General – Page 13 – Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

Notes: Tom Coates talks social software

Tom Coates, Yahoo (also worth listening to is the podcast of Tom’s talk from the London event)

Working for Yahoo in a rapid prototyping unit in London

How people can interact to make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts

MySpace– impressive site, eaten a whole generation of people, easy to take potshots at it but it’s pretty amazing…

Looking up too close at web statistics and at websites is a mistake, have to look at the big picture to see the utility of the whole thing

social software: latest in a long line of cooperative things, goes back to things like the alphabet and writing, justice and government, the invention of money.

(he was a classicist, studied things related to rome and greece)

What is it? It helps us do more together than we could apart.

stated another way: Using software to enhance our social and collaborate abilites through structured mediation

Characteristics, in a nutshell:

When an individual conttributes, they get value

these contributions should provide value to their peers as well

the organization that hosts the service should derive value and be able to expose this back to the user

two models:

1) Consensus: many contributions make one voice (example: wikipedia): Generates canonical or definitive representations in data

openstreetmap.org: response from the bubble community
musicbrainz: about getting new sources of data about music
clear honorable mission is a necessary thing

2) Polyphony: many voices with emergent order (example: flickr): generating a whole lot of material and then manifesting the order in that data, make it comprehensible

works a lot better than the consensus model

– youtube

– delicious

– plazes

– hollywood stock exchange

– last.fm

– amazon.com

Infinite communities, supports a lot of communities not just one: that’s why it works better

MOTIVES: why do people contribute to these sites at all?

friend said there are only two motivations (ha):
– to get laid
– please jesus

Why do people contribute
(Peter Kollack, Economies of Online Collaboration)

anticipated reciprocity

reputation

‘sense of efficacy’

identification with a group, community

Open Source Motives
“Success of Open Source”

Learning to code

Gaining reputation

Scratching an itch

Contributing to the commons

Sticking it to Microsoft

Who and in what context are they contributing…

You can share without really knowing it (example: search engine) (purely utilitarian motive)*

Saving for personal use, but you save in public (example: delicious) (personal utility motive)

Sharing with friends*

Sharing with community interests*

Self expression / showing off**

Altruism / good of the world**

(spectrum: more individual* —- more social/public**)

be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points & competition –> don’t reward the wrong thing, creates gameable and screwed up systems

(points: players who suit MUDs… Richard Bartle, four types of users you have to have to have a MUD. Diamond– achievement, Spades, Hearts:____ ; Clubs: interested in imposition on others, combat with others)

– people might move between these motivations during the life of their existence in a game

– if one of those types of users isn’t rewarded, then the thing comes unraveled –> need a variety of different types of users to create a culture that will last

– example: Digg requires two types of users, one who explores the site and diggs stuff and people who just read pages (and click on ads). If you reward one group but not the other, the sight would come apart.

Building something of collaborative value:
helping people feed back on their own data to build something of lasting value

Last.fm
————————–
Why hasn’t Apple purchased last.fm??

Flickr
————————–
250M photos
all with clear permissions for use
5M of those photos have been geocoded
a vast number of those photos have been tagged
knowledge of which photos are interesting

Open up social value
————————–
expose every axis of data you can
give people place to represent themselves
allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another
help them annotate, rate and comment
look for ways to expose this data back onto the site

APIs are cool

Be VERY careful of user expectations around how private or public their contribution is
— Facebook is an example of where someone failed to do this

Be wary of creating monocultures or echo chambers
— digg homepage, don’t make it so that only the same kind of person can use it

Remember: not all of you users ned to participate to generate social value

Business value
————————–
openstreetmap.org (could challenge navteq, mapquest, etc)
flickr.com (making money not by owning data, by 3rd party services)

Attention and advertising
Premium accounts
Building services around the data
Using user-generated annotations and contributions to improve your other services

Rise of aggregate data?
————————–

This is an idea, I need your feedback…

proprietary data own a space
they license their data selectively
increasingly fluid and commoditized services emerge with flat rate-card data provisions
until finally data services generated by distributed commmunities emerge and take over?

Notes from Kevin Rose’s talk about digg.com (at Future of Web Apps summit)

What is digg?

Stories live in the upcoming queues for 24 hours
– Upcoming stories that were dugg by friends are highlighted
– User can identify a store as their #1 story at a particular point in time

My friends
–> filter for upcoming stories

If multiple friends agree on something, then it’s chances of being interesting to everyone goes up a lot so there’s a “shared diggs”

Initial prototype: 20 hours to complete, $10 / hour

$99 a month hosting plan

200+ blog readers

People love to say they hate stuff (ha) –> threshold for comments that have been buried is 4, yet some comments have like 50 or 500 buries!

Give your developers time to experiment with your data (a la Google 20% time)

Today, there are a little more than 500k registered digg.com users
10M+ pages per day
1M+ daily unique visitors
90+ linux boxes

scaling has been a big issue for us
– PDF ‘Inside LiveJournal’s BackEnd’ (bible for us — how to scale and cache a site like this)
– We hired experienced DBAs, the same people who helped friendster, they taught us how to write queries properly.

Be aware of scaling from day 1 or you could have a month (like we did) where it was extremely painful

Future plans
– Learning from users interests story suggestions, friend suggestions
– Digging other types of content online (videos has been the most interesting… third most popular part of the site today)

We have a fully funded business plan
Path to profitability with current ads –> intention is not to do more any more advertising.

Ads provided by Federated Media with extra inventory filled by Google Adsense

People timeline:

just Owen and Kevin –> first four months

$50,000 investment from Text America friends –> hired Owen full-time, move him out here from Toronto

Jay Allison –> convinced him to leave his current company and join Digg full-time as CEO and pursue funding

today, there are 15 people

majority of people are in operations and development

3 full-time PHP people

4 people that help scale the site, DBAs, UNIX admins, experts at netscalers

1 finance guy

1 business dev

1 graphic designer

1 Kevin Rose (product manager)

1 person dedicated to going through all incoming emails

User’s ability to remove their own data –> we’ll be rolling this out in the future
All of your actions belong to you as the user, your attention is something that belongs to you. You’ll even be able to export your data.

Yes, our search sucks –> we have lots of issues with this, we were using mysql’s text search, moving to Lucene. New technology will add the ability to search by number of diggs (yay!)

Paying top users? The most popular content doesn’t necessarily come from top users — very important that there isn’t outside motivation for submitting an article.

“The Emerging Age of Who” talk by Dick Hardt of SXIP

My notes from Dick Hardt’s talk kicked off the Future of Web Apps thing yesterday about identity… it was short talk, only 15 minutes, but it was dense. I loved Dick’s presentation style of speaking without interruption while a stream of synchronized images flowed on the presentation in the background. It’s something I’d love to try myself, I expect that doing it well takes a lot of practice.

Anyways, the notes:

Overview
————————–
What is identity?
Who are you?
Identity 2.0

parable: throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps out right away…
but if you slowly turn up the heat, it just sits there and slowly its dead

If we don’t have identity, it’s like groundhog day –> you start all over every day
credit history, etc –> past behaviour, predictor of future behaviour

digital identity
— lots of online identities, none of them are machine readability

Yahoo
— lots of experiences that are silo’ed, one identity system
— some aberrations like flickr which has an awkward dual login system

Microsoft
— .Net Passport –> name changed to MSN Live Login
— coming up is “Infocard” — this is “Identity 2.0”, it’s good

Google
— bunch of sites most of which are accessible through Google Accounts
— still the same silo thing that Yahoo and Microsoft have going on

eBay
— sepearate accounts — paypal, ebay,
— reputation — past behaviour –> future behaviour (ebay’s “viagra” around their application)
— anti-phishing — starting to do “multi-factor identification”, biometric ID

evolution of identity systems:

domain centric authentication (identity 1.0)
federation of identity systems — circle of trust — silos (identiy 1.5)
circle of trust that scales to the whole globe… need for identity 2.0

opportunities — single account (single point of failure? no, that’s already there… really strong lock in one place)

Wikipedia–> using openID with reputation
slashdot–> “karma”– what if you could take it over to another site?
ebay–> users could present their ebay reputation to another site

infocard, openID are solutions for single account identity

At the Future of Web Applications event

I’m at the Future of Web Apps event in San Francisco’s today and tomorrow. If you are here, give me a shout.

Some brief notes since I left Houston yesterday:

Apple marketing really knows how to hit all cylinders at once with their launch messaging. When I got into SF last night, I saw a billboard on US101 for the new color Nanos and then when I got into the hotel, this e-mail was waiting for me:

I sat next to this guy on the flight from Houston to SFO yesterday who was grad student in bio statistics at John Hopkins in Baltimore. It comes time to eat and they give him a meal and he puts it on his tray but doesn’t actually start to eat it. He’s alternating between looking at his watch and looking at the stewardesses who are a few rows away from serving us drinks. I’m thinking, “This guy really doesn’t want to eat without a drink first!”. Fine, so the drink finally arrives and he gets an iced tea and he specifically asks if he can keep the entire can. Fine, the stewardess says. Then the stewardess says, can I get you anything else for your iced tea — lemon, sugar…? His response, Yes, I’d like a glass of water. !? OK, so now he goes into overdrive organizing everything on his tray, his food tray, his burger, and the two beverages and one can that he has. It looks like he’s doing some feng shui thing with them all on his tray. So he gets them exactly how he likes them and then he reaches down underneath the seat into his bag and pulls out a… camera. He snaps a photograph. At this point, I couldn’t not ask him what was going on. His answer: http://www.airlinemeals.net/. Ha! Wild. He said it was just a sort of hobby for him.

The incredible transparent building in downtown Houston

photograph taken by j-a-x, featured on houstonist.com.

Service to monitor phpBB, vbulletin, ubb and other forums?

I’m looking for a “Google Alerts”-like service that’ll notify me when certain keywords appear in certain forums (example: I’d like to be notified everytime someone posts ‘snapstream’ or ‘beyondtv’ or ‘beyond tv’ on byopvr.com). Or I’d like to be notified when a particular user makes a post within a particular forum.

Something like this would make it a lot easier for me to track and monitor conversations in the forum-o-sphere (yes, that is a term that I just made-up… 1:15pm central time, Sunday, September 10, 2006 — you heard it here first!). Forums are pretty darn popular, at least they are for us over at SnapStream and my sense for it is they are more practical and accessible to the general population than blogs are. ie random Joe customer is more likely to post something in a company’s forum or in a community forum than he is to create a blog and make a posting about it there. Even if he already had a personal blog, he’s probably still post to a company or community forum, knowing that he’s likely to get more traffic and responses that way.

If a service like this doesn’t exist, it’ll be one of those “shit, why doesn’t this service exist?” moments for me. With blog search being such a hot area, Technorati and Google duking it out, how can everyone be missing out on being able to search and track conversations in the forum-o-sphere?

Making it easier to distribute photographs

One of the fun things about taking photographs of friends and family is sending them copies afterwards so everyone can enjoy them. And sharing photographs online is a relatively simple process. Choose the photographs worth sharing, click some buttons to get them to a reasonable size, upload them somewhere and then e-mail a link to “somewhere” to family and friends. Or maybe there are just one or two photographs of interest so you e-mail those to a friend. Some of these things are even simpler if you are using photo management software (like Picasa) that’s integrated with a website for sharing photographs (for Picasa, this site is Picasa Web Albums).

But what about sharing actual prints that people can put up on their fridge, in their photo albums or mail to grandparents? This is more cumbersome. In my case, the process to do this goes something like this:

1) Select “worthy” photographs in Picasa

2) Export those photographs (I set the “resize too” option to 1200 for 4×6 prints, 1600 for 5×7 prints)

3) Login to Sam’s Club Photo Center

4) Upload all the photographs

5) Tell Sam’s Club that I want 4×6 prints (singles or doubles)

6) Tell Sam’s Club where to send the photographs

7) Complete the checkout process (including credit card info)

So this isn’t so bad — after all, I’m just clicking buttons. No phone calls, no physical trip out to the photo lab, the whole process is virtualized. But it’s still labor intensive, even if it only takes a bunch of clicks.

So first of all, Picasa could stand to have much better integration with photo printing services (or maybe they just host their own like Apple does). The key points for better integration would be:

– Integrate my contacts, so I don’t have to go digging for people’s addresses.

– Save my credit card information

– Automatically resize photos before uploading, depending on the size I want to print photographs at so I don’t have to do it manually (or so that uploads don’t take excessively long when I’m just looking to print wallet sized photographs)

And then the other more innovative thing to do would be to integrate some sort of facial recognition technology into the process so I could take an album and choose a “Send Prints to Detected People” option. My photo printing site/software would then order and mail photographs that John was in to John, and the photographs that Suzie was in to Suzie, and so on and so forth. Each person’s face would need to be associated with their name and address.

The upside to an approach like this is ordering and sending photographs to friends becomes really easy. Your photo printing site or software, with the help of some facial recognition, basically does it for you. What photo site wouldn’t love something like this? If it worked reasonably well, it would surely increase photo printing sales for customers using the feature. And, all that heretofore useless facial recognition software would finally do something useful!

There’s an assumption here that people are only interested in photographs of themselves. I think people ARE, generally, very interested in seeing photographs of themselves, definitely more than most people would be willing to admit. But this approach certainly wouldn’t be complete. To get better coverage, maybe a social network could be thrown at the selection process, after all the problem here is basically one of relationships. “Send person x all photographs that contain person x and of all of the people person x has designated as friends and family.” Fundamentally, though, the question of whether someone would be interested in seeing a photograph of someone else isn’t something that’s easily answered (nor is the opposite question — who a person would want seeing a photograph of themselves, or, say, a photograph of their child).

Another problem here is a problem of physical addresses. With e-mail, fine, you can send separate emails out to people even if they live in the same place — no big deal. But I’d feel silly sending two sets of photographs to husband and wife that live in the same house. This could kind of be solved by working backwards from the address, if two people are designated to live at the same address, then those batches would get merged.

So it seems obvious that the facial recognition + photo ordering feature like what I’ve described wouldn’t be a slam dunk — I’d classify it as potentially interesting enough to try out and experiment with. At a minimum, photo sharing software like Picasa should make the printing process easier. My fingers are getting tired of clicking so much!

Idea for a restaurant review blog

Two people have described themselves to me as ‘foodies’ in the past couple of days so that got me thinking…

How about a restaurant review blog that goes into the kitchen at restaurants and tells the story of the people who prepare the food, how they prepare it, the tools they use, and the environments they cook in? The site would focus on making the behind-the-scenes story of restaurants interesting to average people.

There’s an Indian saying that when someone cooks you food, their disposition and emotional state go straight into the food they cook. Is the person cooking your food at a restaurant happy? Do they love you? Are they sad, bitter, or angry?

It would certainly be something different from your typical restaurant review site and for the information hungry (like me!), it would be welcome new data about restaurants.

Fun with PhotoBooth at the Apple Store

Took a break this evening and we found ourselves at the Apple Store as we meandered through the Galleria. There, I introduced Shonali to the wonders of Apple Photo Booth. How long have web cams been around and no one else thought of this brilliant little application?

Our private session with Andy Warhol: