THINK / Musings

Article in today's financial times about Web 2.0 companies making, and not, making money.   I think the article is right and we are likely heading for some consolidation — but the article misses the most interesting points about why and how that consolidation will take place.  Its a fairly typical turn of the tide article — replete with a bonus quotation from someone who just raised a lot of money.     Moving on from the drama of MSM — start with why there will be consolidation of some form.  

The web 1.0 companies who survived and prospered did so mostly on the back of Google –  its distribution and its monetization platform.    The fact that many web 2.0 companies have yet to turn a profit is an indication that (a) Google's  platform is still not optimized for this generation of web services and that (b) Facebook, the company everyone expected to provide an alternative, has thus far failed to  provide a platform to build a business.    A year ago this week I drafted an essay on why I believed the Facebook platform needed to offer Web 2.0 applications more than just distribution — its a year later and the data is starting to be tabulated.    Facebook has left a wide gaping opportunity for others to drive into –and companies driving in to fill this gap need to scale social graphs and in order to do that they are opening up — Facebook's misstep, accomplished two moves on the chess board!    They had a chance to build another walled garden but now they are in a struggle to the bottom (or top) of who can become more open — very good for the web as a whole and, specifically, very good for web 2.0 companies.      

Moving to the how.    This shift will pry open opportunity and monetization platforms across the web - and its likely we will have diversity in this system, it will likely be much more sustainable than web 1.0.    While this change is taking place its important to grow audience, manage costs and experiment with monetization approaches that follow the grain of your service.   And lastly, the consolidation the FT talks about — may not be the typical consoldation we see as busssiness go through changes — many of the web 2.0 companies have managed overhead/costs very aggresively, there might be opportunities to loosely couple parts instead of the organizational pain that mergers spawn.    More to come on this later when I have some time to write.    

Interesting article by the founder of Meetro about what he learned from his startup experience.   Intrigued by the discussion about launch and member growth — he talks about how it first took off in Chicago and then it started spreading into small communities around Chicago.   A lesson I leant at Fotolog was the value of compacting social networks — its counter intuitive but it makes sense when you think about it.     Communities need to be compact or tightly connected at the outset in order to reach critical mass.    Duncan Watts has done a lot of great research on this — Adam Seifer taught me about it in practice.    Raw growth is not the right metric to focus on when you start a social network — you need to measure and track the density of those connections – tight, compacted social networks grow faster than thin broadly distributed one's.

I saw the future of news unfold today.   We were on a conference call with Jay who was in Falls Church VA - he heard an explosion - Dave posted the question on twitter and in the space of two hours the tweet-o-sphere figured out it was a small earthquake.      There is still nothing on the subject on Google or Google news, let alone MSM.    

You can see the tweet stream below via a search on Summize.  We  talk about this stuff ad-infinitum but its amazing to see it unfold before one's eyes.   The first tweet is from 1.35pm right after the quake.   The last one on the screen shot was approx. 3.10pm — it links to the confirmation from the USG:

(USGS has confirmed a magnitude 1.8 “micro” earthquake occurred near Annandale, VA at 1:30pm.  There have been no reports of damage or injuries.)

note the screen shot below is a compilation of tweets, re-run the search on falls church at Summize.com

What is a web page today? If you look at the average web page, it's a compilation of a diverse set of data sources drawn into a construct that we think of as a concrete whole. It probably started with CGI — and the first commercial application was likely the ad banner — but today that simple web page is made up of a whole mix of things ranging from dynamic content, ad's,  widgets, sidebar tools, gadgets — the frame that we think of as a web page is now constructed from data streams in from all these sources and more.   This componentization of the page was the first step in what is becoming a different architecture for information delivery. What we have today are the equivalent of early life forms - necessary building blocks that evolution will use as more sophisticated lateral services develop. The organization of data streams and how they are constructed relates to our understanding of the dimensions of the web.

Question?   What would the web look like if you picked it up and looked at the bottom? I imagine, what you would see would be a set of databases - with streams of data flowing between them, into these things we call web pages and between these things we call web sites. These metaphors we have applied to the web — pages and sites — are analog's that helped us grasp and structure the web, yet like any proxy they also impose limits on our perspective. RDF/RSS started me thinking about a lot of these ideas but in the eight or so years since those standards were developed our understanding and approach to web sites as vertical businesses has barely evolved. The spacial assumption we imposed on the web — that a site is a discrete experience that a publisher can control — maps with both a human need to impose hard edges on a dynamic, complex system but also with how we have understood media for the past 100 years or so. I think those edges are been broken down and are offering a different view of the web, and therefore of media companies, one that is less structured around the hard edges of a web page or site, less vertical, less about data silos and more about dynamic, fluid use of data and connections between data points. Some examples.

Take a look at this picture of this post I found on tumblr last week. This person — Erin — is using tumblr to announce a meetup. In this case email and reblogging are the tools she is using to confirm attendants. Shouldn't this person use meetup for this — clearly its their preference not to, but why?

I would propose two theories: context and easy of use. First context — context is important, Erin has followers (an audience) on tumblr, she has an environment that is customized with a user experience she could control (nice background) — and so she wants her meetup to appear in that context. Ease of use — for a myriad of reasons it seems it was easier for her to roll her own meetup than use meetup.com or to quote Pip Coburn the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived pain of trying to learn something new. So here is an example of someone molding a use case (creating a meetup) into another web experience to fulfill a need.

Example #2. What about Twitter. What is the web site Twitter.com?   The first answer — the one I would tell a stranger in conversation — is that its a destination to access and use the microblogging service provided by Twitter, "want to try one to many micropublishing? go to twitter.com".   Sounds simple enough. Yet that conclusion isn't supported by the data. I don't have the exact number but I think its safe to say that more than half of the interactions with Twitter occur off Twitter.com — and the number is in all likelihood a lot higher than that. So is Twitter a protocol?, maybe.   Maybe Ted Stevens actually understood the web better than we thought — thinking about Twitter as a pipe makes more sense than as a  destination.   But its not a pipe in way that old media understood pipes — its different, im not sure i understand exactly what that difference is going to yeild but what is clear today is that each interaction that takes place on the network add's value or context to further interactions.    As data chunks move around Twitter the get organized and collated into conversations and meme's.  Similar to the Meetup example — each node on the twitter network is contextualized in form that makes sense for that particular interaction. But unlike Meetup, Twitter is powering all these interactions. The data becomes more valuable as it moves from interface to interface — not less.     There is something very powerful that is happening with the simplicity and openess of this network.   A network is the best metaphor I can think of for Twitter.    

Another example.  Iminlikewithyou — the flash casual gaming site, started off as a destination (disclosure note, a betaworks company).    All of a sudden users started grabbing the code and syndicating their game on to their web sites.    But this isnt just the game — its not a widget model — its the entire underlying game net that is getting syndicated.     IILWY is closer to our understanding of old media but its contains some of the bizarre distributed breadth and possibilities that Twitter holds.

So where does all of this lead us?  I believe we need new metaphors to understand and place dimensions around what a web experience is. I don't have an answer but I do have a few thoughts on how we can begin to frame and understand the shape of what is to come.

i) Think Centers vs wholes, think about networks vs. destinations

Last week I was re-reading Christopher Alexander the Nature of Order . In the first book he has a section about wholes vs. centers. He makes the argument that composing visual structures as whole's — thinking of buildings, things, windows — anything as a whole — fails to recognize the context in which the object lives. He builds the argument up starting with a dot on a piece of paper — he then analyzes how the dot divides and structures our spacial understanding of the piece of paper.  From this point he starts to frame up a way of looking at the world that is based on thinking about centers, zones of spatial activity vs. wholes.   An example he cites:

"On one occasion, I was discussing the concept of centers, as it applied to some bedroom curtains, with my wife Pamela.     She made the comment that the use of the word "centers" as I had explained it to her, was already changing her view of everything around her, even as we were talking: "When I look at the curtain in the room, and think of the curtain, the curtain rod, the window, the sky, the light on the ceiling, as centers, then I become so much more cognizant of the relatedness of all things — it is as though my awareness increases"

I think Alexander's point and work here is profoundly applicable to the web. If you start thinking about centers — clusters of information — vs. destinations and vertical sites, for me at least, it gives me a frame of reference a metaphor that is far more expansive and networked than the one in which we operate today.   At Fotolog I learned that centers can form and cluster with remarkable speed within a community — now this is starting to happen with information moving laterally between domains.

ii) Think what can move laterally and encourage it to move

People, those things we often call users, want to take data and move it laterally across the web.   They want it to exist in context's that make sense for a particular interaction. Whether its data portability standards, micro-content standards, people want to cross post and move data from one service to another. There is much that needs to be done here.   A year ago when F8 was launched it seemed that Facebook was driving headlong into this domain.   Yet a year later it now seems like Facebook might become known as the last portal, the last walled garden experience — data comes in but not out.   Openness of interface, api's — letting data come in an go out of a domain is central to this thesis.    The Facebook newsfeed could be a web wide service — instead the way its articulated today is about retaining eye balls and attention — a movie we have seen before.  Last week we started talking publicly about SwitchAbit — SwitchAbit is a service that is designed to help drive this lateral movement of data across the web, while retaining context, its a small contribution we are hoping to make to this larger puzzle.

iii) Think about how to atomize context so that it can travel with the data

Atomizing content is one piece of the puzzle, the other is doing the same for context so it can travel with the data as it moves around the web from center to center.    Outside.in — Steven Johnson's creation — trawls through blog posts and attaches geo context to individual posts. I sometimes refer to Outside.in as a washing machine — dirty data comes in one end — Outside.in scrubs the data set and ships out geo-pressed results the other end.   The geo scrubbed post is now more useful for end users, publishers and advertisers.   A bit of structure goes a long way when the data can then move into other structures.   The breadth of what geo scrubbing can do is staggering — think about pivoting or organizing any piece of information around a map — the spatial dimension that is most familiar to our species.  A bit of context goes a long way.   (disclosure note, Outside.in / an investment of betaworks)

iv) Think Layers

There is a layering dimension that is worth consideration — there are services starting to emerge that offer functionality that is framed around exposing some separation between different layers of the web.   Photoshop is the software that first introduced me to the layer metaphor,  i still cant use photoshop, but I think I get the layer idea.   Google earth has applied a layering concept to mapping.   Similarly services like PMOG are experimenting with layers.   Back at betaworks Billy Chasen started working with layers about eight months ago.   He developed a simple navigational tool called Fichey that lets you navigate web pages independent of their domain - using a common navigational tool.    Want to flip thru the top digg stories? — fichey makes it fairly easy and fast.   This was just a beginning.    Billy has developed a service called firefly — it's in testing now and over the coming weeks we will begin to preview it — but its all about creating a layer of interactivity that is contextualized with the web site you are on but its exists independent of that web site. 

v) Accept uncertainty, keep it rough on the edges

What did Rummy say about the known unknown's?    As we experiment and design these new forms of interactions its vital that we remain open to roughness and incompleteness on the edges of the web.   The more we try to place these services into the convenient, existing models, that we have used to structure our thinking thus far the more we will limit our ability to look ahead and think about these things differently. 

This is just a begining.   I hope these five areas have helped define and frame how to think about alternative data dimensions on the web.  Time to wrap this post up — enough for now.

With mixed emotions – a combination of great excitement and a slight tug at the heartstrings – we announced today the sale of Fotolog to Hi-Media, one of Europe's largest advertising and micro-payment networks. This transaction forms one of Europe’s best positioned Internet companies, with huge audience reach and great monetization tools. Our release lays out key elements of the rationale for this transaction, but here are the high points:

· The opportunity to bring together Fotolog’s rapidly growing audience of more than 10 million members, 15 million visitors – and its top 20 ranking among the world’s most trafficked websites – with Hi-Media’s huge ad-network and great optimization capabilities

· The tools for Fotolog to extend its platform and community services with one of Europe's largest micro-payment networks · The jump-start Fotolog brings to Hi-Media’s Publishing Group

· The strong geographic fit, combining Fotolog's growing strength in European markets like Spain and Italy with the reach Hi-Media will give Fotolog in rich and valuable Internet markets such as France,Germany and Sweden. · The outstanding opportunity the Fotolog team and investors will have to participate in the growth of the combined company.

· And equally important, the matching of two teams of people who know how to run Internet businesses. Cyril Zimmerman and the Hi-Media team have been building one of Europe's foremost online ad networks for more than a decade.

With Adam Seifer, Warren Habib and Scott Heiferman, we have a pedigree that goes back to the earliest days of social networking. The result will be one of the largest publicly traded Internet pure plays in Europe. Without the tangle of cable, DSL or old media properties that so often come with and encumber European online companies, our combined company will be able to focus on the hottest and fastest-growing media segment on the continent, and in some areas, around the world.

Seen from that perspective, it becomes clear why Hi-Media considered Fotolog so valuable and why we considered them the ideal partner, strategically, geographically and philosophically, to accelerate our growth and fully leverage our team and our audience. So those are the deal highlights. Now to some background on both companies, and why they are such a great strategic and geographic fit.

Hi-who?

Hi-Media, based in Paris, is a leading European advertising network and micro-payment aggregation platform listed under HIMD-PA . Hi-Media’s current management team is the same one that started the business ten years ago as an ad network. Over time they added micro-payments to the business and, more recently, a publishing group. The first two businesses are large and growing rapidly - the third is younger but with the acquisition of Fotolog now reaches scale.

We’re encouraged by Hi-Media’s demonstrated ability to grow through successful acquisitions and integration. The micro-payments business (today one of the largest in Europe), the local ad-sales business (today one of the largest in Scandinavia) and their current content business (a leading French gaming site) were all acquisitions. Hi-Media’s geographic center of gravity also gives reason for doing this deal. Hi-Media's roots are European, but they have a growing presence in South America, based out of Brazil.

This represents a great fit given Fotolog's recent growth in Europe, and with the acquisition of Fotolog, the Hi Media South American business should become an even more significant area of growth. Most importantly, Hi-Media is one of a small handful of companies positioned at the epicenter of European internet growth. I have blogged about this before, but broadband penetration today stands at approximately 60MM HH in Europe – and is poised to double in the next 3 years. Overall, Internet penetration in Europe in '07 will surpass 30% — an important number that has in other geographies represented a step function in growth, usage and monetization. Net based advertising, spending and direct micro-payment services are set to grow proportionally even faster, with analysts estimating CAGR's of over 20%.

Finally, macro trends aside - Hi- Media is well positioned to benefit from the growing needs of long-tail publishers to optimize and monetize their customers. The Ad- Network provides a CPM based platform for publishers to advertise through. The micro-payments platform is an aggregation service, one that offers customers the choice of more than 40 payment providers and access to more than 160,000 premium content sites.

Photo-blogging?

Fotolog was created five years ago by Scott Heiferman. Adam Seifer joined him shortly after and, working out of their apartments, the two of them birthed photoblogging … and created a global phenomenon. It’s strange, but here in the US, the rapid growth of the Internet often reduces business to a set of categories, at which point companies tend to retrofit services to fit those categories. Blogging in the US was initially defined as a text-based experience. Moreover, today daily people post photos to Facebook and Myspace – but those sites are defined as social networks – no one would seriously refer to them as a photoblogging platforms. But look at actual usage data.

The primary media types on Facebook are, first text (messages between members of the community) and second, photos. And that’s exactly what we see on Fotolog — where we host close to 300M photos and billions of conversations … all woven together in a complex social network. Myspace is substantially similar. Today, Fotolog is one of the 20 most-trafficked sites in the world, and the simple magic of Scott’s and Adam’s creation is still seducing our members. I first came to the company as an angel investor, and then Scott and Adam asked me to join as CEO late last year. In the space of seven months we have doubled the membership, inked partnerships with AOL, Google and Sun and brought the company close to breakeven. Our audience has grown in Europe such that today we almost 30% of our traffic is coming from Europe — 2.2 of our 15M unique visitors are coming from Spain. In terms of membership growth — last month — Italy, Germany, and France were right behind.

So why do a deal?

While Fotolog has grown at an incredible pace, it’s only now becoming a business. We have expanded our ad revenue base significantly in '07, yet we have done this with a tiny sales team, based in NY. There are limits to what you can do with 25 people based in NY, serving an audience mostly in South America and Europe. We have a worked with the Google team to use their AFC and AFS networks with significant successes – yet for media companies to build large, sustainable businesses, across both established and emerging markets, we have learnt you need to complement the ad networks with direct sales capabilities.

Fotolog needs room to grow … and with access to Hi-Media's ad-network, we will have an instant ad-sales capability in our largest and fastest growing markets. Longer term, I am big believer in the promise of peer-to-peer advertising among our members. Ads are often blunt instruments that fail to offer value to a membership engaged in a dynamic conversation – targeting and metadata only get you so far. Offering our membership the ability to buy and sell real and virtual items is something we are keen to offer at Fotolog, and a necessary capability to that end is access to micro-payment services across our footprint. Allopass, Hi-Media's micro-payment service, could fill that bill. Finally the agreement we struck with Hi-Media is a great return for our investors – many of whom (including me) are opting to hold stock in the combined company.

To close, a personal note …

As I said in the first paragraph, it was with mixed emotions that I recommended to our board that we do this deal. Fotolog is on a tear. Our international audience is coming of age, there is so much promise ahead, and it’s been a lot of fun running and building the company. The company has a group of very dedicated people. Adam's heart and soul is in the community. And since I came on board, we have weathered some fun operational challenges including user strikes, drowned servers, vendors trashing core databases … not to mention and some pretty hairy and exciting product launches.

Adam, Andrew, Warren, Olu, Frank, Elke, Yossi, Rodrigo, Andrew and many others have all pulled together through many a long night to make the company what it is today. I’m well aware that mergers and acquisitions don't always work out the way you hope. But Fotolog is truly poised to take off – and with the right mix from Hi-Media, there is a lot of potential in this merger that I hope we can make real for our membership, our team and our investors.

Early in the week Fotolog's Alexa rating nose dived:

And then 2 days later, we were up at #11 worldwide:

Alexa needs to start to operate more like a business.   They have a huge lead in terms of toolbar based traffic analysis — they might be a standard but the product hasnt evolved much, the toolbar is considered by many to be sypware and there is little to no customer service for publishers.   Quantcast and others are building businesses and Alexa is standing still.    There are quirks in there system that just need to be sorted out, like doubleclick is #200 or so — they have to be reading iframes and banners wrong to track that ranking.   As for our numbers, I know our geo mix is wrong — there should be a way for publishers and users to interface with Alexa.   We have settled back down to #16, a three month average of 21 — #11 was fun for a day.    

Just passed 10M member accounts on Fotolog.  What a year it has been, some community metrics / data points.   

• We have almost doubled our membership so far this year
• We hit Alexa #17 in the world yesterday (ahead of ebay!), average over the past week is #18, yesterday we were tracking reach of over 2%.
• Comscore recently logged us as having 4.5M daily unique visitors on a base of 10M member, and 15M monthly uniques
• Over 20% of our pageviews last month were from Europe.

And the adoption of new products has been very strong.   When we launched Fotolog Messenger three weeks ago we had 1.5M people try it out in the first 15 hrs.  As of Friday we had 3,193,618 members who had enabled the messenger feature, almost a third of everyone, who ever, over the past 5 years opened and used an account with us? ! That's, one engaged membership.  

Thank you to our members, thank you to our team in NY and thank you to everyone who helped make this happen — its a privilege to be part of this great social media network.   We are figuring out who is member #10M is and do something special.  We will also be launching more new features on Fotolog this week than ever before in our history — 10M or not, this was always going to be a big week!

Big changes at Fotolog last week — we shipped the new Fotolog memberpage.  It is written in Java, an update from the old PHP code that goes back to the founding of the site.   Results are coming in and it looks like significant performance gains across the board.  

First the member experience has improved — the new page is cleaner and has a faster response time.   But in addition, we are now serving the site on less than half the boxes that we were using.  

Registrations are up — over the weekend we are seeing our daily registrations up over 35% given the improved performance and a requirement to register to post a guest book message.  Revenue lift from Google is trending up approximately 15% given additional contextual data from the guestbooks. 

This new code base will allow us to innovate much more on the member experience — that is why we made this change — we did expect to realize some other benefits.  But these across the board immediate gains are far broader than I expected.  

A few people have asked me what applications I am using on my Mac, in particular all the little sidecar applications I use. When I start using a new application I typically add it to the "app's I use" section of findin.gs. But here is a snapshot of some of the more interesting applications I am currently using.

Omnifocus : Omnifocus is a Getting Things Done (aka, GTD) application that grew out of the work of Ethan Schoonover and the set of scripts that he wrote called Kinkless GTD. I tried Kinkless, moved over to Actiontastic and now I am trialling Ominfocus and loving it. The degree of granularity it offers in terms of project/context control is great - as you flip from project to context, zoom in and out of focus, see Ethan screencast of the product. In Betaworks I have a diverse set of projects that I want to track and manage — Omnifocus is still underdevelopment but the omingroup have the beginnings of a great application here.

Neoffice : Open Office for the Mac, works great, unlike MSFT Office it runs native, and becasue it opens files all inside of one application its far faster than office. I dont generate many office docs, I use Neo essentially as a viewer — works very well. The best of lotus Symphony final comes to life as an open source project.

Spirited away: I like to work with a clean desktop — Spirited Away does just that,it cleans up applications that are not in focus after X minutes, very useful.

Backdrop : Nice little application that drops a curtain between the application in focus and others - for someone who likes working with a clean space, this is a great little app. Spirited away and backdrop work very nicely together.

Mindmanager: Just starting to work with version 7. Its good client based mindmapping software, I am still trying to figure out how to integrate this into my workflow (aka "why do I need this, how does it help")

Groupcal : To synch between exchange and ical, snerdware has a piece of software that runs pretty well. Warning, dont disrupt a synch — recovery is not fun.

Quicksilver : Amazingly versatile finder application

Glance : Remote desktop, demo's and presentations, glance is something the Flog team introduced me to and its way simpler than the alternatives (webex etc).

Disk Warrior : I was doing some preventive maintence to the other week and tried to install Tech Tools Pro. In the process my hard drive melted down — half way through the installation I was stuck and off to the Genius bar.   Disk Warrior fixed the problem, Tech Tools didnt.   For hard disk errors Disk Warrior.

Thats it for now 

Now Alexa is tracking Fotolog as #15 in the world, with reach above 2% for the first time??!@?   Facebook is at 2.055% and they have had 80% growth in the past 3 months.    Yes, yes I know Alexa has its limitations but Comscore, Alexa, Quantcast all pointing to solid growth.

Some clips of recent Fotolog data … next week today we will pass 9 million user accounts.  The team has grown our audience by 60% since I came on board in late December and over 150% since June 2006.   Flog is currently the 20th most trafficked site in the world according to Alexa.  Comscore now ranks us as the largest site in Argentina, measured by total page views (we're doing 3x the page views of Yahoo).   In Spain, we're ranked #10, pageview wise we have seen a lot of growth in Europe this year, especially in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. 

Also in May the site saw strong growth in the US (60% growth in unique visitors), albeit from a smaller base.    The arrival of micro-blogging sites in the US like Tumblr and Twitter is demonstrating how the use cases around blogging or self publishing are fragmenting.    Letting people post some combination of text, images, videos, presence and location — mingle that with a social network, shake, don't stir, and you get what Fotolog is about.  

Based on usage data Fotolog has become more of a social media network (tracking the usage patterns of MySpace, Mixi, Facebook and Bebo) rather than traditional online media network.   Lapping Yahoo in Argentina clearly supports this engagement argument — Fotolog's unique visitors are 1MM less than Yahoo's, yet the total minutes on the site are twice that of Yahoo and pages are 3x.     Fotolog's reach on Alexa continues to grow — over the past three months we are up 23% to 1.7% (note, I don't understand what happening with Orkut, both reach and growth seems to be slowing this year).    

I will be very interested to see how our launch of point-to-point IM does on Flog.   Within the next 10 days we will have Userplane's service up and running so members can message each other with one click (no client, user to user IM).     And to boot, Fotolog will have another significant announcement to make in the next few days.

I am trying out the Canon TX1 hybrid cam. I am a big fan of hybrids — for the past couple of years I have used the Sony DSC M1 hybrid. This Canon promises a lot and thus far seems to deliver fairly well. The Camera is very stripped down and easy to use — but the ergonomics aren’t as good as the Sony, harder to hold and shoot with one hand. Stills are 7.1 pixels and other than the flash (which is weak) the stills are good. The face identification software does a really good job of finding faces — less clear whether the adjustments it does once it has found faces is worth much, but that strange allure of technology recognizing a human feature is enough to make one think it must be have some value.

Video is just weird. Canon promote this as an HD hybrid and sure enough the video is 720p, 16:9, 30fps. But it records in M-JPEG (Motion JPEG - basically a string of jpeg images?!). Hugely inefficient at encoding, gives you approx. 13mins of video on a 4 gig card? There is the advantage that you can pull a still from the video stream, which is kinda interesting if you want to wade through a gazzillon frames for the 1/30th of a precious second. But why M-JPEG, Divx or MPEG4? I suspect they wanted to (a) save on licensing fee’s — and (b) make sure the camera wasnt too good at doing video. The tension that hybrids have for Camera manufactures persist — if its too good then people wont need to buy two devices. But the choice is an interesting testament to how the plunging cost of storage continues to radically effect technology standards.

Great example of what the turk can do — distributed application to search for a missing person on satellite images, takes 5 mins of time to sign in and search five images / details below: 

Amazon Mechanical Turk Jim Gray Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery Jim Gray Background On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment. Follow the story here. Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

I have spent a week getting a pots number to call forward to another number. I set it up on verizon.com, took 4 days to complete the order, once it was done the number no longer worked. I called and after 25 mins on hold I got to a very perky tech representative — he checked it out, said it was setup wrong through the system. He went and made some adjustments — I swear I heard wheels turning in the engine room — another 15 mins later we were done. With the caveat that I need to call again nxt week to set it to ring straight through (right now its on 4 rings and then it will forward, and only the business office can change that rule).

Vonage, grandcentral, skype, pick your voip — this take less than 3 mins. to update. Hmmm that sure is one smart network.

I have been using the fon service for about two months now. One of the things that surprises me is the ratio of bits going up vs. down. This is where I stand:

August: 1108 hours - 6617.03 / 3305.65 Mb (dl/ul)
July: 681 hours - 5885.6 / 3907.02 Mb (dl/ul)

The up is considerably more symmetrical than I expected. In July the ratio is approx. 1:1.5 in august 1:2. And the media we push up is photos and email not audio, not video. In the never ending discussions i participate in about bandwidth and bandwidth usage I rarely hear people discuss how symmetrical one pipe/service is vs. another. IP based video is pretty much all coming down today — over the coming years if people start to post video the way we post photos today we are looking at symmetrical usage. Granted we usually dont care about when the bits go up as much as when they come down, but still I would never have expected these ratios. Note where we are located there hasn’t been any sharing of the router — so this is all our usage.