Three things really stand out about the current Iranian conflict.

1. User generated content is easily able to slip through any blocks that the government puts in place over traditional media.  Journalists were locked in hotels in the dark, while a protester sitting on a balcony can snap pictures and post on Flickr/YouTube/Twitter/Blogs.

2. Instead of new media sources being used to highlight traditional media articles, the traditional media was highlighting and analyzing new media posts. Maybe thats where it’ll go in the future?

3. Anything posted to UGC sites was referred to as “unconfirmed” – which is an important aspect of print media. How does one verify things posted online? Will we rely on technical checks (EXIF data in photos, GPS location of twitter posts) or rely on the wisdom of the crowd to decide what is real?

I’ve realized that I’ve been running a Tumblr miniblog for months, and haven’t actually publicized it.

While I prefer to use this blog to “write stuff” I do find a good amount of cool stuff as I’m online, and collect it all on Tumblr.

Check it out!

21stcenturydigitalboy.com

The name is after a song by Bad Religion:

As I have recently moved into downtown Bethesda, and my girlfriend Alex has moved into Dupont Circle, we find ourselves eating out at a restaurant more often than not (even though we both love to cook). We’re always up for trying new things, so we rarely visit a restaurant more than once. For that reason, we spend a lot of time on Yelp, looking for well-recommended restaurants that we think would both suit us.

More recently, I’ve started experimenting with Thummit, now in beta. It’s done to restaurant reviews what Twitter has done to communication; simple, straight to the point. Instead of the standard five star rating system, you’ve got a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or neutral. That’s all I really need, right? It comes down to a binary decision; do I go or do I not go? And while there is not much of a technical barrier between allowing someone to type in a few sentences or a few pages, Thummit keeps reviews to 140 characters or less. Smart. When you ask someone about a restaurant, they’ll give you a few points, not pages.

What I like the best  about Thummit is the interface for it. With an SMS and Twitter interface, you don’t ever have to visit the website. More importantly, this allows you to collect your reviews while you’re at the restaurant (if only Alex would let me use my phone!), rather than trying to remember it later. They hope to have more ways of entering and retrieving reviews in the future.

It’s currently in private beta, but definitely worth checking out. Request an invite or drop me a line!

(Full Disclosure: I work at JESS3, which is helping out with social media PR for Thummit)

A while back I had posted my thoughts on the future of television. Other people, such as Jeff Pulver, have also had this in their crosshairs.

While others are entrenched in how we will watch TV, and where it’s coming from. I’m more interested in what we do while watching TV, particularly integrating the social element that we have when watching a show with other people.

Looks like CBS is doing it. Here is a shot of their Social Room product. It looks like it’s made by a company called ClipSync.

First off, I love the idea.
The interface needs a ton of work. Chat seems to be an afterthought, instead it’s throwing up a whole lot of junk on one screen, with a lot of wasted space. And the primary interaction is really, really annoying.

Besides the under used chat and the quiz element on the right rail, you also can interact using one of the six icons (including the branded Intel logo). Whatever you do shows up on everyone’s screen, and there’s no way to turn it off! I spent a good 10 seconds pissing everyone off by blowing kisses all over the screen.

I urge you all to try it out. I feel this is the future, but it could definitely use some improvement.

When I first made the jump from a big consulting company to a tiny creative agency, I was worried I would be spending most of my time doing small boring web projects. Yeah, right.

As if I the C-SPAN Convention Hubs that I wrote on earlier weren’t successful enough, we at JESS3 teamed up with C-SPAN and New Media Strategies again to launch the Debate Hub. I served as lead developer. Not only does this have the same great features as the Convention Hubs, like embeddable video, Twitter coverage, and blog content from all over the web, we added in some really killer features.
The Timeline is one of the best features. We’re pulling in transcripts as the debate progresses, and have it segmented out by speaker. Click on a piece of the timeline, and magic happens. This is built off of MIT’s SIMILE project.
The Transcript Treemap is another awesome feature. It shows the most used terms of each candidate, based on the transcripts, along with sparklines (more appropriately, the jQuery version). I even managed, thanks to some more jQuery magic, to allow you to dynamically filter what debates/candidates to show. Of particular importance to me, as the Treemap was created at my alma-mater’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, where I was a researcher for a short period of time (more on what I did there later).

It’s received a ton of press coverage, including ZDNet, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, RedState, and a number of other sites. It’s been a wild ride.

I’m not a very politically involved person. For me, I make sure I vote when possible, care about the issues I choose to care about, but never get more involved. However, I like to think that, when working on projects like these, we’re giving more people access to more information than they previously had, and allowing them to make more educated decisions when it comes to electing their leaders. It may only make a small difference for a small group of people, but that’s all that matters.

Hard to believe I graduated college two years ago…

JESS3 has been working on a not-so-secret project for C-SPAN in the past few weeks.

TechCrunch, the best tech blog out there, just reported on it. C-SPAN is still ironing out some last issues, but IT’S ALIVE!

Read it.

A very big moment!

Much more to come about it later.

Stemming out of an heated conversation about who knows what, an idea was born. Jesse and I decided to hold off client projects for one day (just one, calm down!) and set out to build an entire Facebook application from scratch. We had tossed around different ideas in the week before, but by the time we set marker to whiteboard on Monday morning, we had locked down an idea – Facebook friend-based statistics. Jesse is a huge fan of data visualizations, and I like discovering information and patterns out of existing data that I didn’t realize.

So we started from scratch, and by the end of the day, we had the wireframes, full design and a functional version. Jesse was blogging during the day about it.

And now, it’s a full app! Say hello to FriendCompare! We still have a LOT more we want to do with this – even at 1 AM the next morning, Jesse and I were on the phone brainstorming on different things we could do. However, we had to cut it off somewhere!

Development-wise, the application didn’t turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be . Hence why, for the past week, among with working with all our clients, I’ve been working like crazy to get it out.

Some Development Notes:

• Having all the information about the users – their friends, events they attend, education information, is AWESOME – and digging out the interesting nuggets of data poses a really cool challenge.
• FQL, Facebook’s own version of SQL – the language used to access information from just about every modern day database – gives you access to what you think would be a great wealth of today, but also poses HUGE roadblocks, besides the privacy restrictions. You would think that for a statistics application, you would need lots of standard SQL functions like COUNTs and JOINs, but as Facebook had neither, we were left pulling huge amounts of data down onto our server and analyzing it there. This makes any good web developer cringe in pain.
• Additionally, Facebook’s API is horribly slow. If you try to make more than a couple FQL/API calls, Facebook starts timing out, rendering the application useless.
• Enter Preload FQL. Rather than you calling the API from your server, you can specify ahead of time what information you’ll need from the Facebook databases, so when Facebook calls your application, all the data you need is already there. However, developing in that method tripled the amount of time necessary.
• We needed a LOT of different pieces of information, so bearing in mind all the above issues, it took a lot more than a day’s work to get it done.

So, in hindsight, maybe this particular idea wasn’t the best to try and tackle in a day. We were offered an existing codebase, however I turned that down, as it seemed a better decision at the time to write from scratch.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, including Eric and Jay from Lookery! Not to mention all the people who blogged about it and sent messages of support, and our clients for letting us take the day off!

The usual frenzy and buzz surrounding Facebook will peak today as Facebook has their second developers conference. Mike Arrington thinks he know whats going to be launched.

• Facebook payments platform
• Facebook Connect
• Three tier application system

We’ll have to see what happens, but….

• The Facebook payments platform will only work is if it is ridiculously easy to pay for something. However, with increased ease of use comes decreased security. My girlfriend has access to my Facebook account. My friends leave themselves signed into my computer occassionally. I leave work signed in to Facebook. No-one regards their Facebook account as particularly sensitive, maybe at most somewhere in between e-mail and your online bank account. How can this be secure, yet usable?
• It will be nearly impossible to have premium applications that cost money. With the barrier to entry for a Facebook application, free knockoffs relying just on advertising will replace it.
• There will be a run on Facebook enabling e-commerce stores, assuming Facebook allows this.
• The tiered application system will be interesting. I have thought for a while that their needs to be a premium tier, where application developers can pay a certain fee to have better listing/support/features. With the top tier limited to a few applications by the top developers, most applications will be fighting not to hit the bottom tier.
• Facebook Connect… that will be cool.

In order to better establish a web presence for myself, I am rebuilding my own website. I have big ideas for this, displaying my writings, past and present, my interests, my friends, my work, and also as an living technical showcase for my abilities.

One feature I wanted to have is a display of whatever I am up to in the online world. I wanted, to start out with, aggregate my Flickr, Tumblr, blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. In the future, I may add more.

I played with a few different tools for this to run off of, including FriendFeed. In the end, I decided on building my own with Yahoo! Pipes, both as an exercise, and in order to closely control how it works. Yahoo Pipes can be powerful, but at the same time cumbersome to work with.

It took a lot of tinkering around, but I finally got it to work

Then I made a minor variation to it, to show the one most recent item out of each. This way I can show them all together, if I choose to.

I plan on modifying these pipes so you can customize it for yourself at some point in the near future.

A little over two years ago, in the summer between graduating and starting a “real job” I spent a good amount of time at the gym, brushing up on my various web skills, and building cool apps. I didn’t necessarily want to get rich off them, they were more exercises in taking my ideas and actually doing something with them, rather than letting them linger in the netherworld of unrealized dreams.

One of the ideas I had come up with was a tool called YesterdayI. YesterdayI was based on a simple purpose: just write a short passage about what you did the day before. Meant as a lifestreaming tool, you would end up forming a series of small blog posts, a daily journal of sorts. Microblogging.

I built it, but, as is so common in the world of small web applications, I did a half-assed job at launching it (I’m a rockstar designer/developer, not a marketing guru), no-one used it, and by then I was already on to the next cool idea. So here it stands, frozen in time, lingering on some web-host I have set to auto-renew.

Then Twitter came, followed in suit by a dozen copycats, and made microblogging a household term. Now of course, Twitter serves an entirely different purpose, and has a whole host of features I never had thought of. But it’s always interesting to see how I was on a similar track.

I’m not complaining that someone stole my idea. I may have missed the boat on this one, but at the same time, I am well aware that ideas alone don’t matter. It’s about execution, marketing, positioning, and being in the right place at the right time.

It would be interesting to rebuild this, and see where it could go from there…

Also interesting to see how much my skills have changed since then. From the elementary javascript to table-heavy design (not to mention a generally ugly design), it’s always great to take a look back at past work and critique it, just like an author may look back at an old text or an artist look at one of their earlier works.