Month: July 2003

Growth

Friendster, which opened to the public in March and is still in beta, will hit 1M users this week, and is expanding at a rate of 20% a week. Danah Boyd, a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. student researching online social networks, said Friendster is beginning to have an “unbelievable impact” on its target demographic, urban-dwelling 25- to 35-year-olds.
“You go into a club and people are talking about it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people (talking) about it in a social situation.”
Boyd said the word “friendster” is entering common usage. Just as “googling” has become synonymous with Internet search, she explained, “friendster” is now used to describe a person that someone meets or knows through the network. A friendster is not exactly a friend, but rather an online acquaintance about whom a lot is known, thanks to the degree of disclosure in their social resume, which, of course, may or may not be true.

As my friend Fabian can testify, Friendster is everywhere in the US tween group. Before long, it will likely enter Europe in a big way, and prepare the minds here for social networks.

Semi-structured data pipelines

the cocooners are musing about a filesystem that is aware of semistructured data.

Imagine having an XSL processor in the kernel:
You could “execute” .xsl files, bypassing having to run a processor manually.
prompt$ page2html.xsl < input.xml > output.html

this jibes well with the notion of making xml the default programming model, something i would like to see (i like xml much more than java 🙂 i wrote about this 2 years ago. damn, has it been 2 years already.

Location-aware computing


This paper describes our implementation of the Universal Location Framework, a technology that allows aggregating multiple location technologies, seamlessly transition between them, and exposes a single Application Programming Interface (API).
Today there are well-established technologies for position location such as Global Positioning System (GPS), cell phone triangulation using Enhanced Observed Time of Difference (E-OTD), and emerging technologies such as Digital TV (DTV) signals, Wifi, and so forth. The performance variation of these technologies with respect to the environment has been the main reason for their development and continued existence. ULF is addressing this issue by not being restricted to any specific technology. Instead, it uses a layered approach that allows integrating (fusing) multiple technologies.

intel’s research in location-aware computing seems to have resulted in JSR-179, which was approved a few weeks ago. with luck, it will be implemented shortly.

google knows where you live!!

We just launched a new feature on search.ch, that I am very excited about:
Make a query in our Swiss Phonebook and you will see links, that connect non-private entries with a query on our swiss search engine that returns pages related to that phonebook entry.

nice one bernhard! in my experience, the swiss are not very clued in about searching for this kind of information.
bernhard claims that this search offers a higher precision than googling. i tested it for wyona:
search .ch (6 hits)
google (4 hits)
in this case, the links from search.ch are slightly better, probably due to the way google recognizes telephone numbers (may be optimized for american phone numbers).
i also found this nice one:

A chain letter is circulating warning everyone of a new danger: Google will return your name and address if you type in your telephone number. It also, has a link to Mapquest to get a map of where you live.
This is all true if you live in the US It is also a stupid warning.
If you don’t have an unlisted phone number then your name, address and telephone number has already been printed and spread throughout the United States in a revolutionary set of documents known as The Phone Book.

bernhard wants to improve searches for persons too. the first optimization that comes to mind would be to filter out sport scores. whenever i search for friends with a low (or nonexistent) page rank, i’m spammed with their names appearing in sports scores. i like this kind of data mining. open source intelligence is very powerful indeed, and i salute bernhard to make this information available to a broad range of users.

Quines

:quine: /kwi:n/ /n./ [from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement.

<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”&gt;
<xsl:output method=”xml” encoding=”utf-8″ />
<xsl:variable name=”s”></xsl:variable>
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:value-of select=”substring($s,1,148)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
<xsl:value-of select=”$s” />
<xsl:value-of select=”substring($s,149)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

quite amusing, yet ultimately boring as it always reconstructs only itself. it would be cool to add in some mutation, but apparently the problem is not so easy to solve:

It may be that the problem is not amenable to being solved by evolutionary methods. There may be too many local maxima, which give fair to middling scores, but no good way to step from a local maximum to the global maximum without ever getting a lower score.
It may be that the randomprog and mutate functions produced too many offspring with syntax errors or other obvious problems, so that it would have taken longer to generate an optimum solution that I had patience.

JohnnyVon, being rooted more firmly in the (simulated) world of physics and biology, might fare better.


JohnnyVon is an implementation of self-replicating machines in continuous 2D space. 2 types of particles drift about in a virtual liquid. The particles are automata with discrete internal states but continuous external relationships. Their internal states are governed by finite state machines but their external relationships are governed by a simulated physics that includes Brownian motion, viscosity, and spring-like attractive and repulsive forces. The particles can be assembled into patterns that can encode arbitrary strings of bits. We demonstrate that, if an arbitrary “seed” pattern is put in a “soup” of separate individual particles, the pattern will replicate by assembling the individual particles into copies of itself. We also show that, given sufficient time, a soup of separate individual particles will eventually spontaneously form self-replicating patterns. We discuss the implications of JohnnyVon for research in nanotechnology, theoretical biology, and artificial life.

Geocaching


my first association when i heard geocaching was akamai. caching internet content by location. way off-base.

The sport where YOU are the search engine.
A GPS device and a hunger for adventure are all you need for high tech treasure hunting. Here you can find the latest caches in your area, how to hide your own cache, and information on how to get started in this fun and exciting sport.

sure enough, there are 165 troves in switzerland alone. this sounds like something i want to try. i like maps, navigation and being out in the green, and adding in geek toys only makes it better..

blogs vs mailing lists

one of the crucial questions i want to explore in the remainder of 2003 is whether blogs are better than mailing lists for collaboration. i believe they are, but need to try it to be sure. some data points:

  • persons with inadequate email archives are no longer crippled
  • categorization beats subject prefixes
  • linkability: prior art (older posts) are first class citizens as opposed to vanishing in the archives / trash
  • trackback: get more brains to attack the problems
  • it is easier to filter out “me too” posts

the klog mailing list (ahem!) has very good thinking on the issues.
related issues: blogs vs wikis. mailing lists vs wikis

PR outside the beaten trail

this is how i would like to close the feature list once kaywa opens its doors:

Chock full of amusing and delightful technological confections
In addition to doing all that is necessary, Oddpost also does most of that which is charmingly unnecessary. You can, for example, choose one of several uproarious built-in sounds to play whenever new mail arrives, or better yet, specify a URL to your favorite song clip, movie quote, or any other wav or mp3 on the web. And how many times have you resorted to hello or a mind-numbing yo as the subject for an email? With Oddpost, a single click on a new message Subject: label summons the mysterious powers of the Subject-O-Matique to generate a thought-provoking subject for you. But enough talk! We implore you to sign up for a trial account at once!