jpreardon.com » Hi tek

Quote of the Week

jpreardon — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:33:07 +0000

There was a point in the late ’90s where all the graduating M.B.A.’s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it. They brought the whole sideshow of the hype and parties and all that crap. M.B.A. graduating classes are actually a reliable contrary indicator: if they all want to go into investment banking, there’s going to be a financial crisis. If they want to go into tech, that means a bubble is forming.
– Marc Andreessen (Bubble? What Bubble?)

Read the article and you’ll find out that Andreessen still believes that tech companies are undervalued and there isn’t a tech bubble right now. Everyone should be watching where most of the newly minted MBAs land next though.

via Betabeat

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Risk Meets Foursquare

jpreardon — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:00:21 +0000

Care for a giant game of Risk? Enter World of Fourcraft, which uses Foursquare to turn the five boroughs of New York into a sort of virtual board game. Looks like a good reason to start checking in with Foursquare again.

NextTrain Crowdsources Subway Tracking

jpreardon — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:30:03 +0000

The NYCMate application (available for iPhone and Android) has a NextTrain feature, which uses phone data to predict subway arrival times. It does so by analyzing when its users lose signal when going underground. According to this article, the system will need about 10,000 of NYCMate’s 600,000 users to turn on the NextTrain feature to get an accurate view of what is happening with the trains in Manhattan.

Trying to be everywhere…

jpreardon — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:02:30 +0000

A while back, Bits had a post about taking a step back from the constant connectedness. I especially like comment number 2: “Trying to be everywhere means being nowhere at all.” So true.

While I have no scientific evidence, it seems like those I spend the most time with have started to take this step back. It seems as if the smart phones don’t get pulled out quite as much during social times as they used to. Maybe we’re learning that being connected from afar is great, but the person in front of us deserves more attention.

Friendster Purge

jpreardon — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:07:00 +0000

Remember Friendster? Of course you do. If, by chance, you have any old photos on Friendster, you might want to download them soon. Friendster is going to delete old posts and photos, permanently. For me, this serves as a reminder to be careful who we entrust with storing our data (yes, I’m looking at you Facebook). Today, it seems unfathomable that Facebook would fade into obscurity. But, Friendster was once a smoking hot property too, although, it never had the as many users as Facebook has now. No matter how promising a site’s long term prospects look, we should think about how we may want to preserve the data we share on these sites. Especially when we have little control over how or when the data will be deleted.

Friendster’s move to purge data also makes me wish Diaspora were out of private beta. It would be wonderful to have the ease of sharing that sites like Facebook and Flickr give us, while, at the same time having control over the storage of the data.

iPhone Tracker

jpreardon — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:35:03 +0000

For a few months now, your iPhone has been storing your location data and transferring it to your computer when you sync. You can view this data with the handy and open source iPhone Tracker. Getting this sort of information from cellular companies usually requires some form of legal action. But, now you can get it without ever contacting an attorney.

It reminds me of this Tell-all telephone data visualization that offers a more polished interface of one person’s travels. It also overlays some other relevant information like Call and Twitter activity.

UPDATE 2011-04-23 (via Slashdot): Apparently the data stored on the iPhone isn’t super high-fidelity.

Diaspora* in the Times

jpreardon — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:18:38 +0000

Diaspora* got some ink today in the New York Times. Who new they had a publicist already?

This will spark even more interest in what looks to be a great project. Let’s hope they can keep this momentum going.

Diaspora*, the open source social network

jpreardon — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:44:32 +0000

It sounds like the call for an open social network may get answered soon. Diaspora* seeks to be “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”

There seems to be plenty of interest out there for this project. The guys behind Diaspora* managed to get seed funding (and then some) through Kickstarter in just ten days.

Diaspora* is certainly worth keeping an eye on in the coming months.

Has Facebook Gone Rogue?

jpreardon — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:35:52 +0000

Facebook? Rogue? Ryan Singel, on the Epicenter thinks so. In his post, he calls for an open alternative:

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

As Facebook continues to twist their privacy policy to meet their monetization needs, I tend to agree with Ryan–perhaps it is time to move on. We’re not alone, there is even a group of people forming a digital mass suicide pact (they are going to delete their Facebook profiles on 20/10/2010 at 20:10 GMT and suggest inviting some friends over for dinner to commemorate the occasion). And no, the irony that the digital mass suicide folks are using a Facebook fan page to get the word out is not lost on me.

via Hacker News

Farmville and Addiction

jpreardon — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:39:38 +0000

Farmville is the most popular application on Facebook. With over 70 million monthly active users, more people are playing Farmville than using Twitter. I think Twitter should fold before everybody realizes that the whole tweeting thing is a bigger waste of time than harvesting virtual crops. But, my unpopular opinions about Twitter really aren’t the point here.

Mark Newheiser posted a good story on just why Farmville is so popular and what elements keep people coming back for more (several times a day). I’m sure many game designers are looking at Farmville closely to see what “sticky” bits they can roll into their games.

Reading this made me realize that some people take these things way more seriously than I do:

I got roped into playing Farmville when my girlfriend insisted I needed to help her out and play with her. Together we worked up a spreadsheet to figure out what the profit per hour was for each crop in the game, which lead to some interesting results: unlike the other farming games that I’d encountered, trees and animals seemed to simply be an afterthought, they offered nowhere near the profitability of harvesting crops.

No wonder I never attained godfatherhood during my brief time on Mafia Wars.

slashdot, Mashable

jpreardon.com » Hi tek

Quote of the Week

Risk Meets Foursquare

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NextTrain Crowdsources Subway Tracking

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Trying to be everywhere…

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Friendster Purge

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iPhone Tracker

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Diaspora* in the Times

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Has Facebook Gone Rogue?

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Farmville and Addiction

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