Technology. Without Error

1. Twitter is bigger!
2. Follower/Subscriber count does not matter on friendfeed.
3. The general quality of content on friendfeed is better than that on twitter (ok..I made this up..I don’t have any scientific data to prove this)
4. To maximize their reach, spammers believe they need followers
5. Friendfeed is a content aggregator. Spam bots and ppl would have to be on more than one network to actually utilize friendfeed.
6. Many spammers do not even know of friendfeed, Most spammers just copy what other spammers do. (spammers are not as educated as you think they are!)
7. Friendfeed caters to an exclusive audience, while twitter serves almost everyone
8. Most people on friendfeed know how to combat spam!
9. There is spam on friendfeed. And you can report it (instead of just blocking them)
10. Some spam still gets through, like this blog post..and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I came across Strands, thanks to Turoczy, as he was giving out invites to the beta version of Strands and my experience with it has been wonderful. Since, Strands is in private beta, I did not have many invites to offer my friends. I wanted to share my experience with others, so the best way was an interview with the Strands team. Part I is with Kalong Wong and Part II is with John Rogers from Strands.

This is part 1 of the Strands interview. Interviewed is Kalong Wong, from the user’s perspective.

Me: What is strands? (your point of view)

Kalong: Strands is a website where you can display your life in the form of notes, blogs, images, websites, videos, etc.- most everything you do online. Your content can show your followers what kind of things you like and what type of person you are.

Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?

Kalong: Yes I have dropped by different aggregation sites like SocialThing! and Friendfeed but never signed up. One thing I noticed about Strands that is different from those sites is that we focus on content more than social connections. We are more about discovering new things, finding new websites, places to shop, interesting videos, etc. than staying updated with the latest girlfriend dramas.

Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers

Kalong: Strands.com also hosts moneyStrands (in beta, similar to Mint.com), StrandsSocialPlayer (music recommendations via certain cell phones), StrandsBusinessSolutions, MyStrands (music recommendation network) and partyStrands. I work very specific with Strands so I’m refraining to go into detail about the other branches I don’t know very much about.

Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?

Kalong: Oh dear lord I’m not even sure what Web 2.0 is! I only took one Computer Science class my whole life, freshman year of college, and completely failed. The only F on my transcript.

Me: For a user, the most important aspect is convenience.

Kalong: Yes, right now since the site is in beta, many of the functions aren’t quite convenient yet and maybe it even takes quite some effort to share things on Strands.com. This should improve considerably by the time we release it to the public. Adding feeds should be much easier.

Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?

Kalong: Don’t worry too much about finding your friends on here! Use Strands as a way gather your internet activities into a display for others discover and share. Use Strands to discover other people with the same interests and stay updated with the best content.

Kalong: I hope this helps! Sorry I couldn’t answer all of them. Let me know if you need any clarification. Good luck!

Part II of the Interview

Interviewed is John Rogers, Social Media Lead at Strands

Me: What is strands? (your point of view)

John: A life-streaming and discovery site designed to bring together the online services you use, share them with friends, and discover what’s hot among the people you care about.

Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?

John: We see aggregation as a commodity, anyone can do it. The real question is what value can be added to the data you aggregate. We want to put some intelligence on top of this data by adding personalized recommendations. The key differentiator here is that our goal is to help people discover new things, and we provide them tools to do that (filters, hot posts, and soon recommendations).

Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers

John: Some of our services: The MyStrands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. It has recently received Nokia’s Mobile Rules Award http://blog.strands.com/2008/03/19/mobile-rules-winner/

MoneyStrands, which will be launched soon, aims to help people better manage their personal finances (http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/29/moneystrands-expensr/). Business solutions: we help online retailers use our recommendation technology, so they can in turn help their customers discover the content on their site

Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?

John: Users can generate content both on Strands and on other services, and distribute it to the people they care about on Strands with the freedom to share and re-use.

Me: Content aggregation services are the incarnations of information overload. comment.

John: We play in a very noise arena What sets us apart from other players, our recommendation engine, will help deliver content a user likes, and at the same time eliminate some of the noise they don’t. The signal-to-noise ratio is key, and something that is always on our mind.

Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?

John: Invite your friends (everyone in the private beta is given some invites), and tell us what you think! A service like Strands is much more valuable with friends, and we love hearing from our fans. Listening to our early users is a great source of inspiration for us, and it is fairly regular that we will send a cool Strands t-shirt to a fan just to say “thanks”

The following questions directed only at John

Me: What is strands according to you?

John: Strands is a discovery platform, consisting of aggregation, recommendation, and display engines

Me: When is strands likely to be ready for public release?

John: Soon

Me: Can we expect strands to work along with mystrands,  money strands or other services in the near future?

John: Ideally everything Strands will exist under one roof – one account, one username, one password. — There is a natural fit between our music discovery service MyStrands and our new life-streaming service, and soon they will be closely integrated. But when it comes to integrating social media with personal finance there are some reservations. Understandably some people aren’t comfortable mixing to two, and we wouldn’t want to do anything to add to this. Ultimately, we will listen to our fans and go from there.

Me: During times of high volume, most services go down. How do you plan to combat this?

John: Strands.com has been engineered from the ground up to scale, our #1 goal was to build a scalable design from the get go. Having this as a design  priority and knowing we expect huge #’s of users and items, we have designed for future, and this should help us alleviate some of the issues other services have experienced.

Me: The interface of strands looks great and feels great as well? How did you manage to come up with something like this?

John: Thanks Rohit, glad you like it! We’ve heard lots of great feedback about the interface, and don’t plan on straying far from what we have now. The way I see it, we came to this idea by listening to the experts and designing for the novice. We want to provide all the tools to give a technologist everything they want, but at the same time keep it simple and clean enough for a novice to enjoy the service as well.

Me: How is Strands technology superior to other services?

John: We could tell you but then we would have to kill you No seriously, we have been focusing on developing recommendation technologies for a while… our differentiator is our focus on personalization.

Twitter is down from today morning…Out of touch with the tweet world. All I see on my twitter home are the catbot, birds and the broken piece of electrical connection..On the plus side, saves a lot of my time. Twitter is a time waster, no matter how much you try not to think that way. The morning has been really productive in the absence of twitter. Why does twitter go down? Some of the reasons that the twitter folk have given us:

• Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart
• This was a planned maintenance project
• finished a major infrastructure project tonight
• some caching issues—namely, the /home timeline cache wasn’t being updated correctly for everyone
• and many many more…

All of the above are from Twitter’s official blog..But the fact is easy to understands, the network infrastructure is too weak to support the kind of volume which twitter handles. I read somewhere that twitter’s staff are not enough to support the network, which could be true as I note and quote from one of their official blogs

“I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That’s only a handful of people, but we were all there all night”

All said and done, I wish twitter would get its already upgraded infrastructure upgraded enough to handle the traffic or atleast give us prior information on scheduled outages and estimated downtimes (not that they have to be accurate). But, there is one thing which I read somewhere, “We need twitter more than it needs us.”

Awww…twitter is still down, ground control: “may”day…

Update June 25, 2008

Twitter now has whales instead of the bird and the broken robot. And here is a workaround which twitter has brought in to reduce load.

I cannot click on replies.

twitter is stressed out a little bit now..so replies is disabled.

Now, thats stress management at twitter. But, since we have the site status available on the twitter blog, I know that twitter is down. But, I would like twitter to do something about it, rather than telling me that the site is down…I  also note that now API requests have been limited to 20 per hour.

When I going through other blogs at random, I realised that people often put up a slice of their personal life on their blogs. I came across, family albums, messages to near and dear ones…love letters and so on…These were all available on the internet for the whole world to see and hear. I realized that it is the human mind’s need to shout out loud to the wide open world that would have initialized such an urge.
My blog would of course tell you a great many things about the kind of person I am, maybe even more than my facebook or orkut profile would tell you…I would not have discussed these with even my closest of friends…which could be true with many others…You might go out for a movie with a friend, share a lot of secrets, discuss things…still you would put lots of stuff online which you would’ve in fact not discussed with anyone….I didn’t even think about this post 3 minutes ago. But now that I have thought of it, I have decided to work on this.
Which brings us to the core idea behind this post. I haven’t worked so much on this topic so it’ll be sometime before this blog gets completed. For now, all I have is this
The wikipedia article
Its not very helpful, since wikipedia still has only a stub regarding the topic. I did my research on the web and came across this great blog on the subject. I also learnt that the phenomenon I was trying to express in the earlier paragraph of this post is known as the disinhibition effect.
Go here for more: Psycyber’s blog
While on the topic of cyber psychology; I did come across this neat little article titled blogging may have psychological benefits. The article is definitely worth a read (all the more so, if you are blogger yourself)