Hammer's Idle Adventures

How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:14:18 -0400

Cyclists annoy me writ large, but it’s really fascinating to me that in America there is a large gender disparity in cyclists that doesn’t exist in Europe.

ON THINKING: FOXES OR HEDGEHOGS?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:21:40 -0400

ON THINKING: FOXES OR HEDGEHOGS?:

Are there enough polymaths in our society?

The Ostrom Nobel

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:19:07 -0400

The Ostrom Nobel:

Key paragraph:

“[This is] a vote in favor of detailed, working-from-the-ground-up, empirical work, which doesn’t rely on sharply contoured theoretical simplifications and flashy statistical techniques so much as the accumulation of good data, which reflects the messiness of the real social institutions from which it is gathered. “

Charter Cities: Create competition between countries like we do between businesses.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:47:29 -0400

Charter Cities: Create competition between countries like we do between businesses.:

Paul Romer’s Charter Cities project posits a very interesting question — what if we view the evolution of social and political structures the same way we view the evolution of economic structures? Can we create social progress through comptetition between small city-states of the Hong Kong/Singapore variety? It’s worth listening to Paul Romer’s talk from the Long Now foundation about the topic, but it also seems to suffer from problems that too often plague economics. Assumes perfect mobility and information, at least among the upper castes. Don’t know that I buy that.

How connected is your company to the internet?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:10:23 -0400

It seems like kind of a silly question. Every internet startup is part of the internet tautologically — we’re long past the days where AOL and other private services ruled the roost.

Yet the question still has some merit, albeit in a less explicit way — nowadays, the more meaningful inquiry has become: “Do your users feel your site is part of the larger internet, or do they feel isolated from it?”

Google, amusingly, is an example of both potential answers. Web search is naturally and fundamentally bound up with the internet, as virtually every click takes you away from google. A property like GMail, by contrast, encourages people to live in the product, consuming explicitly. Users like this model, too — ergo, the repeated calls for GMail to integrate products like Reader and Voice into a single experience.

Certainly, both approaches have their own advantages. A closed network like GMail or Facebook allows the potential creation of network effects, protecting products against upstart competitors by virtue of insularity, while an integrated product like websearch links its fortunes to a ship much larger than itself. Google web search’s success is contingent on the rise and fall of the internet’s overall fortunes, while Facebook’s failure would mean little to the larger internet as a whole.

Consider the traditional Facebook user experience (previous to the current redesigns); most of the actions performed on Facebook lead the user back to engaging on Facebook more. Searching for friends, looking at updates, using apps and playing games — they all wholly exist in Facebook’s microcosm. Even in its ad networks, I’ve heard anecdotally that many of the most successful campaigns being run on Facebook have other Facebook pages as landing pages (ultimately, this may be part of the reason social networks have had such a difficult time monetizing).

Clearly, Facebook recognized that this fundamental issue was connected to the failures of some of their earlier attempts to connect with the outside internet (for example, Beacon). This may partially explain Facebook’s move away from platform and towards connect, as well as the UI’s evolution to a more twitter-like model. By encouraging people to participate off-site and to view Facebook less as an island, they can hopefully retain their already-constructed network effects while hitching themselves to the larger internet’s success.

Where, then, to make of twitter? By conscious design or fortunate coincidence, twitter’s design allows it to bridge this gap. Certainly, it retains some of the internet-island characteristics that Facebook has — your entire social network is captured and retained on twitter. This may be a wise decisions — so far we have yet to see meaningful distributed/federated identity services.

At the same time, twitter *feels* more like a part of the internet. Two factors, in my opinion, enhance this feeling: First, by focusing on separating the service from presentation and enabling third-party twitter apps, users do not feel like every action necessarily contains them within the service. Second, one of Twitter’s primary uses has become for sharing links (something facebook has attempted to do numerous times, and may only now be starting to succeed).

Can you build a profitable business out of an island? Absolutely. Everyone from AOL to Apple has shown that if you create an service that links only to itself, you can still make money by charging for that service, provided it’s unique and valuable enough. However, I have yet to see models emerge that allow services to isolate themselves without charging — Facebook is starting to reach profitability, but there’s no doubt it’s been a tortuous path for them to get there considering their size and addictiveness.

Does this mean, then, twitter will be more successful at monetizing than Facebook has? Possibly — in light of the extra $100M they raised today, it seems there are many who believe so. Regardless, this is a question every internet product needs to ask itself — are you in the internet, or are you alone?

Total Recall

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:49:59 -0400

*Total Recall*:

Personal-scale analytics, done insanely thoroughly. What if we all could access this sort of data? Some of it is there pretty easily — how do we analyze across corpuses?

Grocery Line Guessing

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:48:49 -0400

Grocery Line Guessing:

Queueing theory, applied to grocery lines. Turns out you want to pick the short line with full carts over the express lines (given appropriate lengths).

Captive electricity

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:08:42 -0400

Captive electricity:

Hiroshi sugimoto is undoubtedly my favorite photographer. His new exhibit looks amazing.

Availabilitybiasworld

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:31:07 -0400

Availabilitybiasworld:

Nothing annoys me more than the general claim that things are getting worse based on a few anecdotal observations. Louis CK has a great bit about thisl

Fundamentals of Transportation online wikibook

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:47:57 -0400

Fundamentals of Transportation online wikibook:

In another life I would’ve studied civil engineering.

New Yelp iPhone App has augmented reality view!

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:26:26 -0400

New Yelp iPhone App has augmented reality view!:

Using augmented reality is the first time in a while I’ve felt like I’m living in the future.

Vacations and Neuroscience

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:37:56 -0400

Vacations and Neuroscience:

Turns out vacations work on rats, too. Witty pun about rat races goes here.

Combinatorial Innovation

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:32:00 -0400

“We’re in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of “combinatorial innovation.” So if you look historically, you’ll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions.”- Hal Varian, in the link I just posted.

My senior year of college, some of my fellow students somewhat rapidly decided I was some sort of internet guru for no good reason short of the fact that I had landed a job at Google. Folks would come to me with some regularity and pitch me on ideas that were, in my thinking at the time, hopelessly derivative — of the form of “youtube for documents” or “facebook for student travelers” or some such. I bemoaned the state of such simplistic ideas and looked forward to moving to silicon valley, where (in my mind) the true innovators must lie.

When I first moved out to silicon valley, I was profoundly disappointed by what I ended up finding out there. I had come expecting this massive movement of innovation and interesting people, and fairly quickly come to the conclusion that most of the ideas there were of a similar bent — iterative improvements and recombinations of existing technologies, targeted towards specific subgroups. Where were the big ideas? Certainly, there were the Kevin Kellys of the world who were thinking big and trying new things, but most folks I spoke with seemed content trying out new variations of the latest flavor rather than building deep technological advances. I started developing a deep and abiding cynicism about the web industry in general.

This jaded view informed another challenge I had started to mull; namely, that technology rarely seemed to wow me anymore. As a geeky kid growing up, the potential of what computers could do kept me breathless. New applications and gadgets that made me simply giddy were constantly emerging. As some sort of adult, though, I’d found that excitement had faded to some degree. Was this simply a part of the maturation process? Was it possible, perhaps, that technology was in fact less cool and exciting than 10 years ago?

Ultimately, I think that Hal’s point answers both these concerns quite clearly. Indeed, right now many of the most exciting innovations in the web world may not emerge from developing new technologies. We have such a glut of interesting technologies in existence right now in the web space that it may be most logical to keep experimenting with the new tools at our disposal until a wide variation emerge.

Yes, technology may very well be less exciting than it was 10 years ago* — much of the work being done now is simply recombining existing tools at our disposal to create mature, refined usage of fairly raw technologies. It’s less common to see something emerge that was really beyond our horizons. Nonetheless, this work is important and powerful — and to me, at least, it’s still exciting.

Hal Varian is a smart guy

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:10:58 -0400

Hal Varian is a smart guy

Starting to tumble again

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:10:00 -0400

I’ve now been on leave from Google for one month, and need to start processing. I’ve been having a difficult time maintaining focus on one area, so hopefully posting publicly will serve as an accountability mechanism. The goal this week is to post twice daily to my Tumblr account (no, this one doesnt count) with semi-coherent posts. We’ll see how it goes.

endpaper.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:01:23 -0500

endpaper.pdf (application/pdf Object):

Clever idea, cute (but annoying) design

Craigslist Vengeance - New York Times

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:24:20 -0500

Craigslist Vengeance - New York Times

something I've long believed: Experiences make better gifts than objects.

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:29:25 -0500

something I've long believed: Experiences make better gifts than objects.

"There are various forms of the disease, the victim of which is unable to say “No.” Some..."

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:08:48 -0500

“There are various forms of the disease, the victim of which is unable to say “No.” Some of these forms are more serious than others, and often lead to electrocution or marriage.”

- Robert Benchley

"There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep..."

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:06:41 -0500

“There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.”

- Etgar Keret (by way of an Amazon review)