Licence to Roam

I’m getting really frustrated with Twitter at the moment and it has nothing to do with the service itself but to the explosion in use. Since the start of the month I’ve received 50 new followers, very few of whom I’ve followed back. Some of it, I’m sure, is because I’ve been on the service a long time and am often on the front page of the followers list due to my ‘membership number’. I’m pretty much on my limit of people I’m following, the limit of how useful the tool is. For me, it is not a broadcast tool, it’s not a popularity tool, it’s a way to connect with friends and ‘friends’ (those online acquaintances who I know virtually, or want to know or find interesting). So here’s some of the reasons I will and won’t follow you. Everyone has different reasons - which is why I don’t feel aggrieved if someone does not follow me, if I don’t fit into their reasons for use, why would they?

• I follow you if I know you personally - and know you have a Twitter account. Recently I’ve not gone out and tried to discover accounts of everyone I know; I’ll come across them eventually
• I follow you if I know you virtually, having had interactions online with you
• I follow you if I’m met you and you mentioned Twitter, or your twittering about an event we’re both at. (for example, I started following a few new people after Over the Air.) I tend to review these after a while to see if we still have shared interests
• I follow you if someone I already follow starts to refer to to you and your tweets look interesting. Again reviewed after a while
• If you start following me, I rarely return the favour if I look at your numbers and seeing you are following 100’s or 1000’s and very few following you. You’re either promoting yourself or just started on the service and think that is the way to do it. If I don’t know you, I won’t follow.
• However, of you start following me, it looks like you are trying to learn how to use the system and you are following connected people, then I’ll see what you have to say
• I have blocked 2 kinds of accounts. Obvious promotion accounts for things I don’t like and people who I feel are creepy (that’s usually men who are folling nothing but loads of women - they write in a certain way)
• I won’t follow promotion accounts in general, nor politicians, etc

There’s my list, that’s the sort of thinking I go through when I look at an account. It has to fit with what I can cope with and what I am interested in. If I don’t follow you after you connect with me, it’s not necessarily you, it’s probably me

Aleks Krotoski talking about the social graph.

• [missed the start] A social psychologist, trying to examine connections
• Pathways can be mapped across friends and people.
• Mass friending…impact the data and how the network connects.
• there are certain relationships and strengths of relationships. You can technological measure strength but difficult as you get to semantics.
• Adding arrows to the graph starts adding information. You can add lots of information, but then it all gets mushy in the middle.  Fuzzy and gooey and technologiest don’t like that. Then I come into the mix and go oooh psychology.
• So how do you measure strength…
  • I asked the social psy questions. list friends and rating of them..
• Based study on actual connection on a virtual world, on the qualitative assessment of relationships
  • Second half of study was looking at getting behavioural shortcuts for this
  • some evidence about how interactions acorss various channels indicates trust.  ie talking in public, IM in SL, outside of SL via email.
• Once you have all the information, all the messy stuff. I was looking at interconnected, closely related groups of people.  I’m interested in them…as they know each other. In the mess, many people, but don’t know others, they identify as something.  Look at a self-decared group to see if they are differently connected.  I did an island analysis, pulled out 4 groups of people who are extremely closely connected to each other.  There’s a lot of trust between each other.
• The point: There are social relationships which have psychologies that can;t ey be articualted through technolgy.  There are social flocking/network effects in these spaces - people move to where their friends are.   Whatever is happening…they’re capturing a lot of data about us.
• The data they are capturing is going to be a key discussion coming up

Tags: aleks krotoski, second life, barcampbrighton, social graph

Jeff Barr, from Amazon, was at BarcampBrighton as part of a long European tour, talking up cloud computing.

• apologised for going to be a little more commercial than others….but taken out the prices so it’s not a sales pitch!
• been at Amazon for 6 years.   Saw real potential, the first catalog service.  they started sending me out to conferences, I was good at it so they made me the evangelist and that’s what we do, me and 3 others. we have a wiki that people can request us.
• FOr the last 5 years we have been opening up the infrastructure - the product catalog, alexa and now infrastructure services. putting APIs out there, charging models around them. we try and make it really simple to get started. Sign up and away you go
• we offer access in a number of ways. a lot of what we have had to do over the years has to do with scale, have the infrastructures.  we offer that out to developers.   The developers can focus on the innovative and creativity part..we do the hardware.
• we rely a lot of input and feedback from developers. let me know what you like and don’t like. we write a trip report everyday to get the feedback to the company.
• Cloud computing- emerging trend. you look to the cloud to do stuff for you. You can treat it as infinite capacity, scale on demand.  With cloud computing, what were fixed costs turn into variable costs, where you pay for what you need.  You get possibly better staff to keep it up, get economies of scale.
• It can reduce your time to get things up and running,
• We have 6 different services - Queue, storage, elastic compute cloud, flexible payments,
• S3: object based storage…1b-5GB. private or public, redundant and dispersed. storage. US and Eu locations. (Ireland). EU added due to latency and data legal issues. We dynamically manage the copies of the data.   We are redundant enough. 99.99% availability goal. Can organise in buckets/ each bucket is a flat storage model. Can use it as a bit torrent seed. Complete API around it.  We have libraries for a number of different languages, that we have built or other developers.
• Elastic Compute Cloud: (not the ZX81): use Xen, take lots of machines, slice into small components, using a indi OS. when you have an instance it is yours while you pay. you get root level, elastic capacity,. There’s a lot of apps built on top as well for you to use. you get to scale in minutes.  Up and down control. We have 3 different instance types - small, Large and XL.  You have an Amazon Machine Image - which is your’s.  You put this in S3, then roll it out to the servers you need as you scale.  Full API into the cloud, you can start machines with one call.  Used in lots of scientific research. MapReduce and Hadoop, for engineering and science calculations.   For Fortune 500 companies, often for high impact, short term projects, as a dev host.  One example is the NYT archive, When it was a closed service, they re-rendered PDF from TIFF every time. They decided to use EC2 with Hadoop to pre-render everything.  They tested it..then ran it over 24 hours over 100 instances. Far better than having to do internally.  Some one has built EC2 Firefox UI - a browser addon that allows you to control the instances

Tags: jeff barr, amazon, s3, ec2

I decided last night to come down to BarCamp Brighton, when I saw there were some tickets made available.  A friend was travelling down so I got a lift straight to the campus and arrived just as it was kicking off.  The usual introductions were made and everyone did the traditional standup and give three tags - it seemed about 40% of the attendees had never been to a barcamp before.

My intention here is to attend stuff I know nothing about, avoiding any marketing or social media sessions.  So far, I’ve suceeded.

• Session 1: Flash and Particles  A badly prepared session that started off poorly, with ramblings about the company website.  It got better as it went through, with some interesting details abut the maths behind the particles and how to apply them which I could have heard a lot more about if time had not run out.
• Session 2: RDF for beginners Tom Morris gave a revised presentaiton from his original from Semantic Camp.  I enjoyed this as it was clear about how to use RDF, with some concrete examples of the code.  I’m still unsure about the why though, later Tom admitted that use cases still need to be developed.  A list of resources are available at http://icanhaz/swtutorial

Tags: barcampbrighton, barcampbrighton2, flash, rdf, tom morris

I went to the Natural History Museum last week and came across this.

An animatronic T.Rex being filmed by a whole load of schoolchildren - like multiple mini versions of Scoble, all with their phone out, video and taking pictures. I saw very few actual cameras, they all had the phone. How many of these actually do something witht he footage, the images? Do they take it off the phone or just keep it on there to share?

For the museum, it does raise a question as their visitor guidelines ban the use of cell phones. I’m pretty sure they mean for taking calls, as there’s no restrictions on cameras. They need to update the rules.

Serendipity sometimes strikes with the feedreader. I’ve just read these two posts from Gia and from JP which refer to conspiracies of truth around the Moon Landings. However, I do love the idea of NASA putting together a Massively Multi-player Online game.

Vint Cerf: The Alternative McTaggert

Vint gave an alternative McTaggert speech this year. The official one was by Jeremy Paxman on Friday, discussing the future of TV and the trust situation it currently finds itself in. Vint gave a slight variation on the same speech I saw at Google earlier in the year, calling out the TV and IPTV issues. (that was not blogged, due to the change in Google rules about their tech series, but it was almost exactly the same talk)

One key trend was that consumers are more and more becoming producers which is challenging the asymmetry of the connection speeds where download is far greater then upload speeds for most consumer connections. The increase of video is huge, with Vint showing a graph of daily usage and YouTube traffic taking a major proportion as people watch more and more video. One question from the audience regarding the capacity of the web to continue to carry the increasing video traffic = he believes that there is no problem and there is plenty of spare capacity. The main issue is the last mile, as few companies are using fibre for that.

Vint touched on neutrality; his initial designs were neutral - the network does not care - it;s an end to end process, only the ends need to know what is on the net. The network needs to just pass the packets. The network is agnostic. this neutrality has been important in creating and encouraging innovation. There has never been need to ask permission. The impact of ISPs restricting the access can suffocate innovation.

He spoke for a while on digital distribution, and how streaming is not the only option. With increased storage and increased bandwidth, you can look at delivering faster than live or slower than live, moving it to storage and then watching at a time of choice. The web, with its ability to deliver packets of any kind, can be used to deliver a far richer experience, adding metadata, subtitles, advertising, interactive videos etc. Looking forward, we need to look at the treatment of IP. In an media where material is easy to copy and distribute, should we pay on copies? What are the alternatives?

The reception overall was good, a surprising addition to a TV Festival. Interestingly, at another session it was commented that people were surprised at some of the things that were mentioned.

Ian Clarke
Freenet and Revver

Founded Revver to help copyright holders get paid for their work. copyright cannot be controlled onthe web - the web is all about communication and Copyright is to prevent communications.

Revver gave an incentive to create and spread videos. Has raised 10m$ in A&B rounds of financing. Many people have or are using Revver. LG15 used it for about a year, Zefrank used. At some point another almost every well known videoblog has used it.

After I left Revver, I wanted to work on figuring out what people are interested in and then showing it to them. Not a new problem, one that anyone in the content business has to solve. Started to look at collaborative filters - eg Amazon, Netflix - based on friends recommendations and other things. One of the problems is they either work or they scale,, they typically don’t do both.

We built Daedulus to do the collaborative filter for Revver (also licenced to Reddit). When working on this, noticed that CFs have to get a lot of information before they start working well for you. So saw a gap in the market - the genesis of Thoof, which uses base info to make generalisations from the start to start with recommendations. mac vs PC, browser, geography. Also built so that you can change things on site, you can propose change that then gets voted on

New project is Thoof. Launched in June, growing 20%/week. Ideology is to let people find info about stuff they did not know they wanted as well as what they thing they want.

Freenet - is moving towards a dark network, so that you only connect to people who have freenet - friends. this can protect your usage in areas where there are problems about using such software or surfing anon.

Q: What do you say about the charge that Freenet can be abused?
A: Any tool can be abused. But the freedom of being able to communicate is more important than the potential of abuse - it’s democracy. In less democratic countries huge amounts of resources are spent on preventing communciations. We believe the benefits outweigh potential abuses.

Love the video from from NYT Technology reviewer David Pogue about the iPhone. But they really need to check facts…that’s no kayak, that’s a scull.

Noel and co, as part of his Luck of Seven series, have filmed two Apple fans waiting outside the Apple store at 5th ave New York. They both have blogs. Greg, from Long Island, does not own a Mac nor an iPod, still want a phone and does not know if he can keep it. Dave is third in line and wants to buy two and sell one for charity. Who’s second in line then? Dave’s reasoning:

I just graduated from college, and have another week of vacation to burn before I enter the work world. I can’t think of a better way to learn about New York than hanging out with a wide cross-section of the New York population. Granted, the thought of waiting in line might not strike you as an ideal vacation, but in my travels I’ve found that the best memories come from unscripted interactions with locals.

So go meet them and ask them why..and find out who’s number 2 inline

Update: and here’s why Greg has no Apple products..he’s just a ‘professional’ liner-upper, who spends his life getting on the media. Dave sounds far more interesting (wonder if he’s told his parents yet?)

Last week I got a sneak preview of Veoh’s new service, veoh.tv, but got asked not to blog about it. The news has now broken and there’s a few detailed write ups around. Erick Schonfeld has a great overview,

VeohTV is an application that you download to your PC. It lets you watch any video, not just on Veoh, but anywhere on the Web—whether it’s on NBC.com, CNN.com, YouTube, or AskANinja.com (but not Joost, which does not show videos on its Website). It turns the hodgepodge of video on the Web into something that looks remarkably like TV by gathering all of it into a remote-controllable experience you can watch from ten feet away

Phil Butler looks at the features and contemplates the revenue drivers

Joost content is obviously excellent and the quality of broadcasts there is very stable, which illuminates one of VeohTV’s only real weaknesses - the system is dependent on the quality of sometimes less than excellent online video. This is not problematic with content from NBC or other major networks, but the user’s “hands on” filtering will determine a quality library. The ads were a major concern of mine and I found Joost to be an early leader in upscale and unobtrusive advertising. Dmitry reflected a rather perfect logic in response to this concern, in that VeohTV will be able to target ads that will be relevant to individual users and therefore inherently less obtrusive.

and Mike Arrington has a business round up.

Will it work? It certainly might. I’ll have to wait and try out the software first. But the vision is solid. This avoids the time and cost of doing licensing deals with content owners. Like Real’s new player that allows users to basically bookmark and locally store video, it assumes that video will continue to be widely distributed across the Internet. Whoever creates the best interface for the content will win users, and liquidity events.

What did I like about it?

• The interface was intuitive, smooth to use and very close to the Tivo model. I liked it better than the Joost model.
• Loved the way you can pull everything together into your own channels
• From an advertisers perspective, the channels and what you can do around them offer some great opportunities, better targetting and , hopefully, a way of advertising that is not too intrusive but could be useful.
• The search function. Cool. Very, very cool. Pulls stuff from all over and let’s you line it all up to watch.

Look out for a lot more online buzz around this once the beta starts rolling out.

On June 12, Flickr introduced localisation - that is local language and country versions - of their site in 7 different flavours. These were French, Germany, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese. In what appears to be a consequence to this extension, they also ran up against local laws (or interpretation of laws) that meant users in Germany, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore were restricted to safe search only, resulting in a storm of comment (most vocally from Germany) accusing Flickr of censorship.

And now YouTube have announced their localisation, with an extension into 9 more domains. As more than half their users are outside the US, it’s probably about time.

Today at a Google press event in Paris, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are announcing the launch of nine new domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK.

All of the language has been translated (and the UK/IE versions are different to the US - they’ve corrected the spelling!) and all are on new URLs. They have not touched the countries/languages that have given so much trouble for Flickr and have some interesting gaps. There also seems to be less advertising (currently) on the local sites; however, local content distribution deals have been done in these markets to add to the ‘professional’ content on the site which will be a revenue stream and I’m sure advertising will catch up.

What I can’t seem to find out is whether uploading to one version makes your video available to the other versions. The home pages are localised as to content - they are the result of an editorial decision. The browsing and listing pages are also localised, there are different in different markets. Looking at the honour listings for some of the video it looks like the US version has been set to the global resource and then each market has it’s own honour listings. Which seems to mean that whilst I can tell how a video would be doing in somewhere like the UK, I can’t easily pull out the US figures. Does this mean all the video ranking sites are going to be changing their results over the next few weeks?

Jason Calacanis’ new search engine Mahalo expands today, with Mahalo Greenhouse. You can apply to be a ‘part-time guide’, submit search entries and get paid for doing so, $10-15 but only if you are a US citizen or permanent resident. I’m neither but still work and pay taxes in the US - so I think that needs changing. If you are from somewhere else, there’ll be a donation to Wikipedia, making this a good way of donating to that foundation.

i find this line “PTGs can’t write search results that already exist on Mahalo” interesting. You have to submit something new, which widens the topics covered, but at some point it will be a law of diminishing returns, surely?

They’re looking for experiences web curators; the application requests URLS and usernames for many of the community driven sites. Unless you’re already active on the web, you’re not getting in. It’s calling for altruistic people, those who want to help. And you’re unlikely to be be making a lot of money off this, but it could by you the odd beer.

As a service, I’m liking Mahalo, as a supplement and value add search engine. It sits between a more typical SE and Wikipedia in finding out useful information and giving an overview of the topic. It gives you a further source, a curated source that allows you to expand your research, as you should be doing anyway of you’re looking for things. A recommendation engine with a sense of humour ;-). Jason’s always trying to shake things up - I’m pretty sure he’ll never stop pushing wikipedia to accept advertising - and Mahalo could be a success in doing just that.

I went along to the NY Tech meetup last night and had a good time. Five short presentations from companies in the NY area, plus a couple of extras from James Hing of Hot or Not (who I also met with on Monday at an IAB event) and Dave Weinberger who gave a 10 minute version of his book. However, Dave and Sanford have done a great job of blogging the actual presenations, so I’ll just add my impressions.

• Goloco. After the success of Zipcars, Robin moves into shared journeys. Join and you can find friends who are going to the same place as you. Lovely implementation, aimed at existing groups rather than random strangers who meet online.
• ExpoTV. I’d never seen this before but superb extension of the review space into video. The revenue share for the reviewers, at $5/video is a good idea. They are realistic about advertisers getting into the mix and provide a way for it to be transparent.
• LiveLOOK. You can share screens via a browser without any downloads, so it can be an alternative to stuff like webex without a download. A paid service, especially useful for service agents, although I was uncomfortable with an answer to a security question (what’s to stop you just putting numbers in until you find a live feed). There are free alternatives to this, ie MSM share desktop, that will be useful for c2c usage but there is an attraction for b2c or b2b.
• Adaptive Blue. I loved this, taking metadata from pages and extending them via contextual menus in the bowser or direct via links. Installed!
• Mogulus. This got the biggest reaction of the night, with a vary cool demo. The service allows you to run video and do lots of cool overlay stuff, live broadcast, plan programming etc. Another entry into the lifecast area, but more focused towards linear programming

The other 2 sessions were a last minute overview of Hot or Not and how James is putting the service onto Facebook and a run through the ideas behind Everything is Miscellaneous from David; it’s a pity I’d already bought the book and read it, as I did not have it with me to get it autographed. One last aside, I found it strange that there was a cheer raised when it was announced that 4 of the presenters were women - if you have to bring attention to it, you need to work on doing it differently.

Through the kind people from Palm (and their PR agency Edelman) I received a nice Treo 680 to play with for a while to see how I like it (and then I have to send it back). This all started at Blogher Business, where they had a stall set up with devices and info. Up until now, I’ve been managing on my feature-less Pay as You Go phone but was planning on upgrading and was not sure what to get. This gives me a chance to try something out and see how it suits me. The phone I had in the UK was OK, but I didn’t use nearly half the stuff it was capable of, partly because I wanted it to do online things and I was always aware of the cost involved. Now, I’ve upgraded to a all you can eat data plan and the incentive is different - I’m paying for it already so I better use it

The only requirement is that I use the Treo and I blog about it. So whether it’s good or bad, you’ll here about it. I’ll also be using the camera (still and video) to take records. It means I’ll be able to take more shots than if I had to lug around the SLR all the time; some will go on Flickr and some here.

Opening up the box, i found plug attachments (one for every style as far as I can see). the charger is a good design, you can just slip the plug prongs on and off to change it for the country you are in. There was also a headset and a USB connector (through which you can also charge the device). the headset is fine, but I tend to work my way through them quickly; also why don’t device manufacturers allow you to plug in a standard jack when they give you a music player. The only thing missing from the box was the software CD; it also did not come with an instruction manual, but the online documents and the ondevice tutorial were fine. The lack of software was solved through downloading straight from the site.

All of done today is set up the email client, synched with Gmail through POP and installed Goosync, to allow me to match up my calendar. Although I can use gmail mobile, I quite like the client version, makes it slightly easier to manage. The only issue I had is I needed to restart the pop connection on gmail; it wanted to download everything since November, which led to it freezing up on me. Not the best idea, so restarting it from today seemed a far better idea.

Via Adam Tinworth, I see that the Telegraph is launching a new service, called My Telegraph. Y

My Telegraph allows any reader to create their own blog, store all the comments they make on other readers’ blogs and save articles to read later. Version one of the site, which you can see below, will be ready to go live soon.

This is a different way to go than USAToday, which allow you to comment on stories and vote for them (but never against them). It’s targeted at non-bloggers and I think it’s a great way to get interaction with the paper and with likeminded individuals around issues and news stories.

If you had gone to NYC Mobile Monday or just like developing things for mobile phones, you may be interested in the launch of Vodafone’s Betavine Developer network.

Walmart launch a new video download service today. Apparently their development team is browser challenged as they only appear to have IE available to them. Under that app, their site looks, well, not beautiful but at least OK.

However, on Firefox it looks like this:

I know that sites sometimes launch without full testing…and that Walmart Video is probably targeted fully at those who have never heard of anyother browser but a token effort to fail gracefully would have been nice. (Tip: Valleywag)

Update: I got the wrong impression from the talk (see, told you that this was all new) and Chaals has updated more in the comments and gives me a far clearer picture of what I was trying to understand.

On Monday I went along to Mobile Monday, this month a 5 hour celebration of SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics. This was held at the Samsung Experience in the Time Warner centre, which remained open during the event so I’m sure the people wandering around looking at the electronics were suitably bemused.

Whilst developing in SVG goes way over my head, it was interesting in hearing from people and companies that develop in the space, giving me an idea of where applications are going. Whilst not ubiquitous, SVG is on enough phones on models to make an impact across the board, being particularly prevalent in high end corporate models where the main applications appear to be in business intelligence and other professional services. But with the release of it far more phones with Java, applications are going to expand.

One point pushed by Charles McCathieNevile, Chief Standards Officer at Opera, is that SVG is perfect for building platform agnostic web applications, or would be if IE and firefox adopted it. He particular emphasised it’s use in building accessible websites, a passion of his. A lot of the same challenges that come with building computer-based accessible applications are there for all apps on the browser, tiny type, limited access to keyboard, lack of colours etc, so solving those issues for the small screen means that your apps should be better on a larger screen. His desire, and that of others speaking, was for one web - the same code being used across all platforms. Charles was someone I’d love to have had a longer conversation with.

Another speaker was Daniel Appelquist, from Vodafone and one of the founders of Mobile Monday London. I must admist when he started to explain what Vodafone was I thought he was being ironic, not realising that the brand is not known very well in the US at all (being 40% of Verizon Wireless only). One of his key focuses in his job is Open standards and vodafone’s participation in setting and evangelising such standards so that it is easy to build mobile platforms across manufacturers and carriers. They’ve been using SVG to develop soem great applications, one such being a Bubdesliga Player that launched in Germany 2 weeks ago, which brings you live scores from football games, news and live video clips. The demo he showed looked pretty cool. One last thing he announced was that within the next 2 weeks, Vodafone would be launching a developer community network, called betaVine. Targeted at individual or small company developers, the idea is to support them and give a showcase for their applications so that early adopters can find and test them them out. This will launch sometime in the next 2 weeks.

I didn’t stay til the end, moving out to go to the Google speaker event, but some thought starters about what could be possible in the US.

Will Wheaton’s wistful and inciteful column over at Suicide Girls had me thinking that the replacement of local shops, which provide some kind of community connection, with the commoditised big chains has been a factor in the development of recommendation services such as Library Thing or Pandora. If we can’t get suggestions from the local physical, we get them from the local virtual.