User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town

Image via WikipediaThis New York Times article makes me feel like I felt when Google did the thing I wanted done on Blog Search and Twitter search results. I have been talking about simplifying Twitter, about taking it more to the masses. And now looks like Twitter is doing it, finally.

New York Times: Twitter Revamps Its Web Site: He has said he was surprised that so many people use the service — 160 million — given how difficult its Web site is to navigate. ..... If people want to learn more about the author of a post, for instance, they must go to a new page. It has been almost impossible to follow a conversation between two Twitter users. And while a quarter of the posts contain links, if people post a link to a photo, readers have not been able to see the picture without going to a new site. ...... people see two panes .... The timeline stays in the left pane. In the right pane, they can see more information about posts — like biographies of authors, photos and videos to which posts link — and conversations that spring from a particular post. .... Twitter now shows a continuous stream of posts so people do not need to click “more” to view additional posts.

Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter
Twitter: The Obvious Missing Features
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine
Google Does Not Need Social Envy
Google's Prediction API
Google Also Answered My Blog Search Prayer
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes
Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social

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Zuck In New Yorker

Image via WikipediaThis article has been getting a lot of play. It has been widely shared on Facebook. Did I say Facebook?

New Yorker: The Face Of Facebook: The site is a directory of the world’s people ..... Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg ..... his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. ..... Zuckerberg’s Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. ..... “Is there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don’t own a TV.)” ..... At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York’s garment district...... our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display...... “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” ..... one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account ..... “our new Caesar.” ..... Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him ....... He does not plan to see the film. ...... s pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes ...... five feet eight ..... distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky...... he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn’t ...... Attached to the basement is the dental office of his father, Edward Zuckerberg, known to his patients as “painless Dr. Z.” (“We cater to cowards,” his Web site reads.) ....... Some kids played computer games. Mark created them...... Soon thereafter, Mark started taking a graduate computer course every Thursday night at nearby Mercy College. When his father dropped him off at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, “You can’t bring him to the classroom with you.” Edward told the instructor that his son was the student........ News of the software’s existence spread on technology blogs. Soon AOL and Microsoft made it known that they wanted to buy Synapse and recruit the teen-ager who’d invented it. He turned them down....... e arrived in Cambridge with a reputation as a programming prodigy. He sometimes wore a T-shirt with a little ape on it and the words “Code Monkey.” He joined the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, and, at a Friday-night party there, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, met his current girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American from the Boston suburbs........ had a knack for creating simple, addictive software ....... Their site, he says, emphasized dating, while his emphasized networking. ..... Sorkin .. professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media ...... “It’s a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world’s great social-networking site.” ...... As it happens, Sorkin’s “The West Wing” is one of Zuckerberg’s favorite television shows. ...... he responded coolly: “I know the real story.” ...... A few days after we spoke, Zuckerberg changed his Facebook profile, removing “The West Wing” from his list of favorite TV shows. ..... after asking a friend to suggest a car that would be “safe, comfortable, not ostentatious.” He drives a lot to relax and unwind, his friends say, and usually ends up at Chan’s apartment. ...... They spend most weekends together; they walk in the park, go rowing (he insists that they go in separate boats and race), play bocce or the board game the Settlers of Catan. Sundays are reserved for Asian cuisine. They usually take a two-week trip abroad in December. This year, they’re planning to visit China. ...... Zuckerberg has found all his homes on Craigslist. His first place was a sparse one-bedroom apartment that a friend described as something like a “crack den.” The next apartment was a two-bedroom, followed by his current place, a two-story, four-bedroom house that he told me is “too big.” He rents. (“He’s the poorest rich person I’ve ever seen in my life” ...... a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s dominant color, because, as he said, “blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Standing in his kitchen, leaning over the sink, he offered me a glass of water...... Looking back, Chan said she thought that the time of the Yahoo! proposal was the most stressful of Zuckerberg’s life. “I remember we had a huge conversation over the Yahoo! deal,” she said. “We try to stick pretty close to what our goals are and what we believe and what we enjoy doing in life—just simple things,” she said. ........ In early September, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, “Priscilla Chan is moving in this weekend. Now we have 2x everything, so if you need any household appliances, dishes, glasses, etc please come by and take them before we give them away.” ...... s a giant sea of desks—no cubicles, no partitions, just open space with small conference room ...... Zuckerberg’s desk is near the middle of the office, just a few steps away from his glass-walled conference room and within arm’s length of his most senior employees. Before arriving each morning, he works out with a personal trainer or studies Mandarin ...... what an “intense listener” Zuckerberg is. ...... In the early years, Facebook tore through a series of senior executives. ..... most of Zuckerberg’s close friends, who worked for Facebook at the start, have left. ..... It’s hard to have a friend for a boss ..... s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet ...... Privacy, he told me, is the “third-rail issue” online.

I don't own a TV either. Great minds think alike.

Your Facebook page is the homepage you always wanted since you heard of the internet. That is why Facebook grew so big so fast.

My favorite color is also blue.

I have not seen the movie. I am in no hurry to see it. I might not even see it. The movie promises to be an elaborate caricature. I am sure it is dramatic, but it is fiction. As for Facebook and Zuck, for me the truth is more fascinating than fiction. Give me a good book or two that tells the story.

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HTML 5 And Online Video

Technology Review: The Next Stage Of Online Video Evolution: CNN and The Onion, for instance, have used it to build out their video libraries, in part because it offers new design options. "The technology is far more expressive" ..... the new Web standard lacks some features of Flash ..... Flash is much better at letting developers use digital rights management software .... a full-screen mode--the absence of which is a glaring difference between HTML5 and Flash ..... not yet fully fleshed out in HTML5 is closed captioning and subtitles via synchronized time pegs

Internet access speed is a big enough bottleneck. But the evolution to HTML 5 promises to usher in a new era for online video. Hopefully the speeds will go up too, but those are two different domains. HTML 5 is to do with programming and architecture.

But HTML 5 is not just about video, although that is where much of the noise has been. It is being said the non video aspects are actually more exciting.

And it's kinda early. HTML 5 - whatever it is - is not quite here yet.

But Adobe has Flash and Microsoft has Silverlight. It is not obvious if they are competing or parallel technologies. Smart minds have made counter claims.

Technology Review: How HTML5 Will Shake Up The Web: lesser-known features could ultimately have a much bigger impact on how users experience the Web..... ts network communications and browser storage features--could make pages load faster ...... Web Sockets provide a website with an application programming interface (API) that opens an ongoing connection between a page and a server, so that information can pass between them in real-time. ... The effect of Web Sockets is something like moving from having a conversation via e-mail to having it via instant message ..... A feature called Web Storage lets Web applications store more data inside the browser, retrieve it more intelligently .... HTML5 allows developers to embed windows of animation onto a page .... improvements in the way browsers handle forms will reduce the amount of javascript needed and speed up page loading

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2D Space Time

Technology Review: Why Spacetime On The Tiniest Scale May Be Two-Dimensional: The latest thinking about quantum gravity suggests that spacetime is two-dimensional on the smallest scale. .... nobody is quite sure whether the terms 'space' and 'time' have any reasonable meaning at this scale..... there is a growing number of indicators (evidence is too strong a word) that point to that conclusion...... recent work in loop quantum gravity, high temperature string theory, renormalization group analysis applied to general relativity and other areas of quantum gravity research, all hints at a two dimensional spacetime on the smallest scale. In most of these cases, the number of dimensions simply collapse in a process called spontaneous dimensional reduction as the scale reduces ..... one of time and one of space

This space time talk reminds me of when I was at a Science House MeetUp months and months back (Thank you FBI, I no longer show up for Science House MeetUps) and this super smart Indian guy was going on and on about ridiculously small structures. And I remember putting in my word to suggest just like we found nuclear energy at the nucleus level, perhaps there are stores of energy at even smaller scales.

My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp
The Science House MeetUp
Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November

James Jorasch who runs Science House later gently nudged me in the direction of algae. There is a lot of clean energy that can be tapped at the algae level, we don't have to go that small, he seemed to suggest.

Although this 2D space-time talk is quite speculative at this point.

In The News

Google Voice Blog: Fast Access To Google Voice With Android Widgets
Wall Street Journal: Digits: ‘Censored’ Gone; Craigslist Could Go Before Congress:adult services listings, which critics say had become an online red light district..... the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on domestic minor sex trafficking ..... shutting down adult services “makes it less easy and less convenient and less normative to buy a child online for sex.”

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Online Measurement Creates A Muddle For Web Journalists: there is such a cacophony of information that it “impedes editorial decision-making” .... Chartbeat .. gives a minute-by-minute picture of what people on a site are reading, searching for, and so on. ..... Talking Points Memo .... news of Al and Tipper Gore’s divorce was doing better than news about the Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, so editors quickly moved the Gore item to a more prominent spot ..... the Daily Beast site: In October of last year, Nielsen measured the audience at 1 million; comScore counted 2.2 million; and the Daily Beast itself said it saw 4 million.

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Analysis: The H-P Suit Against Mark Hurd: his severance could be worth more than $35 million.

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Apple’s Review Guidelines: ‘We Don’t Need Any More Fart Apps’

New York Times: Bits: Betaworks And The Times Plan A Social News Service: News.me that is being developed in collaboration with The New York Times. ..... TweetDeck, a popular desktop client for Twitter, and Web tools like Bit.ly, a URL shortener, and Chartbeat, a real-time Web analytics service. ..... The Times Company, which participated in Betaworks’ most recent round of financing ...... “From the Times’s perspective, we think this is a really interesting way for a company like ours to foster an entrepreneurial culture through a start-up” ..... So far this year, Bit.ly has unshortened more than 30 billion clicked links .... Bitly.TV

New York Times: Bits: SAP Looks To Benefit From The Oracle Tempest:To most in the technology industry, Larry Ellison’s latest adventure — the rapid-fire hiring of Mark V. Hurd, ousted Hewlett-Packard chief executive, and the resulting Silicon Valley fireworks — is entertainment......McDermott called the Sun purchase “Oracle’s wild move into hardware.” ..... “What Apple has done in the consumer space, we’ll do in business applications,” he said.

New York Times: Bits: Ex-Sun Chief Gets Healthy With New Venture: “leverage technology in pursuit of better health.” .... the company will develop software and services to help people keep track of their health information and to create direct links between patients and health care providers.

New York Times: Bits: Apple Lifts Restrictions For App Approvals: In an about-face, Apple announced Thursday that it would change some of the strict and perplexing rules for developers ....Earlier in the year reports circulated that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission were negotiating who could begin making antitrust inquiries to Apple over its stringent App Store restrictions.

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Google's Prediction API

Technology Review: Google Offers Cloud-Based Learning Engine: the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events...... Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds .... extracting emergency information from Twitter ...... machine-learning black box--data goes in one end, and predictions come out the other ...... "This API could be a way to get a capability cheaply that would cost a huge amount through a traditional route." ... Prediction API .... has the potential to be a leveler between established companies and smaller startups

We went from big, ugly computers - mainframes - to PCs. PCs were simpler. And over time they became pretty powerful. And then the cloud emerged. The internet itself was the cloud. So I agree with Larry Ellison when he claims he has always done the cloud thing.

We went from servers to data farms. And these data farms run by big companies like Google and Facebook are huge, big enough that the electricity costs are a major headache even for these rich companies.

When Larry bought Sun, I threw a challenge in his direction. Can you build data centers that are the size of servers? Or at least small data centers? That might be nano territory. But I figured what the heck? There is never too much drama in Larry's life. What is one more challenge?

One common denominator with these disruptive technologies is they have been democratizing forces. It has always been about making it possible for more and more people, more and more businesses. We basically want everybody to be able to go online.

Google's Prediction API is a step in that same direction, and I am glad. Suddenly even small businesses will be able to make sense of large quantities of data they might end up collecting.

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Clean Water, Obesity

Technology Review: Clean Water For The Developing World: Cotton fabric treated with nano inks produces a water filter that's efficient and needs little power to work...... kills bacteria with electrical fields but uses just 20 percent of the power required by pressure-driven filters ..... At least a billion people have access only to water contaminated by pathogens or pollution. ..... There are two major chemical methods: adding chlorine to the water to kill the bacteria, or adding iron, which causes the bacteria to clump so it's easily removed. ..... Filtration, in contrast, is attractive because it's simple. .... other low-power solutions take too long or are too complex.

Obesity is to America what water is to the Global South. So much of health care costs would evaporate if most Americans lost weight. So many of the diseases in the Global South would go away if everyone had access to clean drinking water.

Some say we already have the knowledge for both and I am not so sure. One of my insights from volunteering for Obama 08 was that Americans don't socialize enough. They don't meet each other in person enough. Their overeating has a direct relationship to their emotional malnutrition.

It is not true we know all we need to know about clean water. Obviously the water cleaning technologies we have are not cheap enough, not simple enough. Obviously. There has to be relentless innovation to reach the masses.

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Chris Dixon: A New Breed Early Stage Investor

Chris Dixon is a New Yorker. Chris Dixon has a day job. He is working to build a middle range, ambitious company. Hunch is one of those post-algorithm search engines. They try to bring in the human element more front and center.

Chris Dixon was not trained as a techie. He did not learn programming at school. But he is very much a creature of the tech world, the startup world. He very much fits my definition of a techie. He belongs. He will rule.

I wish more prominent tech entrepreneurs blogged like Chris Dixon does. But his blog is less that of a tech entrepreneur, and more that of an early stage investor.

I think Chris Dixon's real calling is not that he is a tech entrepreneur, but that he is one of those who are really defining early stage investing. If you listen to Dixon, you will think VCs are dinosaurs. They don't "get" it. They are not hands on enough. They don't really get their hands dirty. Writing checks no longer does it. You really have to be involved.

And this blog post by Chris Dixon is a jewel. It really distills a lot of what he has said over time.

GigaOm: Chris Dixon To VCs: Act More Like Startups: “have fewer meetings” and “have everyone at the firm blog/tweet.” ..... venture firms should act more like the startups they invest in, right down to his suggestion that they “have offices that look and cost like startup offices — or better yet, don’t have offices at all [and] spend your time visiting companies.” ..... VCs should not “talk/tweet/blog about your vineyard, yachting, golfing etc. while you tell your CEOs to work non-stop and be frugal.” ..... “Stop kidding yourself that you add a lot of value beyond recruiting/intros/governance/financing/selling companies.” ..... “Say no to companies. Saying “come back later” feels like a free option to you but actually hurts you and the startup in the long run.”

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