One of the many real-life intrusions lately has been the recently-announced planned WhitePages.com acquisition of Snapvine, which I wrote about on the WhitePages Developer Blog on Wednesday morning. We’ve been working on this for quite a while, and I’m very excited about the energy I’ve seen from both teams as we start to meet each other and think about what we’ll build together.

The entire adventure reminds me of the first startup I thought about creating, which I discussed with Victor in 1999 when we were both working on NetDocs. Streaming audio was just starting to be embedded in websites, but there was no such thing as combining audio with personal publishing (and not much personal publishing, unless you count Diaryland – and I did).

My father has been an investment advisor since I can remember, and when I was a pre-teen, he ran a large office of Prudential Bache in Penn Station. One of my strongest memories was the broadcast conference calls he would lead or listen to each day – with clients, brokers, etc. – sharing what was going on in the market, learnings, etc.

So I got excited about building a set of online tools for this kind of person – someone who wanted to publish pure audio to a set of interested parties. I thought about simple web pages and simple audio controls, designed some very basic pieces, etc.

Then Shoutcast came along, and for some reason I decided that was the end of it – someone had beaten me to it. I can’t explain why I thought they were the same thing – maybe it was just that I saw Shoutcast as a demonstration that I was already behind the curve. Anyway, Victor and I worked on our doomed corporate project and played a lot of Run & Gun, and nothing came of it.

Fast-forward almost a decade later, and now I’m working with a company that’s come as close to building that toolset as anyone else out there, and I’m going to get to work on combining those kinds of tools with the most comprehensive people search website on the planet. It’s an exciting road ahead.

Oh, and I still listen to Shoutcast on my Chumby. (And I do owe Victor a call.)

I met someone last night (I think it’s badhill but didn’t get a last name) who described himself as a transit hacker, and we talked for a while about bike commuting (I bike to work almost-daily).

We talked about one of the problems for new bike commuters, which I’ve seen over and over again – getting started is hard because you don’t know how to get there. Especially if you haven’t bike commuted before and so are going to be nervous, you want a route that’s safe, has no unexpected obstacles or hills, and is easy to remember.

Automated online driving directions don’t cut it, even if you can skip highways, because while you might be ok taking a chance on online directions when you’re driving, biking is a bigger commitment and mistakes loom larger (especially for new cyclists).

In Seattle, you can ask for help on the Cascade message boards, but you first have to know they exist. Of course you can talk to friends, but that’s still not perfect.

The City of Seattle distributes a beautiful Seattle bicycling guide map, but it’s job is to tell you what you can do, not what you should do. They take input from commuters, but it generally comes from public forums, which are really just an excuse for people to yell at each other.

This is a perfect opportunity for crowdsourcing, though: thousands of people bike commute every day in Puget Sound, and wherever you’re going, probably dozens of others are doing the same. What if you could just follow their routes, even if you didn’t know them?

The more fun way to do this is to give thousands of cyclists tiny GPS devices that unobtrusively tracked their routes and then reported back to a server, like Dash’s outbound features for cyclists. This would work, could update as construction impacts routing, etc. It’s also very cool. The more practical way to do this (which Brandon suggested) is to have an online map tool where you encourage cyclists to post their commute routes.

Then you overlay all of the paths heat map-style so that people planning their own route can find the most-often-trekked streets (and directions) and routes. Ideally you could follow individual routes as well, so that you could see why people pick one route over the other based on their final destination.

There’s obviously some way to save out the coordinates that somebody uses to create a path on an online map – Gmap Pedometer creates permalinks, for example – so it certainly seems possible to build this sort of thing. And as being a transit hacker sounds fun, maybe I’ll do it sometime. Or maybe you will. I’m already behind on other projects…

In February I wrote about people who follow you on Twitter for no good reason. Since then I’ve probably received a few dozen more requests from entirely random people/bots/MakeMoneyFasts, and while it doesn’t really mean anything, I find it irksome. Others do too – searching tweetscan for block always produces lots of annoyed people.

Blocking someone, though, is a huge pain. You get the mail message which links to the person, then you have to go to Twitter, go to your follower list, page through it to find that person, and then block. Satisfying, but tiresome.

So today I whipped up a Greasemonkey script to help. (You can stop reading and just download it now if you want.) If you’re a Gmail or Google Apps Mail user, and you receive a mail announcing yet another spammer, you can block them in just two clicks: the first goes to a block page, then you confirm. (There’s no way I’ve found to do it in one click yet.)

Here’s what your mail will look like – note the Block!:

Easy to do and satisfying.

You can find the script at this link at userscripts.org. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

Some random development notes:

• This took me about 2.5 hrs, 80% of which was spent learning Greasemonkey, the Gmail Greasemonkey API, and how to do regex replacements in Javascript. I expect doing this for just the Twitter page would take ~30min (so you click through, see that you really don’t know this person, and then block); other mail clients would be fast too, so let me know if you want one.
• The Gmail Greasemonkey API is a nice touch, esp. because I don’t think you can find the body of a message with XPath otherwise (maybe XPath craps out at a certain # of levels, and the body of the message is 20+ levels deep). However, once you use the API, all document.* functions (including XPath ones) seem to be unavailable: maybe unsafeWindow blocks them, or maybe I just had bad luck.
• The Dive Into Greasemonkey tutorial might be out of date, but it was still insanely valuable (even if it’s obsessed with timers for some reason).

Enjoy!

or, even when he’s (almost) gone, he’s not gone…

From Yahoo News, April 4, 2008:

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates said on Friday he expected the new version of Windows operating software, code-named Windows 7, to be released “sometime in the next year or so.”…

A company spokeswoman said Gates’ comments are in line with a development cycle that usually releases a test version of the software before its official introduction.

Give her credit for a nice try, but I do not think that word means what you think it means. Perhaps “or so” would have been a better target?

After accidentally searching for 50 on Google and getting a link to 50 Cent, I remembered the Google Suggest single-letter test when it launched, which showed the top result Google Suggest would give when you pressed just one letter. I imagine this has changed over time, but I’m doing a different test – what are the first things to come up when you search for numbers, 1-50, and what does that tell us?In each case, I’ve included links to a few of the top links (removing similar links,  which Google sometimes gets right and sometimes doesn’t), and when the source isn’t obvious from the title (like VH-1 going to www.VH1.com) and is interesting, I’ve added source information.  Also note that Google inserts a bunch of viral videos with numbers in them from YouTube etc. as part of universal search – I’ve just skipped them.

Google, by the Numbers

Some notes:

• Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, dominates the results – numbers, dates, years. The summaries varied widely – sometimes the first sentence of the article, sometimes a random sentence below
• Technology, especially web standards and Perl, are all over the place. Maybe this is a sign of the long tail of technology online – if there’s nothing else more relevant, technology rushes to fill the space.
• For every commercial brand (WD-40), there’s a non-brand (Z39.50).

• But won’t someone think of the bears? – Both a cute story about tracking bears _and_ a depressing view of political posturing in a semi-ironic tone
• The Cute Cat Theory, or “first comes the porn, then the activists” – this looks like the most interesting talk I missed so far this year, and the notes are really an essay that I won’t forget
• Integrating game design techniques into functional software – hyperblogger Dave McClure puts up Amy Jo Kim’s fascinating talk on using the techniques that prolong game playing (points, feedback, etc.) in non-entertainment software.

When they write the final story on how Microsoft’s attempt to unseat RIM on mobile devices was foiled by the iPhone – and make no mistake, the plink of “pwned” was just heard all across Puget Sound – one overlooked facet will be the implied upgrade.

I replaced my Samsung Blackjack with an iPhone right around launch day, and when I did, I assumed that Apple would continue to improve my iPhone: that when I sync’d with iTunes, I would occasionally get new features, new applications, etc.

It’s not obvious why I thought that would happen. My Mac doesn’t get free upgrades. My iPod gets firmware updates occasionally, but they don’t add new features. Steve Jobs didn’t say anything, there were no press releases, legitimate leaked reports, or anything else. Oh, and one other thing: phones don’t upgrade. We’re used to them being hotfix-for-emergency-only, like your printer or your HDTV.

When I talked to others, they were sure of it too. They were waiting for the announcements of this or that new feature, and we all assumed that our phones would get it. Why did we all think our phones would be upgraded? Something “told” us that. Maybe it was the unconscious reaction to the iPod firmware update process inside iTunes; maybe it was a belief that Apple “got it”; maybe since this was more like a computer and computers get free upgrades… but they don’t. For some reason, we believed in an upgrade.

Well, we were right. Over the last nine months, we’ve seen minor improvements to a bunch of applications, new features like customizable home screens and web clips, and the rollout of the iTunes store. This week, Apple announced and made available the beta of the iPhone 2.0 software, with the features necessary to make the phone enterprise- and developer-ready. It seems reasonable to assume that the 6,8,10 million iPhone owners will have the same software as anybody who buys the phone one year later. For those who didn’t want to buy the iPhone because they wanted to wait until the “second generation,” well, it turns out that for the most part, the second generation is the first generation. (This is especially true since the hardware has proven to be quite reliable.)

Compare this with the Samsung Blackjack. The Blackjack released in November 2006 with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5); Microsoft had already pre-announced features of WM6 by then, and released WM6 in February 2007. (Wikipedia compares the versions; major differences included Office Mobile, Exchange address book support, & HTML email.) There were hundreds of threads at places like Howard Forums with people building hacked versions of WM6 for the Blackjack (and similar devices like the T-Mobile Dash and Motorola Q), speculating on when it would be available, which carriers would allow which versions of WM6 for which phones and when, etc. Microsoft and AT&T (the Blackjack carrier) said nothing for months. It took until January 2008 – 2008! – for the Blackjack to support WM6. In the interim, dozens of phones were released with WM6.

So basically, you buy a Windows Mobile phone, that’s the phone you have. They make the OS better, you probably have to buy a new phone (or just wait a long time). WM phones, like iPhone, are mini-computers with mini-OS’s – making them non-upgradeable as the default plan of record was just one of Microsoft’s mistakes. (It looks like WM6 added Windows Update, but we don’t know if that’s just for hotfixes or for actual improvements.)

Apple got this right – the iPhone is a living, breathing device, improved consistently. When inevitably that stops – market pressure, hardware limitations, or impunity – we will still have seen more during the first 12 months of this device than any previous mobile phone.

In the last few months, Valleywag has integrated an interesting reporting technique – using public Twitter updates as first-party sources (and entire article topics). Examples include Yahoo’s Fire Eagle (screenshot below), Jimmy Wales plans quieter life, and the Twitter CEO’s upcoming big week. Here’s the first one:

This is one of the clearest crossovers between semi-private communication channels with “friends” and making public statements. Individuals use Twitter for sharing time-based nothingness with people they care about (and random stalkers). If you don’t lock down your Twitter stream – and it seems like very few people do, and you certainly can’t get “discovered” by friends if you do – anything you say suddenly becomes quotable. When you answer “What Are You Doing?”, you’re telling everyone. (I haven’t found any clear examples of anybody taking advantage of this – placing content in their Twitter to get picked up by Valleywag.)

Facebook is different, because since Facebook really does lock down the privacy of people’s profiles, the content that’s made it from Facebook to Valleywag etc. is always leaked by someone with access to the data – a more traditional way of getting unknown information.

There’s a legit case to make that this isn’t really article-worthy – what technologist launching a new product wasn’t cranking out bugs a few hours before a public release? – but that’s Valleywag’s MO, and you can’t fault them for using Twitter to do what they would have already done. It does place possibly-public figures in a bind, but it’s a bind of our own culture’s making. This wouldn’t be a problem for a generation earlier: they’d just say STFU. They’re probably right.

(Useless disclaimer: Owen@Valleywag helped me out with something once, and I still appreciate it.)

• IE8 and How Decisions Get Made at Large Companies – This is a hyperliterate debunking of the standard myth around large companies – that they’re hive minds or well-oiled machines following a consistent plan, rather than an assorted group of individuals all grappling about, trying to figure out the right plan. The press echoes the hive mind when it says “Microsoft” or “Bill Gates” made a decision, that no doubt was made up and down a chain by dozens of people. My stories on how things happen are different but the result is the same.
  
• You used <X> to write what? – a set of articles in CIO magazine talking about pluses and minuses of using different dynamic languages for different problems, at a good level for the technologist who doesn’t have time to read every devblog in the universe. Unfortunately each one is written by a different person and the quality varies tremendously – the Ruby one is very good, the Perl one is pretty terrible.
  
• Hanging out at the 2008 Crossword Puzzle Tournament – made famous by Wordplay, this is a good narrative on this year’s tournament. (Random fact: a member of my Puzzle Hunt Team wrote one of the puzzles featured in the film.)
  
• CAPTCHA hacking and farming – A solid article about Google/Yahoo/Hotmail CAPTCHA’s all being broken (or, more likely, farmed), with a good collection of links in the comments. (Updated, via Waxy: a blog post about human CAPTCHA farming becomes a marketplace for farmers – and it looks like the price keeps dropping.)
  
• Dancing with the Data Center – WhitePages migrates every server in its colo, one at a time, with no downtime – with photos. (Insert obligatory disclaimer here.)

Hey, this is fun. Maybe I will actually do it every week…

For the second time in a month, I braved the rain and cold to use one of Seattle’s Parkeon parking meters. Parkeon’s one of the vendors of new-fangled, electronic parking meters, which stops scofflaws who pull in behind someone leaving by printing receipts which are then required to be attached to the inside window. It’s all very fancy-pants.

Also for the second time in a month, the meter didn’t work.

(Look, real raindrops, so you know I ain’t lyin’.)

Above the 01:22, it says “Contacting Bank for Approval.” I’ve put my credit card in at this point, and through some sort of magic means, it’s now doing… something. And that something took about three minutes, and then at the end it said something like “Can’t Contact Bank” and didn’t give me the receipt.

So at this point, I’ve done what I was supposed to do, and something went wrong in the system. I don’t know whether it’s the bank, Parkeon, something in between, and I don’t care – all I know is that at this point I either have to park illegally or move my car. (Or, I guess, tape a note to the window. Or walk to another meter, if you can find one – but why would you believe that would work?) It’s not obvious that it’s broken to a parking attendant, like a busted meter would be, so I’m without recourse (and late for my appointment).

There’s a much better answer to this problem – if the system fails, give me the receipt anyway. Assume I’m a good actor and eat the cost, or process it in batch later when things are working, or upload your failed attempts to the central server and have it reprocess, or something. But your failure is not your customer’s problem.

Of course, if you’re Parkeon or the City of Seattle, you could worry about an attack vector here – if I’m a bad actor and I know that the parking meter will give me the receipt even if it can’t reach the bank, maybe I stop it from reaching the bank and get the receipt. Obvious response: if routing around Parkeon security is so easy that it’s worth not spending <$3 on parking to do it, make the security harder – and it’s not like one person’s hack is going to suddenly create a rash of scofflaw parkers across the city, since I’m not stealing anything of transferable value. The likelihood of attack that has meaningful value here seems like basically zero.

Amazon’s management is great at making this point, though not every system follows through: what part of your system absolutely has to succeed to meet your customer’s needs? And if that system fails, is there any kind of workaround anyway, or is succeed-later (i.e. asynchronous processing of the request) acceptable? For example, what if the meter is out of paper? Well, it could print a message on the screen and suggest you tape it to your window, a message that only the parking attendant could interpret – like a GUID interpretable by a handheld device. That’s almost certainly overkill but it’s a demonstration that you can do something. You can almost always do something, and figuring out the minimum something to make the customer successful is almost always the right plan.