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June 26th, 2008
Good friend - and fellow Mozillian - Chris Blizzard has just released a long-time "hack in the evenings" project of his: Whoisi. I think the best "one line" description that I've heard for it, thus far is "a wiki-like Friendfeed." It's quite fun - sort of an identity service combined with a wiki combined with a feed reader. All without requiring any form of signing up or logging in. It'll be fun to see how it all comes out in the wash, but for now it's certainly grabbing the attention of some notable people.
Chris has posted a ton of details concerning how the application works. I've had the opportunity to follow his development for a while now and heard about all the interesting issues that he's tackled - related to Python, databases, scaling, and jQuery. I love seeing "for fun" applications finally come to light - and this one is a keeper.
Tags: sites, social
5 Comments on 'Whoisi?'
January 23rd, 2007
Step 1) Spam the crap out of the Digg user comments using multiple accounts, multiple URLs, and make them all look like legitimate links. Continue this for a few days, to get people good-and-angry.
Step 2) Post a story calling for your own spammy, fake, accounts to be IP-banned. Everyone blindly insta-diggs it, because they're really pissed off.
Step 3) Profit.
Seriously, read the comments and watch the diggers slowly realize what's just happened. I don't think there's anything funnier on the Internet.
Tags: digg, social, communities
2 Comments on 'Howto Spam Digg'
September 9th, 2006
The other day, Digg made some changes to its voting system. Whereas, previously, votes were not weighted in any discernible manner, they are now weighted based upon the, supposed, level of collusion that you exhibit with other users. The idea is that if you commonly vote up the same article as another user, then your combined vote is only worth one "vote" unit.
The fundamental problem that I have with this implementation is that if you're a normal, non-colluding, Digg user - your generic vote weight will go down as time goes on. The more you use Digg, the more chance that you have of haphazardly voting the same as another user. Eventually the system with find you to be in collusion "Three diggs together! Oh no!" and chop your vote to an invisible degree.
An excellent-quality article made it up onto Digg today (a seemingly rare occurrence). In the article, Pete argues that Digg follows a strict sense of Groupthink and conformity. I couldn't possibly agree more. I especially like his proposed solution to the aforementioned problem (while taking a different aproach than that of vote weighting):
To tackle the problem of conformity, do not show profile or # of votes for up-and-coming dugg articles. Just show the article link, with no profiles or votes attached to it. As a compromise, only show the profiles and votes on the articles that make the digg front page, but make them un-diggable from the front page.
I think the decision made by the Digg team was incredibly mis-guided. But it's immediate ramifications are tangible enough for them to make a quick decision concerning it. In my opinion, stopping colluding friends, or bot networks, is only part of the battle; stopping independent, rogue, users is something else entirely (and which I'll be discussing more, in the future).
Tags: digg, social, software
Comment on 'Making Digg Relevant'
August 8th, 2005
After having posted my Super-Fast Delicious Bookmarklet yesterday, it became quite a hit on del.icio.us. As I watched the links come in I noticed one recurring trend: A lot of users were tagging their links with the cryptic '%s'. I thought for a minute and realized that these users were adding the bookmarklet to their toolbar - then clicking it (which is not the right thing to do).
Anyway, why I was digging through these links I came across one user who had posed a question in his extended description:
I don't quite get this but sense it could be good - question: can the config change be adapted jus to close tab + not window?
There was an easy answer to this - so I visited his del.icio.us page looking for a way to contact him (email, web site, etc.) - but one did not exist. So this posed a quandry: How does one respond to a question on del.icio.us?
The only way that you can 'contact' someone in del.icio.us is to tag a link using the for: prepend - and that's exactly what I did.
But this brings up a couple questions:
- What should the URL for the site be?
- If your contact is browsing through lots of links - and you want him to see yours, what can you do to attract his eye to it?
- How do you make it apparent, to users who read your links but aren't that person, what it is that you're replying to?
I feel as if I was able to tackle the first two problems fairly well, but the last one posed some definite issues.
I solved the first problem by using the original URL for the link, but tacking a #for:peacay at the end. This makes the URL unique - but still provides some context for the discussion.
I solved the second problem by making use of HTML character entities, specifically the arrows. Delicious does not allow you to embed entities directly, but it does support unicode - so I simply copied the visual representation of the arrows that I wanted, pasted them into the 'description' field, and was well on my way. You can see the final result here:
The final problem is the hardest one - and I'm still not sure how to solve it. The idea of having permanent links to a bookmark on delicious has been discussed many times before. If a permanent link existed for this guy's bookmark, I could tag that URL directly - creating a sort of pseudo-threading and giving context to everyone reading it.
Being able to create a usable threading/discussion situation for del.icio.us would definitely be cool - but I'm just not sure that we're entirely there yet.
Tags: del.icio.us, delicious, social, bookmark, tags
1 Comment on 'Discussions Using Del.icio.us'
July 1st, 2005
I had a chance to play with a fun new social application today called Dinnerbuzz. The premise is simple: It's a social network for people to find new places to eat - and to mark off the ones that they've already visited. I signed up and started testing it out. There's only a handful of users from around the country on the site, and none from my city, Rochester, NY. So, coupled with the efforts of my girlfriend Julia we set about entering a number of new places into the database.
Adding a new restaurant to the database isn't 'that bad'. There's a simple form, you provide the name of the restaurant, it's relative location (you can even be vague, which is nice), tags, and a description. All of this is powered by the Yahoo Local API, making sure that all restaurants entered are correctly identified and labeled. If a restaurant is not in the API is has to be approved by an admin, which seems kind of silly for a user-submitted web site.
Now, it's time for some complaints: The tags are certainly interesting, in this context, but I'm not really sure if they work for restaurants. Some tags are immediate 'chinese', 'italian', 'pizza', etc. But how should you tag price ranges, food quality, or experience - it becomes incredibly confusing from person-to-person and daunting to manage within a single account. Should you say 'expensive' or '$20' - if you say 'nice' are you referring to the food or the service? I've found myself using the tag 'moderate' - but does it mean moderate price or moderate quality? Who knows! This may be one application to which tagging, of this kind, is not ideally suited.
I should warn you, however, that there are still a couple bugs in the system, and the GUI isn't completely flushed out yet. For example, there's no way to delete an entry once you've submitted it. (Update: This feature has since been added. Thanks Justin!) I went through and provided ratings for every restaurant that I had been to, including national chain franchises. In retrospect, I'd like to delete the national chain entries, as they're so commonplace that another review seems redundant. I'm going to try and limit myself to local restaurants and local chains. Also, whenever tags are listed, they're listed as 'Recent Tags', which is rather useless (In my opinion) and should be a delicious-like 'Popular Tags'.
Additionally, there doesn't seem to be any sort of 'friends' or 'contacts' feature - I would definitely like to be able to see where my friends are eating and what they think of those places - the results of which I would use in the future.
I think there's a lot of potential for this service, there's RSS everywhere which is nice because I've been looking for some way to pull my latest dining experiences into a feed - and this may be it. Considering that the service is still in its, relative, infancy I'm looking forward to seeing other users join and provide their input. It would be very cool to see other services tied in too, such as Flickr, Upcoming.org, and 43Places. So, on that note - here's my profile, now go and contribute!
Tags: food, restaurants, dining, social, network, web, app, local, yahoo, dinnerbuzz
5 Comments on 'Dinnerbuzz Review'
March 30th, 2005
I just signed up for the brand-new evdb to see what it's like (there's been quite some hype surrounding it. However, I was sorely disappointed. Below is a copy of the email that I sent to their 'bugs' email address, notifying them of the problems.
And now that I think about it - there's no way to make a friend's only event - or even add a friend! What's the point of this, seriously... At this point, Upcoming.org is much better off.
P.S. Plus they use tables! And there's barely any dynamic content... very, very poor show!
Hello,
After a quick run through, a few things;
- There is no way to make a strictly private event.
- There is no way to delete an event, once created.
- There is no way to edit an event, once created.
- There is no mechanism for having re-occurring events.
- When creating a new event, there seems to be some tag left un-closed causing all the items to shift right (in Firefox 1.0 on OS X 10.3). (See bug1)
- There are a lot of problems with selecting a time for an event, just some:
- The 'Ends' checkbox starts unchecked, but the 'ends' field items are enabled.
- When the 'Ends' checkbox is checked, the background turns green. (and the end time stays enabled?) (See bug2)
- When the 'Ends' checkbox is unchecked, the background turns red. (See bug3)
- When the 'Ends' checkbox is checked again, some of the form items are left disabled. (See bug4)
I hope this can help to lead you guys in the right direction, thanks!
Update: And here's their reply - very fast! I'm pleased that they're working on everything. My hopes for this application have risen.
John,
Thanks for the feedback. We're working hard to get all of these issues addressed as soon as possible.
Here are some specific comments:
- There is no way to make a strictly private event.
For the immediate future, we are working strictly on public events. But we definitely see the urgent need for private events/calendars, etc. Stay tuned for further developments. This is my wife's top wish-list item, by the way.
- There is no way to delete an event, once created.
Yes - we'll have this soon. It's implemented on the back-end - it's just waiting on the UI side.
- There is no way to edit an event, once created.
Yes - this is a major one - we're going to have full editing capabilities. Also, if you wish, you can open it up entirely, wiki-style to allow the world to edit as well.
- There is no mechanism for having re-occurring events.
Yes. Doing recurring events completely right is pretty hard. You need to handle the "every thursday except Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks" case, for instance. But we're all over it and should have good tools for handling that pretty soon.
- When creating a new event, there seems to be some tag left un-closed causing all the items to shift right (in Firefox 1.0 on OS X 10.3). (See bug1, attached)
We'll have a look at this. You're the first to report it - thanks.
- There are a lot of problems with selecting a time for an event, just some:
Time handling is currently pretty lame in my opinion. I'm personally working on this one. My goal is to have this as fluid and straightforward as programs like iCal do, within the limits of a web browser.
We'll be updating things regularly, and these are all on our to-do list. I can't promise any specific timetable, but we're working on them.
Chuck
Update: Most of the afformentioned problems have been resolved now - they certainly moved quickly!
Tags: social, events, evdb
4 Comments on 'EVDB, First Impressions'
March 14th, 2005
Something that I've been tinkering around with the past couple of days is the concept of providing visual cues to associate a name with a face, so to speak. For example, I find it to be much easier, mentally, to make the connection between someones face and who they are then someone's cryptic username (which, in turn, is associated with someone's name, then associated to a face - a much, much slower process, for me, that results in a lot of dead ends). To combat this, I've been making a lot of changes to my personal data. The most notable of which is: Locating a headshot picture of all of your friends. In theory, I want to quickly and easily associate someone's online persona with their real life person. It's a challenge and I'm not yet sure how well it will go. However, in order to test it, the first step is to find as many friend headshots as possible. Here are a couple resources that I've used, thus far:
Now that you have a nice list of pictures for all of your friends, here is what you can do: Associate that picture with that person everywhere possible. The first thing that I did was to update the buddy icons for all of my AIM buddies. This gave me a highly usable visual buddy list to browse (also pictured above). The second step was to associate the images with all of my frequent email contacts. Thankfully, OSX makes this process terribly easy. I can take an email address/name from Mail.app, right-click, and add it to my address book. I can then edit the address book entry for that user and add their AIM buddy name. Now I've tackled two of my most frequently used forms of communication: Instant Messenger and Email, but that still leaves a large ocean uncharted: The web.
At this point in the game, I decided to go back to my old friend GreaseMonkey. Essentially, I wanted to write a script that would search through a page looking for certain names, nicknames, and usernames and insert an image to be associated with it. And so, that's what I did. Right now it's very rough around the edges and requires a lot of user customization.
- name2face - This script requires a lot of configuration. Please modify the data structure within the program to change which users you would like to match and display for, otherwise you'll just see a few of my friends, currently.
Ideally I'd like this plug-in to pull from some sort of a dynamic XML repository (possibly in FOAF format?) that could be updated easily. The results are very interesting. Browsing social networking sites, Gmail, and other forms of communication have taken on a whole new feel. I really feel that a service like this has a lot of potential and should be explored more fully, which I hope to do soon.
Tags: friends, greasemonkey, network, social, visual
27 Comments on 'Visual Friend Identification'
March 9th, 2005
Yet another social networking site popped up on my radar yesterday, so I decided to take a look at it. It's called Academici, in theory it's a social networking site for Academic-related work. However, what it actually is is something much poorer, and more useless.
In a nutshell: You can only provide a scant amount of business contact information and virtually no, actual, critical academic information. And to do anything remotely useful, that's when it's time to shell out the cash. I was grossly dissapointed with this site. However, what I would like to discuss is my vision of a good academic social networking site. Here are some of the most critical features:
- Papers - You can provide a form to post papers. It would be nice to be able to: Upload the paper, provide the abstract, authors, where it was accepted to (optional), title, papers that it cites, etc. Much of this could probably be done automatically from a latex file.
- Citations - Having a network based upon citations would be very powerful - you could see not only what papers cite other papers but who cites other people. You could begin to see these other networks form and possibly the people who are at the head of their field.
- Collaboration - Being able to collaborate with other academics on papers and projects would be critical. Listing your skills, research groups that you've been with, and work that you're looking to do would be an excellent start towards this.
- Groups - Being able to set up research groups/corporations would be really interesting. You could see everyone who is in the (in my case) Data Mining Research Group, or everyone who was in that group. That alone would be very powerful as you could see where people might get some of their influence from.
These are just a few suggestions that I've been able to think of off the top of my head and I can tell that I'm only just scratching the surface. This really needs to be explored further. Maybe in the form of a fun side project?
Tags: academic, networking, social
3 Comments on 'Academic Social Networking'
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