October 15, 2007 – 3:47 pm
I don’t have a Facebook account. I don’t do social networking today because I refuse to go to the trouble of doing redundant work on the Internet every time the fashion changes. (LinkedIn got the one exemption here, but I don’t recall why.)
All of you who built a list of LiveJournal friends, and then MySpace friends, and now Facebook friends all know what I’m talking about. Don’t you feel silly now that you don’t use your LiveJournal account, and only occasionally use your MySpace account? Don’t you wish that you could carry your work with you from site to site?
Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon spent some time thinking about this in their August 2007 paper “Thoughts on the Social Graph”. They discuss that there are a large and growing number of useful and interesting applications that depend on data about relationships (such as “friend” or “coworker”) between people. They argue that we should be able to stash this information in a single location for re-use again everywhere else.
I love their idea for many reasons, not the least of which is that it allows me to not have to do the redundant work that I described above.
Rumors abound that Google may ship the first credible Social Graph API in November. If what they ship makes the time I invest cultivating my friends list on Orkut reusable elsewhere on the web, I’ll be among the first to sign up.
There is, however, one additional condition: they have to allow me to use my OpenID. I not only don’t want to have to build the list 80 different places. I also don’t want to have to answer obnoxious questions about which of my favorite usernames happened to be available on each site that I use. Given that OpenID makes use of a well-established global namespace, it makes this problem easy to solve for me as an OpenID user.
In summary, to get me to use your Social Network app:
- Publish to, and import from some sort of community social graph; and
- Allow me to use my OpenID as my account identifier.
October 9, 2007 – 8:20 pm
There have been some good blog conversations lately about myVidoop.com and Vidoop Secure (over at Judi Sohn’s Web Worker Daily review of myVidoop, or Carleen Hawn’s write-up over at GigaOM for example).
There are several really good questions that get asked often. I figured I’d collect them all here so that I have one place that I can point people toward the next time I encounter similar questions.
What’s the difference between Vidoop, Vidoop Secure, and myVidoop.com?
Vidoop is a Tulsa,-OK-based technology company. (We call Oklahoma the Silicon Prairie. I hear that other people call where they’re from the Silicon Prairie, too. But I think ours is the real one.)
Vidoop Secure is our authentication technology (which is available to license as an easy-to-use, low-cost, authentication technology and can be configured to provide strong two-factor security and can even completely replace passwords).
myVidoop.com is our free consumer Identity service that allows you to test-drive the Vidoop Secure technology and manage your usernames and passwords for the entire internet.
How does Vidoop Secure work?
The core of the Vidoop Secure authentication mechanism is a grid of images where each image is chosen to represent a particular category (for example, “cats” or “telephones” or “food”). When a user signs up for an account, instead of choosing a secret password, he chooses a set of 3-5 secret categories (let’s use “cars”, “boats”, and “flowers”).
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October 4, 2007 – 9:53 pm
I’m seriously having about the best possible week I could have.
It got started on Monday when our Biz Dev Veep and I went on a partner status trip. Our various partners are doing some very exciting things, and it was fun to spend some time with them in their own spaces.
Our mid-September myVidoop.com refresh is getting noticed by many new people every day. Our user count is growing daily, and we’re up to a much higher rate of user activity now that we’ve shipped the password management functionality. Firefox users already love our plug-in, and we’ll very soon be able to share the love with IE users as well. Safari and Opera users also don’t have to be patient much longer.
We’ve had a few good write-ups this week. Especially an article in Financial Week and a review of myVidoop in Web Worker Daily.
This coming weekend is Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0, for which Jennifer and I are travelling back to Redmond and solving with the Mithril Battle Chickens.
And finally, Scott Kveton and David Recordon arrive in Tulsa this weekend to do some collaboration with our web team on the OpenID.net web site refresh. There are all sorts of exciting things coming up soon w.r.t. Identity 2.0 in general and OpenID in particular, and we’re all eager to get OpenID.net into tip top shape.
It almost seems impossible, but I think next week just might be even better than this one.
August 28, 2007 – 9:19 pm
With Jennifer and a houseful of stuff finally in town, we’ve got our unpacking work cut out for us. For better or worse, Vidoop is currently marching toward our next big product wave before the end of September.
Overall, I’d say things are going really well right now, with our technology deliverables mostly ready to push out the door and our marketing materials firming up. The technology team is kicking ass and taking names right now, and our leadership is more certain about the future now than ever before.
Unfortunately, Vidoop’s success comes with a price. Only now that Jennifer’s in town, a huge string of out-of-town (and even out-of-state) business travel is cropping up. I’ll have fun with it, and having the two of us operating out of a common base of operation means more time together than when she was still in Seattle, but as with many things in life, the timing leaves something to be desired.
That said, I think we’re both feeling pretty good about getting settled in to our house in Tulsa, and I can’t wait to see what happens at work and otherwise as a result of the hard work and busy schedules leading up to our September launch.
August 21, 2007 – 10:06 am
Made it to Tulsa last night right around midnight. My “Where you at?” tool wasn’t quite as exciting to follow along with as I hoped it would be–we spent most of Day 2 in the mountains of Utah with terrible cellular reception, and then on Day 3, we were on I-40 the whole day so we weren’t terribly motivated to fire up the laptop (despite having good cell signal, I’m sure). Sorry about that. The good news is that I have a good start on the tool for the next time I go on a road trip–it will be used again someday.
The fun story from day 2 is that we stopped at Pizza Hut in some town in Arizona for a break from driving. The waitress took our order using only her incredible memory. Only it wasn’t an incredible memory. She brought our pizza out. “Is this what you ordered?” It wasn’t–the pineapple had migrated from the size with Canadian bacon (yum) to the side with hamburger and tomato (yuck). “Oh–I wrote it down right–must have been the cooks.” Sure–got it.
So she disappeared into the back and came back with the news that she had just remade our pizza and that it would be out shortly. When it came out, it was completely missing the tomato. They told us that they had run out.
The manager ended up just giving us the pizza. We ate it and were on our way.
August 18, 2007 – 10:26 pm
I’ve got our “where you at?” map up. Check it out.
More features to come over the course of the trip.
August 18, 2007 – 5:02 pm
Jennifer got stopped by the State Patrol. Passed a cop going 82 in a 70. He must think she’s cute–she got off with a warning.
August 18, 2007 – 4:03 pm
Jennifer and I are finally on the road from Seattle (Bellevue) to Tulsa, OK. In usual form, it took until 1:00 before we were on the road. Also in usual form, we were up until 2am the night before the cross-country drive. Jennifer points out that we got tons of good stuff done at the house last night and this morning.
My evening started out traveling directly from the airport to the Melting Pot in Seattle for the annual Microsoft Intern Game staff dinner. That was fun, but my flight got in 30 minutes late (thanks, Delta), so I missed my favorite course: cheese. I made up for this during “dessert” when a group of us ordered cheese instead of chocolate. Yay cheese. Throughout dinner a group of us were joking about opening a restaurant called “Cheese ‘Til Dawn”.
After dinner, Jennifer and I stopped in at her office at Microsoft. After we finished cleaning off her computer and desk, the full impact of the move finally hit me. Apparently right up until that point, I hadn’t really moved to Tulsa so much as was I was sorta staying there during the week. As of last night, I realized that I was really no longer connected to Microsoft, and that I was really packing up the last of our things in Seattle to move to Tulsa with no strong connections remaining.
I’m currently working on the position-tracking tool so y’all can watch a moving map to see where we are. It’s coming along well. I have the GPS data decoder done. Now I need to build the database to shovel the data into. I hope to have this done by early evening. I’ll post a link here when it’s ready to go. I’ll also post some pictures as we go along.
Just out of curiosity, who’s following along from home?
Philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and electrical engineers each have their own phenomenon that they’ve dubbed duality. Over the last several years, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that I’ll call television (and movie) duality.
Stated in its simplest form, television duality is the tendency of television shows to be released nearly concurrently by different studios in supiciously similar pairs. I’m having trouble recalling and previous examples, but I recently spotted a dual pair and decided to watch an episode of each so that I could compare and contrast. Today’s dual pair is: The Singing Bee [NBC] and Don’t Forget the Lyrics [FOX].
Both shows are part trivia contest and part talent show and require contestants to fill in the blanks in popular song lyrics karaoke style. They both occupy a time slot right after one of the current season’s reality talent contests. They’re both 30 minutes long.
And that’s where they begin to diverge. TSB is a low-budget sing-off between 6 audience members apparently chosen arbitrarily from the studio audience; DFtL is a high-budget single-carefully-cast-contestant show that was patterned after “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” complete with lifelines (called “backups” as in backup singer) and an exponential prize progression. TSB has a maximum prize of $50k; DFtL has the predictable $1 million purse. TSB is divided into segments each consisting of a different game type and eliminating a couple more contestants; DFtL repeats the same 60 second formula over and over and over and makes use of the obnoxious “find out after this break”.
I would say that overall The Singing Bee is far better than Don’t Forget the Lyrics, mostly because it’s a bit more innovative. Really about the only thingthat DFtL has going for it is Wayne Brady as host. Neither show is worth spending a half-hour of your life on.
I flew back to Seattle this year for Independence Day on Continental Airlines. When I went to check in online for my return flight, the web site told me it was having trouble checking me in, but that I should go to the airport to have them help me out. So I had Jennifer drop me off to catch the red-eye home. When I got up to the check-in kiosk and entered my information, it was slightly more specific than the web site and told me that it didn’t know of any itineraries for anyone with my name. So, of course, I next talked to one of the ticket agents that was lurking behind the counter.
She did some poking around on her computer and told me that since I was marked as a no-show on my flight from Houston to Seattle the day I arrived, the airline had cancelled the rest of my itinerary. And while I’m not in love with aggressive policies like that, under normal circumstances I understand why the airlines do it. But I was most certainly not a no-show! The only way I was able to be standing there right before her very eyes in Seattle was that her very own airline had flown me up to Seattle from Houston exactly as originally scheduled.
In the end, the extremely helpful ticket agent managed to uncancel my itinerary with the help of some magic approval codes from their help desk, but neither she nor the slightly more experienced agent that came over to help her out were able to understand (or at least were unable or unwilling to explain) what happened that got me marked as a no-show despite the fact that I was on the flight. I guess I’m lucky that my luggage arrived on time and that she managed to uncancel my flight.