randomosity

Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns conference seems to have readily accepted the term ‘Social Graph‘, recently applied by Mark Zuckerberg to his FaceBook service. Reading Sean Ammirati’s coverage of the talk reminded me of my own reservations about this term. When I first heard it I was a little confused. The immediate question was how is this different from a Social Network? - a term I thought I was familiar with. Realizing that this is tip to graph theory I wondered if referring to a rather abstract theoretical construct helps anyone to understand the Social Network phenomenon. Apparently I wasn’t the only one and Josh Catone raised very similar concerns when he asked, Is it Time to Retire the Social Graph?
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Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a variety of media and we patiently wait and often salivate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be notified when a service becomes more mature. Invites create a buzz and certainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this marketing strategy. I will admit to being a victim of much marketing. I like my toys. There’s a new service that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sacred sites: Mashable Invites.
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Kudos to Nokia for adding the smarts to their cell phones to let a user know to unplug the charger from the wall socket. Apparently this simple operation (presuming people actually do unplug the phones - as opposed to leaving them plugged in and charging all night) will allow saving “enough electricity to power 85,000 homes a year”.
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A great online historical tour of the University of Guelph campus is now available. It doesn’t feature whizzbang flash effects or implement AJAX functionality. Instead, it delivers a smooth and effective tour in a simple and compelling fashion with simple html. It’s pleasingly lo-tech, well executed and a great example of matching technology to needs.
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Just because it is absolutely so stupid I feel compelled to point it your way. The ‘Will it Blend’ series of videos demonstrating the sheer blending power of Blentec blenders (like they use at all my favourite coffee shops) takes it to a new level today: blending from the perspective of the blendee. Seriously. Today’s challenge…a digital video camera with video running out through a cable. As the reports state…it records its own death. I will spoil the suspense for you…it does in fact blend…and you even get to appreciate a little of the process (not too much), but what can one expect with a whack of spinning rotors attacking a relatively fragile piece of electronic engineering.

I observed my first SmackShopping live internet game show today. Building on the last minute bidding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of committed purchasers, JellyFish offers an intriguing experience.

As a semi-standard demand consolidator, JellyFish has agreements with a wide range of normal retailers who contract to provide X amount of discount for bulk orders facilitated by JellyFish. Purchases earn the discount with is split 50/50 with the JellyFish buyer. So there is a buying incentive through JellyFish. But what makes this fun???

Well, for periods throughout the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Players’ (any JellyFish user) vote on particular products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product discount increases until the fixed number of units are sold. The game involves trying to be the last buyer in and therefore get the highest discount before the deal is done. The top players are then ranked and points are awarded based on the top ten finishers. In addition, observers can guess at what the final discout will be and get a chance to spin a virtual roulette wheel to win an additional prize.

In the game that I observed, buyers were after a PlayStation 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% discount. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but possible prizes ranged from a Wii, to various other electronic doodads in the $250-500 range.

Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addictive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shopping. The idea of consolidating demand and getting retailers to bid for your business has been explored using the net by a variety of startups over the past few years. The interesting thing about Smack Shopping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pinpoints that which makes the eBay experience exciting and fun. The other aggregators made their intention to deliver shopping value clear, but perhaps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.

Lucky for me, Canadians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They promise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many merchants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Canadians can use normal Jelly Fish shopping, and determine whether individual merchants will ship to Canada.

In the process of doing some a quick market survey I was struck by the tendency of some software publishers to coin unique acronyms to establish their technological credentials. To be honest I am not unfamiliar with this process and did my own fair share of this in another life, but I was surprised when seeing it from the other side.

The basic proposition is this: You find yourself in a marketspace with a number of competitors that, in the eyes of your potential customers, basically accomplish the same task. Higher, faster, cheapper, more efficiently are all wonderful things, but are open to direct comparison and the actual business case is much too complex to address using such simple descriptors. So, what to do? The answer is to describe earth-shattering proprietary process using clever acronyms, some of which may actually contain real words, that suggest that you have a scientific basis for differentiation.

The reality is some of these terms and descriptions of process or method are quite valid and simply expressed in a rather abstract way. Others one suspects are actually ‘full of sound and fury, signifying, not much of anything actually real.’ How can one cut through the marketing smoke?

Examples to follow…

We had a short spate of conversation at the TAPoR meeting on forms of disaggregation (and I guess corollorarily demand aggregation) when looking at online swap/consolidation sites. I cam across a further swap site this morning that illustrated this concept…and is one more example of the way in which internet collectivization is changing normal modes of economic exchange through contractual intermediation and introducing another layer of rentier behaviour. CellSwapper, is a P2P exchange that connects people wanting to get out of long term cell phone plans with those looking to pick up a shorter term plan without the costs of activation of of cancellation. That is they are trading on that thin layer of administrative costs that carriers demand. The site is unfortunately for me only available to the US, but they are promising broader geographic coverage shorty. A further form of aggregation is demonstrated by the microlending sites such as the two that I mentioned in an earlier post, Zopa and Prosper.

I have long been a fan of the Food Guru podcasts. This was one of the first video podcasts that I started to download. Peter Harmon, the presenter kept these up on a weekly basis for quite a while then last Fall there was a huge dry period. Then they seem to have started up again recently - cheers. For the last week I was getting download errors and figured that maybe he was going dark again. But suddenly today I have re-established contact and three new video recipes popped my way. One for brown sugar salmon (sounds yummy) a very nice blue cheese and caramelized onion buschetta and the subject that drove me to blog this…an absolutely decadent sounding pizza.
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It’s always good to be reminded of tips, techniques, both basic and advanced. I was shopping for new remote clicker for my Dad today and so as I am want to do did a quick survey of what the current state of the art is in clickers. I picked one up myself a few years back, the least expensive I could find, a Versapoint Wireless Remote but one which i am quick pleased with. But I digress. The PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques blog is a wonderful compendium of tips itself and links to a huge number of other sites. That’s the ‘chef’ of the site to the right. A site worth checking out.