Facebook Games: Better than Facebook?

And to make matters worse, Mafia Wars isn’t even the biggest game — Farmville and Treasure Isle top it, easily.

Donuts versus Breast Cancer Awareness

At least it’s close…  I guess.

Who needs physical activity when you can sit on the couch?

There’s a “That’s What She Said” joke here.  But I don’t see it, sorry.  Feel free to leave one in the comments.

Wow, is it still 2002?

This one is shocking.  Shocking.

Noooooooooooooooo….

And Dunkin Wins Again!

Also, note that Lady Gaga is about seven times more popular than the generally well-liked First Lady.

Sounds Right To Me

I actually prefer Futurama, but accept the fact that I’m in minority.

D’oh!

On the other hand… really?

And my personal favorite

Violin, synced to game

Beatboxing Flute

A capella

A ruler

Two Tesla Coils

An ocarina

A really sick drum set

Stepper motors

A radio controlled toy car and a bunch of beer bottles

A cell phone

It was well received, and I’m a feedback junkie, so I’m considering making this a regular thing.  I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.   One hint:  I shared all of these on Twitter — so if you want to learn this things as I do, it’s best to follow me there.

* * *

1) In Hong Kong, they drive on the left.  In China, they drive on the right.  The bridge between them is TOTALLY SCARY.

Someone I follow on Google Reader shared this blog post by Jason Kottke explaining the problem.  But really, the picture sums it up:

Check out the right (closer) lane.  Watch as it dips below its starting point, coming just a few feet above the water (!).   Marvel as it passes under the previously left lane, and, effectively, flips itself into being the new left.  Gorgeous and horrific at the same time.

Update: Yeah, yeah, it’s an artist’s conception.  Still totally scary.

2) The New York City subway system accidentally renamed a station stop “FML.”

To the Internet generation, FML means something R-rated.  To the Metropolitian Transit Authority (MTA), it means the F line, M line, and L line all stop here — “here” being 14th Street and 6th Avenue.

How did this happen?  Due to service cuts and changes forced by a thinner budget, the MTA cut some lines and renamed others.  The M line now runs down 6th Avenue, and due to coloring conventions, is now orange, like the F.  (It used to be brown.)  The F and M intersect the L — which runs across 14th into Brooklyn — at 6th and 14th.  And F comes before L, so FM lead.

But the MTA is going to break convention after pictures like the one on the right popped up, surrounded by guffaws.

3) Planes sometimes run out of gas, requiring diversion to a nearby airport.

I met Michael Maney at the ReadWriteWeb Summit last week and have followed him on Twitter since.  He shared this tweet from Colleen Swanger, who I don’t know from Adam (Eve?):

Thanks @delta for running out of gas. Now my mother and I are going to miss her mother’s funeral while stuck at LGA when we should be in BDL

The rest of the story:

Seriously @delta how do you run out of gas 75 miles short of your destination?!? (@ LaGuardia Airport (LGA) w/ 21 others)

Standing outside LGA with 100 others waiting for a bus to Hartford because a @delta plane ran out of gas. Not kidding. Or they are lying.

You can read more about the flight here.   The diversion cost passengers six hours — which is ridiculous, given the fact that a bus ride from New York (where the plane landed) to Hartford (intended destination) should be about half that.  It’s mind-boggling.   How do you miscalculate the amount of fuel so badly that you end up having to land at an airport about 75 miles away?

4) There’s a secret, unused subway system underneath City Hall in Manhattan, which you can see if you stay on the downtown 6 one stop past the “last” official stop.

Around the turn of the century — the 1900s, that is — the powers that be decided that the Manhattan Main Line, now the 6 subway line in Manhattan, should terminate at City Hall.  The station, given its location and prominence, was designed to be a showcase of sorts.   But in the mid-1940s, longer trains made the station dangerous.  It was one of the least-used stations anyway, serving a mere 600 people a day, due to the proximity of the Brooklyn Bridge station just a few hundred feet away.  On the last day of 1945, service to City Hall was discontinued, and the station has been closed, frozen in time, since.

But the station is still there, and to a degree, is still used.  The last stop on the downtown 6 is Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, and the first stop uptown is in the same place.  But the trains need to turn around — and they do so by going through the old City Hall stop.  Which means if you stay on the train, you’ll go through this station.   Which, apparently, is perfectly allowed.

But no, you can’t get out at City Hall.  There are tours of the station, and Ben Kabak of Second Ave. Sagas was lucky enough to attend one.  He gathered photos in the gallery below:

5) Speaking about Manhattan subways: are more Subway “restaurants” than subway stations in Manhattan.

I think, for a long time, I always wondered this.  Not explicitly, of course, but subconsciously.   Grub Street has done the heavy lifting and found official counts, and determined that it’s not particularly close: 171 “sandwich” shops to 147 train stops.   Brooklyn represents the city much more positively, with the trains winning, 170 to 70.

It really is too bad that Manhattan isn’t in a dead heat — that would be reason enough to open the old City Hall stop.

But rarely do we create incentives for doing good.  Rather, we tend to create disincentives — legal liability, bad press, boycotts, etc. — for doing bad things.   We see this reflected in everyday life.  When running for political office, candidates will mention their successes, sure, but the discourse focuses on the failures of their opponents.  (Quickly: name one positive thing John Kerry or Sarah Palin did.)   Google’s informal motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” sums up the incredibly low bar of expectations from corporations while simultaneously focusing on the negative stuff they don’t do, rather than their actual philanthropic work.  And with oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, a boycott of BP makes emotional sense — but why hasn’t there been a concerted effort to patronize, as a society, the oil companies which are doing the most work (and investing the most resources) into cleaner-burning fuel alternatives?    Do you even know which company that would be?  I don’t, but I feel like I should.

We rightly place disincentives on doing evil.   But we rarely celebrate the good work done in this world.  Maybe it’s just too much work and not worth our time.  Maybe it needs to be easier.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for about a week, after synthesizing a lot what I learned from Internet Week NYC events.  I concluded that we need to make a concerted effort to celebrate the good in this world, and that Twitter makes that easy, so I registered @CelebrateGood and followed some causes.   (I am not sure yet what I want to do with @CelebrateGood yet — I haven’t even found a good icon! — but it probably won’t focus on non-profits.  I’ll outline my basic thinking in another post.)

Apparently, I’m not alone in seeing this opportunity.   This week, serial entrepreneur Jeff Pulver announced his new project, JustCoz.org.  JustCoz uses Twitter to make it easy to celebrate some of the good work which is being done in this world — and it’s fantastic.

Pulver, the founder of the 140 Characters Conference, is super-invested in the disruptive effects of Twitter and real-time engagement, so it should surprise no one that JustCoz leverages tweets — or rather, non-tweets.   Realizing that you can only share good news — retweet it, basically — when you are actually looking at Twitter, Pulver and company saw an opportunity: what if supporters of causes could automatically retweet the tweets of the causes they support?  If Doctors Without Borders makes a big announcement while you are on a trans-Atlantic flight, JustCoz will spread it to your followers for you.  Automatically.

Noting that personally passed-along tweets are more likely to spread (note the asterisk), JustCoz believes that if we donate our tweets — actually, our idle Twitter time — we, collectively, can spread good rapidly and to orders of magnitude more people.   Whether this works, who knows; hopefully, it will.  But the important story here is that people — Pulver and his team — are taking pro-active steps to leverage social media to celebrate the good in this world.  I hope more people join that mission.

Last week was “Internet Week” here in New York, which means I went to a lot of events.  Four, in fact.   Over the course of three evenings (Monday through Wednesday) and one day-long extravaganza Friday, and learned a ton.  Here’s some of that wealth.

1) The power of good yields tears with thank yous.

At the ReadWriteWeb Summit, I lead a session titled “The Long Production Cycle of Television: How Traditional Media Can Survive in a Real-Time World” or something to that effect.  During it, I mentioned how Sesame Workshop has a lot of outreach programs, and mentioned a recent one, When Families Grieve, which uses the death of Elmo’s Uncle Jack — and the grieving of Elmo and his cousin (Jack’s daughter) Jesse — to help children cope with the loss of a relative.  I happened to have a resource kit with me and I passed it around, causing one participant to tear up.   She later told me that finding out about the hour-long special and the resource kit was timely for her family, and thanked me for the work the Workshop was doing.  It’s a moment I’ll hardly forget.

2) Michael Jackson was probably innocent of child molestation charges.

At IgniteNYC, Anil Dash made a compelling argument that Michael Jackson did not actually molest a child in 1993, even though he paid the family of that child $20 million (and never faced criminal charges).  The salient points:  (1) The child’s father, a dentist, was the screenwriter for Robin Hood: Men in Tights and had a massive incentive to try and hit someone like Jackson up for a lot of money, and  (2) the guy killed himself a few months after Jacko’s death.

There are other things out there which buttress this stance.   As a lawyer, I’m trained to trust in the legal system, and given no convictions here, I’m leaning toward agreeing with Dash.

3) Al Gore really did invent the Internet.  (Even though he didn’t really claim that.)

I actually knew this already, but not to the degree I was about to.

Bob Wyman joined my friend Jeremie Miller’s discussion at the RWW Summit (more on this directly below), and suggested that he was present at a meeting to discuss the future of ARPANET, a (if not the) precursor to the present-day Internet.   APRANET was the largest of many mini-Internets, and these networks were used mostly for military and/or research purposes.

Gore, then a Congressman, was in those meetings as well, and he championed the idea of making these networks into a venue for commerce.  Specifically, Gore pushed the idea that from society’s point of view, having all these networks was unworkable, as it created islands where we needed seamless inter-connectivity.  We needed one “Internet”.

Take a look at Gore’s actual claim: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.  I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth[.]”

Indeed, as Wyman pointed out, that’s exactly what he did.

4) People are already coding stuff for the Internet of 2020.

That’s not a typo.  Twenty-twenty.

Jeremie is building TeleHash, a protocol which allows for decentralized everything.  Basically — and I’m 50% sure I have this right (and 50% sure I have it wrong), when completed, TeleHash will allow an application to connect to another application without having to go through a central server or switch.   So instead of posting something to (say) Facebook or Twitter or whatever and having your friends login to that service to see it, you simply post the message and the application, via TeleHash, finds your friends and brings the info directly to them.

But what I didn’t know is that TeleHash is years away from being mainstream-useful.  At one point, Jeremie said that he’s envisioning this as a part of the Internet of 2020 — ten years out.  To put that in perspective: In 2000 — ten years ago — AltaVista was looking at an IPO, Facebook and YouTube had not yet been founded, and PayPal was still an independent company.  Looking to solve the problems of 2020 is incredibly ambitious, although for some people, ambitious protocol development is par for the course.

5) We’re at the point where the speed of light — literally — is a significant factor in decision-making at Google.

In the same discussion, someone asked if we still need big, powerful super-computers, or if a big task can be distributed over many much less powerful machines and done piecemeal.  Both Miller and Wyman believed that with rare exception — so rare, in fact, neither could come up with one off the top of their head — distributed computing could process any task that a monolithic super computer could do.

Which lead someone to ask: Then why does Google have server farms — singular warehouses with huge numbers of very powerful computers?  First, Wyman said that the computers probably aren’t all that powerful, which is a bit surprising.  Then, he said the most important reason is convenience and cost.  Specifically, he noted the air conditioning — it’s cheaper to cool a lot of machines at once than each machine individually.  But those are not technical barriers.

Wyman said that there probably aren’t any technical barriers.  “Except the speed of light,” he added, his tone dead serious.  It’s true.

All these machines need to communicate with each other, and they can only do so at speeds up to the speed of light.  The speed of light is about 187 miles per millisecond, which means that two machines next to each other can communicate basically instantaneously.  But it’d take 15 milliseconds for the same communication to travel between New York and Los Angeles.  It doesn’t seem like it, but it adds up.

6) LiveStreams of interesting panels are impossible to follow.

I tried to watch a few, and failed repeatedly.  Most notably, I tried to watch Dave Winer’s Sources Go Direct panel — I’d commented on two of his blog posts on the topic and find the thesis interesting.

Perhaps we’re spoiled by the high production values of events like the Super Bowl or the Oscars, or even the evening news.  The camera is almost always trained at the right target, and in the odd event that it isn’t, we immediately notice.  Livestreams seem to be that bad stuff, with a bit of good stuff mixed in.

7) There startup/innovation sector in New York City is orders of magnitude larger than I thought it was — and I thought it was big to begin with.

Fom Monday through Wednesday, I went to three events which had probably had, in total, over 500 people.  And while those events were going on, so were a bunch of others.  For example, while I attended IgniteNYC on Wednesday, a lot of others were in Brooklyn for Social Climbing.  While I went to the #140conf Party, I skipped the NY Tech Meetup which started just as the former ended — 30 minutes away.

Of those hundreds of people, how many did I see at more than one event?

Under five.  Yes, I had met many of them beforehand, and yes, I’d end up seeing a few of them on Friday.  But the overlap between the early groups was virtually zero, which is a testament to the size and diversity of the NYC tech scene.

8 ) The average wait time for a doctor’s appointment in New York?  24 days.

At IgniteNYC, Karsten Vagner of ZocDoc gave an impassioned cry for better customer service in the health care industry.   He pointed out that when we go on a trip somewhere, and our plane is delayed even an hour, we flip out — how dare they!  But when a doctor makes us sit and wait, whatever.

According to Vagner, a New Yorker will wait, on average, the better part of a month to get an appointment with a doctor.  From experience, this is unsurprising.    It’s mostly driven by specialists, though, who have non-emergency/timely matters.   For example, we book allergist appointments months in advance, knowing full well that there’s a need for a checkup/re-test, but nothing which can (or should) be don immediately.

Even so, that’s a great little factoid.

9) Even a near-perfectly scripted presentation by a master showman can be upstaged by an errant comment from the peanut gallery.

The master showman?  Steve Jobs.

Heather Gold ran a breakout session at the ReadWriteWeb Summit, talking about “tummeling.”  Not knowing what that meant — and I’m all but sure that it is not a real word –  I joined the conversation, intent on finding out.   When I joined, she was speaking with Marshall Kirkpatrick about how often, the best part of a blog post or speech is the authentic, unplanned-on feedback you get from the audience.

Cue “ah-ha” moment.  I piped up and mentioned that Steve Jobs ran into network problems during his keynote, and at one point, asked if anyone had any suggestions.

An audience member offered one:  “Verizon.”  (You can see that part in the video at Gizmodo, with roughly 20 seconds left until it ends.)

That was the highlight of the keynote.  Certainly the most memorable part.

10) There are people out there who are leading indicators of what’s going to become big news.  And they may not even know it.

Kirkpatrick gave an opening keynote at the RWW Summit and discussed how the blog tracks potentially viral stories.  One of the techniques the RWW team uses is to take trending Techmeme stories and look back at Del.icio.us to see if anyone bookmarked stories ahead of time.

They gather up those early bookmarkers and build a small, informal database.  Over time, the find repeat users in the list.   They now have about a dozen people who, solely by virtue of this process, RWW recognizes as meme bloodhounds.

That’s incredibly impressive, and kudos to the RWW team for mining these networks to find true gems — even if the gems don’t know their value.

* * *

Thank you to everyone I met, spoke to, and listened to last week.  Internet Week 2010 was a great learning experience, and I’m better off for having participated.

Facebook just served me a “Research Poll,” results above, asking me if I was planning on seeing the A-Team movie.  These polls are sponsored — I assume by the marketing force behind the movie — so I am understandibly skeptical about the “Research” aspect.  (If anyone has used this before, and my skepticism is not well-founded, please let me know.)

Two thirds of respondents are incredibly unlikely to see the movie.   Yikes.   That is probably not the marketing message they wanted to send.

Facebook thinks I should be friends with all of them.

And I have no idea who any of them are.

I am, of course, talking about Facebook’s Suggestions – people I should consider being friends with.   And the suggestions are awful.  But they don’t have to be.  Facebook has a ton of data about me — how old I am, where I live, where I’ve lived, who I’m married to, where I work, have worked, went to school, who I consider my friends, which friends I interact with most often (on Facebook, at least), etc.

And one would assume that Facebook would want to make the Suggestions tool as close to perfect as possible.  Hey, it fits with their mission, over there on the right in big bold letters: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”   If Facebook could actually help me find those people, it’d be a huge first step toward connecting and, subsequently, sharing.

Further, Facebook certainly makes suggestions a focal point of the site.  They appear on the front, News Feed page, right near where the only ad on the page lies.  On other pages, they’ll often take the place of ads.  That’s dedication.

So Facebook should be able to get Suggestions right, or, at least close.  But do they?  Hardly.  The criteria Facebook uses in making its suggestions seems to be simple and binary: Do you and your suggested new friend have a friend in common?  And the results are ridiculous.

Let’s look at Tomek,  Stephanie, David, and Nathan once more, and see what information Facebook has.   As you will see, Facebook has the ability to draw an impressive graph of my social network, and with a high degree of accuracy, should be able to predict whether I actually know someone.   That they fail here is stunning.

Tomek

I can’t figure out why Tomek and I should connect.  How can Facebook?

• Tomek and I have one mutual friend, a former co-worker of mine.  That co-worker and I have eleven friends in common; Tomek is not friends with any of them.
• Tomek lives in Poland.   I haven’t worked there.  I did not go to school there.   There is no reason to believe I have ever been there for anything more than a few days.

The mutual friend and I share eleven friends; that’s a social circle of 13 people.  Tomek is connected to only one of those thirteen people.  Facebook should take this as evidence that he’s not connected to the other 12; unfortunately, they do the opposite.

Stephanie

The interesting angle here: I may have actually met Stephanie before — in fact, it’s incredibly likely — and I don’t think either would recognize the other on the street.   If Facebook can differentiate a  person I may have once met from a person that I actually know, well, that would be great.  They should be able to.

• Stephanie and I have two mutual friends.  They are siblings, which Facebook knows.
• The siblings and I have, in total, three other mutual contacts; that is, there are three people who are friends with me and both of the siblings.  One of those three people is my wife; another is one of the sibling’s spouses.

My guess is that Stephanie is a relative of the siblings, and I’m pretty sure Facebook could do some interesting math to figure that out.     Facebook also has Stephanie’s connection data, and that would buttress my guess.   If I’m right — that this is a question of cousins, then she’s be a poor suggestion, albeit not a terrible one.

David

This one is obviously wrong.

• David is originally from Los Angeles but now lives outside D.C.  I, again, have never lived or worked in either place.
• David and I have one mutual friend.  That mutual friend lives in D.C. (and did not grow up in LA).
• The mutual friend and I went to college together (we’re in the same college network) and our four mutual friends all also went to that same college at roughly the same time.

So: David and our mutual friend know each other from their current lives, while I know the mutual from college.   David is not part of that social circle.  This suggestion is clearly incorrect.

Nathan

This is another case where the social circles are easily drawn, and Nathan and I are not in the same ones.

• We have two mutual friends — who are married.
• The couple and I have three other mutual friends, who are not friends with Nathan.
• The couple and I went to the same college.  Nathan went elsewhere.

Married couples have joint friends; that is, friends of the couple as much as any individual.  But they also have individual friends — friends who are legitimately friends with both individuals independent of the other.   I don’t know if Nathan is in the former group, but there is reason to believe he is.  Meanwhile, I am most likely in the latter group, having going to college with both husband and wife.  In any event, the three other mutual friends make it clear that Nathan is not within that circle.

Facebook can easily draw my “social graph” — they, quite literally, coined the term.  They have all the info they need.  Why aren’t the using it?