wanderingstan

I arrived in Columbia late on Sunday night after a few too many flight delays in Miami. A taxi got me to the house of my friend Jason Bragg, who I traveled through Asia with waaaaay back in 2001.

I hadn’t planned it, but the next day there was a huge march just a few blocks from the apartment. The video above was taken there. What was especially interesting to me as a non-Colombian web guy, was that the whole thing was conceived less than a month ago on a Facebook group. Several hundred thousand people showed up in Bogotá, and worldwide numbers were in the millions. Nothing til now has given me such a visceral understanding of the power of social networks.

So yes, I’m in Colombia, which means blogging will be light. If you want to follow my travels, I’ll be posting more frequently to my new wandering-specific page. (also via RSS )

(Yet another geeky post. Apologies to non-programmers, though you might enjoy making some short URL’s.)

Keeping URL’s short is becoming important. It began years ago with tinyurl.com, mostly because email clients were chopping URL’s that wouldn’t fit on one line. Text-messaging/SMS sites like Twitter have intensified the need for keeping things short.

Last week my friend Danny Newman asked me for help with creating maximally short URL’s for one of his projects. Danny wanted to use at most 5 characters. Given that there are 93 valid symbols for each slot, that is enough to encode about 3.2 billion unique addresses. (That’s 93^5.) Not bad!

I came up with code (below) that converts a number into the shortest possible representation in a URL path. (E.g. the number may be an ID from your database, or the output of a hash function.) If you’re viewing this page on wanderingstan.com, you can try it out here: (See how big you have to make the number before the URL gets longer.)

And here is the code. This is in javascript, but it ports easy.

  function convertNumberToURLchars(N, padding) {      // Standard unique chars valid in a URL path    var chars = "0123456789"               + "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"              + "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"              + "$-_+*,|\^~`<#%/?@&";                  // These chars will not be recognized as part     // of URL by certain email clients (Outlook)     // if they are the last char in the URL.    chars += "=:{}()[]'>,.!" + '"';         var radix = chars.length;    var URLchars=""    var Q = Math.floor(Math.abs(N));    var R;        // Construct the unique character string    while (true) {      R = Q % radix;      newDigit = chars.charAt(R)      URLchars= newDigit + URLchars;      Q = (Q-R)/radix;       if (Q==0) break;    }        // Handle padding    for (var i=padding-URLchars.length; i>0; i--) {      URLchars = chars[0] += URLchars;    }        return (URLchars);  }  

Small point: As noted in the comments, some punctuation characters (14 in all) won’t be counted as part of the URL by certain email clients when they are the last character. The way to avoid this is simply not to use the last 14 numbers available for a given URL length. Danny wanted 5 characters, so then instead of having 6956883692 unique addresses, he’ll have to settle for 14 less with 6956883678. The former would give a code of http://example.org/”"”"”, the latter gives http://example.org/”"”"&.

Hope you might find this useful someday.

(Thanks to linuxtopia for their radix code sample.)

Today I’m going to a local mini-conference to discuss “Social Graph Unification”, a topic that’s been hot the past few weeks. It’s exciting to think that you could unify your friend lists across Facebook, MySpace, and Gmail. But we should not be content with a mere synchronizing of friend lists. Friend lists are merely one class of data that you might like to have synchronized. (In fact, I think it’s stupid to have your replicated across different services, but that’s a post for a different day!) Here is a rough sketch of the different types of data that you might create online these days, across all services. The question for today is, how many of these would you like (or be comfortable with) being synchronized?

Interesting dimensions to think about:

Pointers vs. Raw Data: Identities and Relationships are not data themselves, but point to other data sources.  Profile and Content are data in themselves. Bookmarks are a type of content that is a pointer to other content.

Serialized vs. In-Place: Profile data is typically not serialized, but Content data is. Some fields are in flux between them: E.g. Twitter showed that “Status” could be serialized, and other companies are trying to serialize “Location” (So that you could a feed of someone’s location history.)

Push vs. Pull: Blog posts are messages that are put out there for anyone to ‘pull down’ are read. Emails are messages ‘pushed’ directly to someone else.

Also interesting to think of the coverage that different services achieve. General purpose social networks like MySpace and Facebook cover almost all most of these types of data. Other services have carved out specific niches: LinkedIn does a little bit of profile data, business contacts, and email. Twitter does a little bit of profile information, subscriptions, and status. Flickr does a little bit of profile information, subscriptions, friends, photos, and email. 

Will people remain content to have this data scattered across services? Will syncronization enable this? How the hell do you manage permissions across all of this!? I’ll let you know how the conference goes!

A great interview with Seth in Business 2.0 about SocialMedia. (Hat tip, Mr. Yardley.)

Seth was instrumental in the formation of my company, Lijit Networks, and my turn to entrepreneurship. Back in 2005 he talked me out of a cushy job in the valley to come work for him in New York while figuring out if my thesis could be a company. When things looked good, he introduced me to Brad Feld, which really got things rolling.

What do you call it when your feeds are filling up faster than you can read them?

Over coffee yesterday a friend remarked that she’s frustrated all her “friend feeds”–with so many friends doing so many things, by the time she’s finished reading the feed is filled up again!

I can certainly relate to this. If I actually attempted to read every post of blogs I’m subscribed to, and every update and zombie attack from friends in Facebook, and every email from strangers…I wouldn’t have time left to eat and sleep, let alone keep a job!

Many years ago a computer science professor of mine called these class of problems (which occur many places in programming) as “The Chicago Bar Problem”: It is impossible to visit every bar in Chicago, because by the time you would be “finished”, so many bars would have closed and new bars opened. (It seems though, that this terminology hasn’t caught on in the passing years, as Wikipedia has no entry for “Chicago Bar Problem” but does have one for the related “Dining Philosophers Problem“.)

Any ideas on what to call this phenomena?

On a geekier note: This problem is only spreading as more people consume more information online, and more information is published online. It underscores the need for effective filtering. There are tricks people can learn to do this, as when Scoble showed how he reads 622 feeds each morning. But I the ultimate solution will come from software, which will ultimately extend the information filtering already done by our brain. (See my post on Digital Cortex.)

On a less geekier note, here is Lucy struggling with this problem nearly 50 years ago; (Just replace the chocolates with blogs posts in your mind.)

Link for Video

Here’s a nice (bordering on cheesy) video explaining social networks. (via Ziki’s blog)

(If you’re reading this in a reader, you’ll have to click through to this post to see it. Sorry.)

But to continue my FaceBook complaining: The video points out that one of the values of social networks is being able to connect to friends of friends. However, this is an area where you are thwarted by Facebook’s overzealous privacy settings. There are no tools to help you use your network to find people (as LinkedIn does).

We have seen the rise of vertical search engines (e.g. WebMD). I’ve explained that Lijit turns each person into a vertical search engine based on trusted social connections.

But what about advertisements?

For most internet sites, you put AdSense on your site and hope the checks start coming. But you have basically zero control over what appears.

I had coffee on Monday with Matt Gerson of eConscious, who told me the story of this article about the dangers of teflon. When they had AdSense, it would show ads for teflon products. An article about why teflon is bad, and it shows advertisements for teflon products. The readers were understandably confused. AdSense isn’t there any more.

On the one hand, this violates the ethical standards of the site. On the other hand, this is very poor targeting! Everyone loses: the network gets no money, the publisher wasted valuable space, and the reader is distracted and confused.

Thus the rise of vertical ad networks like GreenAdWorks.

But what I really want is an Ad network that works like Lijit does for searches. I want a network that won’t show ads for products or companies that have been rated poorly by people that I trust, people in my social networks. I want an ad network that hilites products and companies that have been positively rated by people that I trust.

So if someone is reading a post on this blog about startups, I want to show an ad for a book about startup’s rated highly by Todd on Amazon.

This network doesn’t exist. I hope someday it does.

See also:
Social Media and Advertising

TechCrunch is asking Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?. This echoes the thoughts of myself and others from a month ago.

But since then I’ve been wondering: Where are the Facebook stars?

Only your direct friends and members of your “networks” can see the content you create. Only these people can pay attention to what you do in Facebook.

As a result:

• There are no bands giving out their Facebook URLs like they do for MySpace.
• There are no products in Facebook that you can “befriend”.
• There are no movie stars in Facebook that you can follow.
• There are no popular bloggers in Facebook that everyone reads.
• There are no stars in Facebook.

Even though I would like to open my profile to visible by anyone, this is simply not possible. Here are the three settings available for my profile:

There is no way to get rich in Facebook’s attention economy.

One datapoint: My friend Fabian in Germany says that he’s tried Facebook but gets quickly bored because he can’t see any profiles. The German Facebook clone Studivz.com defaults all profiles to being publicly viewable. (They also have a built-in MyBlogLog-esque feature where you can see who has been viewing your profile.)

Bottom line: Attention is the new wealth, but in Facebook everyone has a glass ceiling.

Related:

Paris Hilton is like a present day Greek goddess. No no no, I don’t mean it like that!

I thought of this while reading the excellent post by Paul Salamone about Social Justice in the Attention Economy. His argument: If attention is the new wealth, should we attempt to redistribute it equally? (Goldhaber responds, and Paul responds again.)

Both take it for granted that Paris Hilton is a classic case of someone getting more attention than they deserve.

I won’t argue that she deserves more or less attention. But the contrarian part of me wonders if she and other “attention epicenters” don’t play a useful and age-old role in society.

The basis of language, of society, of culture, is a shared set of stories and figures. For example, in Roman times disparate cultures within the empire had some basic unity with their common set of gods. Conquered nations would often map their local gods onto Roman gods. This common framework allowed for discourse and understanding across cultures. If someone said “This guy is as strong as Zeus” or “You are working like Sisyphus” you knew what they meant.

Biblical characters have played a similar role in most western culture for the past 1500 years. But religion’s influence is lessening, and globalization is bringing together disparate cultures without this common tradition. If you want to tell a story that will be understood by people across generations and across cultures, you don’t have much common ground to start from.

You can see where I’m going with this.

Paris Hilton represents wealth, exposure, decadence and ditzy-ness. Bin Laden represents terrorism and religious extremism. Donald Trump represents capitalism, wealth, corporate success. And so it goes. These people have become ideals. They have become our modern day equivalent of greek gods and goddessse. They are gods that can be invoked to tell your story across cultural and subcultural gabs. Just like the stories Paul and Goldhaber are telling in their essays.

That’s why my partner Todd got a laugh out of this slide in his VC presentation of Lijit:


So is Paris going to unite the world and usher in an era of world peace? Okay, probably not.

More from my blog:

• Attention is meme sex (and Google is a dating service)
• Attention to dollars, and other exchanges

• What to do with too much money? Or too much attention?

Last week we got an email from Gwen and Paul of Plunge Artist Design that they couldn’t make our meeting because their house burned down. Incredible.

Paul was by the office today and showed us some incredible pictures.

So what does a MacBook look like when it’s been through a 600+ degree fire?

Notice the Apple logo still visible in the center.

More details and video commentary at Gwen’s blog.