Author Archives: ohad

Facebook, value added services

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i think one of the next things Facebook could do is offer services to companies who have lots of users already in Facebook.
it’s funny because Google is racing to create an offering of online office/email/calendar/whatever and trying to sell this to small/medium/large businesses.
what advantage does Facebook have ? credentials. take Siemens for example, they have 6,000 employees already ON Facebook. these are 6,000 verified and authenticated users. Siemens
doesn’t need to do anything to verify them (as long as they trust Facebook’s email verification).
so wouldn’t it be ingenious if Facebook licensed or bought some online office suite, some online file management tool and a wiki, and offered these as Value-Added-Services to the companies who already have tons of users ON Facebook. These services would live in an isolated environment accessible only to that companie’s users (easy, according to email address).
instead of Siemens having to buy, deploy, host and maintain some corporate Wiki/file-sharing/whatever, just license it from Facebook, since it’s as if everything is already well
integrated there.
the next thing will be some work from the Facebook side to try and synchronize the Facebook
user repository with a company’s outlook address-book or whatever it is they use there.
this could mean some real $ for Facebook.

The big boys aren’t afraid to use Flash

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Flash has been used for many years, mainly in online advertising, then in online games and most recently in online video sites.
I personally think Flash made its big real debut when the big players realized that ~99% of consumers had a powerful video decoder built right into their browser, yes, Flash FLV.
Macromedia missed out big-time on monetizing FLV, which was one of the technological forces behind Youtube’s $1.5Bn. Macromedia sells Flash-Media-Servers, but nobody uses these as the Flash clients can also play FLVs ‘streamed’ over standard HTTP connections, funny.
In any case, this is no Flash-101, this is me telling you that i’m feeling something new in the ‘hood. Like I said, Flash was used for banners/games/videos, always there to provide some sort of applicative feature.
Recently, meaning in the past month or so, I’ve been noticing a whole different level of Flash adoption by major sites. It started with Google who used Flash for their street-view.
Google are the holly-grail, torch-carrying hero when it comes to utilizing DHTML and avoiding Flash (another fine examples is Yahoo’s Pipes [thanks kevin cheng for the input]). Google needed raw processing power on the client to stitch together these panoramic images, Flash was the only option, and they went with it, kudos. This is still an applicative use though.
Then, in a matter of weeks, Youtube and Amazon both introduce Flash as a core component of their main pages. I’d think Amazon were copying it off Youtube, but i’ll give them the credit.

what’s next ?
well, I guess a whole bunch of sites are going to copy the clean, apple’ish, glassy, reflective sort of item panel that Youtube and Amazon are using. The field is open, developers can do endless things with Flash, and when large sites start using this sort of content on their main pages, we (the users) are sure to have a sleeker experience.
It’s important to mention how Flash content is not indexed by search-engines, although that should be easily fixed using something that provides alternate text for embeds (anything like that being used ?).

listplow

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i recently understood that i want to stop sending links to friends by email and wanted them to be able to consume my ‘stuff’ in a much more convenient manner.

i tried a few existing bookmarking services but no one gave me just what i wanted, so as i always do, i set out to do it on my own. the good thing about this, is that i’ve created something that serves a very specific purpose, i called it listplow.
my requirements were:
  1. sharing something must take exactly 1 click.
  2. the resulting list of shared items must be easily consumed.
  3. this thing should have minimum or no GUI at all.
the first requirement is satisfied using a custom bookmarklet that contains encrypted information used to identify who you are. once you drag this bookmarklet to your  bookmarks toolbar all you need to do is click it, and the page you’re on is added to your listplow. if you happen to have some text selected on the page, that text will be used as the description for the item.
for the second requirement i’ve created two major ways to consume. the first is simple RSS, which i believe is best used in my friend’s feed-readers. a friend who likes my flow of links can now add me in netvibes/pageflakes/igoogle/etc’. the moment i add something to my listplow (with a single click), it will show up on my friends reader in a matter of minutes, depending on the configuration of his RSS reader.
the second interesting way is a little piece of ebmed code that essentially allows showing listplows on most blogging/social-networks/etc sites. for a good example, look at my listplow showing on the right hand side of my blog. this is cool, because the moment i listplow something, and somebody goes to my site, he/she  sees it there, which is just cool.
the third requirement is also a core part of the process. as you can see, there is no GUI along the way. when i go through my day and listplow things, i don’t go through any listplow gui, i don’t answer any question, i just go on with my stuff.
for me its a great way to communicate what i plow through on the web, its easier for my  friends and online-consumers to digest this (much better than a constant flow of emails).
what’s next ?
i’m thinking of adding a way for a listplower to delete/modify links. the nice thing is that i don’t want to force him to do it from www.listplow.com, but i’ll allow him to do it directly from any embedded site (more soon).
also, i’d like to offer statistics on how many people consume the feed/embed tag. this can be found in other places, but it would be nice to get some built-in statistics on the consumption of this.
so, what do you do ? go ahead to www.listplow.com, create an account in one simple step, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar and start listplowing.
oh, and don’t forget to send your friends the address of your new personal RSS feed, or just embed your list into your existing blog.

OMG, LinkedIn has clusters

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the moment has come, i’m really impressed.

someone wanted to connect to me in linkedin. i went in, clicked OK, and then i get a screen saying this:

‘hey man, want to connect to some people who may be your friends:’

and then it lists 10 people, 7 of which are my friends to which i’m not yet connected!!!

holy molly talk about collective wisdom and its gathering, these guys just created clusters of everybody’s friends and figured out 10 people that have a high chance of being undiscovered friends of mine.

way to go linkedin!