Socks and Sandals

I’ve been using Twitter for some time now and I post to Twitter orders of magnitude more than I post to this blog. With my blog, I don’t feel like I should post something unless I have something interesting or funny to say that others would like to spend some time reading. However, Twitter makes it easy to just post whatever I’m doing or thinking at any random time, reply to other’s conversations, keep up on what’s going on with friends, etc.

I really like the Twitter model, too, in that there are some very interesting constraints:

• messages are 140 characters or less
• Twitter auto-shortens links with tinyurl
• no embedded audio/video (I’m looking at you, Pownce)
• very simple network model (follow and be followed)

Twitter’s been the whipping post of the Internet for the past year because they had some well-known scaling issues and this was incorrectly blamed on their underlying Web framework, Ruby on Rails. Twitter’s got some things going for it as far as an interesting example of scaling, though, in that the model is so simple. I’ve been playing around in my mind with designing a Twitter clone in Erlang or Stackless with no RDBMS just as a mental exercise. More on that if it ever becomes concrete-er-ish.

In any case, my blog isn’t going to die for a while but if you really want to keep up with every little thing with me you should follow me on Twitter ;-)

Wow, this year’s ETE was even better than last year. A bigger crowd, a better venue and great speakers made this year the best yet. I can’t wait for next years! There’s a lot of cool stuff going on around the Philly area that you’d never know if it weren’t for events like this. E.g. did you know MapQuest is located in Lancaster, PA? I had no idea until yesterday.

In other conference news, my talk yesterday went pretty well. People seemed to really enjoy it and the room was full. You can view my talk slides on Hadoop on my talks page along with my other slides from previous talks (including last year’s ETE talk on Comet).

Thanks to Chariot for putting on another excellent event, in particular Tracey Welson-Rossman and her merry band of awesome facilitators! Keep it going for next year :)

I’m speaking about Hadoop today at 4PM EDT at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. Its located at Drexel University. Come on down if you can make it; the speaker list is great and I’m sure it will be a great time for all!

I went up to Manhattan last night to attend the monthly NYC.rb Hackfest and it was pretty awesome! Lots of great people and conversation was had. I highly recommend checking it out if you get a chance to head up there.

Last night I gave a presentation on Scala to the Philly Lambda group. The slides are available here. It was a pretty good time and about 15 people or so showed up for the talk. The space was graciously provided in the really cool-looking Cira Centre down at 30th St. by Aaron Feng of Algorithmics. Thanks to Aaron and all who attended; I had a great time presenting!

Happy New Year, everybody!

As the new year rolls around, I find it to be an introspective moment this time around. Normally, I’m not into the New Years resolutions and all that jazz. However, late in 2007 some crazy stuff went down that forced me to rethink my methods of dealing with people. I’m going to have to work on that this year and get a better grip on my interactions.

Right after that unfolded, Zed Shaw posted one of his infamous rants , this time regarding the Rails community and his status therein. I had read it and a number of people had also independently sent it to me, as well. I thought about this article a lot over the past few days, mostly because of the coincident timing with my own realizations regarding social interactions. While I found this article viscerally funny in places, I find it to be a tragedy overall.

Zed’s rant is essentially a view into his dealings with others since he got into Ruby (and then Rails). Up until he updated it yesterday, it was a pretty poor representation of self-awareness and introspective ability. Now, he partially reflects that his situation is of his own making and he’s to be credited for that. But the vitriol in this post can’t easily be wiped away by a correction and he’s burned some bridges forever with his rant. As someone who’s been known to wield the flamethrower over the rope bridge with glee in the past, I can say with surety that this always comes back to bite you in the ass. Also, his original statements still stand and needlessly hurt and incite anger towards people who essentially disagree(d) with Zed.

Then, the updated post goes on to amend the post with some semblances of self-awareness but is almost comically conflicting in places. He goes on to trash ThoughtWorks and then recommend their software. Huh? But then the update drops back into the original vitriol and just sinks any valid points that Zed has into a sea of raw emotion that makes it very hard for a reader to stay focused on the facts and happenings of the situations he outlines.

Personally, I just wish Zed would have maybe just put this in a drawer after he wrote it like Abe Lincoln used to do. There are many graceful ways in which one can back out of a community and I for one would like to have seen a clearly-talented Zed Shaw choose one of them. Given what he did, I can’t see ever hiring this guy: imagine what he might say or do if I ever disagreed with him?

Usually when I prognosticate about the far-flung future, I’m wrong. However, in the case of Facebook I think I will go out on a limb and say that the only thing that can save them from a very embarrassing spiral into nothingness is money. Cash. Duchets. That’s it. Not all the awesome people plucked from Google , not the huge numbers of pageviews they accrue and certainly not Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s what I mean:

Right now, Facebook is a novelty and has a novelty sheen to it. Right now, its not that annoying and the controls and UI and social navigation are pretty good. However, if it remains so, this is all it will be and its users will flow to the next hot new cool awesomr 2.0 beta thing that comes out. Facebook knows this. Hell, it did it to MySpace (well, with some help from MySpace itself).

So, the only thing that can ever take Facebook to that massive IPO is a revenue stream. And I’m talking a big one. Who’s revenue stream is that big? Microsoft. Oracle. GE. Siemens. Oh yeah, they’re not going to get into any of those games. But Google’s revenue stream looks pretty awesome, too. Why should Google get all that cash? I mean, really… all they do is let you find any information you want on the web in under 0.5 seconds. Who needs that? I’d rather be biting my friends and turning them into werewolves and zombies, to be quite honest. And Facebook just kicks ass for that.

Alas, that revenue stream has to come from somewhere and Facebook is looking to advertisers to shell out a bit more than they already do to take them there. Sure, Microsoft pitched in a bit and caused a huge shitstorm of press that has every idiot on the Web talking about how Facebook is worth $15 billion right now. But, anyone who actually knows anything knows that this isn’t true and both Facebook and Microsoft are the most aware of this fact (with Google right behind them in that race).

So that’s not the way to get money because that won’t last. And, as everyone knows, their banner ads as currently implemented are about as useful as syphllis. So, what to do? Well, I guess they have to roll their own ad network using their massive social graph data. Great idea! But how to do it? Seems like they’ve chosen just about the most devious way possible to accomplish this goal.

The problem with Facebook’s ad profile is twofold:

• I don’t want everyone I am linked to knowing what I am buying, and
• They’ve hidden the opt-out so well that this will eventually become “Facebook spam”

Why? Well, because maybe I don’t want everyone I am linked to on Facebook (shocker! not all of them are people I know really well!) to know everything I buy online. Imagine this scenario: you buy a book called “Inside American Terrorists” because it looks interesting. How do you think that will look to your coworkers checking out your profile? Or how about the “Bankruptcy for Dummies” book, Valtrex pills or a Swedish penis pump? Sound like purchases you want your entire 500+ friend network to know about? I think not.

The one great thing about Facebook right now is that there is no spam. None. Its not possible to get spam on Facebook right now because the platform itself functions as a sort of challenge/response system, allowing only the people you specifically accept to communicate with you. You can block and/or ignore anything that comes your way that you don’t like and you’ll never hear from it again. Not so with the Facebook Ad Network.

Facebook’s ad platform will allow each retailer/online business to put you through the whole subversive opt-out process again and again. There’s no way to globally opt-out, or better yet, to opt-in to the process in the first place and not have any ads show up at all. We already know that most people don’t understand that the word “sponsored” is synonomous with “advertisement” from the vast number of people who don’t realize that those links on the right-hand side of the search results are ads, so there’s no chance of just slapping that on each entry will keep anyone honest.

I for one believe that this could go one of two ways: Either nobody cares and Facebook makes a ton, or they annoy the shit out of their users and flame out quickly with many funny articles from Ted to help us through the pain. I’m thinking that the latter is more likely at this point.

My plan is to write a Firefox extension that will refuse to serve Facebook cookies unless the actual domain being visited is facebook.com (not just an iframe inside another domain’s page). This will defeat the Facebook Ad Network attempts to subvert my profile quite soundly. I will of course be opening this up to anyone who wants a taste for nothing, just as soon as I get some time to bang it out. More on that as it comes up.

Here’s hoping everyone just shuts up about Facebook because there’s just not that much there right now. Help me do something that I can’t do with IM or Twitter or Flickr and I’ll be singing your praises. Facebook: Show me you’ve got something of value other than my purchase history.