Dropping off Comcast banner for tomorrow's annual lunch (@ Tacoma Urban League) http://4sq.com/9xo7OM
[Direct Link]Lunch with @oubipaws — at Jimmy John's http://gowal.la/r/W6h
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I uploaded a YouTube video -- Alcaudete Lunch http://youtu.be/SgRPqJ0Ocnw?a
- Dennis HowlettOne of the reasons we live where we do: http://bit.ly/auDTGS ...enjoy
- Dennis Howlett
I did a talk at the Usenix Tech conference last year, Where does the Power Go in High Scale Data Centers. After the talk I got into a more detailed discussion with many folks from Netflix and Canada’s Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry. The discussion ended up in a long lunch over a large table with folks from both teams. The common theme of the discussion was predictably, given the companies and folks involved, innovation in high scale service and how to deal with incredible growth rates. Both RIM and Netflix are very successful companies and, until you have seen and attempted to manage internet growth rates, you really just don’t know. I'm impressed with what they are doing. Growth brings super interesting problems and I both learned considerably from and really enjoyed spending time with both teams.
I recently came across an interesting talk by Santosh Rau, the Netflix Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Manager. The fact that Netflix actually has a Cloud Infrastructure engineering manager is what caught my attention. Netflix conitinues to innovate quick and is moving fast with cloud computing.
My notes from Rau’s talk:
· Details on Netflix
o More than 10m subscribers
o Over 100,000 DVD titles
o 50 distribution centers
o Over 12,000 instant watch titles
· Why is Netflix going to the cloud
o Elastic infrastructure
o Pay for what you use
o Simple to deploy and maintain
o Leverage datacenter geo-diversity
o Leverage application services (queuing, persistence, security, etc.
· Why did Netflix chose Amazon Web Services
o Massive scale
o More mature services
o Thriving, active developer community of over 400,000 developers with excellent support
· Netflix goals for move to the cloud:
o Improved availability
o Operational simplicity
o Architect to exploit the characteristic of the cloud
· Services in cloud:
o Streaming control service: stream movie content to customers
§ Architecture: Three Netflix services running in EC2 (replication, queueing, and streaming) with inter-service communication via SQS and persistent state in SimpleDB.
§ Good cloud workload in that usage can vary greatly and there is value in having regional data centers and a better customer experience is possible by streaming content from locations near users
o Encoding Service: Encodes movies in format required by diverse set of supported devices.
§ Good cloud workload in that its very computational intense and as new formats are introduced, massive encoding work needs to be done and there is value in doing it quickly (more servers for less time).
o AWS Services used by Netflix
§ SimpleDB
o Developer Challenges:
§ Reliability and capacity
§ Persistence strategy
· Oracle on EC2 over EBS vs MySQL vs SimpleDB
· SimpleDB: Highly available replicating across zones
· Eventually consistent (now supports full consistency (I love eventual consistency but…)
§ Data encryption and key management
§ Data replication and consistency
Predictably, the talk ended with “Netflix is hiring” but, in this case, it is actually worth mentioning. They are doing very interesting work and moving lightening fast. RIM is hiring as well: http://www.rim.com/careers/index.shtml.
The slides for the talk are at: slideshare.
--jrh
b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Eating tomatoes for lunch http://post.ly/hiuU
[Direct Link]Lunch w/ @lostbro1 & @tommypierucki (@ Los Rubios) http://4sq.com/dzd44Z
[Direct Link]Had lunch today at WaWa Canteen. http://r2.ly/zbfd
[Direct Link]Grabbing lunch & playing with @gcapablo iPad! (@ Zabar's) http://4sq.com/70KJFP
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Want to meet with me for lunch? You can go to Tungle.me/scobleizer and find an open spot in my schedule and schedule me. I’ll get an email and will be able to accept or reject the request or suggest another time. This is really a great new way to schedule meetings and saves me a TON of time. Tungle hooks into my Google Calendar and then puts the meeting on that, which gets synched to lots of other places including my calendars on my Android-based phones, my iPhone, my iPad, Microsoft Outlook, etc.
Plus they recently added hooks into Plancast, which is where I keep a list of the industry events I’m attending.
So when the team was in town recently I wanted to meet up with them to see what they were thinking about the future of calendaring and scheduling and whether they were thinking of even more links to other information sources like they did with Plancast. We met on the lawn inside Google’s headquarters, right in front of building 43, which I found was metaphorical.
Are you interested in saving time? You should try Tungle and you should watch the video.
Blog: The future of calendaring and scheduling with the @tunglerocks team: http://bit.ly/9McddQ
- Robert Scoble
Lunch with Dean and Lindsay. (@ The Food Cage) http://4sq.com/9xNdeZ
[Direct Link]Great catching up with @Simone http://twitpic.com/1pj3v9 next stop lunch and possibly moet given the dollar :)
[Direct Link]Heading down to Glenferrie for lunch and shop. Bugger driving — at Auburn Station http://gowal.la/c/MbZL
[Direct Link]Lunch with @wildfire (social campaign vendor) team at La Bodeguita Del Medio cuban food http://twitpic.com/1op4nh
[Direct Link]New design came to mind while eating lunch. Looking forward to building it. http://goo.gl/LteX
[Direct Link]During lunch, I put my headphones on and point my browser to this site. http://htxt.it/thXQ
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Admiral Sackbar Puppet Craft (Thanks, Bonnie!)
Artsfund annual lunch: Comcast supports school outreach programs (@ The Westin Seattle) http://4sq.com/1ty9i6
[Direct Link]Anyone remember the early complaints about Twitter? That people were posting updates about what they’re eating for lunch? Robert Scoble noted this phenomenon in a blog post from last September about Twitter’s rise:
It tells me that Twitter isn’t lame anymore. Remember those days when Twitter was for telling all your friends you were having a tuna sandwich at Subway in Half Moon Bay?
I do.
Yes, Twitter has grown up and become much more than the report of what you’re eating for lunch. Which brings us to Foursquare and Gowalla.
These services are in their early stages, with Foursquare outnumbering Gowalla four-to-one in members. Some of us are experimenting with these location-based services. For me personally, it feels like those early days of Twitter (“What should I tweet?”).
The biggest difference since my early Twitter days is that I’ve got more experience with this sharing behavior, and I’m comfortable trying different approaches.
With that in mind, I wanted to describe some early thoughts on Foursquare and Gowalla etiquette.
Louis Gray wrote a post recently asking whether people are censoring their check-ins to maintain hipster cred. It’s a good, if somewhat painful, examination of the fact that we do have some serious hum-drum in our lives. People’s comments on the post are illuminating, as some admit this behavior, but also note that they don’t want to bore everyone.
There are three levels of sharing check-ins that Foursquare provides (Gowalla only has the latter two):
The three levels each have their own unique use cases, and their own check-in etiquette.
I’ve done this before. I check in, but I don’t share it with anyone. Why? Two reasons:
See, a valuable use case of checking in with Foursquare and Gowalla is the maintenance of a personal activity history. The combination of GPS location, pre-existing locations and one-click check-in makes it quite easy to create your personal record. Now, some of those check-ins are less-than-interesting. Like…
Checking in at a gas station
Now it may be boring, but I’ll bet there’s a badge out there for multiple gas station check-ins. Maybe someone will earn a Gas Guzzler badge (as opposed to the Douchebag badge). It’s all part of the fun. A festooned Foursquare profile.
But there is a role for curating your check-ins. I really don’t need to know about your gas station check-ins. That applies to my interests, and it applies to what I assume to be the interests of my connections on the location-based services. Sure, share your whereabouts, but please have some mercy on those who follow you. We successfully graduated past the “What are you eating for lunch?” stage of Twitter.
And good luck with that Gas Guzzler badge.
People that follow you on Foursquare and Gowalla are participating in another aspect of location-based social networks. The “keeping tabs” aspect. You see what others are doing in the course of their day. For instance, I was able to see that Techcrunch’s MG Siegler was in Japan a few weeks back, via his various Gowalla updates.
One commenter on Louis Gray’s blog post noted this use case:
I’ve also found a use case in ethically “stalking” various tech pundits (I hate that word) and found a couple of high value events I would otherwise have missed.
Personally, I look at things like work check-ins as de rigeur for this level of sharing. Whereas gas station check-ins may bore your connections, the work stuff is of greater interest. I’ll often see CEO Eugene Lee’s check-ins at Socialtext headquarters. As head of a major software company, I’m sure he has to travel a fair amount. So the check-ins to HQ tell me he’s working away in the office.
I check in to Spigit every day. Proud to say I’m the Foursquare “mayor” of Spigit, oh yes. But I’m competing with several colleagues for that title. I share these check-ins with my Foursquare and Gowalla connections.
But not with my Twitter/Facebook connections. Those folks didn’t decide to follow me based on my daily work check-ins.
However, I do share check-ins, even mundane ones, on Twitter at times. I’ll explain in a second.
First, interesting ones are a no-brainer. Should you find yourself with Anne Hathaway at a post-Oscars party, by all means, share that check-in! Or maybe you’re in a working session at the White House. Definitely passes the interestingness test.
There’s also a good use case for alerting your wider social networks as to your location for meet-ups. It’s a commonly cited use case for Foursquare/Gowalla.
However, I’ll admit as a father with a full-time job and a mortgage, my “interesting” check-ins are few and far between, and I rarely am trying to connect with others at Trader Joe’s. And I’m not alone. The majority of people will have mundane check-ins as they go about daily life.
It’s making the mundane interesting where the Foursquare/Gowalla art is.
Create “tweetable” check-ins. What’s going on around you that would be worth sharing? What will some people on Twitter and Facebook find interesting?
It’s something I do, and I admit it’s a bit of a game for me. “What can I tweet with this check-in?” I find it forces me to observe what’s around me, or step back from where I am consider the larger moment.
A couple examples below:
I’ll never do a straight tweet of my check-in at a BART station. At least, I won’t unless I fat finger my iPhone, that is. But if I can report out the unusually cold weather we’re experiencing, yeah, tweet that!
As I said above, we’re early in this location-based check-in thing. Consider the observations above a start.
Foursquare Check-in Etiquette
- Rob DianaFoursquare Check-in Etiquette
- Niklas SjostromNew post: Foursquare Check-in Etiquette http://bit.ly/bMqmJp #foursquare #gowalla
- Hutch CarpenterHere’s a new friend I made in Memphis on Beale Street. We talked and took care of his needs, and then I asked him to give a quick word or two to my friend Mark and his project, InvisiblePeople.tv. Sometimes, people complain that Mark’s only doing tactics. Know what? This guy, the guy in the video, needed lunch, needed socks, needed someone warm to talk with him for a minute, and he couldn’t wait for the government to get his needs figured out. I’m with Mark on this one.
Help where you can. The bigger stuff will get figured out by others, but we can do this in the process. We can help Mark with Invisible People.
Dynamo Player, which was first announced at SXSW this year and will also be demoed at the New York Video Meetup next week, is currently in active beta with a small group of users using the player to distribute their films — and get a few bucks back.
Created by former Political Lunch producers Rob Millis and Will Coghlin, Dynamo allows users to set their own prices (from $0.99 to $11.99) and length of access period (from six hours to seven days) for their content. The service has an upfront 70/30 revenue-sharing ratio that gives its users the vast majority of the fee paid, and the videos are also embeddable, allowing Dynamo users to distribute their content widely.
To test out the service, I sat down with Hallo Panda, a zoo-based tale of love featuring a talking panda, embedded below.
The half-hour short film cost me $0.99 to watch, which I paid almost instantly by logging into my PayPal account — and as part of my receipt for payment, I received a temporary login to the Dynamo service that would allow me to access the film as often as I liked for the next seven days. Playback was relatively smooth, with only one incident of stalling, and the HD video looked great both in the player and full-screen modes.
Dynamoplayer.com is not intended to be a hosting site, and remains in a pretty tight beta — although they’ve received hundreds of beta requests, Millis said via email that they use a number of informal criteria to choose beta users, including membership in the filmmaking network Shooting People, users who go into detail about the videos they produce and why they want to be involved in the service and an understanding of “what ‘beta’ means.” Beta invites to the system are opening up steadily, and requests made to beta@dynamoplayer.com are being considered. And in a few weeks, an improved player system with additional features and a more streamlined purchase process will be released.
In the meantime, films like Hallo Panda remain available for viewing. And per a statement on their website, “It’s only thanks to [Dynamo]‘s smarts that this film is online.”
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): A Guide To Online Video Monetization Options
