The Ayman and Naaman Show

Naaman is being persuaded - and even more excitingly, serving as a bridge for persuasion! BJ Fogg and gang had long pointed out the potential of Facebook (and social media) as a persuasive platform. The Causes application on Facebook had been using persuasive elements from the start, and has a significant following (20,000,000 monthly active according to Facebook stats). Causes is cleverly using the social influence potential of Facebook to draw people into supporting various non profits and similar efforts (critics and cynics would say “to satisfy one’s concious while sitting comfortably at a computer screen”). I don’t know when they started to use the birthday information on Facebook, but that’s smart, too: the birthday is arguably the one day a year I have any kind of influence over my friends, if any… right Ayman? Here’s what I got:

Happy (Almost) Birthday!

Thanks to Facebook, in two weeks all of your friends will see that it’s your birthday. Instead of just writing on your wall, or giving you something you don’t need, what if they had a chance to help a cause you believe in? Whether you want to raise money for clean water in Ethiopia, vaccinations for children in Haiti, or a safe home for a puppy in Mississipi, with a Birthday Cause your friends can give in honor of your special day.

Select your Birthday Cause today: Get Started - Learn More

Have a very happy birthday,
The Causes Team

That’s pretty smart. What should I choose? And yes, my birthday is coming up!

In other persuasion news, using YouTube this time (thanks Sagee), Monty Python wants to both free their content and get you to pay for it. Pretty cool assuming they will make all content available and will not fight fans that upload content that the MP’s do not want on the site.

If you live around Pomona, come see me talk today at 4.15 pm in the CS Colloquium.

http://www.cs.pomona.edu/colloquium.html

Oh and check out the past talk schedule.  Seems attendance is mandatory for my talk and optional for Buzz Aldrin.  Crazy!

So I noticed a few things happened while I was dancing in the streets of San Francisco. First, Naaman posted to our humble blog without mentioning me in the post.  Second, my friend the Practicalist posted several maps of “New York Times Election Results: County by County“.  The maps are indeed beautiful.  But I thought to myself to see the change.  This leads my mind down a wonderful path where I envisioned a beautiful movie done up in Processing and leaves you, the reader, with a very rough difference map I forced Photoshop to spit out.

A few things to note. I’ll point out that I’m a Photoshop expert. It takes all kinds of mad skills to make it produce something quite ugly. Next, notice the bright pinkish spot growing around Arkansas: that’s a Blue to Red shift that’s been happening in the past 16 years.  Brown colors are a shift to Blue from Red.

Maybe I’ll make something more pretty next time with more granularity. Meanwhile, if you’re headed to CSCW, stop me or naaman and say hi!

I haven’t written about Fire Eagle in a while but: this is supercool. When we started thinking about FireEagle this was a large portion of the vision we have in mind - information services that tune in on your location and offering you slightly better services - not necessarily radically better - just slightly better - but because of the ease of intergration, provide a location-based service that other would not be available.

So now, my phone talks to Fire Eagle and tells it where I am, while Headup recognizes objects (such as band names) on websites and tell me about nearby events, or shows my photos taken nearby when I visit Flickr.

Now this is the part where Naaman takes credit for introducing the Tals[1] who run Headup/Semantinet to Fire Eagle (first) and the team (second). A beginning of a beautiful friendship, I hope.

[1] Seriously - two guys named Tal.

LinkedIn is one of those sites which, if you still have a job and a you do have life, you only see if something happens (e.g., somebody sends you an invitation). The other day, I got (yet another) invitation, clicked through, and actually even browsed around (to try to figure out if I actually know the person that invited me - it wasn’t Ayman).

They had an ad on that page (bastards!). The ad was actually intriguing - it was designed as a survey, sponsored by Mazda, with a simple question: do you think your car should reflect who you are, or is it just for getting yourself around. Curiosity won over, and I clicked (which one you think I chose? I am not the Racing Geek, remember).

Now the interesting part. Because LinkedIn are so successful in getting your real-life information (jobs, gender, whatever) they were showing the results (”just for getting around” winning 60-40!) broken down to various categories: size of company, position, type of industy. This shows you what a powerful business ad platform LinkedIn could be - for example, you could advertise only to mid-level managers of high-tech companies size 100-500.

On the other hand, if you want to advertise to the youth, you are in the wrong place. Dead wrong:

I totally agree with FiveThiryEight’s Nate, arguing against broadcasting the presidential debate while including on-screen immediate responses from focus groups. It is one thing to have a Hack The Debate discussion showing Twitter messages over the video stream - this is social media, participation that reflect opinion and is expected to be biased. However, continuously showing responses of so-called “testing groups” (shown in the bottom of the screen below) is something entirely different. Not only the opinions of this group could not possibly represent the population or even the undecided voters, as Nate correctly points out. Worse, the presentation completely robs the debate from its status as the last sanctuary of actualcontent (Palin aside) instead of meta-analysis.

Mindless random crowd likey Obama response!

The elections are not a spectator sport. CNN wants us to believe it’s all about the race, while it should be all about the issues. The debate was the last place where you could really hear about the issues (Palin aside). Even following the #current Twitter messages during the debate showed a reasonable sense of discussion - mostly personal views and comments on the content. But on CNN? It was all about winning and losing, in the most immediate and stupid sense of the word. Couldn’t take my eyes off the screen! This is no social media, even if it has people in it.

media lab’s take on markets: RED
Originally uploaded by leahbuechley

An ambient display gives a clear indication (maybe for the first time ever).

Quite a few Twitter-related items in the news today. Twitter themselves finally take the charge instead of playing catchup with people building on their platform. The Election Center brings together all election-related updates from all over Twitter and allows non-twitterites to participate in the discussion. Nice! I like the way the messages appear without the need to refresh (definitely a feature to be added on the Twitter account pages). That’s obviously some code and ideas they inherited when they picked up the formerly-unofficial-Twitter-API-provided, Summize.

Speaking of election, Twitter and Summize… In my Rutgers group we actually started crawling the election-related Twitter messages quite a few weeks ago using the Summize (now “Twitter Search“) API. We will probably have a decent dataset (which we will be happy to share) when this thing is over. Maybe, given more time, we can do something more interesting. Dog, please let it be over already. And while you’re at it, don’t make McCain the president (he’s definitely losing on the Twitter follower count).

While Twitter’s election center is pretty simple and nice, one additional thing Twitter could have used in their Election center is Practicalist Ben’s word-cloud visualization for Twitter. Yes, another word-cloud, Ben admits in regret. But a damn nice one. Better than the cloud Twitter are featuring on top of their page, and the idea of deriving a cloud for each keyword (try: Obama vs. Palin), and the higher refresh frequency, and the better visuals… I like Ben’s better.

I hope Twitter wrote the code for the “Election Central” generally enough so that they can launch an arbirtrary set of “centrals” later. Why just election central when you can have the Twitter “Hurricane Ike” central, the Twitter “Olympic Games” central etc. In fact, why won’t let the user set up those “central” sites that collect all the information about their topic of choice? People are already aggregating messages outside of Twitter, anyway.

[Update: Twitter founder said they might do just that to this NY Times reporter].

Bleecker Street

Originally uploaded by aymanshamma

Question to our readers (Frank, I’m looking in your general direction): How come HDTV broadcasts a good 4-5 seconds behind its analog counterpart?

While hanging out with Naaman on Bleecker St, we noticed the bar had both HD and non-HD sets playing a football game. Those watching the game were huddled around the analog screens as the HD signal was brighter, clearer, and 4 seconds behind the live broadcast analog signal.

It was fun to watch them turn to the HDTV for an ad hoc replay, but we were left wondering ‘why such a big delay?’ Is it from the station? Is it buffering packets? Enlighten us if you can…

That actually made me happy. For years I’ve been telling any Yahoo! who wanted to listen that Start Wearing Purple would make a great Yahoo! theme song. While my preaching did not, in all likelihood, have any influence on the matter, Yahoo! just launched a Start Wearing Purple campaign, sporting one of the most beautiful web projects I have seen recently. And the said song in many variations. And more, for example a geotagging-Flickr-bike which I actually had the pleasure to help with (brainstorming with the super-talented folks at Uncommon Projects) before I left Yahoo!. Oh, yes, I did leave Yahoo! a few weeks ago. But more on that later…

p.s. Two positive posts in a row. I’m losing my edge. Ayman, do something.