Geography

Flickr user Ambrosia Voyeur found a fascinating map published in 1927 that Hollywood studios used to find relatively nearby locations to film far-away places. As you can see, certain spots in California were considered good for filming places like Siberia, Sherwood Forest, the Sahara Desert, and other movie settings. The source is The American Film Industry by Tino Balio. According to the book, the variety of available geography in southern California is one of the reasons Hollywood became the center of the film industry. Link to image. Link to book. -via Buzzfeed

If Facebook has its way (and it usually does), over the coming years a ton of websites and online services will become part of the open graph that Facebook is promoting, with Facebook firmly planted in the middle. The concept is very interesting, and the potential for this web of data from a wide variety of sources is enormous. You could say that Facebook will tie all our information, and the whole web, together.

There’s just one problem (two, if you count privacy): When the web becomes “interconnected” with Facebook, it also means that when Facebook breaks, the web breaks. In short, Facebook becomes a single point of failure for the web.

Can Facebook deliver on reliability?

Any site that relies on Facebook’s API to function properly will be in trouble if Facebook has any service issues (it’s happened before and it will happen again). This is true today, and the more integrated services become with Facebook, the more noticeable it will become.

Since the sites connecting to Facebook will be using the new Facebook Graph API, the reliability (i.e. uptime) and performance of this API will be critical.

A couple of days ago we set up monitoring of this API (with our uptime monitoring service) to see how it will perform over time. We’ll definitely follow up with a deeper performance and reliability analysis when this monitoring has been running for a while, but we already have some interesting results to share:

Geography and performance

On the internet, not all locations are created equal. Since Facebook is hosted in the United States, accessing the Facebook API will be faster in North America than other places of the world. Case in point, when we examined our monitoring results we could clearly see how accessing the API from Europe was significantly slower than from North America, all thanks to the overhead of distance. This is a direct effect of Facebook being hosted in the United States.

Here is the average time to complete a Facebook Graph API request. The chart is based on more than 3,000 requests from multiple locations in Europe and North America, spread over the last couple of days:

Above: Based on monitoring from multiple locations in North America and Europe between April 27-29, tests performed once per minute.

An average 340 ms in North America versus 569 ms in Europe is a pretty big difference, although as we mentioned, since Facebook is hosted in the United States, this should be expected. Nevertheless, Facebook API requests are on average 67% slower in Europe than North America, and this is something that we’ll simply have to live with (at least for now).

Uptime, though, proved impeccable (100%), although since we have only monitored the API for a few days so far it’s too short a period to draw any relevant conclusions about reliability. Regardless of the results, we feel pretty safe to say that unless a website is intrinsically connected to Facebook and has to depend on it, it’s probably a good idea to make sure that the site works ok even if Facebook is down or has performance issues.

Dare we trust Facebook?

The Open Graph is a brilliant concept and the potential for what can be done using this graph of knowledge and social connections (because that’s what it comes down to) is huge. And that potential goes way beyond customized web pages.

Some things benefit greatly from having a central repository, a central connection mechanism, and this is certainly one of those. If Facebook should be that entity is another matter, but regardless of who is in control, having one central point if failure can cause a great deal of problems once something goes wrong.

This central point of failure may be an argument just as strong as any privacy concern for decentralizing the open graph (and APIs used to access it). If it reaches the popularity many expect, it will be such a critical element of the web experience that it probably shouldn’t be controlled by any one company or service. On the other hand, it’s kind of what Google did with Search.

This week's top stories [09 April 2010] —

Our top articles ranked by reader popularity.

• Time Lords discovered in California
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• Did a comet swarm strike America 13,000 years ago?
• Picking our brains: Why are some people smarter?
• Motion sensors could help tennis players serve an ace
• This week's top stories [02 April 2010]
• Animal drug trials keep mum about failures
• Which is the greenest US city of all?
• Simulator gets to the bottom of trough-led tsunamis
• Fight cancer by picking off cells before they go rogue

Investors to Startups: It's Not You, It's Me —

Unfortunately, you can't always explain why a venture capitalist chooses to invest in one startup and not in another. Despite what some will claim, there is no magic formula that entrepreneurs can follow to assure them funding 100% of the time; these are just guidelines to follow to increase your chances, but in the end, a VC's decision is not always about the quality of the company, idea or founders. It's like in a relationship when one party breaks it off by saying, "It's not you, it's me," only for VCs they actually mean it most of the time.

Sponsor

DFJ Gotham Ventures investor Mark Davis, who blogs over at Venture Made Transparent wrote Tuesday about how sometimes, even when looking at a great company with a promising future, VCs (himself included) still say no. The reason? Well, for VCs, investing in a startup is a lot more than just determining whether it will have a prosperous future.

Ultimately, VCs are looking for a financial return on their investment, and while potentially successful startups can mean quick bucks for entrepreneurs, the VC may not stand to benefit as much from investing as they would like. It sounds mean and nasty, but VCs don't exist to simply shell out cash to worthy companies; they have been tasked with taking a venture fund and investing in companies that will provide high returns.

That being said, there are a lot of different VCs out there with lots of different goals in mind, so those looking for higher returns are less likely to invest in a company with a mildly promising future. If a VC turns you down, it could be simply that they are looking for something different than what you are offering.

"When a VC passes on a company that seems poised to succeed, he may do so because the company is not a fit with the VC's thesis," writes Davis. "The company might be based in a geography or sector in which the VC doesn't invest [or] the company is not likely to scale sufficiently to meet a VC's investment requirements."

So before you trash your pitch deck and slam your head against the wall, take time to consider the fact that all VCs have varying motivations and your company might be perfect for a different investor. I would assume any decent VC would tell you why he has declined investing, but if for some reason they don't, make sure you don't leave the meeting without getting some feedback and constructive criticism from them.

Discuss

Financial Times Shuts Semantic Search Service Newsift —

A year ago, the FT launched “a next generation search tool for business professionals”. Powered by Endeca, it was called Newsift and aimed to “enable users to string together a query that can provide insight into the relationship between people, organizations, geography, and business theme, which ultimately facilitates more informed business decisions”.

But Newsift is no more; the site has since gone offline.

Why? An FT Group spokesperson tells paidContent:UK: “It’s the nature of digital media start-ups that not all work out, but we still firmly believe in the need to experiment and innovate.

“Newssift was a good idea, but the timing was unfortunate in that its launch coincided with the advertising downturn.”

We never had any metrics on Newssift’s success, or lack of, but FT continues augmenting itself by acquiring subscription financial decision-making publishers.

Cadmus, the Twitter filter and conversation collector we have covered a few times on the site, has just introduced support for Twitter lists, providing personalized trending topics by list and conversations from that list, giving you an instant update as to what your friends or a specific group of friends are talking about on Twitter. Also, in parallel with the start of the SXSW Interactive 2010 event in Austin, Cadmus has created a dedicated page for speakers at SXSWi.

We've recently seen Twitter introduce trending topics by geography, a good move beyond the worldwide trending topics the company has featured since their acquisition of Summize in 2008. But the trending topics are not yet personalized for you, all those you follow, or by specific list. Cadmus takes these trends a step further with what they call "Personal Trending Topics" and yes, trends by each list you follow.

For me, the personal trending topics I see in Cadmus today are: "#sxsw, Twitter, sxsw, Austin, iPad, news, #media, iPhone, #ff and #followfriday".

If I change my view to the "TopTechBloggers" list, the trending topics for that list show me: "sxsw, #sxsw, iPad, Twitter, austin, #triout, iPhone, new post, #sbs2010 and #NCchevySXSW". Meanwhile, the "awesomesocial" list from Josh Elman is talking about: "#sxsw, austin, sxsw, #gdc, San Francisco, sf, new blog post, iPhone, #startupvisa and api".

So yes, clearly most of those people I follow and list are talking about SXSW.


Within each list, you can still see the grouped conversation that Cadmus is known for. I can see that Mathew Ingram of ReadWriteWeb got 11 responses to a recent query on Twitter, and see that Mashable continues to get 100+ retweets to most of their posts. But instead of seeing all 100, Cadmus groups them under the originating tweet to reduce the noise - as is their hallmark.

While you're checking out Cadmus' updates, also be sure to see their dedicated page for SXSW speakers here: http://thecadmus.com/topics/sxsw-speakers.

Illinois And Wisconsin Do Not Mess Around When It Comes To Drinkin' — Say what you will about the heart of the Midwest, it's certainly not hard to find a bar. Geography blog FloatingSheep took a look a the bar-to-grocery store ratio in different parts of the country and it became immediately apparent that Illinois and Wisconsin (and part of Iowa) team up to form the beer belly of America.

Starting in Illinois, the beer belly expands up into Wisconsin and first spreads westward through Iowa/Minnesota and then engulfs Nebraska, and the Dakotas before petering out (like a pair of love handles) in Wyoming and Montana.

The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.

We wonder if this information will help improve tense Illinois/Wisconsin diplomatic relations.

Alisa, the tipster who sent this in, says, "I am from Wisconsin, and I would say this is accurate!" Well, I am from Illinois, and I would have to agree.

Have to say I'm disappointed in Chicagoland, however. Guess that's why we have to vacation in 'Sconsin. Or maybe they're just counting Binny's as a grocery store.

The Beer Belly of America [FloatingSheep]

Evolutionary history shows us that doubling-down on your defenses is effective against predators but useless against environmental change. Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be effective if Google were merely a predator. But this is the Internet, where copies are free, everyone could be a customer, your competitors are just a click away, and customer loyalty isn't merely a consequence of geography. To treat the Internet merely as just another competitor is to miss the point that it's a new medium which favours some business models and hurts others. To move your content behind a News Corp-style paywall is to be a dinosaur that knows the comet is coming but thinks, "I need thicker armor because I've heard that it has a big tail."

At the end of January, Twitter introduced local trending topics to show what people in your geography are tweeting about. But some have hoped the service would go further, displaying trends only from those you follow. While that may be on the roadmap, Twitter hasn't promised this feature, and other services are filling the gap. One of the first is Cadmus, which I first profiled back in November as a real-time stream filter.

Cadmus' new introductions, described in the company's blog post, highlight not only topics trending in your stream, but also groups conversations with nested replies to popular updates.

Unsurprisingly, for me anyway, my trending topics in the last few days have been "Buzz", "Google Buzz", "Twitter", "Windows Phone" and "Series", in light of Microsoft and Google's latest announcements.

As with Twitter's Web interface, clicking on a trending topic shows tweets that feature this keyword, but Cadmus, again, only shows updates from those who you are following.

Cadmus' personalization mirrors that of the new Twitter client from Twazzup which we highlighted last month. It too features personalized topics. Cadmus also pulls in content from FriendFeed and RSS.

You can find Cadmus at http://thecadmus.com.