Tag: socialnetworks

23AndMe

My SNP for $1000, my 2008 resolution:

groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own.

2008-05-28: fill out surveys to strengthen the links between your genetic makeup and open research questions. Sounds a lot more fun than “walking for the cure”.
2015-03-15: 23andme enters drugs. This should be very interesting. To date, they have SNPs from 800k people, and that could grow rapidly. I’d expect them to release new higher resolution kits and make them available at cost to their customers.

23andMe, the Google -backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself.

2015-06-18: 23andme has 1M customers now. I’m pleased to be among the first 0.2% 🙂
2019-07-16: 23andMe Chip Updates

100s of 23andMe customers tested on those earlier chips have pleaded with the company for some way to get access to its latest features, like the health reports and improved ancestry estimates. Many worried about whether their old data was accurate.

2023-06-01: Now they’re doing cancer drugs, but it’s not obvious why their SNPs matter all that much? It feels they need to rebase their approach on much more powerful technology like full genome sequencing. That said, I’ve yet to receive a benefit from my Nebula 30x DNA sequencing.

23ME’610 is designed to do something similar, by binding to a receptor called CD200R1, which was identified as a promising anti-cancer target by 23andMe scientists studying the 23andMe database. CD200R1 is a cell surface receptor protein that is mostly expressed on human immune cells, specifically cancer-fighting T cells and myeloid cells. Tumor cells can express CD200, the only known binding partner for CD200R1, and use this regulatory protein to turn off the activity of T cells. A drug that blocks the ability of CD200 to bind to CD200R1 may activate T cells and enhance their ability to kill cancer cells.

World Tree

MyHeritage eventually hopes to have 3B profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any 2 people in the world is just a mouse click away.

2012-05-26: I suspect we’ll be able to construct a family tree of all humans who ever lived in the next 50 years. Once you combine billions of complete DNA with data mining, you can predict how long ago any given mutation occurred. Genetics dictates which mutations dominated in what ways. Extract enough DNA from human remains to interpolate. the genographic project is a small step in that direction

2022-03-10:

The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1 ka to 100 ka. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained 27m ancestors.

After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.

USAToday Engagement Engineering

USAToday went from being an old school news site to something much different. Readers could now create profiles, comment on articles, vote to recommend articles to others (very Digg-like), etc. Unique visitors and page views aren’t spiking upwards, perhaps as USA Today and Pluck anticipated. There is no doubt that the Pluck products are very solid products, but perhaps news and social networking just don’t mix.

what did they expect? usa today is average in every way and reading it is a completely forgettable experience. good riddance

Facebook is opening up

According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it’s possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications.

woo. this is good news. i wonder how they balance privacy and serendipity / discoverability.

Open Social Networks

A few weeks ago, one of our execs at work asked me to think about “open” social networks. Since my day job is working on the social networking platform that underlies Windows Live Spaces and other Windows Live properties, it makes sense that if anyone at Microsoft is thinking about making our social networks “open” it should be me. However I quickly hit a snag. After some quick reading around, I realized that there isn’t really a common definition of what it means for a social networking service to be “open”. Instead, it seems we have a collection of pet peeves that various aggrieved parties like to blame on lack of openness.

  1. Content Not Viewable By the Public and not Indexed by Search Engines
  2. Inability to Export My Content from the Social Network
  3. Full APIs for Extracting and Creating Content on the Social Network
  4. Interacting with People from Different Social Networks

some reasonable ideas how to preserve the competition while also locking people in less.

Expensive Friends

A month ago, Brandy McDowell sat down with her longtime friend, Kezia Chandler, and told her she had switched phone carriers. Their relationship has not been the same since. Now, they barely speak. Ms. Chandler rushes Ms. McDowell off the phone when she calls during her lunch break. And long conversations about schoolwork and relationship woes have been reduced to sound bites. But what was set up as a purely business strategy is having an unintentional social effect. It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of phone “friends.”

Outing bureaucrats

In the day to day world, the Churchills write books in the country, the Mandelas serve their prison sentence and the Grants get drunk. The bureaucrats run countries, banks, schools, armies, drug companies, government agencies and our lives. My hope though is that the bureaucratic power is revealed for what it is by organizations that adopt the use of social software. My hope is that as millions of young enter the workforce expecting to use social software that they will open up the internal workings and “out” those that have little to say about the real work of delivering the result to the customer, or the voter, or the patient, or the student.