the hype about why CMP is dead, this could change the game significantly. John Battelle is a big name in the [tech] publishing business and it will be interesting to see how this product pans out.

Check out the site at http://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/.

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If any of you watch the Rocketboom podcast, you've noticed some weird Earthlink promotional bits at the end of the last couple days' episodes.

These guys just got sponsored by Earthlink and they've been doing some really interesting advertising in their podcasts. I subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, some of which are now putting in ads, but most of them are just pre-recorded or pre-scripted sponsor shout-outs.

The guys at Rocketboom are being smart about this. Each of the last couple days' episodes have had a different, Rocketboom-produced, advertisement for Earthlink at the end. Instead of making me want to skip ahead, the advertisements are actually worth watching!

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Last night CakePHP hit v1.0. It is essentially a framework with all of the benefits of Ruby on Rails, but without the Ruby. Instead, Cake is entirely in PHP.

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I've been testing it out for a little while now and its pretty cool. In about 30 minutes I had a simple blog application up and running on my local server.

I've tried Rails but it was hard for me because everything was written in Ruby, not a language I know too much about. Cake, like Rails, makes it simple to develop your apps in the MVC framework and helps to prevent you from doing stupid things.

Although Cake is only at v1.0 and isn't as sophisticated as Rails, it is a promising alternative to Rails that makes great use of the PHP language.

From the end of the tutorial:

"Creating applications this way will win you peace, honor, women, and money beyond even your wildest fantasies."

Check out cake at: http://www.cakephp.org and be sure to go through the blog tutorial.

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I keep stumbling on way too many of these social networking plays. They're all getting x-million dollars in VC but they're all me-toos.

Valleywag ran an interview today with Trent Bigelow, Founder & CEO of Palopia. What is interesting about Palopia is that they really see the "so-what" of social networking. As best described in the Valleywag piece:

""Social software sucks," a developer told me this weekend, "because it makes people autistic." Society arises naturally from interaction, not a friends list -- and forcing it into the latter makes users act autistic."

This really hits the nail on the head. What do we really get out of Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn etc? Sure, they're a good tool for keeping track of your rolodex. Sharing pictures is nice too. How many times do you find yourself just aimlessly on these sites surfing around profiles? What do you actually get done?

Palopia, still in private beta, recognizes this problem and has some great ideas to help solve it. They want to integrate blogs/e-mail/calendar/general PIM functionality into the social networking application as well as help to create easy online communities within the network. More details about their ideas here.

These are great ideas because they allow users to really leverage upon their networks/contacts. Instead of just telling you who your friends are, Palopia wants to help you organize and collaborate with your friends - the "so what" of networking.

Oh, and it's run by a bunch of USC undergrads!

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Valleywag had an article today about Facebook recruiting CS Majors at MIT. From the piece:

"So, no sign of MySpace on campus this week. But the entire CS department job email list just got a recruiting email from Facebook. It's got a bunch of the same stats you already knew, but maybe some new ones too.

They mention, among other things, that that they plan to start doing "ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis." Hmm..."

The article goes on with the full text of the e-mail they sent out to the CS students...full of some bad-ass statistics.

• Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the US.
• The "engineering leverage ratio", which they define as "the number of page views the site gets every month divided by the number of engineers who build it", is 300 million per engineer (9 billion page views per month/30 engineers).
• They have about 7 million active users...if you do the math, with 9 billion page views per month, that is very sticky.
• Google gets about the same number of page views as Facebook.
• The Facebook photos service was created by a team of 2 guys but gets more traffic than Webshots, Yahoo Photos or Flickr - about 1 million uploads per day.

Not too much to add here but these guys came to CMU as well last fall and were recruiting our CS department. At the time, they had a 15-man engineering team which would make the "engineering leverage ratio" twice what it is now with 30 members. They also talked about the amount of page views they get - about as many as google but with only about 6 million active members at the time and claimed that they had one of the largest SQL farms in the world.

I'm a strong supporter of these guys. I love their site and use it regularly. Its like a rolodex that you never have to update. Unlike their competitors, Facebook knows how to implement their stuff elegantly and without too much crap or pretty interfaces like MySpace/LinkedIn (admittedly I use both of them as well :)).

What will be important moving forward, is building unique experiences to different user sets. Facebook now has access for high schoolers, college students and is adding corporate access. These are all different users with different needs and different amounts of disposable income.

A great example of this tiered merchandising is Manchester United. To have fans that remain for life, ManU has different ways that they market to kids, teenagers, 20/30 somethings and the higher end crowd. By doing this, they are able to answer the needs of different segments independently.

Facebook can have a lot of success with a tiered marketing approach. By getting users at a young age and delivering a valuable experience as they mature, they won't need to change over to new services when they move on from high-school->college->real world.

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I'm currently blogging from 11582 meters high at approximately 885 km/h. w00t!

Before I got onto the flight to JFK, they gave me a free trial card for the in-flight WiFi. So I'm testing it out.

This is rad.

...I wish I brought my microphone to go on Skype. That would be a pretty sweet hack.

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I'm heading on the Singapore-JFK flight tonight so I'll be MIA for the next day...probably more like 2.

If you wanna be really stalkerish you can track the flight here.

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The guys at 37signals had an interesting post today.

People will often ask us “how do you find time to do PR or marketing when you are building your products?” Or “When do you find time to do customer support?” Or “How does such a small team accomplish so much? What is your time management secret?”

Here’s the secret: it’s all the same thing.

Product development, marketing, PR, support, design, programming, etc — it’s all the same thing. We don’t put time aside for PR or time aside for design or time aside for tech support. We’re always doing all of these things. They are all part of the same thing: building products we love to build.

These guys are driving home the what seems to be true of the new wave of Web 2.0 sites. What is interesting about all of these new apps is not just the problem they solve, but how great their site designs are. These are sites that have clearly been engineered at both the front-end and back-end level.

Web standards are driving this forward. Technology such as CSS makes it more deliberate to teams about who designs the Model, the View and the Controller. It makes it trivial to keep these independent and allows for designers to have real control over how the user interacts with the site. This, combined with the types of agile development methodologies pioneered by the 37signals guys, is ushering a new era of application development. In the most most recent episode of Inside the Net Dan Cederholm, of Simplebits hits on this a bit.

The other interesting point brought up in the podcast is how all of these "Web 2.0" apps look very much the same. This is probably because these interface trends (tagging, AJAX, big fonts etc.) are the best of breed right now.

I wouldn't call myself an expert on this stuff but it will be interesting in the future to see how easily web standards allow these design trends to change. Will the technology live up to the hype? Will it be as simple as swapping out CSS files?

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Wired ran an article today about Kodak's recent anouncement to "Scan the World." The project is described as:

"New hardware and software still in development digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to automatically organize them." "Along with digitizing the images, the scanning software also assigns each image a tag based on the decade in which the photo likely was taken."

Kodak claims that their software will not only be able to do facial and text recognition within the photos, but also be able to judge the approximate date the photo was taken.

I don't buy much of anything Kodak is saying. The clues they use to deduce different information from photos are just not solid enough. They claim that they will use the paper size and whether the photo is B/W or color to figure out how old the picture is. Sounds like vaporware to me.

Come on. How many times in the last 100 years do you think Kodak has changed paper size? I'm no expert on photography but I bet its not too many. Also, there are plenty of photos taken today that are in black and white. Does this mean that the system will tell me they're from the 20's?

As for facial/text recognition, I can't imagine that what they have is much better than Riya. Riya, while the best out there right now, isn't even close to solving this problem. As they've said, its about "as smart as a 2 year old." Even if Kodak's technology is better, its hard to imagine that it is much better.

There's also the issue to deal with of aging. Last time I checked people's faces/hair/body change over time. This is a tough issue to deal with that I doubt a computer can reason out on its own yet.

Kodak has been having problems for a while now. Digital has been killing them and they are constantly looking for a way to go after the huge amount of photos that people now take because of digital. While "Scan the World" is a nice idea, it is most likely far, far from being something they can make real money on. Kodak has to figure out their story.

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Lifehacker briefly mentioned a company called Blinksale today. As their website claims, Blinksale is "The easiest way to send invoices online."

There is nothing revolutionary about this idea. People have been selling solutions for billing, procurement etc for years. However, this is an example of a great Web 2.0 app.

Note: "Web 2.0" is like the new "Synergy", an overused term that has been made up by the industry to describe something easily. It basically means, using the web for what it was hyped meant to be used for 10 years ago.

To get started with Blinksale all you have to do is create a free account and just like the Web 2.0 trend, they don't have to collect every piece of vital information about you.

Once you've created your account, you can begin creating invoices with their simple web form and then e-mail these to your customers. The app has integrated PayPal support so not only are your invoices handled online, payments are as well.

The power of the application really comes when it leverages upon the invoices you've created. When a user logs into their account, they are shown a dashboard that shows late invoices, open invoices and invoices recently closed. This is possible because of the integration with PayPal. As soon as a payment is made, the invoice's status is changed automatically in the Blinksale system.

There are also great features for sending out quick payment reminders and follow-ups/thank yous to customers. In addition, Blinksale makes it easy for setting up automatic recurring payments. And of course, what Web 2.0 app wouldn't be complete without gratutious tagging - they've got that too.

Although I said it is free, that only applies to the first 3 invoices per month. After that, they will charge you depending on how many invoices you want to send. When you do the math it comes out to around $.30 - $.50 per invoice depending on your account level. After all, these guys do have to make money somehow and this is not such a bad price - pretty competitive with postage.

What is great about Blinksale is it provides small businesses with an easy way to invoice customers without having to install any complex software locally and send out paper invoices. Since the app is hosted online it makes for great integration with online payment as well. Finally, it lowers the risk of a hard drive failure/computer crash that can be devistating to someone freelancing/running a small operation - they don't have to worry about losing all of their payment/billing records.

There are a ton more features and I would encourage you to check out the site. There is also a good walkthrough of the service with screenshots to give you a good idea for the app.

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Kinda a funny post. I'm on exchange in Singapore right now and a few weeks ago some of my local friends asked myself & some of my exchange friends to help them with their advertising project. We were asked to model for some concept ads to be shown to the company, because the client had a specific policy of not using Asian models. The project went well and I just got some soft copies of the ads.

I put them up on my Flickr last night and this morning I found they had been viewed a couple hundred times. My friend pointed me to this story on Adrants. I tagged the shots with "advertising" so they must have been picked up by some of the advertising-types out there. The one above, in particular, got lots of attention.

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I stumbled upon this on Slashdot today. SGT David Coughanour (AHHC 1-110th Infantry) is a marine currently home on R&R from the war. David recently presented at Notacon 3. His presentation was entitled "HajjiNets: Running an ISP in a War Zone" and, as it sounds, is about running an ISP where troops are currently stationed.

More specifically, David is stationed in the Sunni Triangle. He and some of the other troops were getting fed up with the "standard issue" internet access provided by the DOD. As MattGWU commented on Slashdot:

Here's the best line: "And there are couple of reasons why we do it: The uh...the DoD gives us an MWR cafe, for every 1000 troops you get something like 6 to 12 computers. And that's great, except some of the grey-list sites are kind of blocked so basically you can't get porn off it, among other things."

Now although I admittedly don't know too much about networking, I was able to pick up a good amount of what David had to say (mirror here). It was amazing to hear how much logisitics and planning have gone into setting up this ISP at the base.

The network's setup is essentially at $15,000 satelite dish used to link up to a backend provider in the Ukraine. The hardware on the ground is a mash-up of stuff bought, owned and other stuff that "fell of the back of a truck." In all, it adds up to a quarter of a million dollars operation, all coming out of the troops' own pockets.

The guys weren't able to get CAT3 networking cable to build out the network so, instead, they have been using military-issued phone wire which isn't perfect but gets the job done.

Another issue ran into is the fact that FCC regulations don't exist in the Sunni Triangle. Because of this there is a bunch of government equipment that causes interference on the 2.4GHz frequency, crippling WiFi from time to time. If that weren't enough, David has discovered that rockets emit an EMP that fries all of their hardware ROMs, requiring a memory flash.

Even though the network was originally planned to have about 150 users, it has grown to 350 and this makes the cost per head to be $100 in setup costs with a $60 per month fee. All of this is non-profit and any extra money is committed to go back into the troops' pockets. David likes this setup because he essentially has no "customers" and, jokingly, can tell them to "go to hell."

At the end of the day, David sees this as an invaluable service to the troops in the field. He thinks it is a great morale booster and allows troops to stay connected to their families, friends and media at home. An extra bonus is that Amazon ships Spaghettios to the Sunni Triangle so many of these guys no longer have to eat the crappy dining-hall food all the time.

The video is about 51 minutes long, but definately worth a watch, mirror here (Latest Quicktime Required).

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After reading about all the buzz and VC investment in Riya I decided to give it a try. Riya is (from TechCrunch):

"Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web).

Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable."

I'm not going to give a summary of how the service works. Too many people have done that already and you can probably get a better idea from Mike Arrington.

Riya has been around for a while but it wasn't until the last couple of weeks that they started getting a lot of attention. The TWiTs as well as TalkCrunch put out podcasts about them in the last week.

They keep saying over and over that they don't want to be a photo hosting service like Flickr. Rather, they want to leverage upon their recognition-technology.

One feature they're working on implementing right now is the ability to export tags to Flickr. This is a pretty cool idea and I'll most likely really use Riya when they implement this. I don't want to have to upload my photos to both Riya and Flickr to use Riya's facial recognition. At the same time, Riya only supports uploading of 800x600 files so I'll continue using Flickr until something better is worked out.

The real gold mine, however, could be if they integrate into Facebook. Although they are pretty hyped right now, I can say as a college student that Facebook has a GREAT service. A couple of months ago they implemented a unique photo sharing service. The killer-feature of this is easy tagging of people within photos. Rather than using facial recognition, like Riya, they require users to tag the photos during the uploading process.

Facebook has made this so easy to do that most people uploading photos do it. The best part is that its free.

In practice, this means that I can click on a person's name and see all of the photos that have been tagged with their name. I can also see who they are in the photo itself.

I've posted some screenshots of this here.

Although Flickr seems like the best community to go after right now, it would be better for Riya to try out site integration with Facebook. This is an online community that already is comfortable with the idea of people-tagging and has a great set of training data. The Riya system can automatically parse out the metadata and have super-easy setup for Facebook users. Facebook can also be leveraged for improving the Riya system with a real-world data set.

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I've just started getting into this Infogami thing...pretty cool stuff.

There are too many idiots out there with no focus for their blog. I don't wanna just be another one of them.

I'm not really sure what I should blog about but any suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, feel free to check out some of my links, photos and what my musical taste currently happens to be (click on the right).

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