Chris Messina is an interesting guy to follow. Sort of an “NGO celebrity” on the web, he’s known as an advocate for open standards and efforts such as OpenID, DISO and Microformats, and in the past also SpreadFirefox.
One of the many issues Chris writes passionately about is our online identity. That little link I added to his name in the opening words of this post triggers an entire domain of debates, ideals and evil plans to take over the world. Should I have linked to his Facebook page? or Twitter? perhaps MySpace or even Google? all these companies beg us to choose them as our “identity providers“, so that we will let them be our companions when we visit other websites, thus helping their “social colonization” efforts.
So in a way, those companies are trying to become the global “people namespace“. On the web I may be http://facebook.com/ofer.egozi, or http://linkedin.com/in/oferegozi etc., and as Dave Morin of facebook tweeted, “/ is the new @“ (hence their PR extravaganza on vanity urls). Our identity is associated with the domain on that url, much as our email domain.
An interesting corrolary I can suggest here is that the “commitment” of that company to your identity is reflected in the extra padding next to that ‘/’. Companies such as twitter and facebook say “profiles are not just another application for us, they ARE our application”, whereas others such as linkedin and google still interject a /in/ or /profiles/ in between, just in case something else becomes more important…
So why not use his Facebook then? with social networks being such a relatively new entities, we seem to forget the temporariness of a business organization. We also tend to forget that those network accounts are only as free as beer, and the organizations behind them can arbitrarily delete a user or change their policies any time, and your anchor on the web which you built over the years is suddenly at stake.
My own identity is this blog. I own the domain, I maintain an OpenID on it using WordPress.com, and I can always decide to modify that identity, take it elsewhere or remove it altogether. The control over that identity, how it’s portrayed and used remains with me, even if many other aspects (think social graph) are still locked up elsewhere. That’s a start.
Today I gave my master’s thesis talk in the Technion as part of my master’s duties. Actually, the non-buzzword title is “Concept-Based Information Retrieval using Explicit Semantic Analysis”, but that’s not a very click-worthy post title …
The whole thing went far better than I expected – the room was packed, the slides flew smoothly (and quickly too, luckily Shaul convinced me to add some spare slides just in case), and I ended up with over 10 minutes of Q&A (an excellent sign for a talk that went well…)
BTW – anybody has an idea how to embed slideshare into a hosted blog? doesn’t seem to work…
Amazon has been selling stuff online since as far back as 1973, at least if you believe this:
In fact, Google lists over 51,000 pages with this date on Amazon. And mind you – it is the exact date September 4 1973, not a day less, nor a day more.
Of course, some geeks may claim this has to do with some Amazon programmers’ default value, but the POSIX time for this date is just a boring 115945200, not some fun number like 1234567890. I prefer to attribute this to some evil Bezosish conspiracy theory, now I just need to figure out what it was.
Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post, with a good comments thread, on overflowing feed readers. He’s quoting from a post by Farhad Manjoo on Slate:
You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to…
Well, actually Dare’s post is from two weeks ago. The reason I got to read it only now is exactly that…
Yes, I know I don’t really need to ‘respond’ to subscriptions, and the answer should be – unsubscribe, or go on a feeds (or ‘follow’ edges) social diet. But these binary decisions are not always optimal, as I have plenty of feeds I subscribed to after hitting one or two posts I really liked, but that were not on that author’s main subject (if such exists at all). Thus I have to skim through many un-interesting (for me!) posts, many of them somehow always end up discussing twitter. In fact, that’s how most of my feeds look like (including the twitter part).
We need shades of grey between subscribed and unsubscribed. It would be great to have a feed reader that learns from how you use it. It should be quite clear which posts interest me – ones I took time to read, scroll through, press a link etc. – and which did not. Now train a classifier on that data, preferably per-feed (in addition to a general one), and get some sense of what I’m really looking for.
Now, I don’t need this smart reader to delete the uninteresting ones, let’s not assume too much on its classification accuracy. Just find the right UI to mark the predicted-to-be-interesting items (or even assign them into a special virtual folder). Then I can read these first, and only if/when have time – read the rest.
I assign this to be my pet project in case I win the lottery next week and go into early retirement. Alternatively, if someone saw this implemented anywhere – let me know!
No, not Kumo. That’s Google’s recent launch, trying to compete with Twitter search (”Recent results”), to preempt Microsoft (clustering result types), to show a different, though quite ugly UI metaphor (”wonder wheel”), and generally to roll out a whole bunch of features that should have been Google Labs features before making (or not) their way into a public product. So what’s next? buttons next to search results moving them up or down with no opt-out?? Ah, wait, that waste of real estate is already there.
Someone is panicking. OPEN FIRE! ALL WEAPONS!!! DISPATCH WAR ROCKET AJAX!!! The same spirit that brought us the failure of knols, is bringing us yet further unnecessary novelty, but this time it’s a cacophony of features, each deserving a long Google Labs quarantine by itself.
I noticed that much of my recent blog posts have to do with Google criticism . I wrestle with that, there really ought to be more interesting stuff to blog about in the IR world, and there is also great stuff coming from Google (can you imagine the fantastic similar images feature is still in labs? can Google please apply this to the ridiculously useless “similar pages” link in main web search results??), but I truly think we see a trend. Google is dropping the ball, losing the clear and spotless logic we have seen in the past, and the sensible slow graduation of disruptive features from Google Labs. Sadly, though, it’s not clear if anyone is there, ready to pick that ball…
I love Google Chrome. It’s super fast, its default home page (showing most visited websites) and searching from the url box are great, and the javascript experiments really knocked me out.
So Google must know this, as Chrome does talk to the mothership quite often. Then why-oh-why, whenever Google embarks on a “Get Chrome” campaign and I happen to use IE (say for one of those sites that renders well only in IE), do they not spare us the converted? is it really that hard to put a flag on the Google uber-cookie that Chrome is already installed here?…
BTW – all you Firefox users are considered too sophisticated to buy it – this promotion is not shown to FF users, only IE!
As I wrote previously, I really like the idea behind Aardvark (previously known as Mechanical Zoo) and it’s a great social Q&A tool, but it simply is not “social search” (and unlike TechCrunch, RWW realize that). The Aardvark team still pushes with that terminology, I guess for a good reason given the financial climate, and disperses more of it in a white paper. Once they actually start searching in their aggregated Q&A repository to provide you with an available answer without bothering your network – that would become more of a search solution, rather than Q&A.
Having played with the product a bit, I also see an inherent flaw in the social premise here. Aardvark provides me with answers from friends, or friends-of-friends. Now, it’s more likely I’ll get answers from friends-of-friends, as there are simply a lot more of them. However, these would be people who don’t know me, and will not provide a personal answer that is tailored to my own individual needs.
Still, it’s a great way to make new friends. Not kidding – Aardvark strongly drives conversations, as Danny Sullivan also pointed out, and since this friend-of-friend was the one who responded to my question, I’d feel more comfortable discussing further. Presumably Aardvark will also track this, and practically add this person to my direct social graph.
Update: Max Ventilla of Aardvark commented in my previous post that indexing your graph and finding the right person to answer your query has, in fact, the ingredients of social search. He has a point there, but still that search ends in finding a person, not information, so it’s more of a people search. Still, I agree that in executing this task, the varkers face similar difficulties to those we faced in Delver, albeir on much smaller scale.
Long ago I read an interesting book that tried to teach how to actually engineer creativity. One of the simple methods it proposed was – take an existing device, and strip it of a main characteristic. A TV set without a screen, for example. Not good for anything you say? well, if you’re a real soap opera freak, frustrated that they always run when you’re driving back from work, you could imagine installing this in your car and listening to your TV while driving, rather than watching…
So let’s take an iPhone and strip it of its… phone. What do you get besides an eye? Siftables. Got this shared from Oren:
To me, seeing this makes my mind immediately run to how my kids could use it. This is surely a creative Human-Computer Interface, but does that automatically make the applications creative? see the one with the kid injecting characters into a scene played on TV. That’s great, but it’s really limited to the scenarios programmed into this app: the sun can rise, the tractor enters, the dog says hello to the cat – ok, got it. Now what?
My kids and I actually have a non-Siftables version of this, where we took some game that includes plastic blocks with various images on them, and turned it into a storytelling game. Each player stacks a bunch of these blocks and tries to tell a continuous story by picking a block and fitting it into a story he’s improvising as he goes along. That’s a real creative challenge, and it is so because you have nobody to rely on but your own imagination.
Another example is the Lego themed sets, like the “Star Wars” Lego, where there’s really just one way to assemble them right, and imagination is out of the equation. As an educational tool, standard plain old Lego blocks are far superior. The less rules and options, the more creatively challenged we are, and the more a Siftables app follows that principle, the more educational it may actually become.
In any case, Siftables are a great idea, and will surely be a great challenge to the creativity of programmers of Siftables apps…
Microsoft is rolling an internal test for a search experience upgrade on Live (codenamed Kumo) that clusters search results by aspect. See internal memo and screenshots covered by Kara Swisher.
As usual, the immediate reaction is – regardless of the actual change, how feasible is it to assume you could make users switch from their Google habit? but let’s try to put that aside and dolook at the actual change.
Search results are grouped into clusters based on the aspects of this particular search query. This idea is far from being new, and was attempted in the past by both Vivisimo (at Clusty.com) and by Ask.com. One difference, though, is that Microsoft pushes the aspects further into the experience, by showing a long page of results with several top results from each aspect (similar to Google’s push with spelling mistakes).
At least judging by the (possibly engineered) sample results, the clustering works better than previous attempts. Most search engines take the “related queries” twist on this, while Kumo includes related queries as a separate widget:
Clusty.com’s resulting clusters, on the other hand, are far from useful for a serious searcher with enquire/purchase intent.
At least based on these screenshots, it seems like Microsoft succeeded in distilling interesting aspects better, while maintaining useful labels (e.g. “reviews”). Of course, it’s possible this is all done as a “toy”, limited example, e.g. using some predefined ontology. But together with other efforts, such as the “Cashback” push and the excellent product search (including reviews aggregation and sentiment analysis), it seems like Microsoft may be in the process of positioning Live as the search engine for ecommerce. Surely a good niche to be in…
Sometimes I want to check the exact number of pages indexed in Google for some query. You know how it goes – you enter a query, it says “Results 1 – 10 of about 2468 gazillions“, then when you page forward enough, the number goes slightly down to, say, 37 results. Trouble is, very quickly Google thinks I’m a bot and blocks me:
Now, it’s quite clear Google has to fight tons of spammers and SEO people who bomb them with automatic queries. But that’s what CAPTCHAs are for, isn’t it? well, for some reason Google often saves on them, and instead provides you with the excellent service of referral to CNET to get some antivirus software. Dumb.
The amazing part is that you can get this from a single, well-defined, world-peace-disrupting query, for allintitle:”design”. Booh!
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Clusty.com’s 
