I am contemplating moving SF soon so I can be in the same city as @n2frizbee and be able to properly plan our wedding and the rest of our lives.
The only problem is that i have made so many friends here in LA and at MySpace that its really hard to think of not seeing them again.
Even through the harder times when everyone is bitching we find ways to laugh it off and pull through it.
I guess LA is more of a city for single beautiful people. SF is a city for smart friends and more family values.
It would be so cool if I could take my sister Mary with me.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Cerebral Snapshot
Left
- Man on Southwest Flight 3149 from LAS to LAX: I repeat you cannot save seats. Much less 6 seats with a full plane !
- Taxi drivers are really nice when the economy is shit. Today one offered be complimentary bottled water... (I didnt accept it but gave him an extra buck)
- Vegas is the best quit smoking plan -- cough cough -- so that's where all the smokers went
- Damn I accidentally bought an Ed Hardy shirt....
- Eating Healthy Choice Tortilla soup when temperature im my apt > 85F is a bad idea
Right
- The only way to scale is to be redundant.
- Semantics are king
- Progressive enhancement means Microformats and ActivityStrea.ms
- You must inject the microformats server side
- Don't bother exposing an API full of GETs
Sunday, August 23, 2009
OpenID Registrars
Recently I saw Mr. Messina's mocks for teaching the user what an OpenID is and how to get one or use an existing one. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/3841182425/
I feel that this is still complicated for a regular end user. They just want to log in or signup for the new service as fast as possible.
The open id relying party should be able to just show the user their openids with the last one they used selected so the end user does not even have to bother typing anything if they don't want to.
I would like to propose a potential solution to this. When a provider creates an openid for a user they register it with an "OpenId Registrar". The OpenID registrar will cookie the user.
An OpenId Registrar keeps track of all the identities a user has. It will have APIs similar to the Social Graph Apis from Google. Given one OpenID from a given provider you can get the rest. This can also be supported via webfinger. Given an email address give me all the openids for the person. And with the help of the cookie it can say give me what openid provider I should present to this user.
So the way in which having an OpenID registrar would solve the NASCAR issue is that it will provide an API which returns the list of OpenIDs for the user on that browser and the last one used. Which means the registrar should also have an endpoint which can be invoked to store which provider was just used.
Fairly simple but should address end user confusion.
What do you think ?
I feel that this is still complicated for a regular end user. They just want to log in or signup for the new service as fast as possible.
The open id relying party should be able to just show the user their openids with the last one they used selected so the end user does not even have to bother typing anything if they don't want to.
I would like to propose a potential solution to this. When a provider creates an openid for a user they register it with an "OpenId Registrar". The OpenID registrar will cookie the user.
An OpenId Registrar keeps track of all the identities a user has. It will have APIs similar to the Social Graph Apis from Google. Given one OpenID from a given provider you can get the rest. This can also be supported via webfinger. Given an email address give me all the openids for the person. And with the help of the cookie it can say give me what openid provider I should present to this user.
So the way in which having an OpenID registrar would solve the NASCAR issue is that it will provide an API which returns the list of OpenIDs for the user on that browser and the last one used. Which means the registrar should also have an endpoint which can be invoked to store which provider was just used.
Fairly simple but should address end user confusion.
What do you think ?
Saturday, June 6, 2009
MySpace comeback
- Make a huge public contest/tv series "Who will be the next Tom ?" Episodes will show contestants every day life and how they portray this on MySpace. TV show will also demonstrate how to do cool things to your profile page and link to videos on the site teaching you the tips and tricks.
- Users of MySpace follow and vote online for the Next Tom
- Create a secondary contest to pick the best profiles. This contest will include challenge questions to make sure the applicants are "for real".
- Select multiple winners each representing a different audience.
- New Toms will be VIP
- The real people from #3 will get a list of challenges to defeat to become VIP
- Vips will not get ads on their profile page or can have their own adds.
- Developers from MySpace will add modules which allow you to show your friends across all networks.
- Vips will be able to nominate 5 friends for vip. These people will have to face the challenges and can then invite more friends.
And so the user cleansing continues until you have a site with awesome members excited about bringing others on board and a true understanding of why the people are here.
Why MySpace ?
MySpace started off helping those looking to self promote. Primarily bands. They could easily setup "their website" on MySpace.
I think there is now an even broader market for self promotion. Everyone wants to be a celebrity in their own right. Whether you are well known for your musical talents or for your basketball skills or for how ridiculously good looking you are (zoolander joke there). Whatever the reason you are a proud individual with ideas, accomplishments and things to share. This is a time to prove yourself !
MySpace can provide an immense personalization layer. Our users can really "go to town" expressing their individuality via their MySpace profile with: custom art, media and other rich content including information from other sites. This is not something that you can easily do on Facebook or Twitter. They just list a partial set of activities and maybe allow you to change your background. MySpace however allows you complete control of everything displayed and how its displayed.
You may not always have the time or creativity that is why we have many tools to help you build your personal brand. Our offering has hundreds of pre built themes and modules of content you can add in two clicks. You can definitely use MySpace as your personal web page and remember if you look good we look good !
I think there is now an even broader market for self promotion. Everyone wants to be a celebrity in their own right. Whether you are well known for your musical talents or for your basketball skills or for how ridiculously good looking you are (zoolander joke there). Whatever the reason you are a proud individual with ideas, accomplishments and things to share. This is a time to prove yourself !
MySpace can provide an immense personalization layer. Our users can really "go to town" expressing their individuality via their MySpace profile with: custom art, media and other rich content including information from other sites. This is not something that you can easily do on Facebook or Twitter. They just list a partial set of activities and maybe allow you to change your background. MySpace however allows you complete control of everything displayed and how its displayed.
You may not always have the time or creativity that is why we have many tools to help you build your personal brand. Our offering has hundreds of pre built themes and modules of content you can add in two clicks. You can definitely use MySpace as your personal web page and remember if you look good we look good !
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Web Evolution: Implementors Needed !
My response to:
Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid
Given that the first implementations of the activitystrea.ms standard went live about 2 months ago. I think its premature to call the lack of analytics around this new offering stupid. The analytics are evolving and many of those will be feeding into the recommendations engine. There is a lot of opportunity in this field.
As described in this recent article exploring how friends influence purchases
>> "Moderately connected" users exhibit "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior. On average, this social influence translates into a 5 percent increase in revenues.
Additionally, we should not shy away from investigating hyper targetting and ad placement models. After all every item in your activity stream can be considered a personal ad that you want your followers/friends to read. How to make it more memorable ? How to get the user to interact ?
Incidentally, I was just mentioning to Chris Messina last week that the Activities team at MySpace has already gotten initial approval to provide a user's public activitystrea.ms feed in order to encourage adoption. And no, not because no one wants to consume MySpace's feed.
We have several large partners and don't forget the fact that MySpace has more than 70 million total unique users in the US (as of the March 2009 comScore data). However, I do agree a public feed would provide more portability so we are reviewing this proposal.
Bottom line is we are doing everything possible to promote a smarter web and we need everyone's collaboration. Whether its producing smarter feeds or consuming this feeds and creating another consumable a bi-product. Stop pondering on how far others will get and jump on the implementors side.
Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid
Given that the first implementations of the activitystrea.ms standard went live about 2 months ago. I think its premature to call the lack of analytics around this new offering stupid. The analytics are evolving and many of those will be feeding into the recommendations engine. There is a lot of opportunity in this field.
As described in this recent article exploring how friends influence purchases
>> "Moderately connected" users exhibit "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior. On average, this social influence translates into a 5 percent increase in revenues.
Additionally, we should not shy away from investigating hyper targetting and ad placement models. After all every item in your activity stream can be considered a personal ad that you want your followers/friends to read. How to make it more memorable ? How to get the user to interact ?
Incidentally, I was just mentioning to Chris Messina last week that the Activities team at MySpace has already gotten initial approval to provide a user's public activitystrea.ms feed in order to encourage adoption. And no, not because no one wants to consume MySpace's feed.
We have several large partners and don't forget the fact that MySpace has more than 70 million total unique users in the US (as of the March 2009 comScore data). However, I do agree a public feed would provide more portability so we are reviewing this proposal.
Bottom line is we are doing everything possible to promote a smarter web and we need everyone's collaboration. Whether its producing smarter feeds or consuming this feeds and creating another consumable a bi-product. Stop pondering on how far others will get and jump on the implementors side.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Collaboration of Opensocial apps via the Stream
Last week at IIW #8 Scott Seely, Martin Atkins and myself worked to add the hooks to the Opensocial APIs (0.9) in order to facilitate developers adding the full fidelity version of their activities into the stream.
The results of our collaborative brainstorming is here:
http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/OpenSocial-Activity-Publishing-Integration
The main concept behind this was to allow developers to reference an optional tranformation bundle which maps the fields in the activity raised to the proper objects in activitystrea.ms like for example the author, verb, object type and most importantly all the properties of such object: unique id, name, annotations, url, thumbnail, etc
The main pros of this approach is that it allows for the activitystrea.ms standard to evolve orthogonally.
All this led me to thinking:
Could we in fact provide such flexibility to our app developers where their products (the activities) could cross reference one another ? After all the ids are gobally unique. WHy could we not have the activities from one app reference the object of another domain ?
Imagine this scenario:
John Mayer Vanderbilt show on May 22nd 2009 photo stream
The results of our collaborative brainstorming is here:
http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/OpenSocial-Activity-Publishing-Integration
The main concept behind this was to allow developers to reference an optional tranformation bundle which maps the fields in the activity raised to the proper objects in activitystrea.ms like for example the author, verb, object type and most importantly all the properties of such object: unique id, name, annotations, url, thumbnail, etc
The main pros of this approach is that it allows for the activitystrea.ms standard to evolve orthogonally.
All this led me to thinking:
Could we in fact provide such flexibility to our app developers where their products (the activities) could cross reference one another ? After all the ids are gobally unique. WHy could we not have the activities from one app reference the object of another domain ?
Imagine this scenario:
John Mayer Vanderbilt show on May 22nd 2009 photo stream
- Deb loves the new look on John >> from IFan Just Now
- Monica is wondering why John takes so long ! >> from Ticketberry 2 minutes ago
- John is getting ready to go on stage >> from IRockstar 4 minutes ago
Similar effects have been achieved with machine tags however there is no need for that given that the activities stream provides global unique identifiers. Surely one can produce a consumer which can leverage this and properly group based on the object id ?
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social coder
- Monica
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Open Web Standards Advocate