DygiScape

Lately, Facebook has been quickly catching up to MySpace for world domination, or at least Techmeme news aggregator domination. But the question critics always ask, “is it sustainable,” at least when it comes to reaching new audiences and keeping the perceived value in a product high.

I try not to rely on numbers for a lot of my logic, I use fuzzy logic and qualitative analysis, but I figure I’ll take a deep dive and see what I find.

Buzz
Facebook has generated a lot of buzz, not from themselves, rather among many A-list bloggers. Most notably, Microsoft’s rumor to buy Facebook for $6 Billion. I decided to run some quick Google searches on various terms in the industry on the Techmeme aggregator to compare where FB is to MySpace to the Industry. Here is what I found:

MySpace leads as #1 as Facebook follows closely at #2 number of stories on TM.

“Real World” Metrics
Popularity doesn’t equal sustainability, although it does contribute. Ultimately, innovation can be the key ingredient for sustainability. How popular is Facebook compared to MySpace? In my opinion, Facebook and MySpace are still considered to be in separate leagues mainly because of corporate ownership, user demographics, and the features offered. That said, let’s take a look at some fancy graphs, courtesy from Compete.

Not bad for FB. MS seems to be dropping lately.

Interesting. It appears around the time that MS deployed its new home page skins, PVs have dropped.

This numbers and graphs look pretty for Facebook, but they should know the giant they are up against. The only thing that [to me] MS offers that FB doesn’t is fully customizable profiles. While FB is easy — too easy — to add modules to their pages, it can inundate and take away the value of them for some users.

Conclusion
Is Facebook sustainable? Possibly. What they must do is offer valuable content to their users and listen to feedback. Listening can come in the form of Web analytics, user feedback, and even spot-testing new features with users. Looking at the PVs per visit, you can see MS has substantially dropped since they released their new home page skin … did they not poll their users enough? Were MySpacers looking for a more Web 2.0-ey interface? We won’t know ’till the end.

What do you think? Is Facebook sustainable as a prominent social network, or does it need to incubate some more?

Blogging, Geeky, Social Networking, Tech News facebook, myspace, Social Networking, sustainability, web 2.0

In the of time off work, and not sleeping, you’ll find me watching hours of crime dramas like CSI, The Shield, and Law & Order. (Yes, Reno 911, but that’s comedy…) I’m bad, I don’t have cable or satellite, so that leaves me with a snowy TV picture or the Internet.

I think back, and I think I remember my passion for police drama from Rescue 911 and COPS. My father, of whom controlled the remote control for the larger family TV, surfed the major networks for interesting programming; but often resulted in FOX, running re-runs of COPS or America’s Wildest Police Chases — and I was entertained with our tag-team commentary about the suspects. Some dads bond with their kids over baseball, war stories, or building tree houses; ours was law enforcement TV programming.

Crime dramas intrigue me because I like to hypothesize along with the plot and think to myself, “He did it!” or run a variety of what-if scenarios in my head. I like to examine various scenes and find alternate solutions, clues, loopholes or exploits. For instance, how could a criminal avoid GSR from appearing on themselves and where to look?

I also like the different types of action involved in the three I mentioned above. Here is my overview of the three mentioned earlier:

• CSI: LV/Miami/NY — The action is generally divided into the field, the crime lab, and the interoffice drama, such as Sara and Grissom hooking up. The field action is varied between the three different series, from reserved to very direct with suspects and crime scenes. The overall focus is on collecting evidence for the case.
• Law & Order: SVU, CI — The action is mostly responding to a severe, well thought-out crime, and the focus is on the interrogation and investigative processes once they acquire the suspects. The other portion of the episodes focus on the court room drama, with bias for the prosecuting DA and is usually short in length.
• The Shield — This newer FX network crime drama is more action-packed with zero focus on collecting evidence, crime lab, or even the court room drama. The show depicts the fight-or-flight decisions that an aggressive crime task force makes in overriding their supervisor’s orders, bending the rules to take suspects down with a mix of Boondock Saints “god” style of choosing whether a suspect lives or dies in the Sonoran desert. I’ve noticed over the years, the interoffice drama has increased, but the severity of the crime has increased, too.

So which of these are my favorite? The Shield. This series satisfies my action and investigative needs from crime dramas. I really adore The Shield’s approach to crime, the strike force is tasked to take down high-priority crime with whatever means necessary, in addition, living up to it’s TV-MA-LSV FCC content rating. I agree with their choices sometimes, like turning over violent offenders to the Mexico Police, in exchange for cash to assure they won’t gain freedom. Other things like killing your own teammate to cover up internal interests, just ain’t cool and it keeps me on the edge of my seat.

In short: Action!

Update: I wanted to add a visual perspective regarding my interest in crime dramas. Four minutes in Excel 2007 results in this, fairly painless. Thanks, Microsoft.

Blogging, Personal tv

I was looking around at my friend’s profiles on Myspace and such, and I’ve noticed a few of them have a pretty cool music widget that has tons of their favorite music on their profile. ProjectPlaylist is the widget I’m talking about — it’s free and holds up to 75 songs.

Widgets, in this context, are objects that you can take from one site with you and utilize on another Web site. For example, YouTube has an embeddable video widget — something you have to copy and paste for it to be played on your own site. ProjectPlaylist is no different, and because the playlist is in the widget, you could put it on multiple places like a blog or a profile.

ProjectPlaylist is a pretty straightforward Web site, you add the music and it builds a list for you. You can instantly preview it to make sure you got the right song. When you’re finished, you are guided through a process of customizing the widget (auto play, color, custom skin, and where you’re hosting it).

First time confusion: It was slightly confusing at first, because if you add songs, but there’s not a playlist, you added nothing and it doesn’t store your session activity so you essentially wasted the time that you invested into building a playlist. It would be really cool to simply lay out the three steps: sign up, make a playlist, add music and have that on the right rail. Clearly it was my fault, but I wasted 15 minutes, and for a Web user, that’s too much time to waste.

So here is my playlist — with no ads (where’s the monetization?!), and is pretty good on resources. Here’s my playlist that I stayed up too late to fill in:

Blogging, Geeky, Social Networking, Tips music, Social Networking, web 2.0

I admit, I only tried Vista for three days, and quickly reformatted because my RAM begged me to.

Blogging, Geeky microsoft, video

Wow. If you think we’re safer when it comes to information security, think again. I don’t mean this in as bad of a way as you might think. Before I go in to details, let’s have a look at these headlines:

• Stolen laptop prompts Administaff to alert 159,000 of possible breach
• 10,000 Employees’ Data on Stolen Laptop
• Theft Of Gap Laptop Puts 800,000 Job Applicants At Risk
• TJX theft tops 45.6 million card numbers
• Laptop Stolen From D.C. Home

I could go on and on … but how many times does a mistake have to happen before it sinks in. Employee-issued laptops are a hot item these days, as they have confidential company information, personal information, customer information, and more. Information security starts with you, not the enterprise virus scan or the corporate firewall (but those are important, too.)

Trying not to sound like an anti-drug PSA, but it’s easily possible to take people’s information, fraudulently create accounts, false identification, and possibly use in the purchase of weapons. In essence, one laptop theft can result in domestic terrorism. A stretch, I know, but it only encourages it.

Here’s a detailed guide for protecting your work-issued laptop, and I don’t even work in risk management:

• Guard your laptop like it’s your next unborn child. Never leave it unattended in your car, house, coffee shop, or a friend’s house. Not that they will necessarily steal it, but you want to be accountable for where your computer is at all times.
• Going away for a while? Leave your work laptop in a secure location at work. You can’t steal something if it isn’t there, and it will be one less worry. If you’re on vacation, make it vacation and disconnect. The world will not stop if you don’t respond to your e-mail.
• Trust but verify. In downloading attachments, performing various troubleshooting, and responding to peculiar requests, trust it — but verify it. That means even though you regularly talk to someone, and they said something like “send me those records,” when you aren’t sure, take it offline and verify it with them via telephone or in person. (Credit: Junkyard Willie for the phrase.)
• Do not install “gateway” software. What is gateway software? P2P applications, simply. Anything that can download and/or share files from the computer to the rest of the Web. You really don’t want your financial document to be posted on Frostwire, do you?
• Periodically re-image your machine. While we all don’t want our laptop stolen, testing the reliability of recovering backed up data is good to familiarize yourself with types of information your laptop carries. In addition, re-imaging will ensure that unknown programs installed or collected over time are removed and don’t pose as a risk.
• Make frequent, Network-based backups — Don’t store locally. As tempting as it is to keep all your documents on your computer, it’s wise to store it over the network (at work), so you can find the files you need from any machine. In addition to adding this ability, it will also allow you to perform damage control by accounting for what files are on your computer and what’s not.
• Using Public Wifi? Don’t connect to “Free Public Wifi” or similar SSID names in a public area. Often these are other computers, and could be used to easily connect and circumvent your firewall. If you use wireless, make sure it’s encrypted, and if you’re doing work, connect to your VPN so you can guarantee a secure link and no sniffers can pick up your data.
• Engage yourself in security discussion. Don’t wait to be a victim, listen to the security folks at your work and listen to their advice. They know their stuff, they understand your frustrations and can help you work around them easily. Likewise, be sure you check for updates for your software, as that is another hole.
• Never write down passwords. When we were signing onto AOL in the early ’90s, having passwords written down on a piece of paper was acceptable, not these days when we’re all fighting embracing information security risks. Often the easiest way to defeat security, [sic] is often the easiest way.

Now that you are guarding your laptop like a paranoid conspiracy theorist with tinfoil on your head, take a moment to just step back and combine the information you know now along with reality. It’s acceptable to not follow all the above steps, just understand the risks involved and manage those risks accordingly.

Blogging, Geeky, Safety, Tech News, Tips, Work Tips, tutorials

Being on top is nice, but being on top on a regular basis is better.

Robert Scoble explained the fundamentals of gaming Techmeme and shared his observations. I believe it’s important to know that Techmeme isn’t the only social news network that vulnerable and some valuable lessons that new sites could learn from.

What is gaming? Gaming is the behavior of intentionally creating content, rating content, or influencing the top 1% users of a social news site with the end result of having your material reaching the top or featured pages. It’s a little bit like spam, but not as shameful. Put it this way, PR firms could justify their application of “gaming,” but your typical C, D or F-list blogger could argue that it’s unfair.

I don’t think tech blogging is broken, but I do think some influential bloggers should clearly disclose their source of reviewing something (and not selling out and reviewing material because it was handed to them by a PR person). No, having it on your about page regarding your associations to VC firms doesn’t count.

Anyhow, back to the point. Gaming isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around for quite a while. Digg’s top users were caught gaming and accepting cash to simply post a link to a story; Netscape’s [now Propeller] tolerance to gaming was zero, and even Jason Calacanis put a $100 bounty out on these spammers.

There are two types of gaming, the way I see it:

• Malicious spamming: by means of proxies, multiple accounts, sinking relevant stories, raising junk ones.
• Grey-area marketing: by means of reaching out to the top 1% of influential bloggers hoping they carry your story getting your product to the top of sites.

I think a lot of social news sites have been able to reasonably manage the malicious spamming, by simple blocking proxies, verifying e-mails, using CAPTCHAs and rate limiting on IP address. (I’ve learned this by accident when I was using a shared IP and was using Digg a lot.) However, I don’t have faith that Digg or Netscape could effectively handle the influx of abuse that botnets could inflict.

The other kind of gaming is not something a computer or a script could detect — it relies on the top users that aggregators respect — ultimately depends on your own moral flexibility. As Scoble explained in his video, if the A-List blogged about “Google Fubar,” it will be number one on Techmeme without a doubt.

The solution? I think it would be reasonable empower users to vote on the sites on Techmeme, but have it silently raise or lower someone. Have low-rated sources queued in a moderation queue for re-evaluating their “importance” and possibly blacklisting them.

In conclusion, when a social news service is managed by an algorithm, it is vulnerable to mathematical failure; when managed by a human it is vulnerable to human error. When managed by both; you minimize both points of failure while adapting and reacting to user feedback.

Geeky, Social Networking, Tech News internet, social media, social news, spam

Many innovators could tell you about the challenges Apple faced some time ago and how they overcame them to be one of the best-known computer manufacturers. Just as important as the strength of a company, are their weaknesses that people tend to forget.

What they do right:

• Apple is customer focused. A majority of their products, services, technologies, have all been in favor of the end-user — both new and their existing customer base. While I may personally dislike iTunes, I can definitely see the value it provides for people, as well as making amends with the media industry. People love their iPods, MacBooks, Mighty mouse, Mac Mini, and other popular Mac products.
• Apple makes their products available to the market effectively. These days, if you don’t make your product out to market in an aggressive time frame, you fail. I am very impressed with Apple’s innovations and the short time they took to make them available to their consumers.
• Apple is quality-focused. Not many Mac users ever complain about conflicting software. Why? Apple makes reliable, tested, durable products that can withstand the demands of their users. I imagine they probably lab-test with a combination of professional users as well as inexperienced ones to see what’s up.
• “Innovate or Die” is Apple’s other motto. Years ago, the tech giant was facing bankruptcy among other challenges, faced gaining poor reputation among users, industry insiders and investors. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak challenged the industry by improving the basic functions that consumers wanted — and did a damn good job of it.

What they do wrong:

• Not transparent enough. Apple has gained a reputation by means of fan-boys being egregiously gullible to company rumors, especially among bloggers. Whether they are legitimate or not, the company doesn’t do good enouigh job communicating to users and the industry. I suggest they could do a blog with a team of folks who handle user, industry, and press questions and respond accordingly.
• Inching closer to the dark side. I strongly believe Apple does have their customer’s interests at heart, but I think their success is becoming like a snowball — if they can’t achieve phenomenal numbers from the previous quarter, they are viewed as slowing down and imploding on innovation. Because of this (coupled with the obvious — they want to stay on top), they cooperate with the industry too much. For instance, the iPhone, they restricted it to just AT&T and continued to pursue DMCA notifications against the authors of the unlocking software. This isn’t cool, and is proof they are edging closer to the dark side.

That’s pretty much it on what I believe Apple does well and what obstacles they face as they go forward. I presume that as an elitist technology company, a bit of mystery is good which is why they probably keep their mouth shut about their products as it drive bloggers and columnists wild when they release innovative technologies.

Surely that can’t be all the things Apple does right and wrong … share your thoughts in the comments.

Blogging, Geeky, Tips apple, internet, Rants, technology

Mozilla is at it again, standing by to make sure their Web browser is safe and secure (and compatible). The new binaries were updated for OS X to be compatible for the upcoming OS X 10.5 “Leopard” — should be good news for Mac folks.

The fixes for 2.0.0.8 are:

Fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.8

MFSA 2007-36 URIs with invalid %-encoding mishandled by Windows
MFSA 2007-35 XPCNativeWrapper pollution using Script object
MFSA 2007-34 Possible file stealing through sftp protocol
MFSA 2007-33 XUL pages can hide the window titlebar
MFSA 2007-32 File input focus stealing vulnerability
MFSA 2007-31 Browser digest authentication request splitting
MFSA 2007-30 onUnload Tailgating
MFSA 2007-29 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.8)

Blogging, Geeky, Tech News firefox, mozilla

You might already know that a large restructuring took effect today at my employer. It’s always a shame to see talent, skill, and centuries of experience leave their empty cubicle with one to four boxes of their belongings.

I wasn’t in this round (which makes 0-3 for me). But plenty of colleagues that I worked with were. It was sad to see them already packing their desks in a form of box. Many expected it, thanks to the rumor-mill tech gossip blogs, but some were still surprised.

I really wish you were here still with us. Stand strong and keep your head up. There’s plenty of opportunity that awaits you in the D.C. area. In your pursuit for a new paycheck, check out EMurse. You might like it — very Web 2.0, free, and helpful for formatting your resume on the fly.

Lastly, if you read this — keep in touch. Bother me with random IMs when you’re bored, I’ll chat.

Blogging, Work aol, Personal, Work

I occasionally debate many policies on what we (as Americans) do and why we do them. That is, I like to question various topics often raised by conservatives as well as liberals. I prefer to interpret the Constitution without considering environmental or societal influences — that is, the argument that claims “Well, when they [framers] made the constitution, they didn’t have a large government provided militia.”

Well I came across this interesting video [via Govtrack.us] where professor Lawrence Lessig lectured about policy, money and corruption in not just government, but also private enterprise. He sources a multitude of references that support his argument very clearly.

It’s long, but should be intriguing to policy makers.

Blogging, Politics corruption, Politics