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.