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February 20, 2007
Campus Cupid Redux 
In February 2000 I unveiled the prototype of Campus Cupid.
It was the first internet project I produced. I concepted/designed it, and my friend Michael Lieberman coded the whole damn thing for me during his spare time one week.
It was a great idea, born of a drunken 1999 pre-winter-break promise : harness the power of the internet and all those stupid 'secret admirer' messages into something tangible. Something called.. the Booty party.
Our system was simple: students would visit an online website where they would list between 1 and 20 crushes (20? yes 20. the keyword was 'booty'). The pool of people one could crush on was limited to the database of Pomona students ( keyed by student id , cross referenced by name + campus email ). I used my influence with the programming board to have the school sponser a valentines day party with 5 kegs and 1000 condoms. The day before the party, we printed out Crush Sheets - sheets with a listing of all your reciprocal crushes and the number of people who had a crush on you. People could claim the sheets at the party for $1 , and we crowned a Crush King and Crush Queen as we publicized the top 10 most crushed on people. If I recall correctly, 95% of the campus participated.
I graduated that Spring with grand plans of making CampusCupid a commercial venture. No luck - conservative schools didn't like the idea at all, liberal schools couldn't agree on a price point. A deal almost happened with a co-worker trying to broker a deal between me and his old frat house at Florida State -- but they decided to put the money towards better use : a stripper pole in their living room.
Michael was still at Pomona and tried to do it again, using the new improved CampusCupid name. He was overextended and couldn't get the system working right - I believe he was trying to let people narrow down their crushes by using their dorms and first names , and I was helping him with some compatibilty matching stuff based on quizzes. Unfortunately, from what I heard the second party wasn't all that great.
In any event, today my friend Bob sent me a link -- apparently Princeton 'came up' with their own student crush service, and is quite eager to boast about it: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/20/1726882.aspx
I'm kind of surprised by this new system-- in the amazing world of Web 2.0 and all the new technological achievements of the past 7 years, I'd expect the next student crush thing to completely floor me. Instead it just seems (at best) on par with what we did.
Then again, they're just Princeton, and we went to Pomona :)
Posted by Jonathan at 6:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 5, 2007
Flattery will get you everywhere
I just saw a youtube video that uses the same 'hack' around myspace's lockdown of widgets using the new allownetworking parameter in flash embeds -- the widget has a failover that does a screen dim with a copy-paste section for the target URL.
I wonder if they got that idea from me ? The FindMeOn widgets have been doing that since before we launched into beta. YouTube's is a bit more elegant - they seem to show a custom player for myspace ( serving off a referer header ?) that automagically pops up the copy-paste dialog. The FindMeOn one is a bit clunkier -- it just catches the second time someone clicks on a link and shows the dialog as a failsafe.
In any event, I think this is a good time to remind YouTube/Google that they should give Geoff Stearns .5 % of the stock deal, as his SwfObject software is the reason why their flash embeds work.
Posted by Jonathan at 4:23 PM | Comments (0)
February 2, 2007
Rebuilding the machines
I've been doing a ton of work lately on my espresso machines.
The Isomac Venus is in parts as I work on integrating a PID , new OPV system and boiler insulation all at once. What should have been a weekend project has turned into a 2 month ordeal as I wait on parts orders and often find parts that just don't fit right. When finished though, I'm pretty sure there will be a GIANT improvement in temperature stability and overall taste + performance.
The Expobar has been getting work done as well -- I've already insulated the boiler , using 1/2" thick silicon foam rubber: Its FDA approved, rated to over 500°F, and won't shed like the fiberglass/ceramic offerings. I measured 4x, cut once, and it was a great fit. Even better is the performance on the machine. Heat-up time is down to 30minutes for the whole machine (15 for the boiler only) -- before I had to wait 45. Whats more impressive is shot temp stability and boiler cycling - nearly every shot I've pulled has been simply amazing , nothing goes sour from a temp drop. The heating element cycles less frequently and for a shorter time now too. Digging through the expobar I've found a few parts that I'm not too crazy with -- the silicon tubing between the boiler and OPV valve keeps popping off the compression fitting: so I'm going to replace it with a braided steel tube. I'm also looking at putting in some guages - but thats just an idea... for now.
Posted by Jonathan at 7:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 1, 2007
Patents! Patents! Patents!
As of today, FindMeOn and RoadSound are both patent pending.
I'm completely ecstatic to announce this –- I've been working with my lawyers for several months on this task, and its just great to finally say the papers are filed.
The key functionality to RoadSound has been patented as it was first disclosed in February 2006. It's a rather complicated patent - 68 pages in all - but the essence of it is a large content management system that is used to manage data about entities, validate it as possible, and syndicate it outwards. The RoadSound implementation uses this to correlate artist , label and venue schedules with one another , and intelligently build up profiles with alleged data -- confirming it when possible to the scope of the originating entity. Through the use of filters and isolation levels this information turns into reports that exist as RoadSound content, or as syndicated content on other websites. The end result is that an artist and record label can share the same content across all their websites, while respecting industry norms like a label legal department needing to clear something before it appears on their website. The cliff notes version is this: a booking agent can list a show for one of their acts and it appears on their website, all of the acts websites, all the relevant label websites, and the venue website. Or, "Its hott".
RoadSound was built as a proof-of-concept for this style of information management, and while the market isn't 100% ready for this yet, I'm confident that this system will be integral to the future of the internet media outlets proliferate. Solutions one-tenth as robust have received millions of dollars in funding -- including some that I strongly believe were modeled directly after the RoadSound demo -- so I'm confident that the system will begin to prove its utility in the coming months.
In terms of FindMeOn, a lot of intellectual property is being protected -- and a lot isn't.
Right on the outset, I'll state what is not being covered by current patent applications:
The findmeon spec is now, and always will be, free and open.
We are not protecting anything about listing all of your profile identities on a single page, list your RSS feeds etc. Everyone is doing this now, and I don't know who thought of it first , I don't care. We're not looking do to this style of aggregation at all -- I see little difference between it and existing social networking sites. If you want that sort of functionality, the best implementation I've seen of it ever has been Claim ID, and I strongly suggest looking there. There are a ton of new sites every day that kind of do that, and toss on bells and whistles , but its all the same and Claim ID shows the most utility by far.
We are seeking protections for ( this is generalized , and because there's so much activity in this field right now I don't want to get into the exact claims until they're made public by the USPTO ):
How we isolate accounts and identities from one another with privacy
How we syndicate identities and links to other networks via clickable badges ( the webring-ish feature of our badges )
How we handle profile management , permissions, and syndication
How we handle cross-network friendships
+ a bunch of other stuff that isn't public yet
As a side note:
I've had pretty good relations with every other identity 2.0 person that I've come in contact with over the past year. I've even been so bold to publicly state many times that people should use certain other identity projects because the other prodcut is more in line with what that consumer wants (in fact, I just did it again above). This past week, one of the other identity project owners blogged that I trolled boards and pimped out FindMeOn in comments whenever he got spotlighted.
I don't know what to say to that. First off, I barely ever read web 2.0 sites or boards - I'm too busy with work and business meetings. I wish I had the time. I only hear about other identity projects when I get a google alert about a mention of 'FindMeOn' or someone tosses me an IM that reads "this site reviewed some social network aggregator, and said 'it would be awesome if they had this feature' -- doesn't FindMeOn do that ?" And that's when I comment.
So if it makes me a 'troll' for commenting on a blog that mentions my product, or commenting on a posting that mentions a need for a service that my product already provides, then I guess I'm a troll. But I've never gone out and shilled for FindMeOn. I don't jump out of nowhere and say "Hey! Look at me!" on every identity blog. I also don't go out and address other projects by name unless its positive - I only talk about the aggregate of aggregation sites.
Posted by Jonathan at 7:12 PM | Comments (0)