Archive for the 'Computing' Category

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Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com

Published by Jarred on May 20, 2008 in Blogging, Computing, Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Social Networks, Tropophilia and Web 2.0. View Comments

Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!

My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!

Do You See What I See?

Published by Jarred on April 29, 2008 in Computing, Google, Privacy, Search and Web 2.0. View Comments

The Problem

Unsurprisingly, the ever-innovative Google is conducting intensive research into improving image search.  The web giant’s mission – ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — requires that its computers be able to interpret and index images, in addition to text.  To date, as Mike Arrington explains, computers have not been so good at this:

Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.

One approach to solving this dilemma is giving humans an incentive to label images themselves (see my earlier post on human computation).  Luis Von Ahn, the brain behind Google Image Labeler (an addictive game that pairs users together to attribute labels to images), says that all the images on the web could be sufficiently labeled in a short amount time with a critical mass of participants; to drive home his point, he often references the millions of potentially productive hours that go wasted on Solitaire each year.

There are two major shortcomings to this approach.  First, it is still completely text based — what happens when a certain image is only labeled in a certain language, or when pranksters “Google bomb“ image results (imagine every result for “miserable failure” being the face of George W. Bush)?  The second, major shortcoming of this approach is that there are untold numbers of new images being uploaded to the Internet every day.  Flickr alone gets as many as one million new photos from its users every 24 hours.  Is a human-centric approach to putting images in context sustainable?  Google doesn’t think so, and so it is beefing up its computer-based image search strategy.

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Monday Links: April 28th, 2008

Published by Taylor on April 27, 2008 in Art, Business, Computing, Monday Links, Politics, Random, Social Networks and Sustainability. View Comments

Hey folks–I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately, and I’ll be traveling almost non-stop for the next few weeks. While Jarred will be taking one (a few?) for the team and blogging in my absence, I hope to chime in when I can from the road. Here are a few links, albeit a little abbreviated this week:

  • The Bush-Cheney 2004 e-Campaign Director offers ideas for how the McCain campaign could have moved past traditional press-release blasts to create momentum around Obama’s “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” comment. As I think is pretty clear by now, Jarred and I are Obama fans…and, for the record, I think we both ate waffles almost exclusively one summer. But regardless of your politics, this piece is really striking in the creativity available to campaigns online, IF they’re willing to push the envelope a tad and move away from their old habits (NO MORE PRESS RELEASES).
  • I never thought I would subscribe to–much less link to–a Wal-Mart blog, but this post written by the company’s sustainability director is worth a look. He describes new packaging options (some as simple as milk in a bag instead of a carton) and weighs the merits of biodegradable plastics.
  • Lifehacker offers ten tools to maximize your Amazon shopping experience. These range from discount finders and gift list managers to a site that tracks prices of a recent purchase in order to cash in on the “if you find a cheaper price in 30 days we’ll give you the difference” offer. Pretty impressive, though some of these things might take more time than the $3 you’ll save is worth.

“The sculpture consists of 100 cast iron figures which face out to sea, spread over a 3.2 km stretch of the beach. [...] As the tides ebb and flow, the figures are revealed and submerged by the sea.”

  • This is a few weeks old but worth sharing: PaleoFuture points to a 1995 Newsweek article that basically…well…calls the “internet” a passing fad and a huge crock:

“[N]o online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

Well, that’s all for now. Keep checking back all week for new posts.

Questioning Things: Vol. IV

Published by Taylor on April 18, 2008 in Computing, Questioning Things and Sociology. View Comments

internet reasonThis survey–from a British marketing firm–determines your “internet age.” Surmising that the web is roughly 16 years old, it’s a 0-16 scale. According to the survey, I’m 11 in internet years. I’m happy to report that internet 5th grade is awesome, though only slightly less awkward than the real thing.

But the survey is largely a waste of time, and will tell you what you already know: you use the web for many things, and you’ve done so for at least a few years. You are, after all, reading a blog (congrats and thank you). So, instead, let me try a different set of questions. If you want (and you ask nicely) I will arbitrarily assign an “internet age” to each of you based on your comments. It’ll be much more fun this way, trust me.

  1. Have you ever used a search engine, social networking site, or other online resource to find information about someone you have not met, only to draw conclusions (based on the information you encounter) that proved to be wildly off-base
  2. Have you changed your online behavior in the past year in order to protect your real world reputation?  How?
  3. Search for your name on Google or another search engine (if your name is…I don’t know, Eric Smith or something…this might not be fruitful):
    1. What’s the funniest entry that appears; one that has nothing to do with you?
    2. What’s the most embarrassing item from your past that appears?
    3. Of the links to your name, is there anything you’re particularly proud of?

So, let’s hear your answers.  My answers after the break…

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Mapping Our Memories

Published by Jarred on April 14, 2008 in Computing, Google, Health, Humanism and Science. View Comments

We’ve discussed augmented reality a little bit before, but this week’s New York Times Magazine featured an article that got me thinking about a similar concept: human augmentation, which I suppose can be loosely defined as improving human performance through the addition of synthetic or otherwise “unhuman” components.

Of course there are lots of spokes in this wheel: we could easily talk about steroids, for example, and how chemical enhancements are changing athletics. However, Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at NYU, focuses in “Total Recall” on research being done into human memory: how it works, how it compares to computer memory, and how the latter can inform and perhaps improve the former.

As Marcus explains, computer storage is orderly and logical: information is stored in specific locations, and there is an accompanying index or “map” that allows quick and accurate retrieval. When you command your computer to find information, it consults the map, finds the information, and displays it. Nice and simple.  On the other hand, information in the human brain — as far as we know — isn’t mapped to discrete locations. Our memories ebb and flow, often disappear, and sometimes change. When we “search” for information in our brains, it can be a slower and much less accurate or consistent affair as compared to computers. Marcus calls this a “kluge”, the term engineers use for systems that are “clumsy and inelegant but a lot better than nothing.”

With this discrepancy in storage methods in mind, Marcus wonders if one day it will be possible to embed a memory mapping and tracking system in our brains. He predicts the creation of “a system modeled on Google, which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers.” Suggesting that “there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off”, he maintains that such a procedure would not turn humans into machines because it would only augment, and not alter, existing abilities. The quality or quantity of our memories would not change, only our ability to find them again.

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