The community of people using foursquare is growing rapidly and nowhere is this more readily apparent than right here in our lovely Slovenia.

Back when I first started using foursquare for some strange reason (I honestly don’t know) pretty much everywhere you went you were forced to first add the location. Then check-in. And you were seen as this strange voodoo magician with a funky thing that  tells everyone where they are.

However since my first check-in at Hekovnik on the 27th of January this year a lot has changed. Nowadays anywhere I want to check-in the place is already available and what’s more, someone’s a mayor! Hell, just the other day I even noticed some sort of location-based advertising. That was a real shocker to be honest.

But the biggest question on everyone’s mind is: What the hell is the use here? Why am I doing this? Why do I keep checking-in everywhere I go? What possible reason could there be for publishing my location on the internets shy of wanting to get raped?

Two months ago I thought I had the answer: Electronic Graffiti

And sure enough, foursquare can indeed be used as a medium for electronically leaving a mark on places you visit. Everyone who checks-in somewhere near will see what you wrote and will wonder “Who was that guy. What was he doing here. I wonder if he liked soup”

But I soon grew weary of that. Half of the time I couldn’t think of anything whimsical to say and the other half my phone lagged and spazzed out and before I could leave a note for the world to see I felt like bashing my face in with the frustration.

So that can’t possibly be the usefulness.

Then last weekend as I was checking-in on yet another hill in the middle of nowhere a moment of clarity strook me.

Birdwatching! Trainspotting!

Foursquaring is as much a silly hobby as birdwatching or trainspotting! Back in the old days people would travel far and wide to put a check next to a colourful picture in a book, or to cross off a number in a long list of numbers inside a fat notepad of numbers.

These days, we travel far and wide to put a virtual mark on a virtual medium inside a virtual network. All we want is to go “Hey, I’ve been there and that’s great.”

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Remember the days when the modern internet was new and everyone and their dog had a blog they were writing several times a week, if not every day?

Around 2004 blogs suddenly became incredibly mainstream due to their involvement in several political events and some other shady things that happened. If you’re really interested in this bit of history there is a wonderful wikipedia page about the history of blogging.

Personally I was a little late to that revolution having made my first blog post (that still exists) on the 21st of April 2006. My god I felt like I was discovering a whole new world of possibilities! And I was, I really was, it was around that time that the Slovene blogging community started really taking shape and I was following oh so many blogs. Most incredibly bad, some very very good. We even had a conference for bloggers or two, think they were called Blogres.

But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Fast forward into the present time.

Lately what I’ve been noticing is that it’s getting harder and harder to blog even a few times a week. Just blinking my eyes and completing a TODO or two and whoosh, a whole week has passed and my personal blog doesn’t update.

What’s stranger still is that I’ve been noticing this in my RSS aggregator as well! I have a folder specifically for personal blogs, which I define as blogs written by people for the people with no particular reason. Mostly about their life or some especially interesting thing they want to say.

These blogs, and I only followed about ten back then, used to be a daily chore. Nowadays as few as 20 posts accumulate over the course of a week and I’m following around thirty blogs.

My hypothesis as to why this is happening is that people have switched to Twitter and Facebook for their personal expression needs. Because they are tweeting tens of messages every day, they simply run out of things to say on their blogs. It makes sense really, after you’ve told everyone every minute idea that pops into your head, what else is there to say on your blog?

What do you think, is real-time chatting killing the need for personal blogging?

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When we first started the Preona project one of our most important assumptions was that actively liking things is very cumbersome and few people will want to do it in order to personalise the reading suggestion system.

What we wanted to build was a system that could automagically learn from what the user is doing, be intriguingly implicit and invisible.

This was wrong.

After observing what people are doing online and how they behave, we, or rather I, have come to the conclusion that liking is a very important action that transcends cultural and technological bounds. And that people do it for everything but improving the ratings of what they’re reading.

The reason people like liking things is simple: Feedback.

And I don’t mean giving feedback to developers, or recommendation systems. No, they’re giving feedback on a completely personal level. The act of liking things online has gained a significant cultural and sociological dimension – it’s a lot like giving flowers to people, the meaning depends wholly on the context.

But this makes the whole act very difficult to interpret and base your machine learning systems on. When the context defines the action’s meaning, rather than the action itself that’s a very big problem. Sure, in general you can assume that liking means people would like to read more of that particular content, but what about when they’re just expressing agreement, or mutual dislike of something? Or expressing condolences? Nobody wants to read a lot of sad things …

This sounds like a very difficult problem to solve, but perhaps the solution is incredibly simple.

Implement liking as a purely conversational feature and ignore it completely from a machine learning perspective? I don’t know, we’re going to have to try and see what works best.

An interesting experiment would be to try predicting whether a person will “like” something with Google‘s new prediction API. This probably calls for a weekend project, hopefully I’ll have a chance to play with that in the following days and try it out.

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Lately facebook has been taking a lot of flak over user privacy regarding the changes they’ve implemented to their API and how easy it is for 3rd parties to access user’s private data … or more to the point, how much pain users have to go through to hide their personal data.

My personal opinion is that, yes, facebook is being a bit of an arse about the whole issue. At first they were promising everyone a walled garden free of outside scrutiny where you can behave just like you were locked up in your little dorm room having fun with a few mates.

And people got used to that.

For example you’ll never see anyone complain about the fact their tweets are public, or that whatever they post on their blogs is public, or flickr or forums or irc and a miriad other services. The whole online world is … public. And nobody bats an eyelid.

Then facebook becomes slightly more public.

Public outrage!

Villages, internet and old women peeking out of windows

The fact of the matter is that facebook was never private even though it promised to be. In fact I’ll wager it’s more private now than it was ever before!

Wait what?

It all boils down to rumors and basic human behaviour.

if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking

Now I’m not a psychologist or sociologist or anything like that, but because I’m a computer scientist I like to pretend I can understand anything algorithmically complex – like people.

Also I’ve talked to one or two people who have lived in a small enough village to explain this effect to me.

When you have a small population of people living in a confined area everybody knows a little bit about everybody else. It doesn’t matter who you are or how many friends you’ve got. Someone will always know what you did last summer or how drunk you got on that party on Friday and not to mention what big of an arse you turned out to be when you dumped that poor girly.

Everybody! Will! Know, When. You, Fuck Up! They just will.

But when you live in a big city, it’s a little different. Suddenly there are so many people on so big an area you hardly know anyone. Most of us don’t even know any of the people living in the same building we are. If you’re lucky you’ll have a vague idea of what profession they’re in.

This gives us a super huge expectation of privacy and we’ve grown so used to being anonymous and unknown that we want this notion of privacy to extend into every little facet of our world.

So where lies the problem?

The problem is when these city slickers reach the online world. It looks anonymous. It smells anonymous. And it certainly likes to talk anonymous. No names. No identity. Nothing

Hoorah! I can make a total idiot of myself and no-one will know! yay

Well no, not really. Google and a bunch of other things are tracking your every move, every keystroke almost. They do this to make more money off of you through targeted advertising and some other unimportant stuff.

We’ve gone full circle, suddenly the online world behaves a lot like a village. Everybody knows everybody and so on.

So why such an outcry over privacy issues?

Well, because us city slickers don’t really know how to handle this kind of information. We’re not used to knowing so much about people around us, we’re not used to always having a pair of eyes on our back through the curtains of the window across the street.

That’s why we do strange google searches of people we want to hire, we research people we want to date, we … I don’t know, we basically dig up every little detail of anybody we encounter and think is important enough.

We want all that info.

But we can’t handle it.

A long time ago people in villages learned that being drunk at a party 20 years ago does not reflect poorly on a man today. The rest of us still need to figure that out so there won’t be cases of people not getting hired due to an obscure image found online or a drunk photo posted on their facebook etc.

Until then, for fuck’s sake people, if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking!

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Sometimes when I have tasks to organise in my head I waste time online. Menial tasks occupy the higher brain and … boring neuroscience, you don’t want to hear.

So I came upon a very awesome webcomic called Geek’n'poke, read a few issues and decided to bookmark it for later consumption.

In modern days however this is done by adding its RSS feed to Google Reader obviously.

And suddenly a pain came over me. It engulfed my whole being. Crushed my insides. Made my brain as if in a vice. My spider senses were tingling. My skin crawling with fear. It was not unlike somebody suddenly thwapping you on the side of your head when you least expect it.

That’s right, it was the “Oh fuck, why the hell am I adding another feed!? What’s wrong with me” moment.

You’ve had that before haven’t you? Chances are you’re exactly like me and are subscribed to at least a hundred feeds, which swamp you with copious amounts of data you can’t possibly get through every day. Quite unbearable really. Sometimes I’ll come to zero during breakfast and then have another 200 items waiting for me by lunchtime.

the “Oh fuck, why the hell am I adding another feed!? What’s wrong with me” moment

But I can’t just bloody give them up! Oh no, my inner scavenger prevents that. What if! What if I miss something important? What if I’m not on board for that three day meme?

Surely the world would end!

Of course it wouldn’t, but this is generally how the human mind works, we simply cannot bear the thought of closing doors. Even when keeping them open costs us an insane amount of resources and time, we still don’t want to close them. You never know, maybe you’ll want to get back to it … just like you always kept a finger at the last point in a make-your-own-story book. Admit it, you did.

What’s needed is a solution that enables us to both keep adding new and new things to our reading list, but still get through it all.

The answer is value sorting – items sorted not by time, but by their value.

“AHA! Sort by magic!” I hear you say.

True, google reader does offer such a thing as popularity sorting. But that’s a whole different beast than value sorting.

Now I’m not certain about you, but I know that Big Brother was/is a very popular thing and I still don’t want to hear the first thing about it. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care when it’s on and I certainly don’t care who the “stars” are.

Obviously not everybody is going to appreciate everything that is popular. People have niche interests, people’s interests change – several times a day even! No no, sorting by popularity just isn’t going to work if we want to solve this problem.

Value sorting, that’s the key.

When you’re having breakfast you probably would prefer reading a few funny comics to start your on a positive foot, than read about the insane amount of toxins in some chinese brand of food. But when you’re at work, o ho!, totally different story! Now you need something much heavier than a funny lolcat.

Readers of any content stream need to learn how to sorty by value, the user’s value. Then maybe adding a feed won’t be so painful.

PS: my6sense seems to be the only step in the right direction at this point in time, but for some stupid reason it only works on iPhones …

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Yesterday I read an interesting post about the speed at which information travels between two nodes in a network. It was about a so called Data Singularity and the basic premise was that nowadays information flows are so horribly fast that only computers talking to computers can handle the stream at all and that humans are even less than mediaries, but can only really comprehend meta-meta-data.

To recap the changing history of what the concept of “real-time” information means (btw this is a talk I was supposed to have at WebCampLj last month but then lost the artistic inspiration):

• there was once a time when any news that came to the listener in a week was considered real-time information, depending on how far away the event was (snail mail)
• then real-time became the speed of light with human routers (telegraph, early telephone)
• real-time then became instant, but not constant (phone, TV etc.)

But right now we are in a world where there is an instant and constant global conversation going on. Everybody is multicasting, if not downright broadcasting, very many random thoughts that pop into their heads. People are having conversations all over the place and it’s all right there; always.

Hell, even Google has decided to start thinking about something as horrible as real-time RSS feeds by integrating pubsubhubbub into their Reader.

It’s almost as if the whole world is conspiring against the lonely infonaut who just wants to be able to do something while still getting all the information they crave so deeply. I’m not sure where I’ve read it or how far ago, but it was something along the lines of the average person these days being completely and totally addicted to information and that this addiction is made worse than heroin by the simple fact society expects it.

That is to say, if you’re not addicted to information, you’re being quite odd and strange.

But where does this attitude lead us?

There are 25 million tweets made every day, that is to say 289 tweets EVERY FUCKING SECOND! Even if you follow a very small subset of those people, that still makes at least 10 tweets every minute!

Count RSS feeds into that … Reader already pushes updates to the interface so very real-time that when I click “mark all as read” there are usually 5 new items waiting for me in the time it takes for the interface to clear. Yes, it’s That Bad(tm). Considering that following only a handful of RSS feeds (about 100) means I personally get on average 500 to 600 new articles every day … yeah, that makes one article every two bloody minutes!

And they want to make that process even faster.

So essentially, as an infonaut, the internet expects me to read twenty tweets and one long-ish article every two minutes of my day. And that’s not even counting E-Mail, Facebook, Forums and a bunch of other things.

Just to give you a sense of how little two minutes is: It takes three minutes to steep a cup of tea.

Now obviously I am quite incapable of processing information constantly, all day, at a rate of at least 240-ish words per minute. For a little sense of what this means, the world record for typing is 150 words per minute sustained over 50 minutes.

Yeah that’s right, those very very crazy typists that type so fast it looks like magic … type much much slower than you are expected to read these days.

Quite apparent to anyone paying attention is that this situation is very unsustainable and people saying that “Oh you can just take an hour every day and skim through the titles of everyting” are downright bollocking crazy! What can be done is a matter of long debate, what will be done remains to be seen.

But something has got to be done ’cause this is insane.

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Perhaps I’m a bit crazy to name this creation a synaptic autocomplete, in reality it’s more of a real-time reinforcement learning autocomplete, but that just doesn’t quite have the same zing to it if you catch my drift. So let’s stick with synaptic because it fulfills the most basic of requirements – implicit real-time connections.

Don’t worry, we’re not throwing this technology away, fancy user interfaces are just the first application.

I took the example screenshot this morning while sharing a wonderful story about Google Wave beating all communications competition into submission hands down. It’s obvious there’s still a lot of work to be done on the feature before it will be available to the broad public, but the basic premise is there.

And it works! I just love using it! Hell, it’s already increased my probability of sharing/bookmarking an article at least ten-fold.

But what does it really do?

Well the algorithms take quite a lot of whiteboard space to explain in their full nerdical glory so I won’t go into too much detail. Basically what happens is that the software scrobbles my Delicious account to learn about my preferences and usage history. Then whenever I tag a story with my personal vocabulary it connects those keywords with whatever different semantic API‘s (Zemanta, Textwise, Enrycher) said about the website.

All of this happens in real-time, apart from the scrobbling of course.

Then the very next time I’m tagging a similar story the suggestions and connections are already there and bloody awesome, if I do say so myself. One example from a few days ago I remember is tagging a question on StackOverflow as “help” and ten seconds later when I was tagging a different question it suggested I use the keyword “help”.

Don’t you just love it when stuff like that happens?

Yesterday someone asked me a surprising question: How do you define real-time?

Perhaps more surprising is that I had no idea how to answer it! Uhm, ah, eeeh, hmmm … fuck, what IS real-time?

And it got me thinking. Well, ok, in real life we define real-time as the instant reaction from physical interactions between objects. Throw a ball at the wall and it will bounce back in real-time. Smash a photon into a metal and electrons fly out in real time. Go very very fast and … no wait, time gets very complicated in relativistic physics, let’s not go there.

But in communication real-time is defined a bit differently. When you shout at someone to stop being so loud with the jack hammer, if they respond within a few seconds. That’s real-time. When you tell someone to do the dishes, if they grunt within a minute, that’s real-time. When you call someone in the phone you don’t even notice them up to a few seconds delay (tested this myself, it’s weird). When transmitting video you’d rather drop a frame than have the video seem to lock-up for even a fraction of a second. This is real-time.

And that’s before we even get into the time it takes our brains to process audio signals, transform them into language, parse the language and access any memories needed to form understanding.

In electronics real-time are responses that happen within a few nanoseconds, for the really hardcore amongst hardware people even that is a bit too slow. When booting a desktop computer everything under 10 seconds is bloody real-time.

So what gives? How can we talk about the real-time web, already even about the steps beyond real-time, when we obviously have no clue what real-time actually means?

The answer is that we. Do. Not. Care.

Are you with me?

There is no need to define what real-time means because on the web there is no real-time. There isn’t even any expectation of real-time. The real-time web isn’t about how long updates take to reach us. It’s not about how long we have to stare at the screen to find a response. It’s a very technological concept.

The real-time web is simply how we choose to label interfaces that do not require refreshing a website to sync its data with the server. It means that whenever the server finds out something new, we are notified at the same moment or a fraction of a second away from that moment.

Now granted as far as most of the web goes this is a very big revolution. But IM has had this ability for well over a decade. We just needed a way to push it onto this archane technology called a Web Browser and that other archane technology called a HTTP protocol, not to mention the whole Client-Server set up we’ve got going.

There is nothing wrong with this, don’t get me wrong, I love real-time updated websites and I seriously do not care how real-time the information is. Anything with a resolution smaller than a minute is fine for me, I’m swamped as it is.

But don’t you think we’re beating a dead horse with a stick here? Peer to peer is a much better backbone for doing these sorts of things, HTTP and the web were never meant to do this and as long as we continue tacking on gizmos and doodads we’re just making everything a little bit worse. The web is already a duct tape job, let’s give her a chance and, you know, introduce some proper behind the scenes remarkable innovation for this real-time web thing. I would love to see that.

What do you think the real-time web is?

Our earlier post about the Semantic vs. Synaptic Web has raised some questions about the users of this new web trend. Why do we think it will be about the users and no more about the computers talking between each other.

Image via Wikipedia

We can reference a bit with Ghost in The Shell. There is a network in which everyone is connected, our bodies are cyborg and only our brain and thoughts are real and even those can be manipulated if you know how.

How would we fit into the picture at our current age and development of web. We can look at it that we currently have this giant network of data, information and everything. The data is being processed, manipulated and given new meaning each second through mostly open API that people are giving out.

Here we then come to our brains and us as users. We alone read the patterns and connections that start to establish around the things. We give the best feedback to developers. Pushing how we use the application, trying to make it as much human as we can, but the machine can not learn so fast, there is still time to put in and connection that we must establish.

The synaptic web is focusing just on that, that we establish the necessary connection through user interactivity instead of just reading and parsing the text material data and produce extracts, tags and other meta data around things. The user should show us their patterns of use. We are each an individual, using the same applications in different ways.

Image via Wikipedia

So tracking the users behavior and incorporating the connections in the application is the thing that Synaptic Web in our opinion will do. As Semantic Web was just gathering the data and extracting meanings, upgrading the web to a machine learning stage.

The Synaptic Web will hopefully bring the next step, connecting the machines to users and helping users interact with them in a simple way. All users really want is to get the important information for them first, without having to distinguish and apply their own patterns daily as we do currently.

Synaptic Web is the brain-computer interface of the web.

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Word on the street has it that semantic has become a curseword and people should avoid using it at all cost, especially in relation to any sort of internet business or technology.

Hearing about this led me to wondering about why and how it was that the semantic web failed us so badly that even just using the word is bad for business. The first step on my adventure was figuring out what the semantic web promised us, because you can’t see where things went wrong if you don’t know what a movement tried to produce.

After a lot of googling and searching my memory for what people have said/promised over the years this is the best description I could find:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Far as I can understand this means that the web will be organised in such a fashion machines could understand it perfectly and use it as some sort of huge collective brain – a bit like the Borg perhaps. This would indeed be a wonderful future, machines talking to machines, data flowing to and fro with perfect understanding of why, streamlined transactions optimised to perfection through better understanding of their environment …

The big flaw here is: machines talking to machines.

It would be difficult to say how exactly somebody came up with a concept of the internets that so deeply misses the whole point of why the internet is as popular as it is. Perhaps the reason is that the quote comes from 1999 when the web was a wholly different beast, but why then, pray tell, did entrepreneurs latch onto this idea only around 2005 when not much was different than today? If you’re looking for those answers, I’m not the man to ask, but I can tell you what the internet is about and how the synaptic web helps there.

The internet is people talking to people

When it comes to the internet it’s all about being social, about following your friends and having conversations. Nobody cares anymore about finding data, that’s all on wikipedia, at worst a google search away, nobody cares anymore about computers talking to computers. In fact I’d wager a nice lump of money that most user’s eyes would glaze over when you started talking about all of that.

This is where I believe the semantic web has failed us, the users, and investors and pretty much anyone who wanted to do anything serious with it. Semantics are a good background protocol, a lovely standard for obsessive webdevs to follow, an amazingly good technology … but in and of itself without a purpose.

The only people that needed the semantic web were [are] developers, there is no product to be found therein, Zemanta‘s tool is probably the closest one can come to a semantic product and even that probably has far more magic in everything but semantics.

We need computers that understand people and this is something you, of course, need semantics for. It’s also something that produces immediate value to the only person that really matters – The User.

tl;dr version: The Synaptic Web will not fail us because it focuses on users.

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