Web Personalization and Recommendation

Posted by Gideon

One of my routines that I have been doing for a long time has been to log on to a few technology related websites and read up a bit so I can always stay on top of what is happening in the field. One of these websites is GIGAOM and I am really happy with the excellent content that they provide. Today, (yes I have been browsing on Thanksgiving day!), I came across an article that really brought back a combination of very good and sad memories. Here is qoute from the article:

I'm not really comfortable making broad technology predictions, but I've run across two things recently that perfectly illustrate for me the next generation of the web.  Some of us are already living it — those of us that use offerings like Twitter or Hunch, or any service that instead of forcing us to search for information asks for our interests, preferences or even location, then delivers it. The next-gen version of the web will consist of services that tell us what we want to know at the exact moment we want to know it — possibly even if we don't ask.

The good memories is that I was lucky to join a team whose focus was to solve such a similar problem. That was almost 4 years ago! I just happened to stumble into this research group at the proding of one of my programming professors. It was a privilege to join some very smart people who, thinking back now, were visionaries who were thinking several years ahead into the future.

The sad bit is that due to poor leadership, the team crumbled and fell apart. The lesson I learned is that no-matter how smart the team is, if the leader is a wimp and not bold, very little can be done. The sad bit too is that I and my colleagues let the poor leadership, not only break the team but break our spirits.

Web personalization, in my opinion, in huge and very important. Many people depend on it. With information overload and the multiplicity of sources now available, it is important that technologies tell us what we need to know. I use Google News for that reason. I depend on Google to tell me what I should know that is happening around me.

There are many aspects of our information consumption that can greatly benefit from personalization and recommendations!

Thursday, November 26, 2009 | 0 Comments

Hadoop and Data Mining Status

Posted by Gideon

A number of people who have followed my work have been asking me whether I no longer had interests in Hadoop and Data Mining. I can understand where this is coming from since I have not posted anything either on this blog or elsewhere. The main thing is that after graduating from college, I mostly lost access to the cluster that I was using for most of my work. I had always thought that as soon as I graduated I could land a good job and possibly acquire a few good desktops and make my own cluster. That did not happen. The economy decided to completely ignore my wishes. So without resources I have not been able to do much.

So santa if you are listening, I do not need more candy this season. Cash is more like it. As soon as I can get myself a reasonable cluster, I am going to dive back into Hadoop and continue my research. Of course I have been reading a lot about Hadoop but I usually prefer writing about my experiences rather than what someone else wrote. So until then there won't be much. But as soon as I am set up, I am going to finalize/extend my findings on Hadoop and Distributed Data Mining and write about it. I have had requests to write about my experiences learning parallel programing and I am also going to do that once I get the chance.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 | 0 Comments

Will Fox delist from Google

Posted by Gideon Labels:

I have been doing a lot of studying up Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing in general. I just have so much time in my hands and those 2 just happened to be both challenging and not too involving to do. Because of this, a friend of mine forwarded a link to me about Fox delisting from Google and exclusively index with Bing. I then did a little bit of reading trying to find out more about the impact of this and other related stories such as the rumor that Google is going to make pageload speed a factor to ranking.

One of the articles that I found interesting, from a different perspective anyway, is from Marc Cuban on his blog. Here is a quote from the article:

Or they can target to pay sites about mesothelioma and other diseases that ambulance chasers covet and pay huge dollars per click through, or other high paying PPC searches. The advertisers for these categories go where they can get the most clicks. It wont change marketshare, but it could change how the battle between Googe and Bing is fought. If they can win enough categories, all of the sudden they have some bragging rights that set a platform for people to question googles positioning.
It just reminded me of what a friend of mine used to call "guerrilla marketing techniques" and a line from one of my favorite movies, Enemy of the State "In guerrilla warfare you use your weaknesses as your strengths; they are big and you are small; you are fast and they are slow" something to that effect.

Monday, November 23, 2009 | 0 Comments

Facebook killed me!

Posted by Gideon Labels: ,

The title to this posting is not mine. That was the first statement of a conversation I had on my way home. You see, way before social networking was very popular (read as before facebook became popular) I created a social-networking-like site for my high school with Joomla and some custom modules. That was way in 2005 before facebook became mainstream and I was still in college. The site took off very well with a huge number of people signing up and people catching up with friends.

Because of the success of the first site, I started getting a lot of requests to create similar websites for school related sites. The very first person to ask me to do this is this guy who called me today and as I college student this became a way for me to make a little bit of money. Now almost 5 years later, most of these sites are barely making it because people moved to facebook.

So this is why this guy was calling me. Facebook had killed him. His investment in the project was not paying off anymore. That's when it dawned on me that yes facebook had also killed me. The requests for similar projects have all but stopped. Yes its always a tough situation to have to compete for people's attention with well-oiled corporate machines where there is constant innovation.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 | 0 Comments

New Facebook Chat -> Good News

Posted by Gideon Labels: ,

Like many people I know, one of the main problems with a presence of facebook is that as you connect with more people, the upkeep of your profile almost becomes a full time job. At times you end up just deserting facebook because once you log in, you can end up spending a long time tending to the profile. One feature I have always found to be very useful is facebook chat although the fact that it was not a full blown chat interface always bugged me. So it was relief that very soon I can be able to chat to my facebook friends via a XMPP client of my choice.

Here is a brief note from GIGAOM:


The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Thursday, November 05, 2009 | 0 Comments

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