tIn the State of the Blogosphere report posted by Technorati recently, they describe how the top bloggers update their blogs more frequently than the rest of the population. Given the data I have been gathering on the Bloglines subscriptions, I was curious to see what how most subscribed blogs behaved? For the top 100K feeds ranked by the number of subscribers, I fetched their RSS/ATOM files (some failed, some were filtered due to few posts etc). Using this handy PERL module, I parsed all the pubDates (sorry, RSS only for now) and converted them to their corresponding Unix timestamps. Now for each of these feeds, the Mean Time to Update (ie the avg of the number of days between consequent posts) can be obtained. Interestingly, some fraction of the posts were updated after they had been published (hence were out-of-sequence in the RSS feed). For this analysis, I do not consider these updates -- it would be interesting to dig further into it.
Following graph F(x) is defined as the proportion of X values less than or equal to x. Thus you can observe that for the top 10K feeds 40% of the feeds updated in a day or less. For the rest of the feeds it was 30%. I believe as we go lower in the ranking, this would keep decreasing even further. Interestingly, overall, for the highly subscribed feeds, almost 60% update at least once a week.
For a feed reader keeping an index fresh and up-to-date is then a function of how many users subscribe to a feed, how often the feed is updated, when was the last time the feed was requested (by any user in the system) and perhaps even when the last ping was registered for a particular feed in the ping stream. I believe in Google reader's case, clicking "show details" displays the last time when the feed was refreshed -- which I have never found to be over 3 hours for any feed that I subscribe to.
ACK: The above plot was made in MATLAB using this script for cdfplot.
Introducing WIkimatix.com: A mashup for wikifyingGoogle Trend's top search keywords. Moreover you can "disqus" and comment on recent hot topics being searched for right now!
Yesterday, while taking a break from writing my dissertation I was looking at the top search terms over at Google Trends. Few things immediately came to my mind:
I am a Wikipedia and News junkie -- no surprise there! Sometimes, I do not know a whole lot about the top search trerms and have to look up the wikipedia entry to refresh my mind about the topic or person. BTW, have you noticed that so many of the top terms are named entities? I also spoke about this in my earlier post on Intrestingness and Feshness in Search.
Google trends does not have an ability to discuss. I wanted something where I could comment on the terms in a digg like fashion? Perhaps talk to everyone about what I think of this whole "Big foot thing in the news". (Tip of the hat to the awesome widgets powered by Disqus)
Finally, I would like to know exactly why something is in the News or has made it to a top 100 list. I just want a one or two line snippet/summary and a pointer to the most authoritative blog post/news piece about this keyword. While Wikimatix currently does not provide this -- it is something that can be easily extended.
Well, this was a quick hack ( ~150-200 lines of code; ~2 hours) and is meant to be a prototype/proof of concept idea. I think there can be a lot one can do with the idea of capturing the buzz using query logs and having discussions around the search terms and the latest news.
Note: Wikimatix updates itself every two hours. The disqus pages are associated with the individual search term and thus can be accessed even after the term is no longer buzzy.
Some possible improvements that might be good:
Group related search terms like "big foot", "big foot discovery" etc
Name disambiguation can be a problem. Sometimes the right person's Wikipedia entry is hard to determine without the context of the story.
Simple heuristics might work rather well to identify the top categories that are in the news. For instance, today it is all about "Big foot", "Olympics" and a few other major events.
For search terms, there might be a good video, photograph associated with it. It would be cool to display that as well.
I've been tinkering with Google's new Virtual World Lively. It seems a bit flaky at the moment and works only on Windows right now... but I was able to set it up. The neat thing about it is that the rooms can be embedded anywhere; like in this blog, for example. Like MyBloglog, Lively can also serve as a visitor log and unlike SecondLife, it isnt a walled garden. It is a fun thing to try out, but IMO, at its utility seems low. What it lacks right now is the stickiness factor...a few of the 2D Facebook app games are more addictive than this. Usually in such situations, an occasional flash mob like the one on Huddle is a lot more fun!
I have started a Google Calendar to keep track of events and conferences in Social Media. Some of you may have already subscribed to it. However there does not seem to be any way for me to tell exactly how many people are using it!
Feature Request #1: Show Number of Subscribers for a Calendar This would certainly be quite a useful feature to have and as it turns out I am not the first person to request for this.
Feature Request #2: Allow Tagging; Sharing Calendars a User has Added Calendar as a shared resource for planning and organizing events in a community is an important tool. However, the calendar is still not as social as it can be! You can easily find new calendars to add. But what about tags? How about sharing? I would love to be able to create a tag cloud of events and a public list of calendars I have added.
Feature Request #3: Social Event Notification If a user has made his or her events public, then why not show that users friends an update on the event she plans to attend? I think that Dopplr does this at some level but given that Google Calendar is a good place to consolidate all the events and schedules and GMail is our universal contact list -- why not combine it to make it more social?
Anyways, these are just a few quick thoughts I had about Google Calendar. It is a great tool and has made my life much easier. To be fair, I have never used outlook so perhaps my view may be a bit skewed.
I had been hoping to find time to check out Google App Engine. It has been widely touted as Google's answer to Amazon EC2 (which I have used a bit recently). Here is a very simple hack -- a basic proxy server built on Google App engine:
I have seen many "Free" anonymization/proxy servers online -- but in my experience, most of them are pretty slow or just crowded with advertisements. This is where Google App Engine (or EC2 for that matter) could be a good platform! It was dead simple to code up this demo by just following the guide and using the URL Fetch API.
My first reaction: Google App Engine is real Fun! It was much easier than using EC2 and the turn around time was unbelievable -- python gurus would love it!
Unfortunately, I am pretty swamped right now but I would like to get to the following tasks to improve it:
Handle relative URLs correctly
Handle Stylesheets
When clicking a new link pass it to proxifyit again
Options to diable cookies
Options to disable javascript
Options to strip out ads
Add a captcha if there are too many requests in a given period of time.
Nothing like a quick hack at the end of a busy day... :-)
This is indeed very scary and troubling! The court had supported Viacom and asked YouTube to throw privacy out of the door and hand over terabytes of logs on a golden platter. YouTube in its defense is suggesting that
"IP addresses identify a computer, not the person using it. It's not
possible to determine your identity solely based on your IP address."
Except that if they are going to hand over the IP address AND the username -- isnt that sufficient to almost uniquely identify a user? Firstly, why on earth does Viacom need the username and IP address "to determine general viewing practices"? They can do just as well if the usernames are hashed appropriately and IP address masked or mapped to reveal only geographical association.
What stops Viacom from suing individual users? I am not sure if the excuse:
Oh! that was not me... Errr! There was a party at my apartment and .... errr... well.... ummm... no no! it wasnt me.... my roommate did it!
Is gonna gel particularly well with Viacom's lawyers. Well, if Viacom does indeed drag individual users to court, I would be rather inclined to suing YouTube on this since there is really no way for me as an end user to say if a video on their server, that THEIR recommendation engine is suggesting to me is indeed a copyright violation. Watching a video does not indicate infringement.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert please rescue us from this madness!
UPDATE2: Great News! Right while I had been thinking about this issue yesterday, looks like Google released its official AJAX Client library for its Contact API. So after all Google is becoming a universal contact list? Now, with these tools and APIs available, third party sites have no excuse whatsoever for continuing to insist on asking for username and password to import contacts!
UPDATE1: As it turns out, I totally forgot about the recent announcement of Google Friend Connect and the controversy that soon followed. This is the kind of approach I was thinking of just that it slipped my mind while writing this post late into the night. I think I had signed up for the private beta as well and am awaiting an invitation. Here is the video that explains Google Friend Connect.
I hope with Google, Facebook and Myspace all trying to solve this problem, third party apps trying to import contact list using password/credentials directly will soon be a thing of the past.
Gmail has almost become a universal contact list. Atleast all social network sites think it is so..
I just dont understand why every time I am asked for my gmail user ID and password (to find friends on a network) I cringe but then finally give in -- only to get burnt, burnt and burnt (ouch!) What drives me nuts is when some of these sites get away with sending your password in plain text! Why do we put up with this nonsense, in this day and age?
One suggestion I have for this problem is to build a Gmail Friend Finder API that would allow Yet Another Social Network (YASN) to access our universal contact list. What I mean by this is: Gmail knows everyone I know and interact with. I trust Gmail and am generally more willing to let Gmail be the arbiter of my social information. Why is this a good idea? for starters third party apps neednt ask users for their password. I just ask them to go and talk to gmail to see if there are others in their site whom I might know and might be interested in connecting with me.
Yesss! I am aware of OpenID and Social Graph API. Here is a small glitch, though. Social Graph API relies on FOAF/XFN and not everyone has that information published online. OpenID is more for authentication and IMHO, its kinda unintuitive and difficult to explain even to tech savvy folks -- let alone my grandmother! Gmail on the other hand... everyone has an account there and we all 'get it'! To be fair here.. Microsoft passport account in some sense was a precursor to all this, perhaps even a little too early for its time!
Following is an illustrative example of how I see this working:
The approach that I think might work better would involve developing an API for Gmail. When I first join YASN, instead of sending me an email directly, it outsources the verification process to the Gmail API. Gmail sends me an email to verify that it was actually me who signed up on YASN. Once I confirm, it sends YASN a confirmation that it has verified it is me. In addition it sends a secret identifier that it requres YASN to send over SSL when asking for any of my data. Note that at this point Gmail already knows for certain that I am a member on YASN. Now, I want to check if any of my friends are on YASN. So YASN will connect once again with Gmail friend finder along with the token/secret code that was sent to it when I completed the email verification. Now the only friends that Gmail API sends to YASN are the ones who are connected to me on Gmail AND are also members of YASN.
Since YASN can only access limited information via the Friend Finder API, it cannot spam everyone on my email account. Additionally, since it does not have my password, it minimizes the risks of my account being hacked or YASN doing something malicious. Ofcourse all this is just conceptual -- unless Google/Gmail team actually implements some such API.
[Thanks Audumbar Chormale, for the discussions and the question that led to this post]
Yesterday, I discussed an idea around the FireEagle geolocation API. I was envisioning an app where you could have a mobile phone and as you walk down the Mall or any location, it would pre-fetch relevant coupons and offers from the local restaurants. Being a grad student, we always learn to find good Pizza deals online. So I decided to use the FireEagle API to develop a Pizza coupon finder. The way it works is that it authenticates with FireEagle to access your current location and then fetches the coupons from Google Maps and then parses the output to display on your mobile phone or a browser. You can try it at the following URL http://wikimatix.com/coupon/pizza.php if you have a FireEagle account already. First the application will try to authenticate with FireEagle and request the appropriate permission to access the exact or approximate location information and then passes this to the Google Coupon Finder.
Finally you have all the coupons you need to order your fresh pizza. The Documentation and example walkthrough code on FireEagle's developer area is excellent. It took hardly any time to put together this demo!
I think that the possibilities that this opens up for mobile advertising are exciting. We should also keep an eye on Android -- this space is gonna be fun to watch. [Update: Fixed the broken link. Sorry]
This service is currently in alpha but thanks to Pranam Kolari I was able to get an invitation to Yahoo!'s FireEagle platform. FireEagle is an easy way to manage and share location information across many applications. Currently, I publish my location information across many different sites and applications and it is rare that I put in the actual effort to update it everywhere. For example I use Dopplr to publish my travel plans, twitter and Brightkite to update my current location and Facebook to indicate my home address and other details. I was impressed with how easy it was (using OAuth) to allow Dopplr and others to share and access information with FireEagle. If you have a GPS enabled phone you can even update the geolocation on the go! Damn! Thats is neat!
One really compelling application is Wikinear.com -- it shows you the nearest places of interest by matching the location information obtained from FireEagle with Wikipedia entries. This is great especially if you are traveling to a new location or a tourist spot and would like to know the places of interest nearby.
Another very cool application is Metosphere. (PS: I wish I had an iPhone!). With this app, you can leave a digital message for a given location, see places and events of interest and even report Graffiti and City Repair! This gives me a reason to believe that the next big thing is going to be mobile advertising. The advantage of easy availability of geolocation information specific to a user is immense. This reminds me of a project at eBiquity research group a few years back, called Agents2go, that talked about a very similar concept. Imagine that you were walking down the during lunch and the agent on your iPhone would automatically collect coupons or find deals at the nearest restaurants as you walk by. The idea that we can have a query free, geographically relevant search is really exciting. Yahoo! is innovating and pushing hard on the open initiative. With the availability of an API it would be fun to integrate Google Coupons! (OK here is one more fascinating idea and little time at hand!) Location is a very sensitive piece of information and the best part of FireEagle is that you can manage permissions and privacy settings or even temporarily stop sharing your location. You can allow a specific application to only access location information at a certain granularity: exact, zip, neighborhood, state or even country. More at Techcrunch.
“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of
personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of
the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog
visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs,
or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates
opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC
Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition
becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited
based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”
Many brand monitoring startups are helping big companies keep track of what their (potential) customers have to say about them or their products. While the space of corporate brand monitoring is fiercely competed, one area that is overlooked is that of "personal branding" tools. Most of us are highly interested in knowing what is said about us online. As the TechCareers blog points out:
“You are the chief marketing officer for the brand called you, but what
others say about your brand is more impactful than what you say about
yourself,” says Schawbel.
Keeping an eye on what others have to say about you is not always easy. I started thinking about these issues and outlined how I try to keep up with this information. Here is my "Personal Brand Monitoring Toolbox":
Search Engines: The typical way for me to keep tabs on this is by setting up Google alerts for my name, projects, organization (University/workplace) etc. In addition, I frequently perform "ego searches" to forage for mentions of my name.
Statistics and Tools: One very interesting tool that I have found useful is Lijit. It provides you stats on who is searching for you, what keywords were used to reach your blog, etc. In addition I use Google Analytics to know more information about my visitors, most visited pages and time they spent on my site. If you are an academic like me, you would like to know who has cited your papers recently (Google Scholar) and the number of downloads, who has linked to your paper (Google link: search) and/or your blog posts (Technorati searches). Yessss! I admit! I have become a total statoholic! :-)
Comments and Scraps:Twitter is another important tool in our arsenal for personal branding and your replies say something interesting about you. Finally, the comments on my blog, Facebook messages, scraps and photos are all part of my "brand" and I take interest in replying to them just like I would to an email.
As our information spaces diversify, monitoring "your brand" becomes a part of the everyday online activity. I dont think we have exactly cracked the nut yet -- keeping track of your profile and "your brand " is a highly addictive activity and I think that the tool(s) that make it fun and exciting will enjoy a great deal of popularity.
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