Life & Research Notes

I started following FFFFOUND back in mid-2007. I think I was a little late to the party even, but I admitted to being rocked by what I saw rolling through my reader. Yet the past several months I feel I’ve seen a noticeable decrease in quality of the primary feed, driven primarily by an over-diversification of content.

I was captivated in the beginning, not by the system itself (which is elegant and simple), but by the wonderful findings of the curation community. Now, as the audience has grown, so too has the range of tastes. And with an exponential network effect style growth, the site accelerates towards mediocrity. It’s a blurring rather than a sharpening.

So how does one found an open collective that grows intelligently in innovative directions rather than diffusing out in all directions amorphously? How does one maintain community uniqueness and personality while encouraging growth? FFFFOUND clearly had a creative seed group to set a precedent for content. But perhaps some of the base system rules are at fault: a weak identity/reputation, open invitations, weak positive reinforcement, and lack of negative reinforcement. The original community had no strong way to encourage newcomers in any particular direction. The precedent was not enforceable, thus it was lost.

It’s of course ironic that I became a member only a few months ago myself, so I am literally part of the problem. I still find gems by browsing around or following friends, so the site is not without value to me. It’s all a grand experiment, and I’m not sad by the shift so much as curious to watch as the site continues to expand, and to see how future community systems deal with these issues.BLJAT

Lately a few of my social circles seem to be hitting a critical Twitter point, with more people on talking about what they ate for lunch or having weird little conversations or whatever. I’m using it over IM, and it’s fun, definitely distracting, and I think I finally get the hype a little more. It probably won’t be the crazily addictive service for me that I’ve heard it is for others, especially since I refuse to turn it on for my phone. Still, the combination of immediacy with publicness makes it very intriguing.

It’s also not hard to imagine scoping Twitter to selected teams and companies, so the communication is open and archived only within that context. Perhaps this is in Twitter’s business plan, or in someone else’s.

More than anything, whenever I use Twitter I often recall a meme I picked up from Burak’s delicious a while back, that XMPP (Jabber) may be the future of internet services. It’s actually a very simple premise: compared to HTTP polling, XMPP is much better suited to 2-way, stateful, immediate communication. The post comes from an interesting company, Jive Software, that focuses on collaborative systems for business. They clearly have been thinking about XMPP a lot.

Consider a hypothetical platform for public and private data to flow in continually as time-series streams. In almost all cases, the way new data is collected and pushed to this service would be by polling the original source to retrieve the latest update, maybe massaging the data into the right format, then POSTing/PUTting to our service. But rather than this automatic checking and reposting, what we really want is for the data source to just tell us when there is new data, and to either push it to us, or give us a url to retrieve it at. We’d like to register with that source, and from then on continually receive updates as they happen.

Or, since we’re working with data over time, perhaps we’d like our service to nudge data stream providers for the latest data when it’s time to provide it. “OK, it’s been an hour, give me your latest.” If the data script doesn’t provide anything, then we can stick null values in there and just say there is a gap in the data stream.

XMPP makes it easy for either side to initiate the request, and for exchanges to happen as soon as they need to. It’s also been proven to scale well, and there are a ton of clients and libraries out there already. It’s definitely going to play an increasingly important role in services talking to other services, and I’m fairly certain it is the right way to approach data streams. But until then, I’ll just be twittering.

This is going to sound shallow and simplistic, but I think things changed for the better a few weeks ago when I got a new car. Like, new as in new, a 2007 Honda Element (EX / 4WD / manual / silver). Somewhere around here I’ve got some photos, and once I dig em up I’ll post them. OK, it’s dorky, but I like pictures of people with their cars. And it’s a nice car, very friendly looking, definitely a little yuppie, but hopefully forgivably so. The car was a key step because it meant I didn’t have to keep taking the bus to and from work, which was a huge time sink. And it also meant I could once again listen to music while driving, which generally increases happiness.

And then only a few days ago I moved into a new home. I’m living in the city finally, in Bernal Heights, a couple blocks from a lot of good stuff, near my favorite record store and taquerias, yet peaceful and quiet up a (very) steep hill, with a great back yard and a garage. I’ve got an excellent housemate, and a comfy room, although at the moment I’m sleeping on some borrowed twin mattress pads. The hill is a killer, but it gets my blood flowing, and I’d much prefer to be more up and away from things than smack in the middle. We can see both Sutro tower and the bay, and it all feels very SF. My first day involved getting slicks and flat pedals for my bike, cruising around, getting lunch at revolution cafe, and hanging out in Dolores park with my sister. Very pleasant.

So it’s funny how things both fall apart and come together in waves. A few months ago I was totally discombobulated, taking things one step at a time. And I’m still in transition, but now on an upswing instead of a down. At the same time some of my great friends have been going through all sorts of interesting life events, with babies, weddings, engagements, sabbaticals and trips. So with some patience and some effort, things do come back together.