We’ve had some great speakers at Brickhouse and last week’s talk by Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook, part of the 2008 HackHouse talk series, was no exception. Jeff is head of data and analytics at Facebook. He spoke about his role, what his team has accomplished, and some of the challenges they face.
It was standing room only, highly technical, and totally engaging. Jeff described what it’s like to manage unprecedented growth of highly sensitive user data in a challenging business environment ("we’re collecting tens of terabytes of data every day”). The team first tried a standard MySQL database, but quickly outgrew it, and had to devise unique ways of doing weblog analysis.
I was personally interested in how Facebook deals with constantly changing data elements – it’s very hard to track historical trends when the data is always changing. At Facebook, they’ve built custom analytics packages to handle this problem and intend to release some of it open-source. Go Jeff!
Special thanks to Nikhil Bobb, from the BravoNation team, for inviting Jeff to come in and present; and to Ricky Montalvo, from the Yahoo! Developer Network, for the video.
Total runtime: 1hr:11min
download (m4v)
Editor's note: Jeff Hammerbacher's presentation, The Facebook Data team: Infrastructure and insight is also available on Slideshare. Thanks Jeff!
Popularity: 11% [?]
Salim Ismail, January 23rd, 2008 on 12:54 pm
Since last week's exhilarating news that Yahoo! will become a provider of OpenID 2.0 on January 30, 2008, there's been plenty of conversation about the implementation, the benefits, and the impact this will have on millions and millions of Yahoo! users.
Ash Patel, executive VP of platforms and infrastructure at Yahoo! says,
“Supporting OpenID gives our users the freedom to leverage their Yahoo! ID both on and off the Yahoo! network, reducing the number of usernames and passwords they need to remember and offering a single, trusted partner for managing their online identity.”
Individuals will be able to use a Yahoo! OpenID to log into sites that support the OpenID 2.0 protocol. It will be easy for Yahoo! ID holders to move seamlessly across the Web without creating new accounts for each new site they want to explore -- a huge convenience!
As of now, Yahoo! does not plan to become a relying party (a site that verifies OpenID ownership) nor does it plan to implement attribute exchange, although Yahoo! intends to expand support of OpenID as the protocol evolves.
I wanted a more in-depth understanding of OpenID. I went exploring on SlideShare -- the Web's largest community for sharing, discussing, and disseminating presentations and online slideshows -- and an amazingly useful, engaging service. (If you thought powerpoint and poetry were totally incompatible, SlideShare might just make you change your mind.)
This presentation by David Recordon and Brian Ellin is from last spring's Web 2.0 Expo conference.
You can read more about Yahoo! and OpenID on Yodel Anecdotal, where Scott Kveton, Chairman of the Board of Directors, OpenID Foundation, has guest-blogged the news.
Popularity: 8% [?]
havi hoffman, January 21st, 2008 on 12:15 pm
Last week I discovered photophlow, a web app that some are describing as the reincarnation of Flickr Live. Photophlow launched quietly over the holidays and is still in invite-only beta, built by a startup worth watching called Oortle.
Photophlow lets you share your Flickr photos in real time and interact with photographers and their photos in a dynamic chat room environment that feels at times like a virtual world. The application embraces a collection of powerful APIs from a variety of popular services - Flickr (obviously), Twitter, Tumblr - and connects to the instant messaging client of your choice. Even the venerable Yahoo! Search term extractor manages to contribute to the playful ambiance.
Photophlow wires the social and the semantic together to create delightful, unexpected interactions between pholks and their photos. Encounters take place in the present tense, but are preserved and reflected back into the Flickr photostream of the participants as new metadata -- comments, contacts, collaborations. The phph experience amplifies the power of Flickr as an open platform: this app finds new ways to unlock walled gardens of sociability (you know the profile pages I'm talking about) and cultivates an environment where truly original media-sharing activity can flourish. Talk about hybrid vigor: it's now possible to tweet a photo. Or use a Flickr machine tag such as phlow:emote=doh to express an emotion. Or get an IM notification when something happens in your photophlow room.
Photophlow was created by a handful of people, led by Neil Berkman, a veteran software developer who's been building inventive social apps and thinking about "real-time media sharing" since the days of web 1.0; when social media buzzwords were a rare commodity, an open API was hard to find, and the social graph was barely a twinkle in Dave McClure's eye.
A bit of history (from Eric Costello, who was there making it): The original Flickr evolved from a web-based massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. (If you're a Flickr user and student of URLs, as I am, you've probably wondered about the .gne file ending you sometimes see on your travels through Flickr. Now you know.). Along the way to becoming the world-class photosharing site it is today, Flickr was a flash app that let you chat about shared photos in real time. Back then, none of this interaction was preserved asynchronously. As Flickr evolved in response to feedback from the lively community it attracted, the Flash app was retired indefinitely, and "Flickr Live" as it was called, lived on only in the dreams and schemes of a few active and inventive early members.
Neil had the good fortune to hook up with one of these passionate ringleaders -- Bryan "striatic" Partington, one of the early flickrati and a longtime advocate for real-time Flickr. Striatic proved to be the perfect co-conspirator -- an antic photo poet in a bowler hat, a skilled UI designer, and natural born storyteller. They collaborated on photophlow for over a year before meeting face to face. This past fall, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit, they showed their project to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and he gave it his blessing. Photophlow the phenom has just begun.
There's also a photophlow group on Flickr to explore.
NOTE: Here at next.yahoo we have a dozen a few photophlow invites left to share. Leave a comment and let us know if you want one.
Popularity: 15% [?]
havi hoffman, January 17th, 2008 on 1:30 am
The sleep-away camp I went to as a kid must have been founded by hippies. The arts were embraced, every meal began and ended in song, and all games of skill ended in a tie. The focus on winning was de-emphasized in favor of the shared experience.
Photogamer is a community of flickr photographers who take a similar approach. Winners? Nah, just playing is reward enough. Photogamer got started last February to chase away the winter shooting doldrums. "Weekend Workshop" maker Bre Pettis and photographer "Brooklyn Hilary" McHone started a flickr group and invited participants to complete photographic-themed challenges and share their results. There are now over 700 Photogamers, who've contributed thousands of images to challenges that range from the relatively basic (take five photos of people/places/things that can be described as: glowing, artsy, moving, and red) to the more complex (create a comic-book narrative with photos, complete with hero, villain, catastrophe, and happy ending). Once, Bre issued a challenge asking members to collaborate on a single image made up of shots from nine different photographers.
Participation in the weekly and (new for 2008!) daily challenges forces you to get creative -- and ultimately take MORE pictures from a fresh perspective. In the first eight days of January I've stretched my skills with following: "Take a picture of: closed eyes, a bucket, a refrigerator, hair, a lightbulb, television, and toes. Upload it to the group. Live the dream." Forget about winning here--it's more fun to see how your fellow photogs interpret each new assignment.
Photogamer leverages twitter and a WordPress-powered blog to get the word out. This is a game that takes social tools seriously (and knows how to use them)!
So give Photogamer a go--you may not get a bravo for a first-place finish and it won't improve your golf game or freshen your breath, but being part of it is reward enough. Photogaming could make you think more creatively and recall fondly those warm summer days back at sleep-away camp where everybody was a winner.
Meatballs photo by mil8. Used with permission.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Andrew Chen recently blogged about the 5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber.
Driven by blogs, friends, co-workers, and all the other channels of information, it's very easy to get excited about the next new thing rather than realize the eternal truth of technology: [...] Whether it's the iPhone, podcasting, Facebook apps, AJAX desktop, OpenSocial, data portability, microformats, or the other legions of buzzwords, there's a LOT of information inefficiency between Silicon Valley and the rest of America.
Amen to that, brother. I'm going to go one step further and say that the echo chamber resonates outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and extends to the tech community in general. The Web 2.0 movement seems to be all about user-based community sites, and that's great. But the strategy for most of these products is to release them to a mainstream audience; you can't assume that these folks are going to have same design aesthetics and the same technological know-how as the folks who built the product.
So, let me tell you a story: before BravoNation, I previously worked on Yahoo! 360. Say what you will about the service, but there has been an active community on Yahoo! 360 in the United States - and the people there aren't latte-sipping, city-living wannabe yuppies or hipsters like you or me - they're middle-class people living all over United States, like so many Yahoo! users. Some are blue-collar. When they joined 360, many were unfamiliar with the term "blog," much less "tags," and every once in a while I would have to help out a user with a Yahoo ID like, say, sexy_mommy_79* with her profile page full of unicorns riding on glittery rainbows.
It's really easy to make fun of a page full of unicorns riding on glittery rainbows. Really, really easy. But then you have to think - why did she design her page to look like that? What is an ugly experience to you is a way for her to customize her profile page and take ownership of it.
And there lies the fine line - companies like Yahoo! and Google are leading these innovative technological movements, which in turn attract a tech-savvy crowd. We go to conferences where we chat it up with our own folk. We launch products and we call it "beta." But at the end of the day, products and people exist beyond our incredibly geeky bubble. It's up to us, the developers of social media, to showcase new technologies while fostering a good community experience for all users.
(* Flickr photo credit: jaycoxfilm. And obviously, sexy_mommy_79 isn't a real Yahoo! ID, but I've come across Yahoo! IDs very similar. And if it is your Yahoo! ID, my bad. You're, um, very sexy.)
Popularity: 11% [?]
Ernie Hsiung, January 1st, 2008 on 12:19 pm
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