Evening activities

In the past two days I have been trying to relax a little in the evening. Yesterday I actually arrived home sort of early (like 6:40 PM), read and wrote some emails, made a dinner plan then went to the grocery store for getting the missing ingredients. Cooked from 9 pm to something like 10:30 pm, and had dinner. It wasn't that great, but quite fresh. Then, not to end the evening like that, I decided to watch Transformers. Certainly something that wasn't worth staying up until almost 2 AM for. It was cute with lots of meaningless computer animations and very weak storyline.

Then today I didn't arrive this early any more. Made dinner, watched Top Chef (not really my idea, but it's a good way of wasting time) and then played some Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the Wii. I found the game quite bad. Didn't like the use of the Wii remote to point to where you want to shoot. But one thing was great: I've unlocked the galaxy on my DS! I thought it was going to allow me to play between the DS and the Wii, but apparently not. They just connect so that you can unlock the galaxy. Lame!

That's it. Now it's time to sleep as I haven't been sleeping much in the last days. It's not that I have a lot going on at work right now, but I can always find something to do better when I'm not tired.

Vegas

So, yes, I'm back from Vegas. It was quite a good trip. I met some very interesting people, had fun with them talking, playing games, and just hanging out. Vegas was mostly just a backdrop to the people, providing us with things to, ways of staying up until very late.

So, what I thought about Vegas? It's flat, with mountains on the backdrop. It's dry and sunny, quite a pleasant weather except that my lips are all chapped. I forgot about these oddities about dry weather. It's bright and full of drunk people walking around and being "happy". The only depressed-looking people are the ones playing on the slot machines. Made me not even want to give it a try.

Ah, and staying off the strip reminded me a lot with living in Oklahoma: large city blocks full of strip malls with large chain stores... Everywhere! We even ate at some, like Sonic and Marie Callender's. I can't say I'm very proud of that, but, as I said, it was all about the people.

Alright, I thought I was going to have more time than this to write, but I guess I have to go now. Not much more to say about the trip. Maybe more to talk about the people on the trip, but I'll leave this to some other time. I'm not sure I have enough data points yet for a full description. But I did find at least someone with a twitter account! With cryptic sports-related messages, which made me not try to follow him.

Twitter Day

It's funny how things sometimes happen all at the same time. This morning, for no particular reason, I went back to look at twitter and see if there was anybody I knew there... Nope... I had looked at twitter some time ago when I heard mentioned probably on TWiT (actually I remembered that it took me some time, for some reason, to figure out how to spell it correctly).

Then, on my way to work, I was listening to TWiT and they had a whole section on how twitter is huge among the Tech reviewer people. I didn't find it too strange, as they always mention twitter on their shows.

Later, when I was going for lunch, I heard somebody mention that somebody else said something on twitter. At this point I was already finding it very suspicious. Then, finally, on the bus coming home, a couple sits behind me and the guy turns to the girl and asks: "Do you know what twitter is?"

With all this, I had to post something on my blog and write my first twitter (saying that I'm writing this post).

So, what do I think of twitter? It's a very simple concept that, if executed correctly can be fun (thus, addicting), and if not it can be just a huge waste of time. Fun waste of time, but completely non-productive.

Choice of words

Choosing what you write and how you write it is extremely important. Sometimes you might have a very important thing to say, but nobody is listening because you are not saying it in a way that makes people pay attention to you. That's well-known, so why am I writing it? Well, it's just that this morning I woke up at 6:30 AM and couldn't sleep any more (after staying up until almost 2AM last night reading) and was reading some articles around. Suddenly two articles popped up and really exemplified this concept:

1) On Communications of the ACM, one of the cover articles named "Patterns, Symmetry, and Symmetry Breaking" by Liping Zhao, the author tries to explain how we can look at programming and using of design patterns as breaking and generating this symmetries in programming languages. It's an analogy that I found quite hard to follow but was trying to hang on to it hoping that it was actually useful when I read the following phrase:

"In biology and physics, the imperfections and irregularities in the arrangement of cells are more interesting because they pose deeper questions to scientists."

WHAT? What kind of observation is that? Odd things make us more intrigued? This phrase was so strikingly meaningless to me that it completely made me lose interest on the article and I stopped reading. Just one phrase...

2) On the other hand, I was going through some articles on ComputerWorld and found Just-patched Excel makes calculation mistakes. Just the title of the article made me have to have a look through it (and I have to claim that the title of Zhao's article also drew me to it). Fortunately it was a short article and talked about a bug introduced to Real Time Data on Excel 2003. If they had actually said something like "New Excel 2003 Patch Adds Bug to Real Time Data" I wouldn't have even looked at the article. Sure, articles about bugs on products that you have or had access to are interesting (especially when the whole Excel 2007 Bug was doing its rounds), but Real Time Data on Excel 2003?

Ok, time to move onto something else for the day... Maybe organizing my Brazil pictures? Or perhaps cleaning up my office... I just know that I've read enough for the morning. Including struggling through articles in German (quite depressing, actually).

Back from Brazil

I'm back from Brazil and I still haven't had the time to write my impressions. I'll just write a summary here and then leave the impressions for maybe the weekend when I hope to start going through the pictures and remembering the things I've done and seen.

The trip was great. With moments of happiness, learning, surprise, stress, sadness... Quite a complete trip! São Paulo continues crazy with traffic and violence nervousness. Salvador was sometimes annoyingly touristic, with everything built to foster tourism even when it is to the cost of losing uniqueness. It was great, nevertheless. Morro de São Paulo was relaxing.

There were only two very negative memories from the trip. One of them I'm not really going to discuss here. It was related to discussions I had with my family. The other was the joke about my visa. I almost had to postpone my trip back because the American Consulate doesn't really seem to care about people's needs to have a visa. The summary is that they say that it takes 6-10 days for you to receive your visa back. The consulate is very close to my parent's place, so I asked if I could expedite the process and pick it up myself instead of shipping it using Sedex. The answer was "no". So there I was waiting... I went to the consulate on a Friday. The next week nothing happened. The other week I was in Bahia, so I kept somebody verifying if the visa arrived... Nothing.

I was starting to get worried, so my father asked his secretary to call the consulate and check what was going on. She called on Thursday and they told her that the visawas issued but it hadn't been shipped yet. Shipping, because it was local, was supposed to take only 1-2 days, so I wasn't worried. Came Friday - nothing. On Sunday we arrived back to São Paulo. Our flight left on Tuesday back to the States, so on Monday morning I called the consulate just to confirm that it had been shipped and what they told me is that it hadn't been released yet! And that's all they could tell me!

I went back and forth on discussing with people with more experience on getting a visa and they told me to send an email and fax to a certain place. I did and received a prompt response that my visa was still on "processing" and that's all they could tell me!

More back and forth of discussions concluded that I had to show up personally with confirmation of my flight to beg them to give me my visa. Note that this pretty much was killing my last full day in Brazil. So, that's what I did... I got to the information booth (after getting there at 2:15 PM and finding out that it's only open from 3-4 PM) and the woman told me that the problem was a software glitch with their image recognition system that was unable to recognize my face! I asked her what to do and she went inside to ask some people and after 5 minutes she came back saying: "Oh, it was just released! Just go to the back and pick it up!"

This "just go to the back and pick it up" took another 30 minutes, but I did get it. This was on the 10th. Reading the visa what does it say? That it was issued on the 7th! Why do they do that to people?

Anyway, that was the really exciting part of the trip for me. Amy might be able to tell her excitement trying to be vegetarian in Brazil... Recipe to starve or to only eat very healthy things like french fries or fried yucca balls (especially in the northeast). And what a waste, as the fish and seafood in general was so good...

Well, now that I'm back, what do I have to talk about? Well, I'm trying to get back to being productive. I'm still ramping up back at work, feeling a little by the sidelines of what is going on. So I should be getting productive at home. Reading technical magazines, planning on projects that I'll be hopefully able to start now that my wrist feels fully recovered. Lots of things to do... So little time...

Laughable

Sorry, I was going to write something about my impressions of Brazil so far, but I read this and I can't help but laugh at it and pass it on:

Microsoft execs struggled with Vista too, say internal e-mails

It discusses that even Microsoft understood the mess that they were creating releasing Vista "this early" (although it was very late according to their initial plan). Very tragic, but funny at the same time.

Microsoft is a great company that needs a paradigm shift. It's stuck to this self-centered world of major releases that aim on putting out a piece of software that is easy to obtain (it comes inside your operating system when you buy a new computer) that just has parity to the basic of what is out there. Their hope is that people will be lazy to go and get the better things, just because they aren't that behind anymore.

I've felt this when I got home and realized that all my parents' computers had only IE7. I just couldn't deal with it, so one of the first things is that I've installed Firefox, mouse gestures and ad block and now life is so much better and faster. Yes, you can claim you can do it all with IE7 and I did try some of it. I just thought that, from my limited experience, the large amount of very mature solutions that exist for Firefox are just easier to use. IE7 has things like IE7Pro that does a lot of it for you, but it is a huge bundle of different things and not only what I want.

Finally, I was discussing this today: the future lies on integration. Building solutions and hoping everybody in the world with integrate with these solutions is not the direction to go. Even if you open your formats (like Microsoft did with a lot of its Office products). The winner of this fight will be the one that is the most proactive about it, hunting to understand the other and be understood by others. This is an aspect that I actually admire Google for. Look at their Google Docs and Spreadsheets... You can import and export to many formats including MS Office formats and OpenOffice and StarOffice. Do they have a format of their own? No!

My dream is still on a paperless world. But I feel like there are still way too many integration obstacles to get to it. I can share files and sometimes printers between two computers. But any other type of sharing that I want to do (event based things like "open this document, generate a PDF and let me see it on this other computer") takes a good amount of work. Without those seamless integrations we can never achieve the basic infrastructure that I consider needed for getting rid of this isolated interface that is the paper.

Ok, wrote too much already. Time to go to sleep and hope that I'll have time before my trip to Salvador to finish my post about my impressions of Brazil/São Paulo.

on the plane

I'm blogging right now from my BlackBerry waiting inside a plane to go to Brazil. Something about bad weather delaying flights and we staying here waiting for the other passengers to arrive from late connecting flights. And they seem to want to wait because the flights tomorrow and Friday are full. Today's flight so far is only something like 60% full. Odd. Anyway, there are more people coming right now, so we may be leaving soon. Time to turn my cell phone off.

Under the influence of yellow fever vaccine

So last Friday I took vaccine for yellow fever, in expectation of my trip to Brazil in 3.5 weeks. During the weekend everything was alright but today, now that I had to go back to work for a 5 hour workout meeting, it finally hit me. No fever so far, just a general weakness that is actually a little funny. You feel like you are getting sick, but, at the same time, it's just different. Great to focus for enough time to write long phrases or discuss things. So, I'll keep this short.

Lots of things are going on right now. To add to my general not feeling very good, two weeks ago my wrist started hurting. I was working during the weekend at home and probably my keyboard wasn't set up very well... So my right wrist decided to finally complain with me. I gave it a week before I start to worry about it and it started feeling better. Maybe because it started feeling better I started using it more so at the end of last week is was almost feeling as bad as it did when it all started. No time on Friday to call the doctor, but I finally did it today. The sadly odd thing: I'll only see him next Monday, which means that who knows... It might be better already when I get to see the doctor. Nobody ever claimed the US health system was any good!

About my trip to Brazil, the one Amy is going too, it's going to be quite fun, I hope. Lots of things to still organize and gifts to buy, but I'm looking forward to it. Will keep me away from very odd times at work right now. Not bad times, just times of change. Times where it becomes hard to predict people's reactions to things.

Just to make my wrist feel better, on Sunday evening I went volunteering at Teen Feed. It was interesting to work on a more industrial-like kitchen with 90-second dishwashers (yes, it can do your dishes in 90 seconds!), 4 ovens, plenty of prep-space, plenty of chickens to cook. Fun! No, I wasn't doing any of the cooking, just helping with some prep work, cleaning and serving food (actually butter for the dinner rolls and filling up the cups of juice, water and milk). Sometimes it's just good to feel like you are helping.

Last night we had snow (again!). Not all around the city, but we did get a couple of inches around here. Enough to have to be careful walking around this morning. Didn't fall this time, though (I did fall when it snowed last, two weeks ago, just after I hurt my wrist - joy!).

I think it's time to get away from my computer again and lie down. Working on this computer doesn't feel that great on my wrists. Oddly, at work I have a much better setup. Larger table, more space to support my wrists by having my arms on the table. That's the best position that I've found so far. Makes me not want to go home.

Happy 2008

This is actually my 300th post, according to blogger (that has in the past [sorry for all the broken things on my old blog] not been able to count number of posts). So it's a celebration! A celebration of a new year looking back a year to see what has changed:

Actually, 2007 was an odd year for me. There were a lot of subtle changes that compounded in making my thinking different, but everything not as much. Let me try to enumerate things:

1. I was promoted at work: with great power comes greater responsibility, right? Well, I don't have great power, but I can somehow feel a greater responsibility. I'm not going to get to details, as this is not the forum for these kinds of details, but there were quite a few psychological changes in the work environment last year. And there is a Piñata at the center of them all.


2. Video games and video game communities: I've bough my Wii and a DS (two, actually) and have been going to friends' places to play video-game. I've never been away from playing things on video-games and computers, but I haven't bought a video-game console in a long time. What have I felt as different: I have new things to talk about, like I've finished Super Mario Galaxy yesterday (more on this on some other post, perhaps). It hasn't yet affected my blog, but I think it should sometime soon.


3. Less emails: this is probably one of the worst things of the year for me. I have been sending less and less emails to friends and this has been quite psychologically painful. You might be thinking: if it's painful, why don't you just write? The sad thing is that I don't think I have an answer for this question. Every time I sit at my computer to write an email, I end up wasting a lot of time and not actually finishing it. Writer's block, or I don't know.


4. Less of everything else: thinking of less emails, I've realized that not only I've been writing less emails, I've been working less on side projects, I've been reading less research articles, I've been continuously posting less and less on this blog (probably also related to the "writer's block" mentioned above), I've been doing less productive things on my idle time. And I can't really put the blame on video games, as except for a few games here and there*, I haven't been playing that much. But I'll try not to point fingers at things.


5. Pets: well, a pet lizard is a pet too, huh? Needs food and cleaning up. Also needs me to coordinate with friends every time I take a vacation of more than a couple of days. When I go to Brazil I'll need to take her to a friend's place for whole 3 weeks!

So, it's been a year with some changes. What to expect from this year? I'm not really sure yet. I only know that I have two trips to Brazil ahead of me and one to Hawaii. The rest will be trying to do some catch-up with all that didn't happen last year! Maybe...

*games that used a lot of my time this year (not in any specific order):

• Super Mario Galaxy
• Bioshock
• Mario Strikers Charged
• Fifa Soccer 2008 for Wii
• Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Mario Kart DS
• Brain Age DS
• Tetris for DS (not because I've played it, because I've spent a lot of time looking for it before I concluded that I had lost it somewhere)

Seeking entertainment by looking at technology failures

Sometimes going to a website and seeing web technology working to make your interaction pleasant is interesting. But more and more I've been enjoying myself looking at when things fail. Today's example is an old one: Google News.

Google tries to do the almost impossible: match news so that you can look at one single headline and then follow the details on many different news sources. It works well on a number of cases, like when all the news sources get the information from the same place. However, on less-covered areas, it has always tried to match stories that have very little in common. Unfortunately links are hard to provide, as all stories are kind of dynamic, but I'll give a hint: look at Science and Technology. As I'm looking right now, here are some things I see:

Headline: This year in technology
Link 1: Mountain of discarded mobiles grows at 'frightening' rate
Link 2: Record mobile phone spending in 2007

Interesting connection there, huh? Here is another one:

Headline: IPhone Sales: 5 Million Down, 5 Million to Go?
Link 1: Apple's Jobs May Surprise With Slim Mac, New IPhone (Update1)
Link 2: Firms settle annuity

It's interesting that's a technology that was in "Beta" for many years. Now it's not in Beta any more, but seems to have still exactly the same problems. Maybe people just don't care enough. As long as it still makes people click on their ads, it's valid. I've actually learned that sometimes having a bad experience in your "local" system makes people click on ads more often. Maybe people just want to find an excuse to run away from your site into something potentially better.

Deeply annoyed with Netflix

I'm a Netflix subscriber, but not a very big user. I don't watch that many movies, so I visit their website quite infrequently. However, tonight it's the third time that I try to go there to add or remove something and I get the wonderful message:

"The Netflix web site is temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance.
It is anticipated that the site will be available again at 2:30 AM Pacific time.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you. You can contact Netflix Customer Service at 1-888-638-3549.
Please visit us again soon."

Excuse me, but I'm a client. If they have a "scheduled maintenance" they have to schedule it with me! That's how things should work. That's how things are done where I work. And that's why Amazon does not have "scheduled maintenance" of their website. You just keep it up. Shutting a website down for over 2 hours!!! That's just a sign of bad engineering. No wonder when I interview candidates I see that people have very little knowledge of how to design systems with high availability. Performance, sometimes. But availability...

Anyway, if I was the only person that used my Netflix account I would be very tempted to just cancel it tonight. It's convenient, it's really not very expensive, but I just don't like to support bad engineers.

Online purchasing - hard?

Sometimes I'm amazed by how some people just can't get the online purchasing experience right. Today I was renewing my IEEE membership and... It was hard! They pre-set everything that is in your current membership and then they have this "promotions" page that for each entry and sub-entry, there is a potential dropdown box (that is actually a popup) to let you choose promotions that are relevant to your purchase item. However, I think they forgot to include the manual on what each promotion means. For example (unfortunately I have finished the process already and I didn't really capture a real example):

By my IEEE Computer Society membership, when I opened the promotion popup I received a list that looked like this:

Name - Description
ACM-CS - ACM for CS
JJ-994M -
JJ-98B -
ABC-09 -

Huh?

Anyway, I just gave up on trying any of their promotions and checked out with exactly the same I currently have: IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Intelligent Systems Society, print version of the Transaction of Knowledge and Data Engineering and the Intelligent Systems Magazine.

I haven't been reading papers lately as much as I did in the past, but I still do from time to time. So, I'll stick around until maybe I decide that I'll become poor and buy a house, then I won't be able to spend $600 on that any more.

Surprised

It's actually interesting when you do something or look at something with very low expectations and they surprise you. I had this happen to me twice yesterday in completely different things:

1. Tchaikovski's Nutcracker: Talk about over-played pieces, especially during holiday season... So yesterday I went on a concert with the Seattle Symphony and they played excerpts from the Nutcracker. So, not only it was a piece I just heard too many times to be excited about, but they were doing one of my pet peeve: only playing "selected parts" of it. Yes, I know the nutcracker is not that "consistent", but in any way... It was actually a very good performance. Conducted by Rossen Milanov, the guest conductor for the concert, it was like listening to professionals do something that you've only seen done by amateurs. And note that I've watched the Nutcracker at the Teatro Colon before. Everything was in tune, note transitions were precise, and specially, note duration and dynamics were very noticeably clean. Very interesting.

2. Amazon's Kindle: Yes, I don't have one and don't plan to buy one any time soon (well, it's sold out right now anyway). I have been hearing about it for quite some time and when it released I have to say I wasn't very impressed. It didn't seem very user-friendly. But one thing dawned on me when I was comparing it to the best seller in this industry, the Sony Reader: it has a much larger selection and, more interestingly, it's a self-sufficient device, much more like a book. In the other readers you had to really buy your book on the computer and then connect the device to the computer to upload the book to the device. With the wireless option in the Kindle, this is gone. And that's what probably will be the winning feature.

The new iPod touch, with WiFi, has also the same behavior of being able to buy and get music without needing a computer. But it is missing the "free wireless" component and the fact that music you want to accumulate much more than books. So you will quickly hit the barrier of the device size.

Anyway, it's time for me to go for a long day today.

My life

It's been some time I haven't written too much about how my life is going, huh? Well, I still won't write much here, but everything is moving alright. It's always easy to find things to be stressed about; things to be annoyed about; and not necessarily that easy to find things to be excited about. But I'll try to focus on the excitement (although people say that writing down what you are excited about is actually bad for you):

- It's winter here, so it's fun!
- Trips, trips and more trips ahead.
- No more activity on my credit, so it means that whoever stole a piece of my identity didn't do much with it (besides spending $18)
- It's 1 AM and I'm still awake!
- I've been reading a lot of interesting books! More on them some other time.

Yes, I do have a life. It might be isolated from many people, but it's still moving forward. And now I should go and... have dinner.

The two lives of social networkers

Lately I have been amazed about what kind of features social networking sites are adding. This includes things like, as I've mentioned before, showing what you have done on the web automatically to your friends. This assumes that your friends will be influenced by it and do the same, thus generating advertisement for the company and money on the social networking site's pocket.

But what I think people don't quite understand yet is that there are lots of types of social network connections, and each works differently. It's not sufficient for me to say "he is my friend". I have to say "he is my friend, but our relationship is only work-related. So that if I befriend somebody from work, I don't start to spam them with messages like "hey, I bought my new lizard!" or "I wished I could afford this new Mac laptop...". But it would be alright if they saw that I'm currently reading something like "Tapping into Unstructured Data: Integrating Unstructured Data and Textual Analytics into Business Intelligence", which most of my other friends wouldn't care about.

What is the consequence of it? Fundamentally: people get afraid of actually doing stuff online, because you don't know how people will interpret it. People get bored by the 90% of the things you do that aren't that interesting (and each person's 90% is different) and stop paying attention. The final conclusion is that the business just doesn't work very well any more.

Solution? If I was a semantic web guy, I would say: add semantics to your friendship connections. Then, by gathering semantics of your activities, you can create more powerful and robust "filters" to partition your life correctly.

But I'll pretend I'm not a semantic web guy and say: just let people choose. Create a few types of categories, like "professional", "personal", "family", "fan", "joe that I decided to accept in my network" and then allow mutual filtering (not only I can filter somebody out of some types of data, but somebody can choose to be filtered out of some type of data). Give people simple choices and help them choose. There is lots of money to be made in this business.

Telling the difference between MP3 compression rates

If you feel like you have a few minutes to spare (something I don't, but I spent them anyway), you should give this a try:

Are all MP3s Equal, by Dave Munger

It's an interesting experiment on:

- The quality of your speakers/headphones
- Your ability to see the difference between audio compression parameters for the same compression algorithm.

A more complete study would include:

- More types of music (I remember hearing quite a difference between music that has too much silence and music with too much equal noise)
- More compression algorithms (this makes it even harder to judge, but it's interesting to put them side-by-side on different types of music)

As most people, it's easy to tell what is the 64K compression. The rest becomes more subjective. I found that I was barely able to tell any difference between the other two using my speakers, but with my headphones (Sennheiser), I was able to sense something. Not very huge difference, but there was something there.

The funny thing would be to find out that there was no difference and people were making it up because he said there would be three different compression rates.

Facebook in the news

It's disturbing how much social networking systems are the center of all attention right now. It's like the keynote speech that I've heard on last year's SIGIR: the way you see the world will change, because everything you do and everybody you meet will be transparent to everybody without them having to ask you for it. I've talked about this in the past. But some people are taking this concerns to a different level:

In Facebook's Brilliant but Evil Design, Joshua Porter points out that because Facebook ulterior motives are financial (they can tell what, out of the things you've done, should be told to your friend because it will generate more money to them), the experience sharing might actually hurt your social status. And because you don't have much of an option with all the great "you are opted in by default" behavior of social networks out there, you can't really control it.

Makes me a little scared to tell you the truth. Our society is changing in front of us. Initially, we were exposed to product ads based on word of mouth only. So things that came to you were filtered by your friends based on their experience with it. Then came the newspaper, radio and TV, where everybody would be exposed to ads that were considered effective to a large population. It was a very messy "weapon". But we had still the word-of-mouth to filter out this mess and still give you good suggestions.

Now we are moving towards a world where word-of-mouth is being automated for you based on what is more likely to affect you. It doesn't mean that it will always give you bad products. Not all products will be using the fact that you like to buy things with shiny boxes. But it will increase the noise in the word-of-mouth channel. Then what is next?

Some interesting stories

Again, I don't have much to talk about. I've been annoyed most of the morning by crashing eclipse, so I decided to read some articles. Every time I do that, I find interesting things. So I decided to keep the interesting stories for myself and post some that might not be as interesting, but will hopefully prove to be valuable for your day:

Yellowstone is rising - Gives me a complete new perspective on what was happening under me when I was there.

DBpedia - Yes, not really an article, just something I wished worked better than it actually does. the "promise" of combining OpenCyc and Wikipedia (and some other data sources) with semi-well-structured data is exciting. I just don't think the data is there. You can query for information about the Eifel Tower, but when you query simple things like the list of all universities in Brazil, you get something like 25 hits. There are way more than that

Moving on... I've tried to write my thoughts about OpenSocial, but it's quite hard to write something with such an abstract API. I think that it will just turn quickly into a mess when social network websites start to actually expose their data and people will realize how different the data from each website is and how hard it will be to actually write any code that will take advantage of that and will be portable across sites. But we'll see. I don't plan to be a widget builder. I'm actually always annoyed by UI building when I have to do it...

Just to finish with something to keep people busy, one of the most interesting "blog posts" I read every week is Talis's Week in Semantic Web collection of links. It's interesting what they find and collect there. Worth visiting (if you care about it).

FriendFeed continued

So I actually got a FriendFeed account! You can check my feed at:

http://friendfeed.com/michelgoldstein

My current "services" are:

• This blog
• del.icio.us
• Google reader
• LinkedIn
• Netflix queue
• SmugMug

Now you can see how boring I am.

FriendFeed

Why haven't I seen this coming:

FriendFeed

It's a site (currently in private Beta, so I can't really give too many details) that aggregates all the public information it can get from people you consider your friends. You can see what this person added to their Amazon wish list, what they have posted on their blogs, YouTube... And even some things that I didn't even know you could monitor: shared links on Google Reader, favorite songs on Last.fm, things that you dug on Dig... It's quite scary the amount of personally-tied information available out there.

But the concept of the site is quite good, in my opinion. If you have a bunch of friends that are highly connected and use web tools all the time, it would certainly be quite cool to get a feed on what they are up to. I know I miss blog posts from friends of mine all the time (well, ignoring the fact that most of my friends gave up on their blogs - what a shame).

What is the most exciting thing about it for me is that it doesn't limit you to a system. MySpace, orkut, and probably Facebook probably can provide this kind of updates for you in their system; but they can't provide what happens outside their system.

On the other hand, what worries me is that amount of different places that you have to go to keep your list of friends up-to-date. You have to sometimes go through multiple-step registering processes to get each person into the system. And then there is the upkeep (which is probably much more complicated in the case of keeping track of friends' actions on the internet). But we will see. I signed up for Beta testing it and I'll let you know how this turns out.