Making invisible patterns , visible

I have been trying to understand the reasons why people abandoned other social networks like MySpace and Orkut(which was very popular in India and Brazil) in favor of Facebook .. when facebook burst on the scene. And if Facebook would fall prey to the same causal factors - and lose to Google+. My feeling is- probably not. Here are my reasons why: (Your comments welcome); a) On Social Sites - people go where their friends are b) High school and college students - are the heavy users of social sites c) People do not want YET another site to visit to stay in touch with friends ..it complicates their lives So then - why were Orkut and MySpace and Friendster ditched by the users? They had the initial advantage. My top 3 causes: 1) Obtrusive Ads - intruded upon the social interaction 2) Facebook using its university roots and pedigree -- was very appealing to the heavy users (High School- College students). Invitation only cachet made it desirable to join!. Initially- unless you...

One way of taming information overload is data visualization. Here is a video from TED that illustrates this beautifully. It does make you "see" relationships that you did not before if you just read the news. Illustrates the concept of making the invisible visible beautifully. If you have trouble viewing the video, please click here. David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com

I have a hypothesis. All progress depends on making the the invisible visible. As humans it appears that we have to be able to "see" to be able to do something about it; So many people would easily support enivronmental conservation efforts if it was easy to "see" how dirty the air is in some places or "see" how forests are disappearing - with animated before and "now" views. People would not have to "imagine" so much. They would be able to "see" it. The same would be true of many "theories" that affect our lives or our future. Does cutting taxes spur growth ? This would not(should not) be a matter of ideology - but of science if there was a way it could be "shown" whether one was true or not. Communication would be so much more effective -- if we could "see" what the other person "sees". X-Rays and Catscans improved diagnosis and treatment. They made the "invisible" visible. ...

The other day I was revisiting some of the brainstorming exercises that were recommended for coming up with new products. Some recommended Idea joggers were: - What if we made it bigger? Smaller? Combined it with X, Made component X with material Y instead and so on. And then - I was struck how close this is to biological innovation (evolution). Where genes are mutated. The brainstorming was to mutate the core "genes" of the product. The "genes" being of course the key attributes about the product or service. e.g size, color,price etc. Now genetic programming has been around for a while with algorithms to mimic evolution and mutate genes and then evaluate them with fitness functions ie discard bad variations because they do not meet the 'fitness' or survivability test. So do you think that genetic programming ought to be in the management tool bag for innovation, along with the traditional "brainstorming". Actually- identifying the core "gene...

Large Searchable Datasets about the world are being stored online- and the data flow is increasing to a flood. This includes web content (crawled , indexed, ranked by Google). Public records( by many organizations including LexisNexis). In addition people are dumping personal content - into the Cloud via emails and postings on Facebook , Twitter and other Social Sites and Forums. As new sensors and cameras are developed - even more data will be captured and stored. Now raw data by itself is sometimes hard to interpret and therefore it's usefulness is diminished -- But when it is tagged and annotated - it's like the raw stuff has been nicely packaged. The tagging makes it useful - because now it is searchable and linkable to the appropriate context. This is what Augmented Reality solutions are about. You point your iPhone camera at a scene and the GPS gives you the location, the accelerometer /compass gives you which way you are looking. Based on this -- information about the lo...

I have been busy studying the new frameworks like Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails to explore if I should switch to the new bandwagon and see if they will really give me productivity benefits. Some background before I present my problem issue or what I am missing. I have developed some production sites using Zope and Tomcat/JSP/Struts . I am a fan of Zope. As a self taught web developer, here are some things I love about Zope. (I do have a programming background from ages ago!) IMHO the simple , powerful, ready- made management interface provided by ZMI with Zope's inbuilt security admin is really unparalleled in its ease-of-use for first time users. It also sets up easily without much fuss and runs well out of the box! No big configuration hassles! (Zope 3 seems to have succumbed to the complex installation syndrome). Zope is also pretty graceful in the way it handles errors. One struggle much less with constant syntax errors typical in Java and other development languages . ...

Wiki's have a very simple and powerful model for content management that seems to follow Tim Berner Lee's orginial concept for the world wide web where all content is linked via a url. Wiki's allow you to create new pages by inserting a link into an existing page. A "navigator" then uses a search or a url to pick a"landing-point" in this content space and explores the links from there. Wiki's also use the pattern of "view-edit-save" thru the browser - so there is no separate step for transferring information from a "composer" program to the web server. As most web sites are a collection of web pages anyway ,why are not all web sites done this way? Some common reasons with my thoughts on resolving them. A) Preventing Grafiti Solution: A "Lock" on pages - to ensure only authorized people can edit it B) A "nice" aesthetic look to the pages Solution: A Use-Template type command line at the top of the page C) Image...