People Who Read This Article Also Read… by Greg Linden of Microsoft Live Labs (and formerly of Findory.com) is a comprehensive review of the uses of recommendation systems on the Web and their implementations. Recommendation systems is a topic that I love and Greg’s descriptions of systems such as that of Google News was very educational.

I’m a huge proponent of the idea that the newspaper, with it’s one-size-fits-all news, is dead. I discussed this in my prior post, Ok, I admit it one size fits all news will die. In this prior post, I discussed the fact that I consume most of my news today using my RSS reader. I’ve added several news feeds, from many topic areas, that I respect and enjoy to my reader and I check it every few hours. I have found that over the past couple years, my awareness of current events in topic areas that I am interested in has risen considerably.

However, there are limitations to the RSS reader. “Rolling” your own news feed takes time to create and maintain. I don’t expect that many will do this. More importantly, though, the scope of the news that is available to me is bounded by the content of those news feeds which I have explicitly included. I don’t doubt that every day I miss news stories that would be of high interest to me because they originate from news sources that I am not following. A news application that can show me news from both my explicitly chosen news sources as well as news stories that come by leveraging recommendation technologies (e.g. “Story X is similar to news stories which Rishi typically reads” and “Story X is being read by many people who have similar news tastes to Rishi”) will be the ultimate solution for me. What’s exciting is that I expect such a news application to be available very soon…

For a couple of years, I’ve had this recurring thought: “What if you could apply the PageRank concept of link popularity to reputation?” In other words, let’s say person A, a marketing guy, vouches for person J as being an awesome Java engineer. That endorsement, while it may well be true, would not mean nearly as much as if person B, an engineer himself who has 10 other engineers vouching for his Java engineering skills, vouches for person J’s Java skills. Well, imagine a giant graph with edges that represent such vouches. By analyzing the graph, one could find the best (essentially the node on the graph with the most incoming Java engineer vouches…again not just quantity of vouches but quality of vouches…sort of a weighted sum) Java engineer.

Well, as a sort of experiment, Paul and Nick were kind enough to help me whip up the Vouch For Me app on Facebook. Add it and start vouching for your friends and get vouches back.

Lookery, an ad network for Facebook and other social networks with developer platforms, announced that, as part of their effort to rapidly grow their inventory, they are offering guaranteed minimum of 12.5 cents CPM for the next three months for an exclusive on the application’s traffic. 12.5 cents CPM at first glance seems awfully low but one must consider the alternatives.

Ad rates, in this case we’re talking in terms of CPM, generally correlate directly with context. Stronger context means a more focused audience. Targeted ads for this audience brings in high rates. For Facebook apps that have pages with real context, it’s likely that they can and should do much better than 12.5 cents. Depending on the content genre, it may take a bit more legwork on the part of the developers to find the right advertisers who will pay, but if the volume is there, it shouldn’t be too hard. However, for apps that have no real context (the majority of apps), 12.5 cents CPM may be about as good as they can get. Facebook itself sells its “flyer” ad space (the left column under the nav links) for not much more than this. In fact, I recently paid about 20-25 cents CPM for an ad and that was when I instructed Facebook to serve my ad only to a very precise demographic (matching only ~40k users out of the 50M+ Facebook userbase). Without such targeting, I would have gotten away with paying much less.

From my own experiences, I’ve found SocialMedia to be quite lucrative. SocialMedia advertisers, primarily developers who are buying installs for their own applications, pay 15 cents and upwards for a click. When SocialMedia first launched, when we published their ads prominently at the top of our canvas pages, we saw eCPM as high as $2 or so. Now it’s less, but still is above 50 cents eCPM. My hunch though is that applications which serve massive page views, particularly a large number of page views per user session, will see decreasing eCPM from SocialMedia. There’s only so many ads that each user is going to click in a session, no matter how many page views in length. Again, this is just a hunch though.

So, if you are one of the application developers that has a massively popular application which offers no meaningful context, then Lookery’s offer is probably pretty attractive. And this type of developer is exactly who Lookery wants in order to achieve their goal of adding a billion page views of inventory a month for the next few months.

Ever since Facebook launched their Beacon program, there’s been a non-stop attack on it from journalists, bloggers, and even advocacy organizations like MoveOn.org. Facebook has been accused of invading privacy so much so that some are actually describing the publishing of Mark Zuckerberg’s college application and personal journal entries by 02138 Magazine as Zuckerberg getting a taste of his own medicine.

The fact is, the Beacon is designed to be an opt-in feature for Facebook users. If a user does not want to publish an event him/her triggered on a third-party website, they need not do so. In other words, activity is only published to a user’s feed if that user approves. Moreover, if users are sure they never want to do so, they can permanently opt-out.

It turns out, though, that Facebook is being a bit sneaky though in how the Beacon system is implemented. According to Stefan Berteau at CA, even if a user on a third-party site - via a Beacon - declines to publish an event to their Facebook feed, information about the event is still sent over to Facebook. Whether they are doing something with this info is unknown. My guess is it is being recorded. Gathering as much information about what a user’s recent activity is may well help predict/define what their near-term future intentions are. Such info is critical for ad targeting.

What is distinct about this privacy blowup at Facebook compared to the News Feed privacy blowup back in September ‘06 is that the Beacon is a much less visible feature. Beacons launched a month ago and a very small minority of users have actually seen it. Both because only a small percentage of Facebook users have used third-party websites that employ the beacon and because, as a result, few beacon-sourced news feed items have been created (and my guess is that even for those feed items that have been published, few users users viewing the feed clicked on it and realized it was an external link). As a result of this slow uptake, most users haven’t heard of the Beacons and those that do haven’t been personally affected by it. Those that have been prompted by a Beacon were pleased to see that it was opt-in: the user had full control.

The “spying” issue brought up by Stefan is simply not going to be important to the vast majority of users. Unless you’re a techie, you’re not even going to understand the technical details. More importantly, the truth is that most users have simply become used to the idea that companies are spying on them or, worse yet, simply do not care one iota. Heck, some percentage of users probably think such spying may be a good thing because it could mean that companies can offer them better service. Let’s not forget the insanely high number of people who have Google and Yahoo toolbars installed on their browser. The primary purpose of most browser toolbars and plugins is to track your browsing activity. Oh and don’t even get me started on the Doubleclick’s of the world. I cringe to think of how many tracking cookies from all the different ad networks that are sitting in my Firefox right now.

Ask a random sample of 10 your Facebook friends questions about privacy, beacons, tracking cookies, etc. The replies you’ll get back will be filled with ignorance and indifference. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it’s a reality. This passive attitude towards personal privacy isn’t new either. Traditional companies have been tracking individual consumer behavior for decades and only until a person is directly inconvenienced or violated do they actually start to take interest in their privacy.

Perhaps Facebook’s mistake is not so much the Beacon program itself as their recent marketing blitz over SocialAds, which is all about whoring out user profile data to advertisers. It’s a concept that everyone new was coming but to a lot of people I’ve talked to, including myself, it does feel a bit like they’re exploiting the user. Yet, Google attaches ads to everything from your searches to your email and nobody cries foul. Maybe Facebook just needs to adopt a “Do No Evil” mantra to divert attention from their secret goal of beating out Google in becoming the Big Brother of the Web. =)

With all this talk about the Amazon Kindle, I Googled Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder and CEO) and found an article by Fast Company about his, and Amazon’s, story.

On page 4, Jeff’s rules of leadership - and management - are listed:

• Hire very carefully — you’re creating an enduring culture.
• Be stubborn and flexible.
• Obsess about customers, not colleagues.
• Know when to throw away the org chart.
• Get good advice — and ignore it.
• Don’t chase the quick buck.

…and his rules for Amazon:

• Communication is terrible.
• Take leaps of faith.
• Be simpleminded.
• Add up lots of little advantages.

I’d encourage you to click the link above and read the details behind some of these bullets. His general rules on leadership you’ve probably heard before in one shape or form, but his rules for Amazon - particularly the “Communication is terrible” rule - I found to be thought-provoking.

Wow. 5 months since my last blog post. I don’t even know what to say..where to begin. I guess I should start by listing my excuses for this disgustingly long gap. When I first started blogging in late 2005, I was instantly hooked. Much of my idle thoughts turned into ponderings over what I would write in my next post. I was certain that blogging would continue to be a regular activity of mine forever. As it turned out, “forever” was about 18 months. =)

So why after 18 months did blogging suddently fall off my radar. Well here’s the rundown:

1) In early April I started working at SideStep as a product manager. It has been an interesting transition for me..some aspects good..some not so good. Nevertheless, it’s consumed a lot of my time. More time than I had expected actually. Why? That brings me to reason #2…

2) Facebook F8/Platform. In early May, just a few weeks after I joined SideStep, SideStep was enlisted to be one of the F8 launch partners. What that translated into for the company was we needed a Facebook app ready for public consumption in a mere 2 weeks. I was the PM for the project as well as the lead developer (this part was unexpected but became necessary for various reasons). For those 2 weeks leading up to May 24th, the F8 launch, I worked literally around the clock to build the Trips app. We (barely) finished by the launch date. I celebrated the next day by going to Vegas for the weekend with a bunch of buddies. I quickly realized that it was way too early to start celebrating. Various bugs and other technical issues kept me busy for half of that weekend in Vegas. When I arrived back to work on Monday, I quickly fell back into the frantic development pace of the prior weeks.

3) Once July hit, Trips was less crazy but I had taken on new responsibilities at SideStep. I was now the PM for essentially all our community products as well as a couple other products. However, what really kept me busy outside of work was working on facebook apps of my own. With Andrew (my co-founder of Revunity), I built AnswerBook and with a SideStep co-worker, Paul, I built and launched The Nickname App and Complaints. We’ve also developed some really intriguing apps which have yet to see the light of day. The bottom line is, I’ve been a coding machine. (Oh btw somewhere doing this period I bought a MacBook Pro. Thanks for showing me the light Nick!)

4) Finally, in terms of my personal life, things have also been busy. I still live in SF but SideStep is in Santa Clara. The commute is pretty killer, and even though I crash at my parent’s place in Palo Alto often during the week, the back and forth between the city and the south bay is a serious time consumer.

Anyway, I’ve got one or two more solid excuses to add to the list but I’ll spare you those for now. The important takeaway in all this is that Its Rishi is back from the dead, I once again will be posting regularly, and I’m here to stay…forever. =)

Oh how mainstream media has changed over the past decades. Back in the 1960’s, during JFK’s presidency, news outlets wouldn’t publish any stories about the president’s infidelities. News editors had a sense of responsibility towards upholding the values and code of our society. There was no need to blemish the president’s name for little good would have come from it. Back then, news was controlled by a handful of agencies. Not only did these agencies have control over what news was received by citizens across the nation, but also when they received news. There were no 24-hour cable news channels and of course there was no Internet.

The landscape of news exchange/delivery today could not be more different. Major news outlets source and publish news around the clock and around the world. Americans are able to receive news wherever and whenever. News is no longer thought of as a single collection of headlines that you consume at once. Instead, news is a continuous flow of stories and headlines that is streaming whether you’re there to catch it or not. The consumption of news went from being a 30-minute event each morning or evening to being a virtually constant activity. How did this happen? Where is all this news coming from?? From two places:

The world shrank - Digital information networks enables news to efficiently travel across the globe in an instant. Now only can data travel at the speed of light, but there is a connected path from the news source to the news consumer. Often, very little human intervention is involved.

Citizen journalism - Digital cameras/videocams, camera phones, laptops, and wireless connectivity allow every one of us to capture the events of the world. I would venture a guess that the majority of Americans under the age of 30 now have atleast one device capable of digital capture with them at all times. We then take this digital information and disseminate it to the world via social-networking sites, blogs, online photo albums/streams, YouTube, message boards, etc.. An average citizen doesn’t have the reach of NBC or CNN, but as is seen every day on the Web, viral citizen media can spread like wildfire and ultimately achieve the same or greater reach as a mainstream media broadcast.

With so much news being created and so many new ways by which news can be spread, there is tremendous competition for people’s attention. I’m not suggesting that the big media companies are going to be extinct any time soon, but I am suggesting that their role in society is. Let’s face it, NBC was thrilled when Cho’s package arrived in their mailroom. NBC said they spent hours deciding whether to air footage from Cho’s videos on the air. There’s little doubt in my mind that they were going to broadcast it. How could they not? The fact that Cho chose to send the package to NBC affirms NBC’s stature as a dominant media outlet. The only issue that they may have been wrestling with was whether to air it and get a backlash from the public, politicians, or special interest groups who might denounce NBC for sensationalizing the Va Tech shooter. However, if NBC didn’t air the footage, they would have no doubt posted it on their news website, MSNBC.com. I’m sure the NBC execs realized that if they didn’t release it, eventually the material would at some point get leaked and in this case, NBC wouldn’t get the limelight for having the scoop.

If Cho would have simply posted all his videos to a MySpace page or YouTube, he would have demonstrated that the big media companies are simply becoming irrelevant. But, whether he knew it or not, what he did was smart. He knew that NBC would whore out the video footage as much as it possibly could since they would have the exclusive and others would inevitably do the job for him of ensuring that the video got on MySpace, YouTube, etc… The reach of his videos was maximized as a result.

Unlike 40 years ago during JFK’s presidency, the media companies a) can’t afford to ignore stories which will garner them attention and b) simply have little to no control over what stories make it to the public. If they don’t cover a story, someone else will. AOL Time Warner realized this a couple years ago and launched TMZ.com. TMZ.com is a hollywood news/gossip site that basically runs stories that AOL Time Warner couldn’t on their mainstream sites. TMZ.com stories often lack the journalistic integrity that a mainstream news organization would want to uphold. AOL Time Warner knew that this segment of news was too much in demand and too lucrative to ignore. And they were right: TMZ.com has been enormously successful and one of the fastest growing blogs on the Web. Moreover, TMZ.com relies heavily on citizen- captured stories, photos and videos and not a dedicated news team. TMZ.com is an example of an old media giant embracing the fact they are losing control of the news rather than trying to combat this fact. There can be little doubt that other media giants will follow suit with sites of their own which embrace citizen media.

A big part of being a trusted news source is providing comprehensive information. Increasingly, this means relying on sources beyond a dedicated news team. Dedicated news teams simply will not be able to scale to meet the volume of news consumption in the future. News sites like TMZ.com, which rely on citizen journalism, can scale and will be a crucial strategy for the big media companies to maintain their significance.

Hmm I know I’ve got some more thoughts on this but enough for now… =)

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55% of plepoe can.

I cdnuolt blveiee waht I was rdanieg. Due to the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are. The olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig, huh? And I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

– tkean from a psot on Tim Ferris’ bolg.

Waht I am egaer to unrsedatnd is wyh smoe poelpe cna raed tihs adn smoe poelpe cna’t. I gsues I wlil need to dgi up teh sduty to laren mroe.