Jared is a real inspiration. He built something from nothing, and took it to a public launch. Congratulations Jared, and I’m so happy you let me play a very very small part in it.

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!

I looked everywhere for validation on my idea. Of course I felt it was needed, as did a select few entrepreneurs. But I received rejection from everywhere. VCs I met with said it wasn’t really addressing a specific need. An entrepreneurial advisor who had himself tried out a similar idea, said I would probably not succeed. I knew rejection would be part of it, but I kept getting frustrated by the dearth of Eureka! moments as I explained the concept.

The other day I was unloading excess computer equipment from my car, a dozen obsolete CPUs and monitors from my parents house. A construction worker approached me, and started asking for advice about resolving a virus issue on his kids computer. I happy gave him some advice, and he walked away.

A few minutes later, he came back and asked “Hey, can I hire you for a couple hours to come help me out?”

Unfortunately I had to decline.

He then responded “Too bad. I know a ton of people who could use help with their home computers and TVs. The big services are way too expensive, but we need it.”

Validation comes from the most unexpected places.

Watch below:

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.

Thanks to all the sponsors for making it possible, and CDIA for hosting. The volunteer organizers, primarily Justin, Shaun, Peter, and John, deserve an infinite amount of praise. The DC community has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year, and were it not for the efforts of people like you, we would not be where we are today, myself included. So thank you. I had attended the first planning meeting, but unfortunately I was unable to attend any others or contribute any time, and I’m sorry for that.

Leslie, Bill, and myself gave a presentation on our awesome work for C-SPAN, through our respective companies New Media Strategies and JESS3. We received great feedback, and high praise for our work throughout the rest of the day. I chose to speak on how I leveraged the codebase in a number of open source projects to turn around each of these complex and high-performing sites in a week (no, I was not kidding), and people kept on coming up to me, shocked that I was able to do that  . Slides will be posted soon.

I collected all the fortunes I and my friends received, and years later, put it altogether.

Rather than taking a “usual” internship at a government agency or consulting company for the summer, I instead chose to stay on campus for the summer, and in addition to a lot of relaxing, worked at two amazing labs at UMD. One was the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, where I got to play around with awesome gadgets like motion tracking cameras and sensor networks. The other position, which I kept throughout the following school year, was as a researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab. I was tasked with working on an Java interface (using Swing) for the MALACH project, which, in a nutshell, was to allow people to browse and view a massive amount of transcripts of recordings of Holocaust victims. The recordings originated from the Shoah foundation, whose mission is to record and store all memories of survivors of the Holocaust (side note: my grandmother volunteered as one of the interviewers). So I spent the summer working under Ryen White, who now works at Microsoft Research.

As we were presented with developing an entirely new interface, we had a number of challenges. We came up with some pretty cool solutions. One thing I came up with was an interface element nicknamed PygmyBrowse. PygmyBrowse is a rather simple and easy method of bi-directional navigation of infinitely complex trees in a compact environment. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the professors around me disagreed, and suggested I pursue it further. After spending a good chunk of the semester holding user trials (in between running one of the largest student groups on campus, being actively involved in my computer, and oh yeah… double major), we ended up with an academic paper, with yours truly as the primary author. Which ended up getting accepted to a major human-computer interaction conference. Whiiich I didn’t attend, because there was one or another extra-curricular event going on (kicking myself 3 years later).

Now when you do a google search for PygmyBrowse (a lame moniker I concocted with a couple friends), it’s actually been implemented.

If I dig up the Java source code for it, I’ll release it.

You can download the PDF of my paper here, or view it on Scribd.

One thing stood out. McCain said “friends” 18 times. Obama? Zilch.

It’s clear who has my vote.

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…

“100,000 people in 100,000 garages” - great line.

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.

I’ve been noticing for a while that, since graduating from college where I had to memorize programming languages, I learn less and less. Why should I bother to memorize the ins and outs of every system when instead I can just do a quick google search and find what I need?

As a web designer/developer, am I contributing to this? Is this a good thing or bad thing? And how can we combat it, or accept it?

I read an article today about FireRift - this seems exactly what I was looking for out of a content management system.

Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or
develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the
site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your
code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the
corresponding function.

Really looking forward to this, as should any frustrated web developer.

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!

Pretty neat, right? Check it out.

Continuing the *Camp franchise, a group of entrepreneurs with failures under their belt held an unconference in Philadelphia to focus on their failures. It was last weekend. Sad I missed it!

Check out FailCamp. Hope they post their slides and such soon!

We’re just wrapping up a planning meeting for BarcampDC2, here at Murky Coffee. We are looking for sponsors and such, and soon opening it up to people to register. If you have an idea or are interested in sponsoring, check out the wiki here!

BarcampDC was a pretty big turning point for me. Having lived in the DC area for so many years, I had never even thought about reaching out to the tech community in the area - I wasn’t even aware it existed. It was there I met Ann, Justin, Keith, John, (the four of whom are sitting here planning the event with me) and many others, whom I consider mentors, colleagues, business partners, and friends. There is no doubt that where I am today is a direct effect of showing up that morning and talking to people.

If you are in the area, come on out!

At a wedding - the cake was designed to match the artwork!

In light of all the recent Facebook and Social Media frenzy, which, to me, has very little impact outside of it’s self-engineered ecosystem, I’ve been thinking about ideas that that solve issues that really matter.

Look no further than this list.

Really gets the ideas flowing.

Going down this list, I found 5 or 6 “pains” that really intrigued me. The juices are really flowing. What can you think up?