Free Idea: Collect Your Friends

Posted on July 29, 2011 by James Fuller

A few weeks ago, I was working on setting up another webpage as a portfolio and jokingly made Holden Page a project. I then shared over on Friendfeed that Holden was now a personal project, which turned into a thread filled with Pokemon jokes. This is when I started thinking about how cool it would be if you actually could collect your friends in a game.

So with that idea I decided to lay out a few structures and ideas rather rapidly on what would be interesting. I’ve decided not to follow through with any of the aspects at this time and figured I’d make them public record. Obviously, the ideas are pretty closely related conceptually, they will be presented as such, but they may be applicable elsewhere. I’m just going to write it up as a bit of a package deal.

Concepts

Connect to one or more networks to gather friends
Convert your friends into a set of useable gaming aspects
Random occurrence of friends or competitors
Should be able to collect, compete, or trade friends with others
Maintain a list of friends that will be commonly used

Connect to networks

Allow the user to import their Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ friends into the game. Personally, I thought Twitter would make a better base for the game, but it’s possible that both Facebook and Google+ would make better networks to connect with since they both have gaming platforms built in. There isn’t really anything novel here.

Convert you friends

This was the main idea that I thought could be used in an interesting manner, which also lent itself to Twitter quite well. Take the username of said friend and create a hash from it, doesn’t have to be unique. Use this hash to create parameters befitting your usage (e.g. Taking the Pokemon/RPG aspect, using the hash to determine HP ATK/DEF SPD S.ATK/S.DEF, and they’re various growth rates at level up.) In addition to or in lieu of the hash, you could also try to determine a type by analyzing the friend’s recent content and create a type for that user. This would be more advanced, but doable.

Random Occurrences

This is where I had issues, not so much the occurrences, but how the encounter’s would be handled. I couldn’t come up with any reasonable interaction for this portion of the game. The few very weak ideas I had were using recent content as a competitive method or creating a set of abilities from the hash.

Trade, Collect, or Compete with Friends

These tools are what I find interesting. By encapsulating these concepts into a game, you make sharing friends an aspect that would be a hopefully rewarding experience. This would hopefully increase serendipitous encounters with people you may not have encountered before, but also allow you to reward people for their interaction with you. I’m in love with this, honestly and hope to either come up with a decent way to manage it, or hopefully someone who sees this would.

Friends List

This would be the parallel to your team of Pokemon. The differences would be that it could be possibly generated by those people you interact with most, or people you most want to reward with experience. Experience could be tracked individually(only for the user) or by aggregate(for the friend id). This would allow for possible global ranking based on usage, which would be an interesting concept, compared to our current systems of trying to track and analyze social value.

Random Ideas Related

Items that can modify elements of the game, such as leveling up or accessing certain areas.
Add minigames for users to play, possible advertising location.
Allow users to send out and view network updates from in-game.
Instead of using network relationships, maybe use websites, or resources

Like I said, I’m not interested in following through with the concept at this time so go ahead and use them. If anyone would like to discuss them in a more in-depth fashion you can leave a comment or email me at jamesfuller@theinnovationist.com

Also I have to thank World of Higlet for getting this started, and had she not given me a nudge those many days ago I wouldn’t have thought about half of this. In thanks I’d like to give a shout out to her current web-series, “Mind My Brains, Darling!“.

Pip.io Plowed Under As Seeds For Harvest Are Sown

Posted on June 22, 2011 by James Fuller

I was stumbling my way around on Quora and saw a link to Pip.io, which I used, for a period, as it was a promising alternative to Friendfeed. I decided to click the link to see how the service has changed since my last use, and discovered a message saying it had shut down. The message is embedded below.

Dear Pip.io Members,

Thank you very much for your guys’s support! We couldn’t have done it without all of you!

I have decided to shutdown Pip.io and pursue other dreams.

When I started Pip.io, I dreamed of a social web that was more than just what Facebook and Twitter offered.

I dreamed of a social service that could unify and simplify the social experience people have on the internet.

However, even though I will be shutting down Pip.io, I have not given up on those dreams.

The best way to stay up to date with what I’m doing is on my blog at http://www.leoshimizu.com

Thank you members and hopefully we’ll meet again!

Sincerely,

Leo Shimizu
Founder & CEO

After reading, I had two questions, the first, “When did it close,” and the second, “What is he working on now?” So first I checked out the link he posted, but there wasn’t much there, but the Twitter widget on the side was interesting; it was pushing a link, http://ha.rve.st/, multiple times. Checking it out, from as close as I could get, it is reminiscent, in look and style, of Pip.io, but the copy on the homepage, is intriguing.

Harvest is an easier and better way to consume the social web. Harvest is a communication platform that not only gathers your posts into one stream in real-time but lets you be you. Experience the social web in a way you never have before!

It lets you be you, by at least, discussing the concept of social circles, or “Personas,” where the problem is you only want to share with certain groups selectively. It also, appears to manage imaginary connections across services, though I don’t completely understand their solution there. It also appears to be a cross-client and aggregation tool. You can check out a few public pages of the interface at http://ha.rve.st/leo/ and http://ha.rve.st/matt/, most others appear to be private. Image at bottom.

As for the other question, when did Pip.io close, I had to travel through Leo’s twitter feed. On May 16th, he discusses the possibility of a Pip.io mobile app coming soon. His next tweet, on May 18th, pushes http://ha.rve.st/ to a user quoting the phrase, “I have decided to shutdown Pip.io and pursue other dreams.” So I assume that means the Pip.io was shutdown on May 17th.

Best of luck to Leo and his partners, on this new project.

Why I’m Not Hoppy With The Cloud (Particularly Music)

Posted on May 23, 2011 by James Fuller

When it comes to my opinion on the cloud, it comes from personal experience, over the past few years. I tend to heckle people who have shifted towards the cloud over the past year or two, and mock the cloud. In most cases, their choice is probably valid, because they don’t live in the same environment that I do, living last mile. However, even when I didn’t live last mile, I had issues with services that were based in the cloud, that have solidified my views. Just to note, when I’m talking about the cloud, I’m referring to the consumer side, it has different use case than that of using the cloud from a business perspective, which I’m mostly behind.

One of the people I tend to mock, quite often, is Louis Gray, who just wrote a post titled, “While Amazon Chokes on Lady Gaga, Spotify Flows“. In it he tries to promote Spotify, to US consumers (who can’t even use it), in the face of Amazon’s issues with users, trying to download Lady Gaga’s latest album for $0.99. The fact is that I would rather own the music, that rely on someone else’s right to license the music to consumers. If the service falters, I lose access to the music, and possibly my playlists.

To many, a failure might seem unlikely, but I doubt most of them have suffered through a failure in the service, or even a complete shutdown of the service. I happen to have experienced this on more than one occasion with since fallen services: SpiralFrog and Ruckus. I still remember how I waited patiently for my beta invite for 9 months, to get into Spiral Frog, I finally received my invite into the private beta on 8/31/07. Now I wasn’t much of a music fan, up to that point, only listening to VH1 in the mornings, and various metal bands in school. However, after I started getting acquainted with Spiralfrog, my library ballooned to 6000+ tracks in a few months.

The first failure came around January 2008, when I decided to reformat my system back to just Vista, rather than the dual-boot (Vista/Ubuntu) I had been running for my CS coursework. In the process, I managed to screw up and invalidated all the files, because of how the DRM worked. So I had to start downloading them all over again, at the same time I picked up on Ruckus, and started using them, again my collection ballooned upwards of 4000+ between them. In April of 2008, I moved home, where we were still using dial-up. So over time, the files either expired, or I didn’t feel like re-downloading the updated keys, to keep them going. Eventually, I just stopped using them, because it wasn’t worth the time or effort to keep up with, and they both went under, permanently invalidating any files I might have had left.

So towards the end of 2008, I started purchasing the media I wanted to listen, too. Originally, from iTunes, and then from Amazon, over the past 6 months or so. I like it this way, because I don’t have to worry about the service ending, access being invalidated, or some other circumstances where I don’t have control over them. I have little trust of the cloud, because of my experience of using it before, and how freaking annoying it is when it does fail. It’s wonderful when it works, but there are no guarantees, about it.

Spotify, is profitable in Sweden, but is operating at a loss, across all of it’s markets, and still hasn’t come to the US. As I’m sure other companies are dealing with similar circumstances, of managing the label contracts, as well as the stiff competition. Cloud music is a reality, but not if you expect long-term reliability, at least for the next few years. I expect Amazon, Google, iTunes, or one of the others to be the leader of the pack, but not Spotify, at least in the US. Amazon’s solution and Google’s solution, uploading files to their service, don’t thrill me, because of the tendency for low upload speeds on consumer networks.

Ideas For Making Color More Vibrant

Posted on March 30, 2011 by James Fuller

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried Color, and am decidedly against mobile in my personal life. This is my analysis, having only watched an overview and read several of the articles.

The recent hubbub about Color, by Scoble and the other’s, discussing the poor first experience and “Bubble Welcomes Color”, is partially on the mark, is also partially off. I won’t deny that the execution and even idea may have been weak, but I think it was mainly a chicken/egg problem. They also walked into a problem with the buzz around their funding, it being so abnormal they had mass’s attention, to the point of possibly being a detriment. For both of these negatives, they have some very intriguing aspects, some that will certainly be surfacing in other products, over the next few months – years.

In today’s world, with several large pre-built social networks, it is extremely possible to piggy back, at first. to build your market usage to help reduce the chicken/egg issues. As far as I can tell, they did nothing to mitigate the chicken/egg issue, and may have actually made it more prominent with their decisions to only offer the sharing in a small area and time period. Those two features, are great in an active environment, but in this one, that is new and empty, it provides a negative experience lacking true interaction. Why would anyone want to use it if there is very low level of interaction?

The funding news helped to promote Color to a larger audience, because of the discussion that was caused by the abnormally high investment of $41 million. $41 million for a company that was on the dawn of releasing it’s first public product. Assuredly absurd, or is there something there that everyone was missing; there are varying opinions on this. In light of the bubble speculations, of the past few months, many are leaning toward the absurd, and point back at Color as evidence that there truly is a bubble. The extra attention, which was exposed to the poor interaction, and the negative connotations of the bubble, are overshadowing what could be a great product.

The public introduction to implicit networks, even as an idea represented in the video demo for the product, is what I find most interesting about the service. The use of creating one based on vicinity to other users is brilliant, if they had an active user base, of course. The whole idea that you can interact with strangers to embrace the moment, is the key to the idea of “you had to be there,” and makes it easier to create real-world memes. I can definitely seeing this being an amazingly fun experience, in sharing and creating images/videos with strangers, it could generate games like ‘I Spy’ on the fly. There is something to this product, and I’m a little worried that it will be missed, because of the previous reactions.

I’ve said a few times over the past week, “If Color was a Twitter Client, then it would have been really impressive. Images, not so much,” and even joked that it was Twitter’s new anti-client stance that ruined the app. I might take back my comment about images, now, as I think it is a good fit, but maybe not for the introduction. In my opinion, it may have been more useful if it was a fully, or mostly, functional client for Facebook or Twitter, and provided the feature of sharing posts made through Color, with others in the vicinity, as is present in the current version. A decent client, with this bonus functionality, in my opinion would have been amazing, because it lets you engage those directly around you, when you want, and could create a virtual icebreaker. The major benefit of a client would have been, that the app is usable even when nobody else is nearby.

They could also widen the vicinity, 150 feet seems like a very small area and would probably be better suited to 300-450 feet, so that there is a little bit of room to play with it. If they widened the vicinity, it could also open up the service to a nice little promotion network, with ideas for people to get together and do. I think this may be their biggest issue currently, the area just sounds too small to be effective; they need to open it up.

Overall, they made plenty of mistakes out of the gate, but I think they are definitely in redeemable territory, particularly with the numbers in the bank. What they can do immediately is expand the vicinity, add some other types of media (besides just images and comments on them), and create some sort of larger interaction outside of the small ‘global’ area. Right now, it’s all about creating some active audience, so they should focus on specific areas to promote it, as Scoble mentioned about focusing on SF and NYC, and some introductory use cases, such as games like ‘I Spy.’ Ultimately, I do see Color as a company that will succeed, even with their current stumbles, but they do need to pick it up and start running with something that will boost interaction. It’s all about interaction and engagement.

I wish them the best of luck.

The Future Of Search Can Be Found In Dungeon

Posted on March 17, 2011 by James Fuller

Earlier today, I made a comment asking, “Could it be that Zork* is the search of future,” then deleted it. Louis Gray ended up calling me out on the deletion, which was for no real purpose other than not wanting to fully explain myself. I might as well lay out my thoughts on what I meant, lest I forget it.

A problem with search currently, is that we’re being trained to speak to the engine, with a penalty to using regular phrases as your query strings. Various terms are stripped from the query strings, and you end up with items that aren’t relevant or hardly related, when you just haphazardly place your key terms in. This is an issue that I find frustrating; I often end up banging around for hours on end trying to get proper query terms to bring me the results I’m looking for. Search is simply hit or miss, even for the new guys, such as Blekko and DuckDuckGo, trying to beat the incumbent which is Google. The new guys have better quality, but it does come at a cost of having special syntax, Blekko with the slash modifiers and DuckDuckGo with the bang modifiers.

Why don’t we have a search system that uses a more intricate text parser, to parse the queries. It’s obvious that we have the technology, just look at how amazing the parser for Zork and other text-based adventure games were. Why can’t we use grammar that we are used to, and let the software parse the elements out, where necessary? Simply put, I’ll trade off the ability for instantaneous results if you provide a simple text parser that makes it easier for me to input my queries in a more natural form.

Let me put in something like one of these:

“Louis Gray’s latest post about Friendfeed.”
“Most recent blog post from Louis Gray about Friendfeed.”
“Latest blog post on louisgray.com containing Friendfeed.”

All of those should return similar results, but they all share a common set of elements, that humans often have to convert into their queries if they want to get a valuable response. A decent Google query for this would look like, {site:”louisgray.com” Friendfeed}, but this requires that you also select an option outside of the query box, to narrow it to most recent. All of those queries I would like to use return very noisey results, even the modified query is noisy, and is more closely related to “containing” than about.

My question is why don’t we have a text parser, probably client-side, that helps us out in getting the content we want? If you look at my preferred queries they break down in to relative elements.

A source. Signified by ”s,’ ‘from,’ and ‘on’ in the relative examples. They all signify that your looking for something from Louis Gray, in some form.
A temporal modifier. Signified by “‘latest’ and ‘most recent,’ in the examples. Signifies that the period is a significant element of your query.
A source modifier. Signified by the ‘post’ and ‘blog post, in the examples; easily could be Tweet, Status, Image, to search for.
A search method. Signified by ‘about,’ ‘containing,’ or ‘with.’ These signify how the elements that follow should be interpreted.
A set of query elements. In my example I only used Friendfeed, but it is what follows the search method signifier.
A system of set logic. Using ‘and,’ ‘or,’ or ‘commas,’ as a way to modify the way the sources and queries are handled.

Why aren’t we using this now? Sure, some of what I suggest is harder to manage, because it requires the ability to know who Louis Gray is, and what sources he has, but this only requires having a somewhat decent image of his set of profiles. Google happens to have just that, as do many other aggregating services, but Google has the power here, being a search provider. I don’t know if it will enhance the results we receiver from such services, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to talk to the system in a way that is at least halfway normal, and get decent results even without a solidly designed query.

Search providers please give us a half decent text parser, even if it’s only as advanced as that of the 70’s. Hell, it’s already common enough to see simply text parsers that pull hashtags, and @user strings, and converts them to links. Why not something that takes a more English approach to the query, and does the conversion for us to get the perfect query strings, that the system wants?

“What a (ahem!) strange idea!”

Notes:

*= Zork’s original title after completion was Dungeon, but a trademark violation saw that it was changed back.

Living Last Mile

Posted on February 25, 2011 by James Fuller

I apologize for any cursing I do, this is an issue I fight with daily, and it’s a ridiculous one.

I live in semi-rural WV, but I also live without adequate access to information, at a nominal rate. In order to get an internet connection, where I live it costs roughly $50 on top of a phone bill for 768kbps ADSL. There is also no means of getting television, besides paying for satellite service, which also doesn’t come with local channels f or some absurd reason. Ever since the Analog-to-Digital transition in June ’09, the reception which is known to be bad in mountainous areas, dropped completely off the map, because it became an all or nothing signal.

What you end up with is exorbitant costs for minimal service, even though people within a mile, have no such issues; cable is provided along the main road on the backside of the property, but it’s about 3/10th’s of a mile. Currently, the two bills are $80 for TV, for mid-range satellite service, that isn’t 2/3 Christian broadcast, receiver rental, and 2 broadcast station feeds, that should be locally provided, and $65 for Phone & Internet. It pisses me off to know that just because we live just outside, the service area of the cable companies, we are charged out the ass.

If our house was moved less than half a mile, we would have a more stable internet connection that is 10x as fast, basic enough tv with local stations, we really only need broadcast stations. For about half the price. This needs to be addressed, as well as anti-competitiveness in areas, companies trade off in areas and create virtual monopolies on local markets. I’m just frustrated at how close, and yet how far the access to information is, and I also know that I’m not the only one in the area that feels this way.

Our nation, has turned its back on those that live last mile, and the infrastructure required to provide its citizens decent access to information. We are solidly driving forward, in improvements, but those improvements are generally within the large metro areas, where they see maybe a 2x increase ever 3-4 years, while those living last mile slip further behind. I understand it’s not feasible for the companies to create the infrastructure, that they won’t see a return on any time soon, but there has to be a way to improve our nations information infrastructure(IPv6 should be included).

Super WiFi is probably the only decent technology for this area, considering everyone is stretched rather thin, the infrastructure costs would be lower, but that’s not a likely roll-out option for at least 4-5 years, if not a decade. That’s how slow progress is, when you’re living last mile. It’s infuriating to see improvements so close, and simultaneously know that it will be held right in front of your face, but out of your grasp.

What Made Facebook Special

Posted on February 12, 2011 by James Fuller

Why did people join Facebook; what made it special?* This is a though I have so often, it’s become funny, but my answer has never been precise enough, “critical mass.”

Critical mass doesn’t tell you anything, except that they manage to get enough people to use it, and as more did, it became almost invaluable to the rest. The problem with such a simple, and ignorant response is that doesn’t really help to understand how they generated that critical response anyways. That’s the real question that needs to be answered.

We all know about FaceMash, and the exclusivity presented by the college email restrictions in the beginnings. I think through every phase of the company it has held momentum by voluntarily limiting growth, and strategically raising the level of suspense, and necessity via critical mass in various markets.

One quote paraphrased as I remember, “When we went to add Baylor, they wouldn’t allow us on campus, so we went to all of the surrounding schools, and added them to the network. In effect, we built the demand within Baylor by adding most of their friends from other schools to the network, and then expanded to Baylor.” [Editorial Remark: It was from The Facebook Effect. The paragraph was about the “surround strategy.” Also, I originally thought it was BYU, and not Baylor.

I find that brilliant, they built demand in the market, before releasing in the market. The same can be said of Mark’s original FaceMash, which provided him with enough notoriety and acknowledgment within Harvard to release Facebook, as well as providing access to a tool that helped to keep up with your friends.

The whole reason I brought this up is I started thinking about how my friend made me create a new account** when I got to WVU, ‘because everyone uses it.’ I find it interesting that it had created such a critical mass at that point in schools, and it seems to have managed to maintain critical mass among it’s markets this whole time, I find it simply amazing.