Sep 16

Google could provide the ultimate matchmaking service if it wanted to

Google, Ponderings 3 Comments »

Check out the full list of Google services and then think about one that’s not on there now but that could be in a big way: Google Soulmate Finder. If you subscribe to the notions that a) there’s a person out there who uniquely complements you and b) it’s possible to qualify/quantify experiences, traits & behaviors to identify that person and match him/her to you, then Google is in probably the best position of anyone to help you find your soul mate.

Here are the four main reasons why they could (and may choose to at some point) pull this off:

  1. Hands down they have the most comprehensive, indexable data set of both explicit and implicit behavioral, personality and intention info in the world. And they have it for a huge population. Folks drink the Google Koolaid in varying degrees (I would be best classified as an intravenous Google Koolaid consumer at this point) but for even the people who only use search, they have access to an incredible amount of material that could be mined for insight into what makes one tick. For instance, for users of Gmail & Google Apps they know: where you’ve been, what you care about, who you correspond with, activities that define you, etc.
  2. Their core expertise is in serving relevant results – they rule at pattern matching and developing algorithms that weight results based on what’s working. Their whole search business revolves around improving the quality of results that are delivered and they have more expertise than anyone on refining results via empirical data.
  3. Were they to offer a matchmaking service they would have access to a pretty interesting feedback loop by virtue of knowing how things worked out. Their matches might suck at first but pretty quickly the AI could validate which algorithms yielded successful results because they’d know which people stayed together. Other matchmaking services have to rely upon explicit input from the participants to know how well the suggestions worked – Google has data that gives them this implicitly. That means the speed and accuracy with which they could iterate their algorithms isn’t gated by reliance upon explicit feedback from participants.
  4. They’re motivated to do things that draw in new users & drive increased usage across all services. Their stated goal is to index the world’s info and make it more accessible. Anything they can do that gets more people hooked on using their services helps their cause. The matchmaking service would be a killer app for both attracting new people and getting existing ones to further embrace all the Google services. If they reliably demonstrated a string of successes in matching people, I guarantee you’d see a bunch of the people that currently subscribe to paid dating sites flock to the Google equivalent if it were a) free and b) more effective. Provided Google sold the story well about “the more you do on our system, the better the quality of our matches will be,” those new users would be heavily motivated to go all-in on using Google services. They would pick up not just new users but die-hard ones motivated by the promise of finding their soulmate.

Now my hunch is that a significant countervailing force here that prevents them from doing this now is the “creepiness factor.” It would make it all too real how much they truly know about you if they were to offer this service today and it might actually have a detrimental effect of driving users to defect from their service. This is definitely something that changes with the times though, we’ve seen the “boiling frog comfort” effect in the last four years with Facebook. Kids growing up today will have never known life without exposing everything via social networks and may be more comfortable with this type of service. At any rate, if you see a heart icon and the “Google Matchmaker” app appear on Google labs, you heard the prediction here first ;-)

Apr 27

Which commenting channels yield the most productive conversations?

Nerd, Ponderings No Comments »

Matt Asay wrote a post about a month ago and I’ve been meaning to respond. He argues that the comments section on blog posts tend to devolve into ghettos of expletives and personal attacks instead of productive discussion (I agree with this part of his post). He then proposes that Twitter is the medium we should be using to hold conversations around blog posts (this is the part I take issue with). Rather than describe at length why, here’s a graphic that summarizes the argument:


Examining what’s worked empirically

I believe commenting channels can be examined on the above seven dimensions. Admittedly there is zero science behind the above chart – this is purely subjective analysis via thinking about aspects of each medium and how they contribute to effective or ineffective discussion. In thinking about groups I’ve been involved with and which ones worked well the most interesting realization is that there’s a factor outside of the qualities of the channels themselves that trumps everything here: it’s the glue of interaction beyond the channel. The most meaningful discussions I’ve been a part of were in groups where we had in-person or real-time interaction punctuated by periods of asynchronous online exchanges. AZCFUG, CFUG manager list, Cambrian House, Refresh Phoenix, AZIPA – these are all groups that produced valuable insight and relationships, every one of them anchored by a good level of accountability through real-time interaction outside of the online channels.

When you strip everything away it’s not even the real-time aspect that’s critical though- it’s the accountability / reputation factor that ultimately drives quality discussion. When you know your words stick with you wherever you go, you behave differently. You show respect, humility, ensure what you’re typing actually adds unique value, etc. Remove this factor and you get the faceless, ghetto problem of Digg comments and the troll activity on our city’s newspaper site. You lose pride in ownership, start getting a few broken windows and the whole neighborhood adopts a license to behave badly. BUT… Twitter is not the antidote folks- starting a personal blog and supplementing it with Twitter is. Twitter alone is too short-form of a medium to communicate real substance and the “one-way follow” aspect makes it impossible to see the whole conversation as an outsider (unless people happen to be using explicit #hashtags). Yes, it addresses the accountability concern but it does so at the expense of introducing new issues of an “ADHD/Sound-byte-speak” and fragmented dialogue for the people involved. It’s like having UN delegates hold a debate where everyone can talk into their mic but nobody knows who’s hearing who because each set of headphones is tuned pickup a select fraction of the participants involved.

So what do you suggest?

The question becomes, “short of being able to have face-to-face interaction serve as an anchor of civility in discussion between online exchanges, what do you propose as the most effective means of holding productive debate online?” If you look at the above graphic you’ll understand why I believe the answer is to return to using the personal blog w/ a combination of verified comments for short responses and trackbacks for more substantive responses. Twitter has IMHO shoplifted people’s mojo and derailed this practice that used to be commonplace. I believe we’ll see Twitter fatigue and a resurgence of the way it used to be with volleys of blog posts that mutually link amongst one another. Facebook link shares and Tweets are pointers to content – like a fluid, more social RSS feed. But the real substance of discussion has always and will continue to reside in blogs.

Mar 17

Towards a more useful high school experience

Ponderings 2 Comments »

If you were tasked with re-architecting the typical high school experience with the end goal of “better equipping students for whatever they do next,” what changes would you make? Don’t confine your ideas to simple curriculum changes either, go nuts. Change anything about the full experience. Some aspects to consider:

  • how are classes delivered?
  • what is the best use of classroom time and what interaction can be conducted electronically?
  • how are parents involved?
  • how are grades determined?
  • how are grades reported?
  • is there another system besides standardized testing that will yield objective results?
  • is striving for objective results even the real goal?
  • how early is too early to fork the paths of college-prep hopefuls from others?
  • what skills are timeless and is there a better approach than the current one for developing these?
  • what’s the new interaction model look like in the classroom?
  • if the agile manifesto were written from the perspective of teachers today, how would it read?
  • what aspects of how classes are rendered is completely legacy and can be thrown out
  • are there any fundamental sea changes occurring with skill development like shift from knowledge-retention as a goal to development of knowledge acquisition strategies?
  • how do you amplify “street smarts,” social skills & intangible benefits?
  • what can be entirely eliminated from the existing system?

Every time I hear the phrase “education reform” I cringe. Not because I don’t believe it needs reforming, but because the people throwing the phrase around are thinking in terms of “How can we boost standardized test scores? How can we graduate more students? What counseling programs can be introduced to reduce dropouts?” In other words, they’re thinking purely in terms of optimizations to the existing flawed system. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” comes to mind. These people unfortunately suffer from the same “curse of knowledge” that will guarantee their thinking remains constrained to the current paradigm.

Try this Innovation Games exercise: Try to imagine forward ten years. The kids that are currently in high school now will be a few years into the workforce (and possibly more if they skipped the college step). Hold an image of prosperity. Picture a scene of advanced living standards, a world successfully meeting challenges from all sides with our environment, urban development, natural resources, international relations, medical challenges, etc. Picture the younger people who are either responsible for these advancements or who are delivering the labor to render these developments. NOW…

Project yourself back ten years from this future point of prosperity and ask “What must the high school environment for these young adults had to have looked like for them to develop the qualities they possess today?” Note: this is a waaay different question than the typical “what should we change today about schools?”

I haven’t thought through all these suggestions entirely but here are some raw ideas that I’ve been thinking about:

Curriculum substitutions

Allow students to nix their current electives and choose from the following:

  • basic accounting & finance: reconcile statements, concepts of interest, budgeting, investing
  • speed reading
  • typing
  • practical web knowledge: effective search techniques, web fundamentals, intro web apps
  • GTD methodology
  • collaborative web applications 201
  • negotiating
  • persuasive writing
  • public speaking
  • sketching
  • team collaboration
  • scientific method
  • critical reading
  • logical fallacies
  • entrepreneurship
  • personal branding
  • nutrition, health & wellness
  • money management
  • time management
  • stress management
  • basic auto maintenance
  • minor home repairs: clothing fixes, appliance maintenance
  • incentives & economics
  • career safari

While these are typically thought of as college subjects I believe they’re core enough to merit pulling them down into the latter half of high school. The fact that things like money management, critical reasoning skills, basic auto maintenance and time management were never taught has always seemed like a major omission. And how obvious is it to have a course that exposes students to the breadth of careers available and plant early seeds which the student can investigate? While my high school experience was 90% quality, we had courses like Biology, Calculus and European history which I would have gladly traded in a heartbeat for any of the above.

Interaction model changes

To me it’s clear the interaction model needs to move away from the primarily unidirectional “hub and spoke” teacher-broadcasting-to-students approach. It needs to move towards a clustered student-to-student group mesh interaction with the teacher as facilitator. The immediate response is likely “wouldn’t this just be pure chaos with blind leading the blind?” The key is to think of this mesh spanning vertically across grades. Look to the interaction model of a martial arts dojo where experienced students must teach smaller groups of novice students in order to advance to their next belt. When you must learn something to the point at which you can teach it to others, it necessitates an entirely different level of understanding (not to mention it amplifies the power of your teaching force and the new “teachers” are much closer in demographic profile to their students and therefore better able to relate).

Course goal changes

The concept of courses as we know them today seems at best geared towards “imparting knowledge” and at worst “teaching to the test.” Perhaps the goal of school needs to be rethought more in terms of one’s “essence discovery,” cultivating raw talents, inspiring students to seek to develop these and most importantly, getting to a point of being excited to pursue whatever is next? We need to think of educating kids more like developing an athlete. I had this discussion with a good friend over lunch the other day: it seems like schooling for us mostly consisted of loading our mental computers up with software. The game now has changed and it’s more about developing our CPU/RAM capacity, installing a better OS and learning strategies for finding the software we need at runtime.

Grading model changes

To support the above goal, the concept of grades needs to be reassessed entirely. Given how the world works clinging to standardized testing is like if eBay were to discard its peer rating system in favor of a 100pt multiple-choice test administered to each buyer to determine buyer ratings. Sure, it’s a more standardized approach… but that’s all it is. It sacrifices meaningfulness for the preservation of “standards.” I don’t have a concrete proposal for what this new system should be but I know when something’s broken and standardized testing (especially the AIM’s test) is horrifically broken. We need to consider moving to a market-driven peer-review type grade system. Investigate marketplaces like Elance and “asymmetric follow” systems like Twitter to get ideas here.

Changes to Parent involvement

When I was in high school we had a parent teacher conference once a semester. One night. Likely the only interaction our folks would have with our teachers (unless we really f’d up in class that semester). With all the low-friction collaborative tech that’s available these days there has to be a way to channel more meaningful input to the parents and get more pro-active involvement out of them. Invested parents can compensate for a crappy teacher (I know this first hand) while it’s nearly impossible for the best teachers in the world to overcome a crappy parenting situation. And involved parents are better parents. Private microblogging platforms are what I’m envisioning here.

Getting Real

Cordon off at least 1/4 of the time for teaching skills in a Startup Weekend-esque way (ie. not explicitly but rather via pursuit of finishing a real project). Pick from non-profit endeavors or other public works projects and deliver some aspect as part of your class. Fieldtrips weren’t always about ditching the tedium of the classroom and goofing off, they were reminders of how what you were learning was applicable to real life. There’s a lot of room to move what’s currently being taught in classrooms into field exercises. The result is students that are more engaged and learning that gets more deeply encoded and anchored with real experience so it can be recalled later.

Anyways, this post is getting too long. I have a bunch of other ideas, but what do you think? What changes will have needed to have occurred for the workforce ten years from now to be flourishing?

Mar 09

Email now suffers the problem of carrier pigeons

Nerd, Ponderings 3 Comments »

It can’t be assumed it will reach its intended recipient.

It’s not actually a new phenomenon but it seems the deliverability of application-generated email has fallen to a point where a letter sent via the US Postal Service is more likely to reach its intended recipient. Let me explain.

Many services (including our own) use email as an integral part of the service itself. Account activation, critical system notifications, trial key issuance, software update alerts, billing-related communications: email is the transport mechanism we rely upon because it’s realtime and it’s the lowest common denominator for reaching a user. The recent preponderance of SPAM however and (consequent aggressiveness of spam filters) has rendered email unreliable for this purpose.

Person-generated emails still seem to make it 99% of the time but I’d guess the deliverability of our automated emails is maybe 85%. In scenarios of account activation it’s merely an annoyance but in scenarios of proactive notifications of important events this is a real issue. Failing to receive those communications can have real material impact to the customer.

How are folks dealing with the unreliability of email in their apps? Are you staying within the realm of email and seeking better ways to ensure delivery? Exploring alternate communication mediums like SMS or IM’s? Offering personalized, protected RSS feeds of account activity? Or has someone developed a web service that can launch carrier pigeons?

Jan 22

You Are (not) Here: the perils of LBS

Nerd, Ponderings 5 Comments »

I saw this post from my friend Andrew Hyde on the homepage of Tech Meme today and judging by the number of reactions he got his story struck a nerve. Long story short: in the course of using LBS apps like Bright Kite and Foursquare to announce his location he picked up a stalker who would coincidently “bump into him” wherever he went. Creepy.

So the “people knowing where I am and stalking me” scenario is one potential negative implication of using these types of services. But there’s another to consider:

Not only do these services tell the world where you are, they also tell the world where you aren’t.

My friend Bill said it most eloquently the other day when I had posted this tweet:

PHX -> SFO

This is a pretty standard convention when you’re going on a trip. He cleverly responded:

Bill -> Sean’s house -> Pawn Shop -> Casino

And immediately I realized he’s right.

Twitter is just one surface area too. I also have my LinkedIn account integrated with my Tripit account so that it passively tells my contacts when and where I’m traveling. Presumably there’s no threat from people you’re connected to but as these social networks gravitate towards being more and more public (as FB has demonstrated recently) innocent location announcements to trusted friends become inadvertent invitations to burglars with remedial googling skills. Add in a little smoke screen creativity by placing a hoax Craigslist ad and you have a repeatable formula for low-risk burglaries.

Something to think about.

Dec 31

Ten IT predictions for 2010

Nerd, Ponderings 5 Comments »

psychicHere’s ten things I predict we’ll see in the IT/computing industry in 2010 (and yes, I’m biased about some given the world we live in at JumpBox):

  1. Self-healing applications become commonplace: We’ll see the rise of preventative and predictive technologies that fix problems in applications before they become fatal. Monitoring systems can already intelligently scale computing resources allocated to an application by detecting when it’s hitting a resource wall. But beyond this capability we’ll see a new set of tools arise that automatically intercedes and conducts repairs on the fly by reverting to a snapshot of the app and re-injecting data. This won’t be for financial applications and mission critical apps but it will happen for apps that need high availability with data that’s “good enough.” The net effect will be that the apps are perceived as being more stable when in reality the real hero is this adaptive repair technology behind the scenes.
  2. “Brick laying” in IT gets commoditized and the IT admin’s focus returns to architecture: By “brick laying” I mean the tedious, manual processes of maintaining and provisioning applications on the network. Virtual appliances deployed on private clouds will free admins from the menial chores of wedging the next PHP app onto an existing server and enable them to focus on proactive rather than reactive pursuits. Some admins will fear obsolescence and seek job security by keeping practices esoteric and arcane but the smart ones will realize their craft is merely shifting to the more interesting duty of architect with a focus on how to leverage things like virtualization and cloud computing to keep users happy.
  3. Balkanization of non-critical IT systems in the enterprise: We’ll see the proliferation of small, rogue collaborative applications in the enterprise. This will stem mainly from the frustration of being shackled by the company’s monolithic enterprise collaboration system. As self-serve deployment of collaborative apps becomes more feasible for non-technical folks the do-it-yourselfers will circumvent IT altogether and implement the apps that make their jobs easier. These transient, project-specific apps will blossom, serve their short-lived purpose and then vanish without ever involving IT. The more territorial admins will see this as chaos and try to retain control while the enlightened ones will realize that non-critical app governance is merely being pushed out to the edges where it belongs.
  4. Someone successfully addresses data interoperability amongst SaaS and local apps: As these silo’d supporting applications sprout up both inside and outside the firewall, it becomes important to have a way to share and manipulate data amongst them. Technologies for deploying the apps will have made them trivial to deploy but the connective tissue like REST and SOAP APIs will still be way too technical for the layperson to use. ETL (data Extraction, Transformation, Loading) products like Jitterbit, Talend and Snaplogic will put more control in the hands of the business user and empower them to do useful things with the data from these disparate apps. Laypeople will be able to snap together data streams like lego blocks and make the things they need without involving a developer. The intuitiveness of the IDE for the lego-building apps will be paramount and a superior UI will emerge and become THE way it’s done (making one of those ETL companies a boatload of money). The other piece of the puzzle will be the presentation layer for consuming the data from these ETL apps. You’ll see more press releases like this one in which the presentation/collaboration product companies join forces with the ETL companies under the realization that peanut butter and chocolate just taste better together.
  5. Minority/Majority shift between desktop apps and web apps: I don’t have the current figures on desktop vs. web application usage (and I’m too lazy to look them up) but we’ll see a majority of one’s work conducted via the browser. This has been a trend in progress for some time but 2010 is the year that the perfect storm occurs where: connectivity improves sufficiently such that latency is negligible, web apps interfaces match the usability of desktop apps, there becomes a critical mass web-based alternatives for all former desktop-only apps and the ubiquity of access becomes crucial as necessitated by remote workers and telecommuting requirements.
  6. Trials become the new black: The traditional practice for ISV’s promoting a white paper that then promotes the download of their software will be replaced by landing pages that offer immediate trials right in the browser. The advent of mechanisms for delivering a fast & convenient hands-on experience will remove friction from the sales process. There will no longer be that step where the vendor needs to convince prospective users to expend energy to download & install software for the purpose of investigation.
  7. Social networking fatigue sets in and blogging sees a resurgence: People will get burnt out on the barrage of micro-updates from services like Facebook and Twitter and divert their precious thought cycles to fewer sources that serve as “lenses” and provide more depth. Twitter and FB will continue to experience insane growth and conversations will still occur via those channels but people will feel their mojo zapped and rediscover the role of the blog.
  8. A major privacy breech casts doubt over enterprise use of SaaS for critical data: Cybercriminals will become more advanced and we’ll see a major breach of a high-profile SaaS provider like Salesforce. This will create a backlash that staunches the migration of IT operations to SaaS providers. The press will scream that the sky is falling, middle managers in IT will read articles and regurgitate headlines to CIO’s who will look for alternatives that deliver the same convenience factor of SaaS whilst satisfying the need to run on-premise. And JumpBox will be there to deliver ;-)
  9. Open Source gains mainstream acceptance: The stereotype of crappy UI’s and hard-to-use software will be gradually shed as apps like WordPress continue to deliver kickass user experience and win a huge number fans. Proprietary app vendors will cry, spread FUD and cling to a receding coastline only to see it inexorably washed away by OSS. There will still be a place for proprietary apps around niche situations but one by one the OSS substitutes for things like CMS’s and ERP systems will overpower their proprietary counterparts.
  10. An as-of-yet-to-be-discovered use of mobile phones becomes huge: In the mobile space companies will continue to build stuff nobody really wants (ie. ways to get spammed with location-specific coupons as you walk by a Starbucks). Meanwhile in a basement somewhere a small team will conceive and develop a killerapp for mobile that’s actually useful (either a consumer-facing app or a data mining app that’s sold to service providers). In the consumer space perhaps it’s a convenient 3-factor security mechanism that ensures your laptop can only be accessed when your bluetooth phone is with a few feet? Or maybe a clever way to facilitate ad hoc carpools amongst participants? On the data analysis side it may be a way for the CDC to model the spread of an epidemic via cell phones or a service for municipalities to do more intelligent traffic routing based on cell activity.

Do you agree or disagree with any of these? Do you have any predictions of your own you can share?
If you want more to ponder Read Write Web has some insightful predictions from its contributors. Here’s to computing awesomeness in 2010!

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