Brinkish

Facebook is Rolling

New data out from comScore shows Facebook’s growth continuing to accelerate.

• Unique monthly visitors have almost doubled in the last year from 14 million in May 2006 to 26.6 million in May 2007
• Total page views has increased over 140% during the same time period, from 6.5 billion per month in May 2006 to 15.8 billion per month in May 2007
• Most provocatively, average minutes spent on the site per user per month increased 35% over the last year, from 138 in May 2006 to 186 per month in May 2007

Facebook demographics also saw a rise in the young and the old - it’s no longer just the college crowd.

• Visitors aged 12-17 increased 150% over the last year
• Visitors 18-24 increased 38%
• Visitors 25-34 increased 181% during that time - a huge number
• Visitors 35+ increased 98%

By opening its registration beyond college students and companies, Facebook has succeeded in growing the service beyond its founding core of college students and recent alums.  We expect its recent 30% month-to-month growth rate to continue for at least another month or two as Facebook continues to penetrate international markets and older demographics.

Also -- Facebook recently says,

"We asked ourselves the search question more than once while working on improvements to search in March 2006. At the time, there were bigger search engines out there, including some good open source ones, that we could have used to power Facebook search results. However, we decided that searches carried out on Facebook had a particular structure that only we could understand and optimize for. We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles.

Some quick stats about Facebook search:

• Over 600 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
• Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
• Average search query time of less than 100ms.
• Most used people search engine on the web.

Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance. People closer to you in the graph—your friends and people in your networks—are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. We also use this concept of "social proximity" to order results within applications like groups and events. Facebook search's key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a individual's place in the social graph.

We have big plans to improve Facebook search in the upcoming months. We want to leverage the power of the social graph to further improve the quality of the results and ensure that you find what you are looking for on Facebook."

Story of the World -- Told in Data Bubbles

Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats.

(Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels.

Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.

Watching this data visualization allows you to picture the human species as one organism -- as swarm intelligence.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS

Eco-Footprint Data Map

Check out this US Energy Usage interactive graphic which provides data on carbon emmissions per state.

Georgia has a Per Capita Carbon Footprint Score of #25, each person contributes 21 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year on average. The total Carbon Score of #11, with the 10th highest resident population, Georgia is the #11th highest Carbon Dioxide polluting state in the United States.

A little rough around the edges (e.g. I couldn't find how to zoom back out of the map - it turns out you need to use the right mouse button), but pretty useful.

Note that if you click on the information icon on a state (when it appears) you get to a page for that state with lots of interesting data.

Google Feeds Innovation - So Can Your Boss

Google is widely considered to be the most innovative company on Earth (not to mention worth more than 50 Billion) by many in the software industry (and obviously stockholders as well).

A number of Google's competitors have several internal groups whose job is to "incubate ideas" and foster innovation yet it seems that Google is the company most associated with innovation in the online space.

For example, Yahoo! has Brickhouse and Yahoo! Research while Microsoft has Microsoft Research, Live Labs, Search Labs, and Windows Live Core among others. 

Below are some of the ways technology companies can follow Google's  example without having to resort to some of their more eccentric practices like free food prepared by gourmet chefs and on-site massages, dry cleaning and oil changes to motivate your employees.

1.  Everyone is Responsible for Innovation: There are several ways Google has created a culture where every technical employee feels that innovation is expected of them. First, there is the strong preference for people who have a track record of producing original ideas such as Ph.D's [who are required to produce original research which advances the state of the art as part of their thesis] and founders of Open Source projects (e.g. Spencer Kimball (GIMP), Aaron Boodman (Greasemonkey), and Guido Van Rossum (Python)). Secondly, employees are strongly encouraged but not required to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own design which are intended to benefit the company and/or its customers. Not only does this give employees an outlet for their creativity in a productive way, working on multiple projects at once gives developers a broader world view which makes it less likely that they will develop tunnel vision with regards to their primary project. Finally, Google has a single code base for all of their projects and developers are strongly encouraged to fix bugs or add features to any Google product they want even if they are not on the product team. This attitude encourages the cross pollination of ideas across the company and encourages members of the various product teams to keep an open mind about ideas from outside their particular box.

2. Good Ideas Often Come from Outside your Box: A lot number of people in the software industry often criticize Microsoft for it's practice of innovation through acquisition and have compiled lists of Microsoft's innovations that were actually acquisitions but the fact is that the road to success lies in being able to spot good ideas whether they come from within your company or without.

3.  Force Competition to Face the Innovator's Dilemma: One reason that a number of Google's products are considered innovative is that they challenge a number of pre-existing notions about software in certain categories. For example, when Gmail [a product of an engineer's 20% time spent on side projects] was first launched it was a shock to see a free Web-based email service qive users 1 gigabyte of free storage. A key reason that this was a shock was because most free Web-based email services gave users less than a hundredth of that amount of storage. This was because the business model for free email was primarily to give users a crappy user experience (2MB of storage, obnoxious advertising, etc) and then charge them for upgrading to a decent experience. Thus there was little incentive for the major players in the free email business to give free users lots of storage or a rich online experience because isn't how the business worked. Another example, that is likely to be a classic case study of the innovator's dilemma in the years to come is Google Docs & Spreadsheets vs. Microsoft Office. From the Wikipedia article on disruptive technology.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market.                        

As someone who now maintains several wedding lists in collaboration with his future spouse I can say without a doubt that universal access to our files from any computer without my fiancèe or I having to install or purchase any software is head and shoulders beyond the solution provided by traditional desktop productivity suites. In addition, it is quite clear that Google will move to address the gaps in time (see Google Gears) so we are likely on the cusp of a multi-billion dollar software category undergo upheaval in the next few years.

The main lesson here is Change the Game. Do not play by the rules that favor your competitors.          

Every successful company needs innovation -- tell your boss.

Floating Text

a novel form of presenting text data on electronic media by displaying the text as a series of cascading phrases. this presentation technique has been proven to result in faster reading with greater comprehension.

[link: liveink.com & readingonline.org]

Atlanta in 4 Dimensions -- To Hell with Georgia Tech

Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (also known in Georgia Bulldawg circles as the wreck down at tech) and Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the evolution of a city over time -- pretty great technology, bad football team and all.

New Scientist writes that you can see the  city of Atlanta change in four dimensions.

So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning historical photos and then lets some software animate and render the image.

This application will be useful for architects, historians or town planners and the team of scientists already has plans to model other cities.

The Team:

The software has been developed at Georgia Tech by Frank Dellaert and Grant Schindler, with the help of Sing Bing Kang of Microsoft Research.

The team is currently working on “a small 4D-pilot project centered around the Candler building in Downtown Atlanta, which is the trapezoid-shaped building at the center of the map above, using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API” (Credit: Georgia Tech).

An interactive version of this map is available from the 4D Cities website by clicking on the “4D-Atlanta” link. And here is a link to a larger, standalone map where you can choose between 3 kinds of interactive views (road, aerial and bird’s eye) — and have lots of fun (especially if you know Atlanta).

Here is how they introduce the project on the 4D Cities home page. “The research described here aims at building time-varying 3D models that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time, as exemplified by the 4D Cities project: the completely automatic construction of a 4D database showing the evolution over time of a single city.”

Now, let’s return to the New Scientist article for additional details.

To create a model of Atlanta, the researchers scanned in numerous historical photos of the city that had been snapped from similar vantage points. The software is designed to identify the 3D structures within the image and break them down into a series of points. It then compares the view in each one to work out why some of these points are visible in some of the images but not others. Was the building simply out of shot? Or was the view of one building blocked by another? “If we can rule out those two possibilities, then we know that the reason we don’t see a building is because it didn’t exist when the image was taken. Either it was not yet built or it had already been demolished,” says Schindler.

For more information about this project, you should read the talk that Frank Dellaert gave at the 3rd International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization & Transmission 2006 (3DPVT 2006) (PDF format, 30 pages, 8.32 MB). You also should read a paper named “Inferring Temporal Order of Images From 3D Structure” (PDF format, 7 pages, 1.78 MB), which was presented at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2007).

Sources: Paul Marks, New Scientist Magazine issue 2610, June 27, 2007; and various websites

They don't have Reggie Ball anymore, but look for Sean Bailey and company to lay it on em' again come November. Go Dawgs!

The Journey of the Human Genome

National Geographic has introduced a geographical & "genographical" world map illustrating when & where ancient humans moved around the world, as a visual explanation about the appearance & frequency of genetic markers in modern people. the interactive application also acts as the basis of depicting your personal ancient ancestors & genetic lineage around the world through the ages, after sending back your own DNA sample.

[link: nationalgeographic.com]

How the Music Business Committed Suicide in 2000

Rolling Stone magazine's article "The Record Industry's Decline" says the record industry blew it by not making a deal with Napster.

Well, duh!!

See "Napster: The Inside Story" for the Napster perspective on this story. The record labels screwed themselves by suing hundreds of individuals who downloaded music, and the RIAA is continuing this trend -- wasting thousands of dollars on the symptoms instead of the cure.

Big Music screwed themselves for the third time by waiting 2 years after Napster to make a deal with iTunes for digital distribution. Read this excerpt from the Rolling Stone story;

"They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."

"The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn't bring themselves to jump," says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "A lot of people say, 'The labels were dinosaurs and idiots, and what was the matter with them?' But they had retailers telling them, 'You better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store,' and they had artists saying, 'Don't screw up my Wal-Mart sales.' " Adds Jim Guerinot, who manages Nine Inch Nails and Gwen Stefani, "Innovation meant cannibalizing their core business."

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster's July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, which launched in the spring of 2003.

Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. "That's when we lost the users," Rosen says. "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."

Hilary Rosen's comments are especially painful, and ironic. Rosen was the head of the RIAA and the one leading the charge to kill Napster. We wanted Napster to be the digital distribution channel for the record labels, like iTunes is today. We told them if they forced Napster to shut down there would be hundreds of Gnutella style file sharing services popping up all over the place. Gnutella didn't have a central server, and no company to shut down. They would be unstoppable. The RIAA didn't believe us. You know the rest of the story. Again, from the Rolling Stone story;

More than 5,000 record-company employees have been laid off since 2000. The number of major labels dropped from five to four when Sony Music Entertainment and BMG Entertainment merged in 2004 -- and two of the remaining companies, EMI and Warner, have flirted with their own merger for years.

About 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003, according to the research group Almighty Institute of Music Retail. Last year the eighty-nine-store Tower Records chain, which represented 2.5 percent of overall retail sales, went out of business, and Musicland, which operated more than 800 stores under the Sam Goody brand, among others, filed for bankruptcy.

The record labels faced the classic Innovators Dilemma. They saw the new disruptive technology (p2P file sharing) but held on tight to their existing business model. They were making billions and living the life of rock stars and music moguls. Not anymore. Now they are firing thousands of employees, watching sales decline every year for the past 7 years, and clueless about what to do next.

Rolling Stone introduced some ideas on how to move forward. They include; ad supported music, P2P subscriptions, and social network affiliate sales.

People haven't lost their love for music. We want more music, tailored exactly to our tastes, delivered when and where we want it. And, we will pay for it. The record labels just aren't providing a good way for us to consume and pay for music. They are killing themselves.

Why not podcasting and syndicated music channels? Why not pure streaming combined with P-2-P?

Are the Movie studios making the same mistakes? The movie studios have the benefit of hindsight and seven years of experience. The MPAA is experimenting with a few ideas but they are still hanging on tight to the old school models. BitTorrent and YouTube are the new enemies of the establishment. Google's deep pockets and legions of lawyers are defending YouTube.

The sheer size and length of movies protect them somewhat from mass distribution on file sharing services. But bandwidth is improving all the time and compression schemes are getting better. Unless they make changes the movie studios will eventually suffer the same fate as the record labels. It is just a matter of time.

I say bring it on -- change is the only constant. Change allows for innovation, and innovation is all about improving the status quo.

In the case of the music business norms, there's certainly a lot of room for improvement.

Facebook -- the King of Networking

With the Facebook Platform’s launch and the thousands of independent 3rd party web application developers that have jumped onboard, Facebook’s biggest competitors are reacting quickly to follow suit.

What does this mean?

It means that Facebook is winning the race -- that race being to populate the Internet with people-powered content that is open and shared.

- Last week, Reid Hoffman told Dan Farber that LinkedIn would be announcing platform-esque capabilities later this year:

“Over the next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook…”

- A few days ago, Chris DeWolfe told the Financial Times that MySpace is basically going to follow suit and open up more than it ever has before:

“MySpace is likely to change its technology strategy to allow other online companies to ‘plug’ their web services directly into its social networking site…’The [Facebook] platform is interesting,’ Mr. DeWolfe said.”

With the advent of the Facebook Platform, many entrepreneurs have realized how much harder it is to convince people to build their social network on a new platform than to get them to share a new application with their network where they already are.

Aka, for the last few years...it's been all about creating new social-networking Sites, but now Facebook has made the application plug-in business model a legit possibility like never before.

As  the consolidation of social-graph building onto core networking platforms continues into the coming year, expect to see other social networks, Web 2.0 Sites, and even corporations begin to follow suit with much more open APIs.

What does open APIs mean?  It means more mash-ups, more developers, more creativity, more utilities, more business models, and more Web 2.0 doo-dads that most people haven't even thought possible.

The Facebook Platform is going to show corporations the value of building a third party application ecosystem around their “platform."

The bottom line....Facebook is in the driver's seat with strong and visionary leadership behind the wheel.