Real time search – the problem

Both Google and Microsoft’s new search service Bing has partnered with Twitter to provide real-time search results for queries. This is great news for finding valuable information but it also creates new problems to overcome; filtering out the irrelevant data.

Search today is based on relevance through counting the number of links to and from a site. This relevance also weights the linked sites. This is the basic idea behind Google’s PageRank system. But its fundamentally flawed, namely the older the site the more information and weight it can get. Google has of course tried to minimize this affect but it’s still visible when searching for certain topics.  Google “next apple event” for an example. The search result is completely useless.

Twitter however has the opposite problem. Without a system like PageRank to value the posts a lot of relevance comes from time. The latest posts are the most relevant. But this also means that topics that aren’t current might not yield any relevant information available. So the time problem is reversed from Google’s PageRank time problem.

So how will we solve this? Well, I don’t have a definitive answer of course. But I’ve more and more come to believe in crowd sourcing as a means to get accurate data. Perhaps relevance can be calculated not from the content itself but from how we interact with it. If users can be filtered out from bots (usage patterns for bots are really hard to mask over time since the cloud could potentially remember ever mouse move they make) relevance could be weighted from number of users who actually read or view the content.

No doubt Google has teams working on this. And no doubt they will eventually buy some small startup doing it a lot smarter than they are. It’s an interesting problem nevertheless.

Strange news about Happiness

What is happiness to you? To me I’ve always defined it as reaching my goals, whatever they may be.

Turns out I’m wrong. Dead wrong apparently.  As Dan Gilbert explains in the video below happiness is comprised of a lot of synthetic happiness. And as Luis C.K. displays in the next video our many many choices leave us stranded in a place of chasing happiness that is really all around us. What we need to do is really enforce more restrictions on our own lives.

For games and products, this translates into restricting what they can do. Think about how strange that is, restricting what players / users can do will actually make the product more fun and usable. Not because it is, but because the choices will make that happiness more available.

Agile development another new oldie

It struck me about a week ago. Agile project development, which is a somewhat new fad in software development, is not really that new.

Now most of you are probably shaking your heads thinking Of course it isn’t, we’ve been using it for ten or more years. That might be true but I’m talking seriously old here.

Compare agile development, where features are implemented in short both to enable developers to work instead of plan and at the same time not commit the entire project down one road if something changes during development. With Kaizen, where each working (or even living) person takes time to be just one step better, just one step more efficient, each day.

Now I know, the parallel is a bit stretched, But it’s not really that far fetched is it? We’re all simply trying to improve our projects just one step (feature?) at a time.Perhaps we can learn even more from Kaizen and shorten our sprints even further.

Power of Crowdsourcing example

Hanna is a geek in Sweden. I don’t know her, I don’t know of her. She’s not a huge name as far as I can tell.

But she just did something amazing using Twitter and Spotify. About an hour ago she created a collaborative playlist on Spotify and tweeted the playlist link asking for Christmas songs.

One hour ago. The playlist is now 18 songs and 1.2 hours long. Potentially it could last forever if more people join in.

Thanks Hanna, for showing us a great example of the power of social media and crowd sourcing.

Hanna’s Christmas Playlist

Why change is hard for companies

Change is of course always hard, but I’m not talking about personal change here but about change in organization and how companies and industries work. We have a lot of current examples with now with the entire Music and Mobile phone industry plunging off the revenue cliff like lemmings.

New ideas tend to come from people who have a lot of time on their hands. You see, there is something about our minds that just makes us crave new things. This might sound strange as we’ve all had grand mothers and friends who just put up a fight against everything new. But we are slightly skewed as witnesses towards these events, they’re not against new things you see. They are just a bit frightened that what people are pushing for might make what they were doing sound wrong or stupid. Basically, we’re all afraid to be laughed at.

But we still love to learn new things, most of us travel or read or watch movies. And while we often do pick out favorites just to be safe we always got those favorites or find new ones because we learn as we go. Fast or slow, we all learn and move on. But the process takes time.

This is why youth always seem to be full of fresh ideas. Sure, many of them have been tried, not all youngsters check before they start to wave red flags, but certainly not all of them. This is because young people have more free time to indulge and learn new things. Name any period in your life when you learned more than as a student? Can you honestly say that most of what you learned happened in classrooms?!

And this, alarmingly, is the problem. As companies get larger and the people working for them are more senior they get busier and busier. Which leaves less time for learning. While people are promoted because they do excellent work, they usually struggle to keep doing excellent work and thus have even less time to indulge.

Because of this we end up with a pyramid of ideas and power that is completely polarized and slightly ageist. The broad bottom is made up of mostly young people with most of the ideas while the upper parts are made up of mostly older people with less modern ideas. It’s not the fault of any of them. It certainly isn’t intentional. But it’s bad for the company and it leaves the company less open to change. Not because the people in charge don’t believe in change, but because they haven’t had time to live the change that has already happened.

An old saying is that winners work hard and play hard. I would argue that because they work hard and find the time to play they are still agile and current enough to be winners. They have all the experience and still have had time to learn the modern ways of doing things before Google took over the market.

Ah, you’ll now think, or did earlier, what about companies such as Google? How can huge organizations like them stay current?

Well. They don’t. Not completely. But they are fighting this trend by letting their employees use 20% of their time to work on their own projects. A few other companies use similar strategies but Google is the most famous promoter which is why I chose to make an example out of them.

No one can stop change. We have to move with it or be left behind. This includes the Music industry, Mobile phone producers and web start ups equally. Maybe using a bit more time  for playful learning can give us a competitive advantage?

Oh, and “free work time” is also the only way to motivate people working creatively apparently:

Google releasing Chrome OS for netbooks

My first thought: “Google OS, great! Go google! Wait, haven’t googles products got steadily less and less stable and good as the company has expanded? oh well…”

Then I realize this is another OS on an already shattered market (PC/laptop). Of course it’s based upon Linux but it doesn’t support a lot of heavy features. Basically it’s made to boot an Internet browser and nothing else.  This is, of course, Google’s stratagem and has been from the start. And I see their point, web apps are steadily taking over functions I used desktop apps for earlier.

But there is a long way to go, web apps are just not responsive enough for smaller tasks, I use notepad, and Things. Programs that are snappy. I haven’t seen anything web based that comes close to them in responsiveness.

Maybe HTML 5 can speed things along.

Amazon game shop

Amazon has tossed down the gauntlet on the casual games industry and started a downloadable casual game portal. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Games are priced at a competitive $10 and with amazons huge customer base it will certainly be interesting to see the effect this might have. More and more mainstream businesses are approaching the games industry, hard core developers tremble and might go extinct.

I can has cheezburger

The world foremost kind of entertainment, beyond any doubt. Can be enjoyed for a second or for hours.

Web 3.0

The next step in web development has been claimed to be the semantic web, sounds great but I think we’re a few steps away from that. The next step I believe will be to integrate web services seamlessly into our user experience, essentially making them part of our everyday lives without gluing us to the screen with 789 tabs open.

Enter Ubiquity, the command line interface that lets you use all web service functions from a standard browser window. Check it out, the example video will blow your mind.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Cloud based computing

The cloud based computing term is thrown around a lot on the web these days. While we wait for a completely cloud based computer to be released (www.cloudo.com) we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. This is my rundown of how I solve the common everyday problems.

I bought an Asus EEE pc. It’s great, it’s small, it has battery life and a full qwerty keyboard. The biggest problem is the OS (xandros) which I can thankfully replace with a proper one (ubuntu, xp is to slow). But it still doesn’t have the kind of power I’m getting used to while at my computer.

Sure for office work I mostly use google documents, and for storing images (if I needed to) I have picasa or flickr or oosah or a million other services. But what I really want is a place to put all those things that I want to keep with me. Bookmarks, notes, files and so on. Google had most of these needs covered with google bookmarks and google notebook, but Google have yet to release their fabled online drive. And they also messed things up when they released Chrome, which is a great browser, that doesn’t support it’s own products such as bookmarks!?! Way to go Google, your age is showing. Is this the first step towards becoming Microsoft? Seems to be.

But lo! Saving the day a small upstart called Drop Box smashes into my life and makes things work. Drop Box is a small program or online interface that lets you sync a folder on your computer with an online storage space. It runs in the background, doesn’t take up any RAM (a lot of bandwidth though if you handle a lot of files) lets you sync the folder to an unlimited number of computers (windows, mac or linux) and has no file size limits. Sounds awesome? It is.

But whats the catch? Well, drop box is still in development and you can only sign up for 2GBs of storage… Sure, their free and that’s great. But I was hoping for more. This is a service I’d be happy to pay for though.