Juixe Techknow

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If rhythm is a dancer, then algorithm is a break dancer.
• If you were a Java language reserve word what word would you be? I would be volatile!
• I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humanness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• Is there group think in the development community? Yes, but we build patterns around group think and call it Best Practices.

Team Leadership

• Change your perspective and you can change the world.
• If you don’t have an original idea you can remix existing ideas in original ways!
• Go hard, go home, go big. Pick two.
• If a web site’s end users are not paying customers, then the end users are the product that web site then sell to their advertisers.
• Why do people compensate their inability to communicate with the belief that others just know what they mean, you know what I mean?
• Hype is the food of lemmings.
• The plan was to have no plan, the backup plan was to leave the backup plan at home.
• Most people are natural born followers, it’s human nature.
• The toughest competition doesn’t always come from a competitor trying to build a clone of your product but from market shift in the industry

Product Placement

• In terms of hardware, mobile, and even operating systems Microsoft is anywhere between 3-5 years behind the leader.
• Startups age really fast in Internet time, by my calculation Digg is already and Old Media Company.
• Like what percent of Tumblr’s posts are reblogs and reposts?
• I want JJ Abrams to do a movie about do a remake of The Muppets in an alternate time line like he did for Star Trek.
• I want an iPhone that transforms into an iPad when I need a bigger screen.
• Google is an advertising company with great search technology. Facebook is a virtual share cropping company with great social technology.
• Who collects more personal data and knows more about a given user, Facebook or Google?
• Apple should add a few filters to their iPhone camera app.

Mini Meme Machine

• Scotty and Christopher Walken Mashup: Captain, I’m giving her all’s she got.  She needs more cowbell.
• You know who would be great in a reality television show? A prison gang! Imagine, Real World San Quentin.
• r-EPO, the performance-enhancing drug of champions!
• Monetize common sense because people don’t have it.
• I want to trademark the & char so that I could file a trademark infringement to all law firms with names of the form Dumb Dumber & Dumbest.
• The best part of a bagel is the creme cheese.
• My all time historical hero is Johannes Kepler.
• Your life comes with terms of service, batteries not included, void where prohibited.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone drinks the kool-aid but using bottled artisan water from a 10,000 year old glacier.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone is more interested in their piece of the pie than in the recipe of success.

Quote

• I didn’t mean for it to be released so quickly because I wanted to control peoples’ being offended by it. – Mark Zuckerberg
• I think people might be slightly offended but whatever, maybe there’s a way to control that. – Mark Zuckerberg
• Quitting while you are ahead is not the same thing as quitting. – American Gangster
• Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception. – David Willetts
• We should start a new social media web 2.0 holiday: Friend, Fan, and Follower Appreciation Day!!!

People are by nature social, they have always been so. Prehistoric people were social, Neolithic people were social, the Mesopotamians where social, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Elizabethans, and even web 1.0 developers where social. By design, our technology has also been designed to be social, from written language to books to email to instant messaging. In fact, everything is social. Just about every physical object can be used in a social setting, rocks, bullets, and flowers.

Blogs too are social, it allows one group of individuals to share information and knowledge with a whole set of people, who in turn can comment, share, and add to that information. But since Facebook, social is sometimes meant to mean something different. Most features in Facebook have a element of social spam that forces a response. I people that first discovered Facebook because they received a spammy email from Facebook saying that someone they might have known, most likely some one they had an email correspondence, had joined Facebook. Facebook’s first spam social behavior was to email everyone in every of their users contact list, this behavior is the same as the Melissa virus. Facebook’s first element of social spam is borrowed a mass-mailing macro virus.

Everything is social and if everything is social, everything that is connected has a social graph. Facebook has managed to capture people and their relations to their friends, family, coworkers, church members, etc. Facebook has coined the pseudo geek speak social graph to describe a persons relationship to their friends and family. If everything is social, then everything has a so called social graph.

For example, since blogs are social it has a social graph of all the people have have posted comments. If Mark Zuckerberg would have designed WordPress, the blog platform I use for my blog, then each person who left me a comment would receive email telling them that if they wanted to participate in recent blog posts and even unsubscribe to the email they would need to sign up. WordPress.com and Discuss, the hosted commenting service, has millions of emails of people that have commented on blogs! If they choose to exploit and zuckerpunch all those people they can.

Everything and everyone is inherently social, technology like Facebook is not making users any more social it just simplifies how we interact with each to the like button.

Just like opinions, at the end of the year everyone has their own predictions for the new year. I came to these predictions by reading the back of caps of green tea bottles. If you like to see my accuracy with past predictions see the predictions for 2009 and 2010.

• Mark Zuckerborg will be summoned by congress for a congressional hearing to clarify privacy settings and violations when some White House intern force checks in the President at a Hooters.
• Digg will buy Reddit from Conde Nast and rebrand the merged organization as Reddigg.
• DVDs and Blu Rays sales will slow as users switch to on demand streaming service such as Netflix and Apple iTunes.
• Groupon will be purchased by Yahoo for $1.5 billion dollars.
• Facebook will have a major privacy and security flaw but non of its users will notice because they all found a pony in their stream.
• Google will allow its developers to only use cheap commodity Linux machines. Google employees will no longer be allowed to program in Macs.
• Google will start to aggressively push and market the Go programming language as an replacement of the Java programming language in the enterprise.
• Google will buy PostreSQL.
• Google will buy the Library of Congress.
• Quora will buy the domain ask.com.
• Ticket Master will buy Eventbrite.
• Rupert Murdoch will sell MySpace for $35 million.
• Mashable will be sold to Rupert Murdoch for an undisclosed $50 million dollars.
• Michael Bay will write, Steven Spielberg will direct, and Johnny Deep will star in Zynga: The Movie.
• Zynga and Rock Star Games will co-develop a crossover game called Grand Theft Auto: Farmville.

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas were either to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to belong on their own post.

In the computer world, Bill Gates will always be remembered for Windows and the blue screen of death. Now that he has moved his attention to education and health care such as vaccines, a blue screen of death in these fields will can really cause someone dying.

If your enemies enemies are your friends, then it is to Microsoft’s interest to see Facebook get into the search space. It makes sense that Microsoft would pay a ridiculous amount of money for the tiniest fraction of Facebook just to see Facebook’s value go through the roof and branch into search, ads, mobile, etc.

I just started noticing people I follow on Twitter start using a new service to take and share their pictures taken from a mobile device. There are already a ton of other services such as Twitpic, Facebook, Flickr, Mobile Me, etc. I consider myself an early adopter, but I think there is a new category of adopter, the “I’ll try everything adopter.” There is a bunch of folks that suffer from the New and Shiny Syndrome where they must try every single new product or service they hear about. They all rave how much better that new product is on Facebook and Twitter for a week and then the herd moves on to the next new and shiny thing.

Every year there are a few companies that everybody wants to work for. It has been reported in many news outlet that there is a micro-brain drain at Google as engineers are migrating to Facebook. Zynga has also seen a tremendous growth and has been attracting talented developers, designers, and engineers. Both Facebook and Zynga are already large establish companies. If you are looking for the next breakout company I think you should look into Second Market. Second Market is building a marketplace for employee stock to private companies, Second Market is building a new market and perhaps a new industry. Second Market is has the potential to eventual be at a level to create or move markets.

Microsoft is anywhere between 5-10 years behind current market leaders in social, search, mobile, internet television, digital music, etc. They only consumer technology that they have a leg up on the competition is gaming with its XBox console system. As Microsoft keeps missing each industry boat in the consumer space, Microsoft more and more starts to resemble a company that only sells to large companies. For example, it took Microsoft a long time to get the security in Windows OS right (from XP to Vista to Windows 7) and all along the missed the mobile as a platform.

Twitter and Facebook need to come out with a year-end zeitgist for 2010. Google has been releasing zeitgists for each year since 2001, see the Google Zeitgist Archives. From Twitter I want to know what event was the most tweeted about, what was the hottest trending topic for the year, and a graph of the number of tweets throughout the year. From Facebook I want to know how many likes does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, who do they sell private personal data to the most, if they fixed the broken fence that let out all those sad malnourished cows.

Zynga is one of the fastest growing social gaming companies. Zynga is the maker of compulsion loop filled social games such as FarmVille, CafeWorld, and Mafia Wars. These games have proved to be like crack for people bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now Zynga has patent the novel idea that has been around for decades of virtual currency. Zynga’s file to patent Virtual Playing Chips in a Multiuser Online Game Network. They claim that real money can be exchanged for virtual currency. The virtual currency can be used to purchase virtual goods between any two users. A user can be credited or debited virtual goods based on the outcome of events in games. The virtual currency can’t be exchanged back to legal money.

There are, and have been for a long time, games that thrive because of the virtual economy built into the game. Games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, which have been released since 2003 and 2004 respectively, depend on virtual currency to a large degree if you want to get far in the game quick. Within these games you can virtually work and earn currency or simply buy in-game money to buy virtual property such as a house or armor or whatever you like. The maker of Second Life have gone as far as to name their currency after themselves, the Linden Dollars. According to Wikipedia, in 2009 the Second Life economy grew to to half a billion dollars!

Outside video games, virtual currency has been used in real life scenarios such as at amusement parks and or places like Chuck E. Cheese’s or Dave & Buster’s. Chuck E. Cheese’s has game chips that you purchase with real legal tender while Dave and Buster’s uses smart cards to debit and credit in-store currency. In both franchises, the in-store currency can be used to play games priced using the in-store virtual currency. Two users can exchange and gift the in-store currency and based on the results of such game you win points that can be used to purchased goods.

All of their claims have been around for years and have been implemented in a variety of systems for years. Another real life example is iTunes. At most retailers, people can purchase iTunes gift cards. The virtual value that can be redeemed from a given iTunes gift card is usually given at a rate of $1 iTunes dollar to $1 real dollar. But some retailers, such as Costco has rates of $1 iTunes dollar to less than $1 dollars. The iTunes gift card will be used to credit a user with some amount of value which can later be used to redeem virtual goods such as songs, movies, and apps through iTunes, the online network application.

Outside of games that force you to tend to virtual crops for virtual money, in other words virtual share cropping, virtual currency has been used to control runaway inflation.

Facebook wasn’t my idea necessarily, I’m just borrowing Microsoft’s Windows 7 ad campaign to make the point that most of Facebook’s features are not original to Facebook. And as such, most features in Facebook are borrowed, lifted, cut and pasted, inspired, and based on features from other sites. Flash-based games, image sharing, status updates, location-based check-ins, friending, etc. are all features that have made other social oriented sites successful, such as Pogo with Flash-based games, Flicker with image sharing, Twitter with status updates, and Foursquare with location-based check-ins, and on and on. Facebook is a hybrid of every successful feature developed, tried, and tested by other successful websites and web applications. Facebook is the Frankenstein of social networking sites, put together from the features of others sites.

Facemash, A website created by Zuckerberg prior to Facebook, was a clone of Hot-Or-Not specifically for Harvard students. But using his trademark of abusively, forcefully, and willfully opting user into options that they would not otherwise choose, Facebook used unauthorized pictures of Harvard students to seed his Facemash site.

Mark Zuckerberg’s true genius is that he has no ethics, in a another dimension or another time he could have easily been a Nigerian scammer or a Russian spammer. It is clear, from previous settled lawsuits and poorly planned privacy controls, Mark Zuckerberg can easily backstab a former founder and throw under the bus his whole user base.

Because Mark Zuckerberg has a skewed moral compass and as allegations of his character have been settled in court, it’s clear that it’s as easy for him to cheat a partner, hack into users accounts, sell out his users, obfuscate privacy settings, copy features, as it is for him to throw out code and re-execute on an idea. This is what Mark Zuckerberg is great at, to throw out a feature or code and try again and again and again even if users complain about backward compatibility, loss of privacy, excessive rights over user’s data.

So, the question that we can try to answer is, what feature will Facebook focus on next? To answer this, we need to survey the web application landscape and see what has been successful over the past year. Web search is an obvious space for Facebook to move into next. Facebook Credits and apps can lead to a healthy paid app market. Facebook has had a great success with it’s photo service, I could see them moving toward support for movies and videos. Facebook has also acknowledged that they are moving to provide a mobile platform, I can see them providing the social glue for mobile application as they have done for web applications. I the long run, I see Facebook as being as one of a few companies that can threaten Apple’s dominance over digital music. Groupon has been one of the hottest startups over this past year, maybe Facebook will get into social location base group coupons.

Most, if not all, of Facebook’s core features have been borrowed from other successful websites or services. Mark Zuckerberg has always taken a back seat to innovation but a driver seat into ramming features into users via opt-in settings. Mark Zuckerberg’s earliest website was a clone of a website popular at the time. As Facebook continues to evolve, what features do you think will be implemented in the social network?