Oracle AppsLab

Foursquare

Also titled: “What I learned from FourSquare.”

A few years back when we started exploring new technology, one of the ideas that seemed to stick with me was around gaming.   The processes that made something enjoyable seemed to be an essential, yet elusive ingredient in business software.

In truth, I felt there was something magical about games, even if I could not articulate it.  For many people, games are an escape – a respite from the day to day.  A chance, even for a moment to be someone, or something, they are not.  Whatever the call, the reality is that millions of people choose to spend their precious free time paying to game.  If you don’t believe it, you can look to the hundreds of millions of game consoles currently out there (DS, Wii, XBOX360, PS3, etc) or the recent online examples like Zynga and their 50 million daily active users playing casual games.  Zynga is especially interesting since users actually pay for virtual goods.  They amass hundreds of millions of dollars from people buying better (virtual) guns in MafiaWars or more productive (virtual) tractors in Farmville.  Think about that.  People pay real money for stuff like hairstyles for their avatars. If that doesn’t blow your mind you should exit at this point.

Still here?  Cool.  Now, let’s contrast this to work.   Work is a place where employees provide a function for a certain amount of pay.  Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but this is the general model.  I hire you to do a job.  You agree to do that job in return for compensation.  Repeat.  Work is the OPPOSITE of a game.  In fact, if you even hint at the idea of work having the potential to be a game (or at least gamelike in some small way) you are relegated to the padded corporate room never again allowed to send an email to your bosses boss without your bosses careful review.  No promotion for you!

One of the problems here is a genuine lack of respect.  It is hard to take people’s ideas seriously when you don’t respect them.  If we don’t appreciate games for the amazing things they do, we will never pay attention long enough to actually learn.  As software developers and product managers of “valuable” software we could use a bit of humility, and perhaps games can be a great source of inspiration.

Games are the highest form of application development.  They have tackled extremely challenging problems that would cause most software developers to wake up in a sweaty mess.  Take Halo as an example (a game several years old).  Incredible graphics…sure.  Real time interaction…got it.  Physics modeling for gravity, destructive environments… done.  How about connecting people from across the world, as if they are in the same room, fighting an alien race, in real time, while talking on headsets to each other…why not?

And the web software world is abuzz with an ajax pop up menu?

Games are not trivial technology, but more interestingly, they are not trivial in how the do what they do.  The magic is that they get you to return again and again to do things THEY want you to do while thinking it is what YOU want to do. Does this sound like it may be useful for work?

Indulge me in a walk down memory lane…Remember that old school tabletop/cocktail pacman from the local pizza place?  Remember how much you wanted to get to the top of the high score list?  Remember how you wanted to express your originality with a cool three letter handle? (Hey self-expression wasn’t so easy back then!)  I always went with the boring “PDP”, but maybe if I made it to the top I’d have been emboldened to go with “ACE” or “XXX” or something else my 14 year old self would have found cool.

The point is that I pumped quarters into that thing for the street cred and lavish lifestyle that a high score would inevitably bring.  But the rabbit hole is deeper.  It’s not just about the leaderboard and the praise that would have most surely been showered upon you.  It’s HOW you got there in the first place.  You had to pick up dots,  throw the javelin and hit the albatross, or get the second space fighter to drop to double your firepower.  Every game had its own little tricks to up that score – unlocking secret levels, extra lives, and more.  The game designer kept you exploring, learning, developing, growing, wanting.  Not a moment was work.

I bring that up to express that there is in fact an art to game design.  A balance between ease of use and depth.  The interplay of challenge and frustration.  I once read an article by a member of the Bungie development team (of Halo fame).  He basically noted that all shooters have to get a single experience right.  That moment when you happen upon a group of enemies and dispatch them with extreme prejudice.  That simple act, repeated over and over, has to be fun.  You can do a million other things, but that one thing must work, and work well.  Said another way, if jumping barrels in Donkey Kong, no leader board would save it.

Back to the present day.  If you have been following the location based services out there, you have no doubt heard of FourSquare.  They are in the same game as earlier rivals such as Loopt, Google Lattitude, Dopplr, and FireEagle.  All of these bring their own flavor to the concept of broadcasting your physical location, but Foursquare was the first that made me want to play.  In fact, for years I have been bearish on location since I really didn’t want to publicize where I was at all times.  Why did FourSquare work for me when the others did not?  Foursquare is a game that happens to feature location.

Let’s look at a few examples of how FourSquare is a game:

1. Collecting: You get points for various actions like providing your location (ie. checking in), checking in multiple times at a venue and more.  You can earn badges (eg. medals) as well.  Examples include a local badge for checkins in a given area or you can become the mayor if you check in enough at a single given location.

2. Competitive: The game puts leaderboards in an easy to reach place.  This gets you to strive for being the top point earner among your friends or your geographical area.  What do points do for you?  Nothing, just status.  Prestige.  I am not sure why you want em’, but trust me, you want em’.

3. Powers: Everyone starts with basic abilities like checking in, but you soon gain more capabilities depending on your “level”.  So you can do things only the experienced can.  Feeling special is cool.  Ever wonder why they have that velvet rope and a line at empty nightclubs?

4. Shared: The game is not played alone (much).  Solo games are OK, but the great games include others.  How fun is reading Trivial Pursuit cards on your own.  “YES!  Nailed another Arts&Leisure – Sweet”.  As an aside, what was the last “business” app you “played” with someone else?  Bueller, Bueller?

5. Expressive: Foursqure allows users to co-create.  You augment the reality.  In FourSquare you can add venues or badges.  You play a part in crafting the experience for other players.  Truthfully, this is FourSquare getting the masses to do their work for them, but you don’t care cause you get to show off a bit and express your greatness.  People like to brag.  Who knew.

6. Purposeful: You don’t think about it, but games have a purpose.  Save the princess.  Eat the little dots.  In FourSquare it is to check in.  That is the goal above all else.  They get you do do that over and over again, willingly.

7. Surprise: Every time you check in you may be the “mayor” of that location.  You may also find someone you know there already.  There is some exploration going on.  The element of suprise and the search for the unknown keeps you coming back.

Of course this is not a complete list of game mechanics, but they were the most obvious ones I saw in FourSquare and I thought they were implemented well.

So let’s return to the world of business software for a moment.  Hopefully I have convinced you that games are serious stuff and that we can learn a lot from them.  The challenge is that it takes courage.  I say courage because all product development is the application of resources to create a solution that you hope people will use and pay for.  Given that perspective, you begin with a problem like “people can’t track billable hours” or they “need to manage accounting”,etc.   People don’t start with “we need a game that can do accounting” – for obvious reasons.

That means that if you want to make a game you need to put the game first (like Foursquare did).  It needs to be a first class citizen and in the end, FUN must be a design principle.  If I was building a task management application I’d have to be asking “is it fun to add a task” as much as I’d consider things like categories, sorting, due dates, owners, and milestones.   This is extremely tough.  Adding gaming means something else does NOT make it.  Resources, scope and time are a zero sum game. I’d have to ask myself, do I create yet another task management application with the “features customers are asking for”, or do I create something that will really inspire (a few).  Do I accept the fact that most won’t like it or understand it?

Incremental is without risk and real innovation is definitely not for everyone.   Snapping a leaderboard on your application is fake innovation for those who want credit from others.   Real innovation means you must say no to a lot of things that everyone will tell you are a must have, but if you want inspiration it’s the only way.  Find that core of what your application is.  The one reason it lives (eg. adding a task, tracking time, sharing a file, whatever).  Find it.  Honor it.  Strip away the noise.  And then work like hell to make it FUN.

If you do that you will most surely be laughed at.  You will almost definitely fail, but you will have pushed the needle of innovation a wee bit ahead.

Until next time.Possibly Related Posts:

• Mayor of Simpleton
• Learning from Entertainment
• OpenWorld Manifest: Days 0 and 1
• Oracle Gets Social
• Work Could be More Funner

Right, wrong or indifferent, we all use the following and followers metrics to make quick judgements about a person’s reputation, and now, Twitter has provided another dimension, the listed metric.

This added dimension provides a much needed, albeit flawed, way to determine a user’s mojo. I use mojo here loosely to represent a user’s authority, something Twitter lacked in the past.

The number of followers or the ratio of following to followers were the only ways to get an idea of a person’s authority before, and these numbers could easily have been functions of popularity (ahem, celebrity), laziness or strict following rules (e.g. only following people met IRL), rather than authority or real reputation.

Listed allows you to size up how other Twitter users feel about a specific user, which adds some semblance of authority, i.e. being listed by lots of other users might be more meaningful than having lots of followers.

I’m using mojo here because the listed metric is still flawed for measuring authority. I suspect that lists will follow the same curve Twitter itself did; early adopters will use lists for reputation and authority, and everyone else will use them for other purposes, completely borking any reputation calculations.

Not that it matters, but I’m interested to see the evolution of the listed metric. Twitter’s inclusion of it on the user profile tells me it has some purpose related to reputation.

Anyway, now that lists are available to everyone, I figured I should show some love to you guys and add to your listed metric.

I created a “friend of appslab” list, including all people we’ve met over the years at conferences, here on the blog, at work, etc. It’s not complete by any means, and I’ll be adding to it.

I also added a nifty little widget to show tweets from the list right here (look to the right). The list widget is another new Twitter feature to support lists. For some odd reason, it’s not streaming any tweets behind our firewall. Not sure why, investigating.

Anyway, what do you think of lists? Does the listed metric help you apply reputation? Think it’s a fair way to do that?

Like the widget?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Twitters Lists Land, for Some Anyway
• Measuring Influence and Reputation
• 90-9-1 Rule Skews the New Web
• AppsLab Events Widget
• Qwitter Points out How Boring You Are

There’s been a fair amount of debate among the early adopter crowd lately about the place of syndicated content in relation to Twitter.

The debate has been renewed in light of the general release of Twitter lists, which allow people to create and follow bunches of Twitter users en masse.

Since many people use Twitter to share links to interesting information, Twitter has always been a great source for news and information, essentially crowdsourcing your intertubes reading, much like a feed reader, only with a lot more discovery.

Lists make it even easier to discover interesting content using tweeters as a proxy.

Anyway, two posts recently caught my eye, one by Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) called “Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore“, the other by Louis Gray (@louisgray) called “Why I Wouldn’t Accept $25k To Stop Using Google Reader“.

There are a couple points munged together in these posts that are worth discussing, as much as anything here is worth discussing.

1) Twitter vs. feeds for information

2) Google Reader’s product direction

I’ll touch on both, even though they’re not obviously related.

Which is better for information, Twitter or feeds?
The short answer here is they’re equally useful, and better together, a conclusion shared by many when asked the question by Dawn Foster (@geekygirldawn) over at WWD. You’ll notice about as many said Twitter had replaced feeds too, so maybe I’m just pumping up my own side.

Part of the problem here is that feeds have never really taken off, and Twitter provides a much less geeky way to get information. Personally, I prefer taking feeds from Twitter and adding them to my existing feeds in Reader, and services like ReadTwit have helped scrape the links out of my tweet stream, essentially beefing up my Reader.

Interestingly, I’m not seeing feeds surfaced for lists, which would really help me. I wonder if this is strategic.

Anyway, guys like Robert and Louis consume factors of ten more information than we mere mortals do, so I can see why they have a preference.

I’m dodging the question though. If I had to choose one or the other method today for information consumption, I’d go with Twitter. Why? Because of the network.

The network has always been Twitter’s ace in the hole. Remember back in bad old days of early 2008 when Twitter’s uptime teetered below 99%, which is pretty sad for a web service, even a free one? There were movements afoot to jump to Plurk and Identi.ca and Jaiku and Pownce.

Heard those names lately? They never took off because Twitter had the network and recreating that was too high a barrier to entry for pretty much everyone. So, we all suffered and hoped for the best.

To Twitter’s credit, they have dramatically improved the uptime of the service.

Even though I really like feeds and continue to believe they are the best kept secret in tech, using Twitter for information is way easier. Cue the segue.

Where is Google Reader going?
Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for years, and I’ve got a lot invested in it.

It’s funny to read Robert’s and Louis’ posts because they both hint at a problem I have with Reader, new features. Reader has been slowly socializing for a while now, but the most recent additions have me wondering.

I haven’t found much value in the social features, beyond Shared Items, and I have to agree with Robert’s assessment that Reader has become a bit slow due to the new stuff. One huge head-scratcher for me is why there isn’t a public API for Reader data; why build “likes” before that?

Anyway, Reader has deviated from what it does best–fast feed reading with great search. The easy assumption here is that Twitter and Facebook have pushed the Reader team to add social features, but at what cost?

Maybe it’s just me, but I want a feed reader to be a feed reader because I already have a Twitter client for the social stuff. So why not add feed reading features like a proxy setting for feeds inside the firewall or open source the code so it can be installed inside a firewall, since feeds are still the best way to follow information within the firewall.

Or maybe if the strategy is to go social, why not build a Brizzly-esque interface right into Reader? Maybe that could be part of the search deal Google just did with Twitter.

So, two areas of interest here: Twitter vs. feeds for information and why and what’s up with Reader and where should it go?

A bit disjointed, but these two are wrapped up together for me and others.

Find the comments.

Update: The widget actually works inside the firewall, but it takes a while to load.Possibly Related Posts:

• Connect Adds Keyboard Shortcuts
• What We’re Reading
• How Do You Get News Online?
• Found: Cool Stuff in Your Shared Items
• What’s New with Connect?

I’m finally getting around to penning that post on Brizzly I’ve been threatening for a week.

Not that anyone noticed. It’s been eerily quiet in the comments lately.

Anyway, at OpenWorld, Rich turned me on to Brizzly and provided an invite. I’d heard about it over the Summer, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.

Oh, I know why; Brizzly is a web client for Twitter, which sounds pretty dull, considering that Twitter.com already exists so why would I need a web client?

Turns out Brizzly has done a lot of the things I wish Twitter.com had done, and frankly, Brizzly is the web interface that Twitter should have built for Twitter.com.

Beyond the feature set, I’m ready to ditch TweetDeck, not for lack of features, but because Adobe AIR uses way too many system resources. I’m happy with TweetDeck’s features and continue to use it on my iPhone, but the AIR client is just too much of a resource pig.

This is more an AIR problem, than a TweetDeck one.

So, what’s the big deal about Brizzly?

Brizzly showcases some great interface design, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising considering that Jason Shellen, formerly of Blogger and the founding PM for Google Reader, is one of the founders of Thing Labs, the company behind Brizzly.

Shellen’s influence has brought a lot of thoughtful, Reader-esque features to Brizzly, making it much easier to consume a stream of tweets. I’ll hit the features I like best individually.

Links, media resolved inline
Brizzly resolves shortened links and shows media (definitely pictures and video, not sure about sound files) inline, which is a huge feature.

Aside from the whole “breaking the Internet” problem, shortened links lead to blind clicking in that you have no idea what’s behind them. Brizzly resolves the link to show the original URL.

In addition, if someone shares a video or a picture, Brizzly includes the content inline for viewing, something we included in our most recent redesign of Connect. It’s so much more convenient to stay on the same page, rather than bouncing all over the place. Not to mention that this keeps the focus on the stream of tweets, rather than fracturing my attention.

Navigational improvements
Brizzly has a couple thoughtful navigational features that I really appreciate: infinite scrolling and keyboard shortcuts.

Infinite scrolling is huge. What do I mean? Sites like Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook all have long pages of activity, and when you reach the bottom of the page, you’re presented with a pager (old school) or a “load more” function.

Brizzly just keeps loading tweets as you reach the end of what they’ve fetched. So, you never have to signify that you want more content; it just appears, after a short fetch. Don’t be surprised if this soon becomes the de facto standard.

I’ve documented my love for keyboard shortcuts in the past. I love them in Reader and on Connect, and Shellen has brought this feature to Brizzly.

It’s surprisingly productive to navigate through a bunch of tweets using keyboard shortcuts and infinite scrolling.

The rest
Brizzly also has the features you’d expect from a good Twitter client–groups, multiple account support, saved searches and trends.

With the release of Twitter Lists, I wonder how groups will be handled. Brizzly’s groups are limited to five with a cap on members at 50. A bit odd, but I assume it’s a scalability concern. Every Twitter client with groups will face an interesting problem with Lists though, not just Brizzly.

Brizzly also auto-shortens links and supports a Twitter picture client, not sure which one.

Saved searches are very handy. I used #oow09 quite a lot during OpenWorld.

Brizzly also shows the current trending topics, along with an explanation about why a topic is trending. It also adds a crowdsourcing element, allowing you to explain why a keyword or phrase is trending.

Overall, I’m digging Brizzly, and it’s replaced TweetDeck completely. The one drawback is speed, but it’s still in invite-only beta so I assume this will improve.

Last week, Brizzly announced Facebook account support, but I’ve yet to see that appear in my account, not that I’m in a huge hurry. I hardly ever use Facebook and doubt that a client would increase that; I fiddled with TweetDeck’s integration for about a week before turning off the Facebook account.

I would like to see Facebook Connect or OpenID support though. I’m so over having a new account for everything.

Anyway, if you use Brizzly, what do you think? If not, I have a few invites. If you want one, drop a comment.

Update: I still have a few invites left, and there are several people in the comments who’ve offered to provide invites as well.Possibly Related Posts:

• TweetDeck Adds Facebook, What’s Next?
• Twitters Lists Land, for Some Anyway
• Connect Adds Keyboard Shortcuts
• Sharing OpenWorld
• Now We’re on FriendFeed

Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share.

PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client.

Sweet!

Oh, and there are a lot of PuSH-enabled feeds, like all the Feedburner, LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, Moveable Type, and Reader Shared Items feeds; check our previous coverage of PuSH, which is apparently the preferred acronym for PubSubHubbub, for more. PuSH is a big deal, and we’ve been noodling ways to use it for Connect, since we serve a lot of feeds.

The ability to read Connect content in IM is something we’ve wanted to implement for a long time, pretty much since FriendFeed debuted their IM implementation, which I really like. Probably the biggest barrier to wholesale adoption of Connect inside the firewall is the necessity to check it for updates; sure, we have feeds, but RSS will never get fully over the hump among enterprise types.

As I’ve said before, our most commonly requested enhancement is email digests, and when polled, nearly all the people who want email notifications would be happy with IM.

Anyway, I’m testing out PuSH Bot for a couple feeds to see how I like it. I’d love to get a PuSH installation going for Connect and install PuSH Bot to serve feeds by IM, assuming we can use it. Maybe Rich will tinker with the Ruby reference implementation of PuSH he just found.

It also occurs to me that PuSH Bot could partially replace (i.e. read, not post) the gone-but-not-forgotten Twitter IM client, which many of us miss terribly. Not exactly what it was, but pretty close.

Anyway, check it out and kudos to Mihai for this sweet PuSH-XMPP gateway.Possibly Related Posts:

• PubSubHubbub: Cool, but Hard to Say
• What We’re Reading
• Why Do Feeds Fail?
• What’s New with Connect?
• How Do You Get News Online?

So, finally, Twitter has finally dropped a grouping feature, called Lists, at least to some users, including @oraclemix and @theappslab.

Rich (@rmanlan) had them earlier in the week, too. Guess who’s out in the cold? Yours truly (@jkuramot), or at least I was when I started this post. Now, I’m in the club too.

I, among many others, have been quizzically wondering for years why groups weren’t in the app from the beginning.

The lack of a grouping feature has (happily) spawned several great client apps, including TweetDeck, which had them first, and more recently, Brizzly, which I know I promised to cover and will, eventually.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, Twitter needs groups because as you follow more people, your tweetstream gets more noisy, making it way tougher to find useful and interesting content, assuming you believe this type of content exists on Twitter.

Not everyone will agree, but for me, groups (or lists) have kept me using Twitter, even as it gets more noisy.

Anyway, if lists have been added to your account, you can create your own (public or private) to segment your tweetstream, see the public lists of other users to which you belong (a nice little ego-trip), and view the public lists of other users who have the feature.

For example, our pals at Oracle Mix created a list of the “official” Oracle Twitter accounts, which you can view and follow here (note: if you don’t have lists yet, this URL won’t work), and oh by the way, @theappslab is now an “official” account.

W00t!

Twitter has also altered profiles to add the number of lists to which a user belongs, right next to the followers and following counts.

If you’re interested, I’ve created a list for our little team, plus sometime-contributor Matt (@topperge) and the official WebCenter account (@oraclewebcenter). Follow if you like.

I wonder how apps, especially those that have added group functionality, will handle this new feature.

So, what do you think of lists? IMO, it’s about time. Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• More Fun with Twitter Lists
• Posting to Twitter Now
• OraTweet Ready for Flight
• Last Week’s Mix Updates
• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM

No one likes to admit failure, especially when duplicity is involved. The intertubes is rife with scams and hoaxes, and I’m pretty sure everyone reading has fallen for at least one at some point.

Case in point, today, I tried to download the bogus beta version of Chrome OS. Yes, it’s a hoax, so don’t get all happy.

Gizmodo’s feed had an item titled “Chrome OS Now Available, Go get It” (image), and intrigued to create a VM and geek out, I clicked through on the “Google” link provided at the bottom.

I suppose reading the list of featured software should have tipped me off first, but the site, which is a Google Sites URL and not one under the Chrome browser home (i.e. google.com/chrome) seemed fishy.

Even weirder was a list of previous beta versions to download. Something as big as Chrome OS going into beta would not have escaped my Reader.

The final straw was that the download was served from a non-Google domain. Mmm-k.

Had I only checked the footer, I would have seen:

Chrome OS is not related to Google. Service provided by SUSE Studio. See the license.

Oh well, at least I didn’t download it and go any further.

Twitter has been all abuzz (Chrome OS is trending), first with the news, and now, spreading the word that it’s bogus.

Apparently, it’s not a new site either and has been around a while. The Download Squad actually did a dissection of the install back in September, in case you’re wondering. Funny stuff and also a pretty clear picture of the comparative clout of Gizmodo.

A few places have reported the hoax. Interestingly, Gizmodo chose to take down its post, rather than update it, which is a bit odd since those of us reading the feed had no point of reference when clicking through for details.

This post from the WATBlog raises an interesting question, “Is Twitter making us headline junkies?” Apparently so, and I can vouch that RSS did that to me years ago. Discussion of this point warrants a full post at some point, but the short answer is in order to process the massive amounts of information, one must become a headline junkie.

Anyway, that’s my confession. I fell for the Chrome OS download hoax. I think at some point in the mid-90s, I fell for an attachment virus too. Oh, and way back in the day, I called an 800 number my friend said was a Sam Adams free beer survey. Turned out to be a gay porn line.

So, what hoaxes or scams have claimed you? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Firefox Still Pwns the Field
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• Browsers Wars on Like Donkey Kong
• Feeds: Dead to You or Still Kicking?
• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM

So, we’ve got a lot going on lately, what with the move and all. We’ll try to keep the content rolling despite real work.

Rich attended Startup School 2009 over the weekend, and although he didn’t find much to blog about, you could try to rally him into a post by commenting or pestering him on Twitter (@rmanalan). That might work.

Paul has been doing some deep thinking about foursquare, the latest shiny object. I’m hoping he puts them into a post. If you read here, you’ll recall he enjoys the intersection of work and play and has a lot of good ideas there.

Figured I should fill the dead air with something, so here comes a few tidbits I noticed over the last few days.

BART + foursquare
Just when you thought you couldn’t hear more about foursquare from me, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) announces a partnership with foursquare last week at the Web 2.0 Summit. From the announcement:

“Foursquare will offer a BART-themed badge that can be unlocked by regular riders of BART, which provides train service in the San Francisco Bay Area. BART will award $25 promotional tickets each month for the next three months to riders chosen at random from all the riders who have logged Foursquare check-ins at BART stations, starting in November.

. . . BART also will look at other ways to coordinate promotions with new and existing venue partners, through www.mybart.org, its free service offering contests and discounts for entertainment, sports and other events.”

So, not only will there be IRL incentive for people to ride BART, but it sounds as though BART will work with other foursquare venues to create additional incentives, all based around a silly game that no one would ever play. Right.

When I read about this agreement, I immediately pinged Twitter with a plea to Portland’s TriMet to investigate something similar. Portland’s public transportation is much more cohesive than the Bay Area’s and, generally speaking, Portlanders use public transportation more frequently.

Plus, there are a lot of people playing foursquare here, so it makes sense. TriMet should be open to the idea, since they already offer web services free to developers who want to build transit apps.

Project Eagle Claw
From the it’s-about-time department, the Nigerian government has begun cracking down on 419 scammers, arresting 18 and squashing 800 websites. Apparently, this is just the beginning, as the project becomes fully operational in 2010.

Good news for the victims out there who fall for these scams and an about-face from the Nigerian government’s previous stance. I guess it’s bad news for the scam-baiters, who’ve provided quite a bit of humor, but in the end, I suspect they would agree it’s better for everyone to have fewer 419ers out there.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10
Windows 7 launched last week, and I’m mildly interested to take it for a test drive on a VM. I tried in vain to get a beta version; the in vain part was frustration with the download times and registration process.

Rich says it’s pretty nice, but has no intention of switching. I agree. It would take a lot for me to go back to Windows.

I’m much more excited for the GA release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, which reached the release candidate milestone last week, coincidentally the same day Windows 7 launched.

I’ve heard great things about 9.10 end-to-end, and I just hope the upgrade process goes more smoothly for me than 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope did.

Let’s take a moment and consider how awesome it is that Canonical will be releasing not one, but two major OS updates this year. They did the same last year and have consistently done so for five years now.

Awesome feat. The Linux community rocks.

ORACLENERD goes gratis
Chet, recently unemployed again and looking for work, has decided to offer his services for free, which is an interesting model, especially considering the current state of the Economy.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds, and this business model has worked for centuries, i.e. give them a taste for free and sink the hook. Sound familiar?

So, Chet is offering his services for 2-4 week engagements, although the timeframe is negotiable, to clients in the Tampa area. His resume is here.

I wish him luck, and I’m curious to see how this model works for employment. He might be on to something big.

Floating airport?
And finally, from the crazy-ideas-FTW department, there’s a legit plan floating (no pun intended) around to construct a new airport off the coast of San Diego. That’s right, a multi-level, floating, oil-rig style structure that would be accessible by ferry or underwater light rail. Update: The plan calls for an entire city, not just an airport.

Sounds pretty sweet, except for that last bit. That sounds like disaster-flick fodder in an area prone to earthquakes.

Anyway, maybe Joel Garry can comment more on this crazy-cool architecture plan, since I think he’s from San Diego.

So, that’s about it for now. Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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• Freely Available Utilities

A few weeks ago, I announced that our team was moving to WebCenter development.

Since then, several people have asked what our role would be specifically, many of you in person at OpenWorld. Now, I can tell you, since I finally know for sure.

We’ve been charged with the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, which, we’re hoping, will become the de facto place inside the Oracle firewall to collaborate, share information, manage group projects and generally, you know, do work.

WebCenter 11g is currently hosted internally and available to all employees. Our mission is to bring what we’ve learned operating Connect to the WebCenter instance.

We’ll begin by making tweaks to the hosted instance to make it more like Connect, and eventually, Connect’s data will move to WebCenter, allowing our existing users (about 1,500-2,000 unique visitors per day) to leverage all the goodness of WebCenter’s backend services in a Connect-like interface.

Like what services you ask? Well, we’ve never been able to offer file sharing on Connect due to a number of reasons beyond our control, but now, with WebCenter’s UCM services, we can. That’s a huge win for Connect users.

But, we’ll not only add files, but we plan to add viewers so people can browse the content inline without having to bounce to another site, download the file and open it. We already do this on Connect for certain media file types, and it’s a huge time saver.

Don’t believe me? Use Brizzly for a day and come back to me. More on that tomorrow.

Anyway, this is our mission. To take the awesome array of services that WebCenter 11g offers and call them out in ways we know users want and will appreciate.

Overall, I’m excited for this venture. It’s not without challenges and risks, but it’s a great opportunity.

When we launched the IdeaFactory, which became Connect back in 2007 (full history), there were no social platforms inside the firewall, and many people didn’t see the value of a social platform inside the firewall.

Today, it’s a much different ballgame. We’ve learned a lot in the last 2+ years, and Connect has grown to be an everyday business tool. We’ve learned a lot, and Connect’s current iteration is much more about sharing information than about social features, which makes sense.

I like to think our work on Connect is what got the attention of the WebCenter team, since they have been thinking along the same lines we have for quite some time.

Managing the internal instance of WebCenter will get us exposure well beyond what we’ve had with Connect, which never had any marketing behind it and spread only through viral adoption and word-of-mouth.

All of this is good, especially for our little team. We’ve come a long way, and I finally feel like we’re living up to our tagline of driving innovation, at least directly.

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Connect as a Blogging Tool
• We’re Joining WebCenter
• The Obligatory Post #oow Post
• I Got ID
• Connect Flirts with 200,000 Pageviews

The good thing about having a blog without a narrow focus is that I can blog about pretty much anything.

And I do.

Case in point, auto-tuning. Until a few months ago, I wasn’t familiar with the practice of auto-tuning, which applies effects to people’s voices. I guess it’s usually applied to singer’s voices to give them so-called perfect pitch.

Auto-tuning can also be applied to produce interesting effects, a la T-Pain and others. You might have seen the I Am T-Pain iPhone app released in September; the app, which costs $2.99, is already among the top ten grossing iPhone apps.

Key takeaway: auto-tuning is fun.

Auto-tuning the spoken word, rather than sung word, creates some funny and interesting work. Barely Political’s Auto-tune the News was my first exposure to this phenomenon. Funny stuff, if you like irreverence, and also interesting, since you may not really realize the cadence (or lack of it) in everyday speaking.

Yesterday, I found the best use of auto-tune yet IMO, Symphony of Science, specifically We are All Connected, embedded here for your listening pleasure.

This work has a charm and beauty reminiscent of Where the Hell is Matt?

It’s very interesting to see user-generated content like this spring out of the interwebs, which is one thing I really love about my favorite medium.

Auto-tuning may be the next genre of music, although I suppose the usage rights and copyrights might ensure that it never makes any money. That might be fine though, since then, only those who truly love the production would undertake it.

Another recent UCG phenomenon that makes me laugh–record a video at your local Apple Store and post it to YouTube, like this kid and this guy.

I <3 intertubes.

Your thoughts should be free in the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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I’ve been playing foursquare regularly for about a month now, and even though I was teased by several people (you know who you are) at OpenWorld last week, I’ll continue to play.

/me thumbs nose

If you’re not familiar, foursquare debuted at SXSW this Spring, and it’s currently the latest shiny object of the early adopter crowd. If you read here, you know I like shiny objects, and you know I also like studying game mechanics and reputation, especially as applied to non-traditional areas like work.

I also like to test drive new apps, so if I’m asked to comment on this or that latest shiny object, I can provide an informed opinion.

Anyway, there are a lot of aspects I like about foursquare.

It’s easy.
Foursquare is super easy to play. Just like any geo-location app, you tell it where you are, a.k.a. checkin, and you receive points (or not) depending on how frequently you’ve been at that particular venue. First time there? Get five points. After the first time, I’m not sure how points are awarded, but you get the idea.

Beyond the checkins, you’ll want to add some friends, like any social app. Foursquare can mine your Twitter, GMail and Facebook contacts to pull from your existing networks, which is nice. They use OAuth for Twitter and Facebook Connect, which you can also use to login to foursquare. Plus, you can search for people and invite people too.

All these are what I expect from an app today. OpenID support would be nice, but the team is only four people (like ours). So, I’m guessing they’re pretty swamped with other features. I can relate.

Once you add friends, you can play the game with them, see their checkins, what badges they earn, etc. Of course, there’s an obligatory Twitter integration for announcing your location and gloating about your accolades there.

Foursquare also has leaderboards, for your friends and for the city you’re currently playing in, so you can track your progress. Each week, they reset the scores, leveling the playing field.

You play a distinct game in each city you visit, assuming foursquare supports that city, which is an interesting wrinkle. When I landed in the Bay Area for OpenWorld, I started earning new badges, and I was able to play the game with the guys on our team and other people I know there.

Although I love geo-location and believe it has great potential, my main complaint has always been remembering to tell it where I am. This is why apps like Dopplr, Shizzow and Google Latitude have failed to keep my attention.

Foursquare adds a reason, to play the game. So, I’ve made it a habit to checkin when I’m out and about.

It’s engaging.
Once you start playing and make an effort to checkin, foursquare is quite engaging, e.g. Rich, Paul and Anthony hadn’t played much before I arrived in the Bay Area, but while I was there, they all played, making for friendly competition.

Similar to our use of Twitter at OpenWorld 2007, foursquare was the app of choice this year.

I doubt they’ll all continue to play, but they got a taste of the mechanics that make foursquare engaging.

Foursquare does a good job of mixing easy rewards with difficult ones to keep you playing. The game has several reward systems, badges, points, and mayorships (achieved by checking into a venue the most times in the last 60 days).

Plus, last week, they introduced superuser levels, which when attained, allow you to edit and control certain aspects of the game, e.g. as a Level 1 Superuser, I can close and edit venues. I used this newfound power on Thursday to close the OpenWorld venues when the great gig ended.

I’ve found the badges to be most motivating so far. Competing with friends and with the entire city is nice, but for some reason, the badges keep me playing. This is the same impetus behind Stack Overflow, bling shows status. Believe me, if I had the technical chops to contribute to Stack Overflow, I’d be there.

Maybe all this sounds silly, since, after all, there are no real rewards for playing, but think back to the mechanics of social networks and Twitter. Collecting friends is a hallmark game mechanic for any synchronous connection network, like Facebook or LinkedIn. Collecting followers has the same effect on Twitter. As silly as it may seem, these are legit game mechanics that engage people.

It’s pure, for now.
The developers of foursquare have built an open game that assumes everyone will play fairly. This is totally the right approach, i.e. apps should be designed to be open and the security added later.

Sure, you can game the system by checking in places where you’re not to get points or mayorships or by adding bogus venues, but there’s no real gain to doing so because the game is for fun, at least for now.

Foursquare uses crowdsourcing intelligently by creating incentives that encourage the users to make the game better, e.g. awarding points for new venues, promoting users to Superuser, asking for badge suggestions. Eventually, these highly engaged users will help police people gaming the system.  It’s a very smart approach.

At some point, they will need to publish the scoring algorithm I suspect. Having invested users will force more openness, but if I had to guess, I’d say the algorithm will be published and open for suggestions too.

It has lots of possibilities.
Foursquare was great fun at OpenWorld, and Rich and I chatted at length about its potential as a conference app. Because you can see all the people checked into a given venue, it’s one step better than Twitter, no need to announce where you are or poll for where your friends are.

Maybe Marius and Tim can noodle on this for next year.

There are obvious IRL tie-ins too that have begun to surface. While in San Francisco, I saw my first foursquare special, at a nearby yogurt shop. Foursquare could easily virtualize the frequent visitor card, a pet peeve of mine. Mayor deals are also great ways to spur patronage.

With the impending release of geo-coded tweets, I have to assume that the Twitter integration foursquare already has will be extended. As with its entire service, Twitter seems to be content to let API developers build compelling features for them, e.g. groups. So, this will be an area where foursquare could show the value of geo-coded tweets.

Overall, I’m happy with the game and have only a couple enhancements.

I’d really like to see a worldwide leaderboard so I can compete with friends out of town and see the top scorers in the world. I suspect this is on the radar.

Also, a map of my checkins would be very interesting not only to me, but to merchants, e.g. my travel patterns would open up new ways to market to me. Yeah, I hate being pitched by advertising, but not so much if the pitch is targeted and valuable to me.

Anyway, this post is too long already, but I had a lot to say. I’m excited to use what I’ve seen in foursquare within the enterprise, assuming 1up gets some momentum.

What do you thing about all this? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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I need to watch what I say when I’m with Jake, else I’ll be asked to blog… what a chore

Anyway, just a few thoughts from last week’s craziness known as #oow…

• Congrats to Raimonds Simanovskis for winning the coveted Oracle Developer of the Year award.  Raimonds’ is known in the Ruby and Rails world for building and maintaining the Ruby Oracle adapters (oracle-enhanced, ruby-plsql, and the Oracle adapter for DataMapper).  I wish I had more time to contribute to Raimonds’ work.  Sounds like he’s got a few new projects planned… Ruby client for Coherence.
• WebCenter sessions — I learned quite a bit about WebCenter this week.  I’m particularly excited about the REST based support that WebCenter will be offering with this month’s release.
• It was great to meetup (in real life) with the folks I frequently twitter/im/email with… too many to list here.

I’m not sure how this came about, but Jake and I were discussing how CS students should be required (or highly motivated) to work on open source projects as part of their coursework in college.  Then I read Raimonds’ Oracle Magazine interview where he said:

“It would be good if there were more sharing,” says Simanovskis. “A lot of very good developers have created a lot of good components that could be reused, but too often they stay inside the corporate firewall.”

Too often, I work with developers who have no desire to share their work (even internally).  I believe having developers participate in open source communities before starting their careers would greatly help out commercial software vendors foster an openness that can promote innovation and creativity.Possibly Related Posts:

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The big show is over for another year, and San Franciscans are happy for the return of that critical block of Howard between 3rd and 4th.

As with every year, my show was pretty much over after Tuesday, leaving me with a couple sessions and lots of work to get done. Oh, and our annual team dinner, which is always a fun time.

Wednesday, Day 3:

• Woke up to no rain, w00t!
• Took 45 minutes to get over the Bay Bridge.
• Felt happy that I work from home.
• Resisted the urge to tweet everything on my mind.
• Snapped my first ORACLENERD shirt in the wild, Tim Hall (@oraclebase) in the OTN Lounge.
• Stole the Foursquare mayorship of Moscone North.
• Returned with Rich to Puccini and Pinetti, our haunt from OOW 07, to plot world domination.
• Got to meet Clayton Donley, who swung by to say hello, and blow our minds with his smartness.
• Spent six hours at P&P loving their wifi and their hospitality.
• Headed off to our team dinner.
• Watched Anthony eat another huge steak, or most of it anyway.
• Earned the Bender Foursquare badge.
• Gloated.
• Had a drink with Matt at Jillian’s.
• Overheard a woman loudly brag, “My Mom’s stacked!” to the entire bar.
• Called it a night.

Thursday, Day 4:

• Completed my final trip over the Bay Bridge.
• Made a mental note to stay somewhere else next year.
• Met Paul to head into a customer meeting.
• Found the meeting full and bowed out to work in the SF MoMA cafe instead.
• Headed with Paul to Oakland to meet Rich and Anthony.
• Plotted world domination for a bunch of hours at a hospitable pub in Oakland.
• Got lost heading back to my hotel.
• Spent entirely too much time looking for a decent place to eat.
• Lost two Foursquare mayorships.
• Called it a conference.

Exciting, right? So, today’s another scheming day in the Pleasanton office. Apparently, everyone’s moving to a new building, so the wifi has been shut off in the old space. Good thing I carry a patch cable.

Anyway, back to the regular programming next week. Rich threatened to write a couple posts. We’ll see if he finds the time.Possibly Related Posts:

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• OpenWorld Manifest: Day 2
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Wow, so it rained a bunch today, and it was windy. Like a tropical storm or something. Not the best weather for me, being umbrella-phobic and all. I nearly had my eye poked out a dozen times, not a good day to be anti-umbrella.

Anyway, here we go.

Tuesday, Day 2:

• Woke up to rain and wind.
• Looked out the hotel window to see Bay Bridge traffic backed up to Berkeley.
• Decided to catch the morning keynote on OpenWorld Live.
• Watched the keynote, stoked to be on the WebCenter team.
• Ventured out into the rain.
• Soaked through shirt and undershirt on the way to car.
• Sat in Bay Bridge maze for 45 minutes, recurring theme.
• Noticed how much angrier Bay Area drivers are compared to Portland drivers.
• Understood why.
• Felt bad for people who have to cross the Bay Bridge every day.
• Tweeted in traffic.
• Checked Google Maps traffic to confirm I was totally hosed.
• Felt nervous on the top deck of the Bay Bridge in 40 mph wind gusts.
• Made it to Moscone unscathed.
• Confronted fear of umbrellas.
• Ducked into Moscone West to avoid wet clothes contest.
• Stole Foursquare mayorship of Moscone West.
• Gloated to myself.
• Chatted with Bex in the OTN Lounge.
• Skipped a session to stay dry.
• Thought I lost my phone. Eek.
• Ran into Meg and Vivian.
• Felt bad for being discombobulated about my phone.
• Found my phone.
• Felt sheepish.
• Ran into Anthony.
• Convinced myself someone was blocking Brizzly and this blog to annoy me.
• Confirmed suspicions.
• Felt annoyed.
• Had lunch with Anthony and Dan.
• Learned from Dan that I couldn’t get an Exadata 2 instance to make Connect awesome-scary fast.
• Came to terms with that.
• Avoided umbrella eye-pokes.
• Returned to the OTN Lounge.
• Got the high hat from Floyd, again
• Attended a WebCenter Spaces demo.
• Learned some things.
• Plotted world domination with Matt, Dan, Paul, Floyd in the OTN Lounge.
• Went to a customer event.
• Went to the blogger meetup.
• Met a bunch of people.
• Caught up with people I know.
• Thanked Justin and Alex for paying and hosting.
• Hugged Floyd, Amy, Meg.
• Caught up with Floyd, finally.
• Wandered around SOMA a little.
• Blogged about it all.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.Possibly Related Posts:

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Even though many of you are either here in rainy San Francisco or are following OpenWorld via its many virtual channels (#oow09 on Twitter, OpenWorld Live, OraNA (and @orana), etc.), I figured I’d give you a list of what I’ve been doing.

Sunday, Day 0:

• Landed around 11:30 in Oakland.
• Spent 35 minutes in the Bay Bridge maze.
• Saw an awesome OMG!!! PONIES!1! bumper sticker.
• Missed the start of Chris Bucchere’s Ruby session.
• Hung out with Rich and Raimonds after the session.
• Went to the not-yet-open OTN Lounge to visit Justin.
• Noted his ORACLENERD shirt, lurking under his fleece.
• Plotted world domination with Rich over giant burritos.
• Waited to meetup with Floyd.
• Ran into Ted and had a drink.
• Bailed on Floyd who had better things to do
• Checked into hotel to discover the bar and room service were already closed.
• Felt disappointed.

Monday, Day 1:

• Arrived at OTN Lounge to catch the morning keynote.
• Plotted world domination with Rich.
• Ran into Tim.
• Plotted world domination with Paul.
• Said hello to Floyd before his unconference session.
• Had a ZOMG moment when he gave us Mars Rover stickers.
• Forgave him for blowing me off on Sunday
• Plotted world domination with Rich, Paul and Anthony.
• Went to WebCenter 11g Strategy and Vision session.
• Met our new boss, Rahul Patel.
• Plotted more world domination over lunch.
• Made the end of the WebCenter 11g introduction session.
• Noticed each session listed available space and reserved space.
• Chatted with Paul about how to build a game for speakers around those numbers.
• Chatted with Paul about predictive markets and under/over for session attendance.
• Decided that would be fun to pitch to Marketing next year.
• Hunkered down in the OTN Lounge to get serious on that domination.
• Ran into Floyd again.
• Met Espen, who had been stalking me on Foursquare
• Said hello to Marius.
• Headed to WebCenter 11g REST session.
• Got promoted to Superuser Level 1 in Foursquare.
• Gloated.
• Left session with some questions that we’ll need to address.
• Hiked over to the Hilton with Anthony for WebCenter 11g hands-on lab.
• Finished the lab before Anthony.
• Gloated.
• Stole my first Foursquare mayorship, Jillian’s, doubt that will last.
• Had drinks with my old boss.
• Headed back to my hotel.

I’ll try to keep a log. It’s rainy like crazy today, which should make for an interesting day or more.Possibly Related Posts:

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So, we’ll all be making the trip to OpenWorld in a few days.

I’m the only one on the team actually flying, but if you’re familiar with Bay Area traffic, you could argue that we’re all traveling (vs. commuting).

Photo by our good friend Eddie Awad on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Anyway, I’m not sure of my exact itinerary, assuming you care, but due to our recent move to the WebCenter team, I’ll be spending a lot of time in WebCenter sessions. I know, surprise.

If you’re interested in WebCenter (and Portal) sessions at OpenWorld, I highly recommend this page over on OTN that lists all the Portal-related sessions and activities during the big shindig. Peter Moskovits also has a great summary here.

Suffice to say it will be a busier than normal OOW for me. I’m geeked to meet all my new compadres in WebCenter and some customers too, I hope. Plus, it’ll be a great chance to catch up with my team and the other usual suspects I only see at OOW.

So, if you’re going to be at OOW, and you want to meetup, I’ll likely be at the OTN Lounge when I’m not in sessions, or stop by the blogger meetup on Tuesday night. Or, Plan C, drop a comment or tweet @ me (jkuramot) with alternate ideas.

I’m guessing the posts will slow down next week, as I’m consumed by the OpenWorld experience, but I’ll be tweeting random observations and possibly interesting stuff if you’re interested.

In homage to Chet (and his absence), I’m packing my ORACLENERD shirt, but I’m wondering if I’ll find an opportunity to wear it. Employees are expected to dress business casual, but I might be able to swing a wardrobe change for a casual evening meetup.

My feet will be begging for mercy by then anyway.

See you there.Possibly Related Posts:

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Following Rich again with Google Wave coverage, I figured I should add some of my own impressions of Wave after using it for a bit.

First and foremost, Wave is a work in progress, and it may eventually live up to the potential we all saw in it after the demo at Google I/O in June. However, right now, it’s a snoozer for some (ahem, Paul), and a nightmare of unproductivity for others.

Photo by jurvetson on Flickr used under Creative Commons

After I got my coveted invitation, I immediately logged in and was hit with a “what now” moment. I had a few waves waiting for me, which I replied to, but that experience felt exactly like email. I didn’t get the IM feel until later, when Rich and I happened to be on the same wave.

I had tinkered briefly with Rich’s sandbox account earlier in the year, with exactly the same “what now” feeling. Wave seems like an empty room at first. I guess the main difference this time is that it’s way more stable than the sandbox was, which Rich also mentioned.

So, faced with having to learn on my own, I watched a couple of the videos provided in an introductory wave and quickly found the “with:public” keyword.

There went the quiet.

Tons of public waves are out there, and they’re very active. The tough part was scrolling through them all to find anything remotely interesting. Plus, you can’t just browse a wave. Once you click it, it’s added to your Inbox.

I did find a trash button to remove waves from my Inbox, which led to a funny discovery. That trash button is hidden on smaller resolutions. I stumbled onto this by seeing the button on my 1600 x 1200 CRT, but not on my 1280 x 1024 LCD.

Turns out you have to expand the Inbox horizontally to see it on smaller displays, but there are no visual cues to clue you in that there are other buttons on the toolbar though. I hope that’s not the final design.

This leads me to the next observation. Wave requires work. I have to learn how to use it, which I find a bit annoying. I guess I’m accustomed to more intuitive web apps, especially from Google, but I guess Wave gets a pass for now a) because it’s a preview release, and b) because it’s a game-changer.

Incidentally, Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani has a fantastic post on how to get started called Google Wave 101. Check it out first or walk through it when you get your account. It’s an excellent resource.

Most of the negative feedback about Wave is due to a single fact. It doesn’t do anything new right now. We already have email and chat, and several of the cool robots demoed in June, e.g. Bloggy, aren’t functional yet.

So, many people are rightly feeling let down by the hype, which is understandable. But even if Wave were more functional, I don’t think it would be hailed as a game-changer by many because it simply provides a (debatably) better mousetrap.

There simply aren’t that many tasks that people use the consumer web for that Wave can replace.

Rich and I are of the same mind that Wave will find more success within enterprise firewalls because work provides a slew of processes and tasks, typically spread across many systems, that Wave can automate and centralize.

This should remove the “what now” problem for people, but this is all speculative for now. We won’t know for sure until an open source version is available. That’s when the fun will begin.

Until then, we’ll have to wait and see. I suspect the API will produce some interesting stuff in the meantime. Maybe when Bloggy is working, I’ll post from Wave for giggles.

So, if you’ve been in Wave, what do you think of it? If you want to add me, I’m jkuramot at googlewave dot com.

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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After several days under the weather, I emerged today to several thousand unread feed items.

Normally to get through a lot of content, I scan the titles of the items for interesting stuff before reading further. Today, I think I passed up PhotoSketch (h/t Techmeme, Gizmodo) at least four times before it stuck, but when it did, wow. Just wow.

So, PhotoSketch is the work of several Chinese computer science students, and in a nutshell, it creates a montage of images based on freehand sketches.

In other words, you draw some stick-figure images, label them and PhotoSketch creates a composite image for you, like so:

That looks totally real to me. Unbelievable.

From the student’s abstract:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Check out their video. This is incredible stuff, and if it’s ever made available to the interwebs, it will be a giant time-suck. Of course, licensing for the images used by PhotoSketch will be a rathole too, but hey, it’s still the coolest thing I’ve seen today.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.Possibly Related Posts:

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When I first saw Google Wave, it was like experiencing a messiah. For a web/tech geek, @larsras‘ and @twephanie’s 80+ min demo was a spiritual affair that I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life [in software].  I even spread the love on this blog.

After Google I/O (where Google Wave had it’s coming out party), I got a chance to kick the tires in the Google Wave sandbox.  Boy was that rough — it should have been called a “wave pool” instead of a sandbox.  The product was unusable after 5-10 minutes of use.  With that said, I was cool with it because the Google engineers behind it are rock stars and it’ll get cleaned up… and hell, it was basically alphaware.

Fast forward to last week when Google opened up Wave to ~100k users.  I thought great… it’s almost ready and most issues should be ironed out by now.  Hmmm… after using it for a week, I’d say it’s got a long way to go.  Yes, most of the bugs I’ve seen in the past are gone.  However, there are still several things that make this product very unusable as an email alternative.  First of all, whenever I use it, it spikes my browser’s memory usage by about 300-500mb on top of what was already there.  So, it’s not unlikely to have Safari or Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) consuming ~1gb of memory.  After using Google Wave, I had to cycle my browser just to free up the memory.  Ok… so the browsers have to improve because of Google Wave… that’s a good thing.  Nothing pushes innovation faster than an innovative product that relies on it, right?

Aside from technical issues, Google Wave’s largest hurdle is to convince people that this platform really is better.  I get that Google released Wave to hackers early to crowdsource the innovation that could help propel its use.  However, it’s going to be a while before most common folks really “get it.”  It’s also going to require some innovative applications (extensions, robots, etc) and use patterns to push it forward.  Right now, the general consensus among my circle of wave friends is that they “don’t get it.”

With that said, I’m confident that Google will pull it off.  Not very many companies can do it, but they can.  Everything gets reinvented at some point and email is a prime target.  So, I’m sure that in another few months, my current feelings toward Wave will be different.  In the meantime, if you happen to get a Wave invite, send me a wave.Possibly Related Posts:

• More Wave Reactions
• The Enterprise Implications of Google Wave
• Finally Something Interesting, Google Chrome Frame
• Just Send Me an Email
• Google I/O Sessions Live

Just testing out a collaborative sudoku gadget from Google Wave. Update: you’ll only see this if you have a Google Wave account. 7 invites left. First 7 to comment gets an invite!

Update: All my (Jake’s) invitations are gone, not sure where Rich is with his batch. Also, the Wave script seems to be borked. It’s try to render at the bottom of the page and failing. Oh well, it’s definitely a “Preview” release. More to come as we experiment with it.

Update 2: Removed the embedded Sudoku Wave because for some reason it stopped working correctly and was trying to load at the bottom of the page. Possibly Related Posts:

• Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K
• More Wave Reactions
• Google I/O Sessions Live
• Mix Updates and New Features
• Google Wave, the Aftermath