Today's New York Times tackles the question whether people will pay to get friends. The article missed a couple important points about social networks beyond the typical sales, dating, or job lead. Social networks also determine product purchases, such as a book or DVD, and can enable a secondary market for exchange of such goods on a sale or loan basis. Some large companies like Microsoft have intranets and mailing lists that cover topics similar to Tribe.net's tribes or Orkut's communities. There are also internal book recommendations and the sale of second-hand goods. Unsolicited e-mail is a hot topic and…
A laundry room operator in Boston, Mac-Gray, has started installing a Web based tracking system for users of its washing machine facilities. You can monitor the minutes left on a cycle, see who is waiting to use a particular machine, and check usage data for an entire building's facilities….
Randy Cohen, Ethicist for the New York Times magazine, says it is ethical to use an open WiFi network for casual Internet usage. Time Warner Cable disagrees and encourages you to personally sign up for their services….
Last night I attended the birthday party of Orkut Buyukkokten, which he cleverly double billed as an Orkut launch party so Google would pay for everyone. We were downstairs at suite one8one for most of the night. Interesting mix of people, including some Tribe.net crashers. The video projectors at the club were playing content licensed under Creative Commons. Suite one8one had no beer on tap and served me Guinness in a can: an act of sacrilege to an Irishman. This was my first social networks gathering. It was interesting to try to figure out how you may be connected through…
Samsung is planning a cellphone with the ability to receive satellite TV broadcasts. 70 channels in Japan, 40 channels in South Korea. It will also support pay-per-view services. Trial service starts in April with a commercial launch in July….
Stephen Wolfram is offering A New Kind of Science online for free. Wired wrote a long article in June 2002 about the book and the years of isolationist thinking that went into its creation….
Tonight I attended an event featuring Eric Rudder of Microsoft. The Commonwealth Club of California gave Eric an award for being a person who will shape the upcoming century. I sat in the second row with my Tablet PC and have the whole hour recorded, if only I can clean up the sound from my built-in mic. It was interesting to hear Eric speak about software engineering as a profession in its infancy and therefore very prone to making mistakes. Brown's computer science department will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year. Ten years ago computer science degrees were still not…
Chris Pratley writes about bug fixing within Microsoft and how Watson, a software reporting tool, has changed their debugging process. He follows up with a second post about attention to detail and how hardware obscurities sometimes lead to buggy software….
Scoble might be taking a break from his weblog, but Andy Beal of Search Engine Guide posted an interview with him today. The article focuses on WinFS and some specific issues such as metadata for photographs and contacts….
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for AMD Athlon64 or Opteron processors is now available as a customer preview from Microsoft. 450 megabytes to download, and the software expires in 360 days….
HBS Working Knowledge on the answer to music piracy. A few good points: Ted Cohen of EMI Music said that EMI is trying to convince Apple that WMA needs to play on iPod and AAC needs to play on WMA devices. He sees this issue as "critical for consumer acceptance." Few users could afford to purchase the thousands of songs you can fit on an iPod. The assumption is you steal the music. My legit music collection is around 20 GB. Most are MP3s encoded at 192Kbps using LAME. Enough for a mid-range iPod without room for growth….
MSN has a beta version of its new search engine online. Better differentiation between paid and ranked search results. Categories are from Zeal (LookSmart), paid listings are from Overture, and ranked results are from Inktomi. Two of the three pieces are owned by Yahoo. Microsoft needs to step up and buy LookSmart. They are without a CEO. At around $2 a share their market capitalization is $214. Yes, Looksmart's properties are mostly written in Java, but there is some C++ in there as well….
David Jones of the New York Times writes about the growing popularity of self-service kiosks at airline check-in and their growth into the hotel sector as well….
The SWIPE Toolkit demonstrates "the value of personal information on the open market and enable people to access information encoded on a driver's license or stored in some of the many commercial data warehouses." Covers how to decode your driver's license and request your data from large data warehouses….
Sunday's New York Times took a look at the upcoming search war between Microsoft and Google. There is no doubt in my mind that Internet search will be built-in to Longhorn. Google will offer their deskbar, and you may even be able to choose your default search technology similar to your media player, instant message client, browser, etc. today. Google will change once it enters the public market. Employee perks will be scrutinized, and there might be some employee shuffle. Google and Yahoo! are the first names techies think of when it comes to search, and MSN Search will have…
Would you like to pretend you have a girlfriend? There are over 60 women on eBay right now willing to be your imaginary girlfriend: write letters, talk on the phone, instant message, and even send underwear to the highest bidder. Most offer 4-8 week terms and include a break-up letter detailing how sad she is to see you go. Sounds like a great job for writers looking for work. Just create a fantasy and take in the money. Thank you Jason Kottke for the link….
