fluidinfo

I had breakfast this morning at a bar in the Santa Caterina market in Barcelona with Jono Bennett. He’s a writer. We were reflecting on similarities in our struggles to do our own thing. An email about a potential Fluidinfo investor that I’d recently sent to a friend came to mind. I wrote:

I had a really good call with AAA. He told me he’s interested and wants to talk to BBB and CCC. I then got mail the next day from DDD (of the NYT) who told me he’d just had dinner with AAA and BBB and that they’d talked about my stuff. So something may happen there (i.e., I’ll never hear from them again).

The last comment, that I’d probably never hear from them again, was entirely tongue-in-cheek. I wrote it knowing it was a possibility, but not really thinking it would happen.

But it did.

Things like that seem to be part & parcel of the startup world as you attempt to get funded. I have often asked myself how can it be possible for things to be this way? How you can have people so excited, telling you and others you’re going to change the world, be worth billions, and then you never hear from them again? (Yes, of course you have to follow up, and I did. But that’s not the point: If you didn’t follow up you’d never hear from them.)

How can that be? In what sort of world is such a thing possible?

I came up with a highly flawed analogy. Despite its limited accuracy I find it amusing and can’t resist blogging it even if people will label me bitter (I’m not).

First: startup founders are pond scum. Second: potential investors are a troupe of young kids wandering through the park with sticks.

The kids poke into the ponds, stirring up the scum. They’re looking for cool things, signs of life, perhaps even something to take home. They’re genuinely interested. They’re fascinated. The pond scum listen to their excited conversation and think the kids will surely be back tomorrow. But it’s summer, and the world is so very very big.

The pond scum are working on little projects like photosynthesis, enhancements to the Krebs cycle, or the creation of life itself. All the while they’re pondering how to make themselves irresistible, believing that someday the kids with the sticks will be back, that they’ll eventually be scooped up.

As Paul Graham recently wrote, fundraising is brutal. His #1 recommendation is to keep expectations low.

Yep, you’re pond scum.

Get used to it.

Embrace it.

I drove from Oakland up to the O’Reilly Foo camp last Friday. The O’Reilly offices are just outside Sebastopol, CA. I stopped at an ATM and my GPS unit got totally confused. So I took a few turns at random and wound up on Florence Avenue. I drove a couple of hundred meters and started seeing big colorful structures out the front of many houses. They were so good I stopped, got out my camera, and took a whole bunch of pictures.

I talked to a man washing his car in his driveway. He told me that “Patrick” had created all the figures, and installed them on the front lawns. I got the impression that it was all free. Soon after I found the house that was unmistakably Patrick’s and seeing a man loading things into a pickup truck I went up and asked if he was Patrick. It was him and we had a friendly talk (mainly me telling him he was amazing). He gave me a calendar of his work.

Click on the thumbnails below to see bigger versions. There’s even a FC Barcelona structure. As I found out later, lots of people (of course) have seen these sculptures. When I got to Foo, there was one (image above) outside the O’Reilly office. Google for Patrick Amiot or Florence Avenue, Sebastopol and you’ll find much more. And Patrick has his own web site.

I was checking out the new bit.ly URL shortening service from Betaworks.

I started wondering how random the URLs from these URL-shortening services could be. I wrote a tiny script the other day to turn URLs given on the command line into short URLs via is.gd:

I ran it a couple of times to see what URLs it generated. Note that you have to use a new URL each time, as it’s smart enough not to give out a new short URL for one it has seen before. I got the sequence http://is.gd/JzB, http://is.gd/JzC, http://is.gd/JzD, http://is.gd/JzE,…

That’s an invitation to some minor mischief, because you can guess the next URL in the is.gd sequence before it’s actually assigned to redirect somewhere.

We can ask bit.ly for a short URL that redirects to our predicted next is.gd URL. Then we ask is.gd for a short URL that redirects to the URL that bit.ly gives us. If we do this fast enough, is.gd will not yet have assigned the predicted next URL and we’ll get it. So the bit.ly URL will end up redirecting to the is.gd URL and vice versa. In ugly Python (and with a bug/shortcoming in the nextIsgd function):

This worked first time, giving:

Step 1: bit.ly now redirects http://bit.ly/fkuL8 to http://is.gd/JA9
Step 2: is.gd now redirects http://is.gd/JA9 to http://bit.ly/fkuL8

In general it’s not a good idea to use predictable numbers like this, which hardly bears saying as just about every responsible programmer knows that already.

is.gd wont shorten a tinyurl.com link, as tinyurl is on their blacklist. So they obviously know what they’re doing. The bit.ly service is brand new and presumably not on the is.gd radar yet.

And finally, what happens when you visit one of the deadly looping redirect URLs in your browser? You’d hope that after all these years the browser would detect the redirect loop and break it at some point. And that’s what happened with Firefox 3, producing the image above.

If you want to give it a try, http://bit.ly/fkuL8 and http://is.gd/JA9 point to each other. Do I need to add that I’m not responsible if your browser explodes in your face?

Another day, another great sight in the Born.

I was sitting here 15 minutes ago when I became aware of lots of drumming and piping outside. I tossed up whether to go down and film some of it, given that I’ve recently been posting a few things from the Born and it might be getting repetitive. I’m glad I did though, because the giants were out.

I’ve seen these giants dozens and dozens of times over the years in Barcelona, but I’m still not sick of them at all. I find them somehow majestic and solemn, and I love watching them parade down an old street bobbing up and down to the music, doing courtship dances, and spinning around. There’s also lots of variety. Sometimes you’ll see at least a hundred of them out for a special occasion.

Have a look at the video. It’s very impressive live. I hope some of that comes across in these few short clips. You have to wait until about 2 minutes in before the giants start moving and dancing.

Once a year they cook paella in the Born. They put out two long lines of tables and chairs. Anyone who wants a ticket buys one (8 euros in 2008) which gets you a large plate of paella, bread, salad, water and wine.

This year there were seats for 325 people.

It’s changed over the years. There are more tourists and it’s more expensive. Some say the paella is less good, though I don’t agree with that (in fact it’s never been fantastic). The atmosphere is completely relaxed with tons of people from the neighborhood out having a nice meal. I’ve been going every year for 10 years, when not away on travel.

The best part for me is usually watching them make the paella. This year was a bit different. For the first time they had butane gas burners under the paella pan. Usually they just break up a bunch of wood and set a blazing fire right there in the middle of the Born. They also only had one pan, whereas there are usually two.

The photo on the right shows one of the paddles they use to stir the paella. That should give you a good idea of how big these things get. Today they didn’t really need anything that long, but it was nice to have around just in case.

And below is a short movie I made. I chopped it up a little so as to end with a frame of my daughter.

OK, this will be a quick one. I’m trying to post occasional videos taken in my neighborhood.

Here you have a typical Catalan scene: a band playing and people dancing Sardanas. You can see this any weekend in front of the cathedral. But this was in the Born and I happened across it on the way home. It’s 60 steps from my front door (yes, I counted).

I don’t really like this music. Like living in Santa Fe and eating Southwest cuisine, I thought it was great at first but that quickly changed. I don’t enjoy the too-reedy quality of the sound and that it’s almost always identical. It’s also really long. But you may go ahead and enjoy it. Be my guest. I really like it when the first person does the initial piping and beats the tiny drum attached to his forearm near the elbow. The dancing starts a couple of minutes into the video. It’s cute.

The church in the background is Santa Maria del Mar, whose stained glass windows and gargoyles are about 4 meters from my balcony.

[This is a bit rambling / repetitive, sorry. I don’t have time to make it shorter, etc.]

Last year at FOWA I had a discussion with Paul Graham about programming and programmers in which we disagreed over the importance of knowing the fundamentals.

By this I mean the importance of knowing things down to the nuts and bolts level, to really understand what’s going on at the lower levels when you’re writing code. I used to think that sort of thing mattered a lot, but now I think it rarely does.

I well remember learning to program in AWK and being acutely aware of how resource intensive “associative arrays” (as we quaintly called them in those days) were, and knowing full well what was going on behind the scenes. I wrote a full Pascal compiler (no lex, no yacc) in the mid-80’s with Keith Rowe. If you haven’t done that, you really can’t appreciate the amount of computation that goes on when you compile a program to an executable. It’s astonishing. I did lots of assembly language programming, starting from age 15 or so, and spent years squeezing code into embedded environments, where a client might call to ask if you couldn’t come up with a way to reduce your executable code by 2 bytes so it would fit in their device.

But you know what? None of those skills really matter any more. Or they matter only very rarely.

The reason is that best practices have been worked out and incorporated into low-level libraries, and for the most part you don’t need to have any awareness at all of how those levels work. In fact it can be detrimental to you to spend years learning all those details if you could instead be learning how to build great things using the low-level libraries as black-box tools.

That’s the way the world moves in general. Successive generations get the accumulated wisdom of earlier generations packaged up for them. We used log tables, slide rules, and our heads, while our kids use calculators with hundreds of built-in functions. We learned to read analog 12-hour clocks, our kids learn to read digital clocks (so much easier!) and may not be able to read an analog clock until later. And it doesn’t matter. We buy a CD player (remember them?) or an iPod, and when it breaks you don’t even consider getting it “fixed” (remember that?). You just go out and buy another one. That’s because it’s cheaper and much faster and easier to just get a new one that has been put together by a machine than it is to have an actual human try to open the thing and figure out how to repair it. You can’t even (easily) open an iPod. And so the people who know how to do these things dwindle in number until there are none left. Like watch makers or the specialist knife sharpeners we have in Barcelona who ride around on motorcycles with their distinctive whistles, calling to people to bring down their blunt knives. And it doesn’t matter, at least from a technical point of view. Their brilliance and knowledge and hard-won experience has been encapsulated and put into machines and higher-level tools, or simply baked into society in smaller, more accurate and easier to digest forms. In computers it goes down into libraries and compilers and hardware. There’s simply no need for anyone to know how, learn how, or to bother, to do those sorts of things any more.

Note that I’m not saying it’s not nice to have your watch repaired by someone with a jeweler’s eyepiece or your knife or scissors sharpened in the street. I’m just noting the general progression by which knowledge inevitably becomes encapsulated.

In my discussion with Paul Graham, he argued that it was still important for tech founders to be great programmers at a low level. I argued that that’s not right. Sure, people like that are good to have around, but I don’t think you need to be that way and as I said I think it can even be detrimental because all that knowledge comes at a price (other knowledge, other experience).

I work with a young guy called Esteve (Hi Esteve!). He’s great at many levels, including the lower ones. He’s also a product of a new generation of programmers. They’re people who grew up only knowing object-oriented programming, only really writing in very high-level languages (not you Esteve! I mean that just in general), who think in those terms, and who instead of spending many years working with nuts and bolts spent the years working with newer high-level tools.

I think people like Esteve have a triple advantage over us dinosaurs. 1) They tend to use more powerful tools; 2) Because they use better tools, they are more comfortable and think more naturally in the terms of the higher-level abstractions their tools present them; and 3) they also have more experience putting those tools and methods to good use.

The experience gap widens at double speed, just as when a single voter changes side; the gap between the two parties increases by two votes. Even when the dinosaur modernizes itself and learns a few new tricks, you’re still way behind because the 25 year-old you’re working with (again, excluding Esteve) has never had to work at the nuts and bolts level. They think with the new paradigms and can put more general and more powerful tools directly into action. They don’t have to think about protocols or timeouts or dynamically resizing buffers or partial reads or memory management or data structures or error propogation. They simply think “Computer, fetch me the contents of that web page!” And most of the time it all just works. When it doesn’t, you can call in a gray-haired repair person or, more likely, just throw the busted tool away and buy another (or just get it free, in the case of Open Source software).

That’s real progress, and to insist that we should make the young suffer through all the stuff we had to learn in order to build all the libraries and compilers etc., that are now available to us all is just wrong. It’s wrong because it goes against the flow of history, because it’s counter-productive, and because it smacks of “I had to suffer through this stuff, walk barefoot to school in the snow, and therefore you must too.”

Some of the above will probably sound a bit abstract, but to me it’s not. I think it’s important to realize and accept. The fact that your kid can’t tie their shoelaces because they have velcro and have never owned a shoe with a lace is probably a good thing. You don’t know how to hunt your own food or start a fire, and it just doesn’t matter. The same goes for programming. The collective brilliance of generations of programmers is now built in to languages like Java, Python and Ruby, and into operating systems, graphics libraries, etc. etc., and it really doesn’t matter a damn if young people who are using those tools don’t have a clue what’s going on at the lower levels (as I said above, that’s probably a good thing). One day very few people will. The knowledge wont be lost. It’s just encapsulated into more modern environments and tools.

I’m writing all this down because I’ve been thinking about it on and off since FOWA, but also because of what I’m working on right now. I’m trying to modify 12K lines of synchronous Python code to use Twisted (an extraordinarily good set of asynchronous networking libraries written by a set of extraordinarily young and gifted programmers). The work is a bit awkward and three times I’ve not known how best to proceed in terms of design. Each time, Esteve has taken a look at the problem and quickly suggested a fairly clean way to tackle it. Desperate to cook up a way to think that he might not be that much smarter than I am, I’m forced into a corner in which I conclude that he has spent more time working with new tools (patterns, OO, a nice language like Python). So he looks at the world in a different way and naturally says “oh, you just do that”. Then I go do the routine work of making his ideas work - which is great by me, I get to learn in the best way, by doing. How nice to hire people who are better than you are.

That’s it. Encapsulation is inevitable. So you either have to embrace it or become a hand-wringing dinosaur moaning about the kids of today and how they no longer know the fundamentals. It’s not as though any of us could survive if we suddenly had to do everything from first principles (hunt, rub sticks together to make fire, etc). So relax. Enjoy it. The young are much better than we are because they grow up with better tools and they spend more time using them. It’s not enough to learn them when you’re older, even if you can do that really fast. You’ll never catch up on the experience front.

But it sure is fun to try.

In a belated attempt to educate myself by reading some of the things that many people study in high school, I’m reading The Histories of Herodotus. It’s highly entertaining and easy to read. I read The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides a few years ago and enjoyed that even more. Herodotus is the more colorful, but the speeches and drama in Thucydides are fantastic.

There were lots of oracles in classical Greece, and elsewhere.Of the Greek oracles, the Delphic Oracle was, and still is, the best known. People (kings, dictators, emperors, wannabees) would send questions like “Should I invade Persia?” to the oracle and receive typically ambiguous or cryptic responses. We have a large number of famous oracular replies. Herodotus recounts how Croesus decided to test the various oracles by sending them all the same question, asking what he was doing on a certain day. The oracle at Delphi won hands down. Croesus then immediately put more pressing matters to the Delphic oracle, famously misinterpreted the pronouncements, and was duly wiped out by the Persians.

Imagine yourself in the position of the Delphic oracle. You’ve got all sorts of rulers and aspiring rulers constantly sending you their thoughts and questions, asking what you think. You’re in a unique position, simultaneously privy to the most secret potential plans of many powerful rulers. You really know what’s going on. You know what’s likely to succeed or to fail, and why. You get to give the thumbs up or thumbs down. By virtue of your position and the information flowing through your temple, you can direct traffic; you can shape and create history. You might even be tempted to profit from your knowledge. Your successful accurate pronouncements invariably reap you rich tribute.

OK, you can see where this is leading…

Sequoia Capital, and other well-known venture firms, have a somewhat similar position. They have thousands of leaders and wannabee leaders bringing them their detailed secret plans, proposing to mount armies, found cities, build empires, to attack the modern-day Persians, etc. By virtue of their unusual position they probably have a pretty good idea of what might work, and why. Using this knowledge, but without necessarily revealing sources, they can cryptically but assuredly state “oh, that’ll never work” or they can encourage ideas that are new and which they can see will somehow fit and succeed. If company X has consulted the oracle, disclosing a detailed plan to go left, and company Y plans to attack from the right, well…. why not?

Entrepreneurs beg an audience, get a tiny slice of time to make their pitch, and occasionally receive rare clear endorsements. Much more frequently they are left to scratch their heads over cryptic, ambiguous and unexplained responses (and non-responses). You can bet the Delphic oracle didn’t sign NDAs either.

It’s stretching it too far to seriously claim that Sequoia is the modern-day equivalent of the Delphic oracle. But on the other hand, over 2500 years have elapsed, so you’d expect a few changes.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter this year. Here are a few thoughts at random.

Obviously Twitter have tapped into something quite fundamental, which at a high level we might simply call human sociability. We humans are primates, though there’s a remarkably strong tendency to forget or ignore this. We know a lot about the intensely social lives of our fellow primate species. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we like to Twitter amongst ourselves too.

Here are a couple of interesting (to me) reasons for the popularity of Twitter.

One is that many people are in some sense atomized by the fact that many of us now work in an isolated way. Technical people who can do their work and communicate over the internet probably see less of their peers than others do. That’s just a general point, it’s not specific to Twitter or to 2008. It would have seemed unfathomably odd to humans 50 years ago to hear that many of us would be doing a large percentage of our work and social communication via machines, interacting with people who we don’t otherwise know, and who we rarely or never meet face to face. The rise of internet-based communication is obviously(?) helping to fill a gap created by this generational change.

The second point is specific to Twitter. Through brilliance or accident, the form of communication on Twitter is really special. Building a social network on nothing-implied asymmetric follower relationships is not something I would have predicted as leading to success. Maybe it worked, or could have all gone wrong, just due to random chance. But I’m inclined to believe that there’s more to it than that. Perhaps we’re all secretly voyeurs, or stickybeaks (nosy-parkers). Perhaps we like to see one half of conversations and be able to follow along if we like. Perhaps there’s a small secret thrill to promiscuously following someone and seeing if they follow you back. I don’t know the answer, but as I said above I do think Twitter have tapped into something interesting and strong here. There’s a property of us, we simple primates, that the Twitter model has managed to latch onto.

I think Twitter should change the dynamics for new users by initially assigning them ten random followers. New users can easily follow others, but if no-one is following them….. why bother? New user uptake would be much higher if they didn’t have the (correct) feeling that they were for some reason expected to want to Twitter in a vacuum. You announce a new program, called e.g., Twitter Guides and ask for people to volunteer to be guides (i.e., followers) of newbees. Lend a hand, make new friends, maybe get some followers yourself, etc. Lots of people would click to be a Guide. I bet this would change Twitter’s adoption dynamics. If you study things like random graph theory and dynamic systems, you know that making small changes to (especially initial) probabilities can have a dramatic effect on overall structure. If Twitter is eventually to reach a mass audience (whatever that means), it should be an uncontestable assertion that anything which significantly reduces the difficulty for new users to get into using it is very important.

Twitter should probably fix their reliability issues sometime soon.

I say “probably” because reliability and scaling are obviously not the most important things. Twitter has great value. It must have, or it would have lost its users long ago.

There’s a positive side to Twitter’s unreliability. People are amazed that the site goes down so often. Twitter gets snarled up in ways that give rise to a wide variety of symptoms. The result seems to be more attention, to make the service somehow more charming. It’s like a bad movie that you remember long afterwards because it wasn’t good. We don’t take Twitter for granted and move on the next service to pop up - we’re all busy standing around making snide remarks, playing armchair engineer, knowing that we too might face some of these issues, and talking, talking, talking. Twitter is a fascinating sight. Great harm is done by its unreliability, but the fact that their success so completely flies in the face of conventional wisdom is fascinating - and the fact that we find it so interesting and compelling a spectacle is fantastic for Twitter. They can fix the scaling issues, I hope. They should prove temporary. But the human side of Twitter, its character as a site, the site we stuck with and rooted for when times were so tough, the amazing little site that dropped to the canvas umpteen times but always got back to its feet, etc…. All that is permanent. If Twitter make it, they’re going to be more than just a web service. The public outages are like a rock musician or movie star doing something outrageous or threatening suicide - capturing attention. We’re drawn to the spectacle and the drama. We can’t help ourselves: it is our selves. We love it, we hate it, it brings us together to gnash our teeth when it’s down. But do we leave? Change the channel? No way.

Twitter is both the temperamental child rock star we love and, often, the medium by which we discuss it - an enviable position!

I’m reminded of a trick I learned during tens of thousands of miles of hitch-hiking. A great place to try for a lift is on a fairly high-speed curve on the on-ramp to the freeway / motorway / autopista / autoroute etc. Stand somewhere where a speeding car can only just manage a stop and only just manage to pull in away from the following traffic. Conventional wisdom tells you that you’ll never get a ride. But the opposite is true - you’ll get a ride extremely quickly. Invariably, the first thing the driver says when you get in is “Why on earth where you standing there? You’re very lucky I managed to stop. No-one would have ever picked you up standing there!” I’ve done this dozens of times. Twitter—being incredibly, unbelievably, frustratingly, unreliable and running contrary to all received wisdom—is a powerful spectacle. Human psyche is a funny thing. That’s a part of why it’s probably impossible to foretell success when mass adoption is required.

If I were running Twitter, apart from working to get the service to be more reliable, I’d be telling the engineering team to log everything. There’s a ton of value in the data flowing into Twitter.

Just as Google took internet search to a new level by link analysis, there’s another level of value in Twitter that I don’t think has really begun to be tapped yet.

PageRank, at least as I understand its early operation, ran a kind of iterative relaxation algorithm assigning and passing on credit via linked pages. A similar thing is clearly possible with Twitter, and some people have commented on this or tried to build little things that assign some form of score to users. But I think there’s a lot more that can be done. Because the Twitter API isn’t that powerful (mainly because you’re largely limited to querying as a single authorized user) and certainly because it’s rate-limited to just 70 API calls an hour, this sort of analysis will need to be done by Twitter themselves. I’m sure they’re well aware of that. Rate limiting probably helps them stay up, but it also means that the truly interesting and valuable stuff can’t be done by outsiders. I have no beef with that - I just wish Twitter would hurry up and do some of it.

Some examples in no order:

• The followers to following ratio of a Twitter user is obviously a high-level measure of that user’s “importance” (in some Twitter sense of importance). But there’s more to it than that. Who are the followers? Who do they follow, who follows them? Etc. This leads immediately back to Google PageRank.
• If a user gets followed by many people and doesn’t follow those people back, what does it say about the people involved? If X follows Y and Y then goes to look at a few pages of X’s history but does not then follow X, what do we know?
• If X has 5K followers and re-tweets a twit of Y, how many of X’s followers go check out and perhaps follow Y? What kind of people are these? (How do you advertise to them, versus others?)
• Along the lines of co-citation analysis, Twitter could build up a map showing you who you might follow. I.e., you can get pairwise distances between users X and Y by considering how many people they follow in common and how many they follow not-in-common. That would lead to a people you should be following that you’re not kind of suggestion.
• Even without co-citation analysis (or similar), Twitter should be able to tell me about people that many of the people I follow are following but whom I am not following. I’d find that very useful.
• Twitter could tell me why someone chooses to follow me. What were they looking at (if anything) before they decided to follow me? I.e., were they browsing the following list of someone else? Did they see my user name mentioned in a Tweet? Did they come in from an outside link? Would a premium Twitter user pay to have that information?
• Twitter has tons of links. They know the news as it happens. They could easily create a news site like Digg.
• In some sense the long tail of Twitter is where the value is. For instance, it doesn’t mean much if a user following 10K others follows someone. But if someone is following just 10 people, it’s much more significant. There’s more information there (probably). The Twitter mega users are in some way uninteresting - the more people they have following them and the more they follow, the less you really know (or care) about them. Yes, you could probably figure out more if you really wanted to, but if someone has 10K followers all you really know is that they’re probably famous in some way. If they add another 100 followers it’s no big deal. (I say all this a bit lightly and generally - the details might of course be fascinating and revealing - e.g., if you notice Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer have suddenly started @ messaging each other again it’s like IRC coming back from a network split :-))
• Similarly if someone with a very high followers to following ratio follows a Twitter user who has just a couple of followers, it’s a safe bet that those two are somehow friends with a pre-existing relationship.
• I bet you could do a pretty good job of putting Twitter users into boxes just based on their overall behavior, something like the 16 Myers-Briggs categories. Do you follow people back when they follow you? Do you @ answer people who @ address you (and Twitter knows when you’ve seen the original message)? Do you send @ messages to people (and how influential are those people)? Do those people @ you back (and how influential those people are says something about how interesting / provocative you are)? Do you follow tons and tons of people? Do you follow people and then un-follow them if they don’t follow you back? Do you follow random links in other people’s Twitters, and are those links accompanied by descriptive text or tinyurl links? Do you @ message people after you follow their links? Do your Twitter times follow a strict pattern, or are you on at all hours, or suddenly spending days without Twittering? Do you visit and just read much more than you tweet? How much old stuff do you read? Do you tend to talk in public or via DM? Are your tweets public?All that without even considering the content of your Twitters.
• Could Twitter become a search engine? That’s not a 100% serious question, but it’s worth considering. I don’t mean just making the content of all tweet searchable, I mean it with some sort of ranking algorithm, again perhaps akin to PageRank. If you somehow rank results by the importance or closeness of the user whose tweets match the search terms, you might have something interesting.
• Twitter also presumably know who’s talking about whom in the DM backchat. They can’t use that information in obvious way, but it’s of high value.

I could go on for hours, but that’s more than enough for now. I don’t feel like any of the above list is particularly compelling, but I do think the list of nice things they could be doing is extremely long and that Twitter have only just begun (at least publicly) to tap into the value they’re sitting on.

I think Google should buy Twitter. They have what Twitter needs: 1) engineering and scale, 2) link analysis and algorithm brilliance, and 3) they’re in a position to monetize the value illustrated above (via their search engine, that already has ads) without pissing off the Twitter community by e.g., running ads on Twitter. What percentage of Twitter users also use Google? I bet it’s very high.

I should be coding, not blogging. But a friend noticed I hadn’t blogged in a month, so in lieu of emailing people, here are a couple of comments on programming in Python. There are many things that could be said, but I just want to make two points that I think aren’t so obvious.

1. Python looks great

In Python, indentation is used to delimit code blocks. I like that a lot - you would indent your code anyway, right? It reduces clutter. But apart from that, Python is very minimalistic in its syntax. There are rather few punctuation symbols used, and they’re used pretty consistently. As a result, Python code looks great on the page. It’s not painful to edit, and I mean that figuratively and literally. This is worth noting because when you write complex code it’s nice if the language you’re doing it in is very clean. That’s important because code can become hard to understand and unpleasant to work with. If you have pieces of code that you dread touching, that may be in part because the code is really ugly and complex on the page. Perl is a case in point - there’s tons of punctuation symbols, and in some cases the same thing (e.g., curly braces) is used in multiple (about 5!) different ways to mean different things. If the language is pleasant to look at for longer, you are more willing to work on code that might be more forbidding when expressed in other languages. Esthetics is important. Actively enjoying looking at code simply because the language is so clean is a great advantage—for you, and for the language.

This might not seem like a big point, but it’s important to me, it’s something I’ve never encountered before, and it’s a nice property of Python. BTW, people always make fun of Lisp for its parentheses. But Lisp is the cleanest language I know of in terms of simplicity on the page. The parens and using prefix operators in S-expressions removes the need for almost all other punctuation (and makes programmatically generating code an absolute breeze).

2. Python stays wet longer

I don’t like to do too much formal planning of code. I much prefer to sit down and try writing something to see how it fits. That means I’ll often go through several iterations of code design before I reach the point where I’m happy. Sometimes this is an inefficient way to do things, particularly when you’re working on something very complex that you don’t really have your head around when you start. But I still choose to do things this way because it’s fun.

Sometimes I think of it like pottery. You grab a lump of wet clay and slap it down on the wheel. Then you try out various ideas to shape whatever it is you’re trying to create. If it doesn’t work, you re-shape it—perhaps from scratch. This isn’t a very accurate analogy, but I do think it’s valid to say that preferring to work with real code in an attempt to understand how best to shape your ideas is a much more physical process than trying to spec everything out sans code. I find I can’t know if code to implement an idea or solve a problem is going to feel right unless I physically play with it in different forms.

For me, Python stays wet longer. I can re-shape my code really easily in Python. In other languages I’ve often found myself in a position where a re-design of some aspect involves lots of work. In Python the opposite has been true, and that’s a real pleasure. When you realize you should be doing things differently and it’s just a bit of quick editing to re-organize things, you notice. I might gradually be becoming a better programmer, but I mainly feel that in using Python I simply have better quality clay.

I’d never even heard of a bandoneón before last Thursday.

There was a performance of the guitar class at the kids’ school and after they were done the two teachers played for us all. It was great. The woman on the right playing the bandoneón is Argentinian and has been in Barcelona for 3 months. She’s been learning the bandoneón for 5 years and playing guitar “all my life”. As for the bandoneón, it looks good, sounds good, and doesn’t sound easy to learn. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia page linked above:

Unlike the piano accordion, the bandoneón does not have keyboards per se, but has buttons on both sides; and also unlike most accordions, most buttons on the bandoneón produce a different note when played closing than when played opening. This means that each keyboard has actually two layouts - one for the opening notes, and one for the closing notes. Since the right and left hand keyboards are also different, this adds up to four different keyboard layouts that must be learned in order to play the instrument.

Check it out:

[Listening just now to the Tiger Lillies song Bankrobber Blues I decided to post another little fictional story I wrote some years ago. The first in the series was Lucky Streak. As a kid I had a head full of criminal schemes and at times was convinced I’d inevitably grow up to be a cat burglar. Mathematician by day, cat burglar by night. It didn’t pan out that way.]

Manhole

I recently became a photographer. Before high-quality digital cameras became available, I had never had an interest. Sure, I liked photos as much as the next person, but it was all so messy. So imprecise. So… analog. I mean why bother? I’m into digital music in a way I could never have been with tapes or vinyl. Why do anything else? Nostalgia? Tradition? Gimme a break. Analog devices with linear access? Puhlease. I keep an eye on things, I have a feel for this stuff. When technology crosses some line, it’s time to buy in. Before that it’s just too messy.

I recently became a criminal. Historically, crime at a distance was always a challenge. Physical events took place, objects were exchanged, people met or talked on the phone. Messy, way too messy. There was always a chain, a trail: someone had met the guy, someone had given someone else a brown paper bag stuffed with cash and a pistol. With time and money, the feds were eventually going to catch you. You couldn’t find good help, couldn’t recruit and train them, had to trust them, were betrayed or sold out, either to the cops or a rival. Whatever. It made no sense, unless you were the mob and you paid everyone off. Or bumped them off. Messy.

The internet changed all that. No government wants to allow anonymous action, but the net was too big. For nearly twenty years I have watched and been amazed that they didn’t do something to stop it. Now it’s too late, far too late. Anonymous action is possible. It’s not straightforward, one must be careful, but it can be done. Tools like mixmaster (anonymous remailer), spamgourmet (similar), the anonymizer (anonymous browsing), ssh tunnels, cheap and disposable machines for rent on the network running simple forwarding servers, paypal for anonymous transfers of cash, public auction sites for posting messages to those who know what to look for, steganography, instant messaging, strong crypto, wide open windows boxes (with broadband connections and fixed IP addresses) just waiting to be commandeered, etc. The tools are all out there and in most cases they’re freely available. With some knowledge, one can carefully build an action network that no-one’s ever going to trace. The whole point of some of these tools is to preserve anonymity. No logs are kept. Subpoenas are useless when there simply are no records.

Just to warm up, I robbed a bank. Not a white-collar electronic robbery. I’m talking blue-collar physical bank robbery. It’s hardly a well-paying profession, but it’s a good lark. In fact, it pays rather badly. It’s also increasingly common and easier, as tellers and other bank staff are instructed to do exactly as told, not to make a fuss, etc. So why rob a bank? Well, why take a dumbass picture of a tree or your pet dog with your new digital camera? Why? Because you have the technology and you want to try it out. Because you can. Because you’ve gone digital and you can take a no-cost snap of whatever you damned well please.

I, physically, robbed a bank. That’s messy, true. But at some point I wanted skin in the game, wanted the whole thing to be real, to prove that it all worked. Plus, I can’t solve everything at once: I didn’t want someone else actually robbing the bank. That way, I’d either never see the money or I’d leave a trail that could be followed. So I planned carefully and I did it myself.

I recruited a dozen people online. That was actually the easy part. There’s any number of bored and broke college kids out there on the net. I made two roles: watchers and actors. I had actors do various silly extroverted tasks and each time had a watcher turn up to verify that the actor showed up. Everyone got different instructions and everyone was told enough and reported enough back to me so that a) actors knew they were being watched and b) I knew the test tasks were in fact getting done. I paid on task completion and verification. An actor would be instructed to do something oddball and very specific, like walk into a 7-eleven at a certain time in the middle of summer, buy six dozen hotdogs and a case of Bud Lite and comment to the cashier that it sure did look like it might snow. I’d schedule a watcher, and tell them to look out for the person who bought six dozen hotdogs and said how it looked like snowing. The watcher would be told to pay special attention to the other purchases and to the shoes of the purchaser. Afterwards, when I heard back from both, I’d ask the watcher what the other purchase was and tell the actor what sort of shoes they were wearing. So the actor knew that I was in the loop and I could verify that the watcher had been there to verify. Everyone had to do their part or I’d know. In this way, I built up the confidence of my players: they knew that the game was for real and that, for whatever reason, if they just did some seemingly random and simple acts from time to time, they’d be paid. I let the actors and watchers take turns at both roles. If they ever asked what the deal was I just told them I was a university psych professor experimenting on social norms.

I admit this took some time. Two months. I had a few dropouts: people who found it too weird, people who tried to cheat by not turning up while claiming they did, people who just dropped out of contact.

When I was ready, I gave all my little helpers an identical task, each at a different bank. Each was to walk into their appointed bank, get in line for a teller, hand the teller a note that said they had a gun and to hand over all the cash from the drawer. Having done that, the actor was to turn and walk straight out of the bank. No watchers, just twelve people playing actors. Everyone dressed the same. I figured several would drop out at this stage, but on the other hand I’d had them doing some pretty silly stuff, pushing the edge, and I knew at least half of them would be up for it. I also know a thing or two about banks. When the note gets to the teller, the first thing they’ll do is trigger the silent alarm. The security guard in the bank will still be clueless, but the bank manager will see it and so will the cops, who are directly connected.

The banks are dotted around midtown Manhattan. The area’s thick with banks and crazy with traffic. Between 11:00 and 11:05 on July 2, the day before the holiday weekend break, the direct-connect police alarm systems of the 5th and 6th precincts go nuts. Cops cars are scrambled and routed to what turns out to be nine simultaneous false-alarm bank robberies. And one real robbery.

I walk into my bank at ten minutes after eleven. I’m dressed in a red shirt, just like my actors who are busy triggering the alarms in a dozen other midtown banks. After a few minutes I reach the teller and hand her a note: “I have a gun. Keep your mouth shut. Pass me all your cash.” After a pause, she does this without a word. That’s the training, the banks learned that one a long time ago. A hero teller or guard taking a bullet winds up costing more than dozens of unsophisticated heists. Plus the banks are fully insured. So teller training is explicit: trigger the silent alarm and do anything the nasty bank robber tells you to.

I sweep the cash into my bag, there couldn’t have been more than $10,000 probably closer to $5,000. I hand her two more notes: “The client at my window has a gun. Keep your mouth shut. Pass all the cash from your drawer to your right.” The other is identical, for the other direction. I indicate that she should pass them the notes, which she does. Handfuls of cash are passed from one to another between five tellers, under the glass to me, where I drop them into my bag. Other customers look on, and I guess they figure something odd is happening, but of course no-one says anything.

Start to finish, I’m there putting money into my bag for less than two minutes. Up until the point the first cash hit my bag, I had a pretty good story: some random person on the internet put me up to it, got me to do all this weird shit, watch others do weird random stuff, paid me through paypal. With the money in my bag though, the game has changed. I know the silent alarm was probably tripped in the first thirty seconds. With your typical mid-morning midtown traffic chaos and the cops already dispatched to at least half a dozen banks apparently being robbed simultaneously, I figure they may not get here for twenty minutes. I’m not counting on the delay any more than I have to, but I figure my margin for error is pretty healthy.

I walk out the front door. Fifteen steps from the bank entrance is a convenient manhole. And look… the cover is already off. The hole is surrounded by four orange cones connected by official-looking Men At Work tape. Of course this is my doing: started and finished a few minutes before entering the bank. From my bag I take a hard hat, some old gloves, and an orange reflective sleeveless vest. Standard issue street crew garb, bought for a few bucks here and there at thrift stores. I pick up the steel tool used for removing manhole covers and drop it into the hole. The rest of my props I leave for the cops. I climb down into the hole and pull the cover across on top of me. Although the covers are heavy, putting one in place is actually a surprisingly easy job when done from below.

The sewers of Manhattan are pretty ugly, despite large-scale efforts to sanitize and modernize them in the 90s. But there’s no need to stay down for long in order to simply disappear. I’ve walked this route before a few times. It’s no big deal. How do I know all this? The plans are on the net: obtained and published online by some urban spelunking group. Along the way I remove the red shirt and put it in my bag. A little over six minutes later I emerge from another manhole in a lane behind a hotel. A couple of suits are standing outside having a smoke. Nothing if not brazen, I bludge a cigarette and a light from one of them. He’s only too happy to help a working man in a hard hat. Show his mates he’s on good terms with blue collar America. With a false mustache, non-prescription glasses, a vest, and the hard hat, there’s not going to be much to go on later, even if these guys do wind up talking to the cops. Besides, as is well known, witnesses are wonderfully unreliable, so the more the merrier as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to know how these things work and use them to your advantage. I tell the suits I’m on a break from the sewer, got to go to my bank, and off I slouch. Around the first corner I remove the working gear and it goes into my bag too. By my reckoning, the cops wont have even gone down the manhole outside the bank. At most they’ll have a call in for someone to remove the cover. They’ll also know that I’m probably no longer underground.

I walk down into the subway and head home to count my cash ($47,000 and change) and to catch the headline news: Daring daylight robbery! Criminal mastermind! Nine (only nine) banks used to create a distraction while one was well and truly robbed. The police chief is interviewed, indignant: we’ll hunt these men down and put them where they belong. A sophisticated operation like this isn’t done in a vacuum.

Well, good luck chief. For me this is just the beginning, just a proof of concept really. No-one should have to rob banks for a living. That kind of crime doesn’t pay well enough, even if you never get caught. Of course, I have other plans. As the world becomes more digital, less messy, things will only get easier for those who have the balls.

I’m a big fan of Google maps.

But sometimes they get things very very wrong. In January I posted this example of them getting the location of the San Francisco international airport way wrong.

The screenshot linked above is supposed to show the location of the hotel Princesa Sofia in Barcelona. They have the address right, the zip code looks about right, but the location is about 30 miles off.

Caveat turista.

We found a digital camera down in Barceloneta this afternoon. Here are a couple of the images on it.

Do you know these girls?

The menu on the camera is in German.

You can see why I’m desperate to get them their camera back.

I spent Sept. 2004 to Sept. 2007 as a postdoc in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge. We did research into influenza virus using a technique we called Antigenic Cartography.

I don’t want to go into details now or here, but I do want to say that we yesterday published a paper in Science. The paper’s title is The Global Circulation of Seasonal Influenza A (H3N2) Viruses. It digs into how flu viruses circulate around the world and what happens to them in the off season (summer) in temperate zones. This paper was years in the making. And if you consider the data collected by the worldwide influenza surveillance network, it has been decades in the making. As a result the paper has 28 authors, many of whom work at the international flu collaborating centers.

Here’s the official paper in Science. There’s a ton of other coverage, including stories in Science Daily, New Scientist, the LA Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic, Times Online, Reuters, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. There are plenty more links (currently) available at Google News if you search for influenza.

I’m listed as the #2 author, but it’s really my close friends the first and last authors, Colin Russell and Derek Smith, who did the heavy lifting on making this paper a reality. It’s so nice to see the thing finally published and getting such wide attention.

Could someone please give Natalie Jeremijenko a MacArthur “genius” Grant?

Thank you.

I’m not in charge of these things, obviously. If I were though, I’d be hoping to see Natalie nominated so I could give her a grant. She’s a poster child for a genius grant (as is my good friend Derek Smith; but that’s another story). I just spent 2 hours chatting with Natalie in her NYU office.

Here’s a long article about her in Salon.

The MacArthur Foundation moves in mysterious ways. And so does the blogosphere. So I send out this tiny tug on the invisible strings to my invisible readers, asking them to tug in turn. Like many of Natalie’s many projects, a little collective tugging might do wonders.

When I heard that Obama had described people in small US towns as being bitter I immediately thought it was an unfortunate word choice and that it was probably something that wouldn’t have happened if he’d been speaking in Spanish.

The problem with bitter is that it’s an adjective that has a sense of permanence about it. It’s like calling people stupid. Other adjectives, like angry or upset, don’t have that sense at all. They’re temporary states.

In Spanish there are two forms of the verb to be (sometimes called the copula), ser and estar. Estar derives from the Vulgar Latin estare, to stand, and is usually used for temporary states. So you might say están enfadados (they are angry), and it’s clear from the verb form that you don’t mean that as a permanent characteristic. You can use ser and estar with the same adjective (e.g., feliz) to give a different sense of temporary / permanent.

You can’t do that in English, though. So we rely on the adjective to carry the sense of permanance. If you say someone is happy, a native speaker will know you mean happy right now, for the time being. If you say someone is friendly, you know it is a permanent characteristic.

Bitter is one of those adjectives that clearly falls on the permanent side of the divide. That’s the real problem with Obama choosing that word. He continues to make the same point (which I’m sure is valid) and continues saying bitter too. I think it would be much wiser if he hammered the point but switched to adjectives with a temporary flavor: angry, upset, pissed off, fed up, etc.

It’s funny how so much can hang on one word. I wonder if someone gave Obama bitter to use or if it just came out as he spoke. I imagine the former. If so, the person who suggested it should be given something else to do in the campaign. The stakes are too high to miss things like this.

I’m often surprised at how confident people are about their knowledge of the world. Looking at the history of thought and of science, you quickly see that it’s strewn with discredited and totally incorrect theories about almost everything. So I don’t understand why it’s not more commonplace to look at history and to arrive immediately at the most likely conclusion: that we too have almost everything wrong.

I don’t mean that literally everything we think is completely wrong. Some things are certainly partly right, or even mainly or fully right. But to have a high degree of confidence, or to assume we’re right just because we know so much more about the world than our ancestors did, or simply because we think we’re right, is just inviting ridicule. Considering our record, and our continual attendant misguided arrogance and confidence along the way, you’d be nuts to think that we know much today or that our confidence adds any weight at all. Many thousands of years of history argue strongly against that conclusion.

Thinking that almost everything is probably wrong in some important fundamental way is a useful default. That attitude stands you in good stead for digging into things, for reconsidering them, for asking questions at a low level. In mathematics when you know for sure that something is wrong (or right) it helps enormously in proving it. It’s a psychological thing. In my dissertation I proved a statistical result that I knew must be true from running simulations. It took me a week or two to nail the proof, and I would never have gotten there if I hadn’t known in advance that the equality I was trying to prove analytically was certainly true (pp 201-207 here in case you’re interested).

As an example of something that I think will be overturned, I think we’ll come to regard our decades of designing computational systems according to the Von Neumann Architecture as extremely primitive. Maybe that will involve some form of analog or quantum computation. I think we’ll take more and more from nature, for instance in solving optimization problems.

On a less grandiose note but still important, I think we’ll look back on our current information architecture and also see it as being extremely primitive. Or, as I’ve said before, we’re living in the shadow of information architecture decisions that were made decades ago. I think that’s all hopelessly wrong. In the real world, information processing simply doesn’t look much like a hierarchical file system.

Hence Fluidinfo.

And so ends another semi-cryptic and ultimately unsatisfying post. I do, as always, plan to eventually say more. And I will.

I’ve been talking to people about raising money for Fluidinfo over the last 5 months. Along the way I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the process. I have a series of blog posts saved up. They’re mainly about oddities and discrepancies between appearance and reality. I plan to write them up gradually. Here’s one I wrote earlier this year but which I never finished. It’s still unpolished - but what the hell. This is a blog, after all.

In September 2007, Fred Wilson posted asking whether VCs should blog. The first thing I thought about when I read his title was transparency.

Increased transparency is a side-effect of easier communication between people. There are many relatively opaque human institutions and professions that have persisted for decades or centuries, relying on the fact that their subjects or customers were unable to communicate easily, to self-organize, to be widely heard, etc. Exclusionary access to knowledge is the foundation of power. As barriers to communication begin fall, openness and transparency increase. Cracks appear in the walls. At that point anything can happen. The typical response is a heavy-handed crackdown to maintain or regain control. Examples are so numerous and widespread that any small sample would be woefully inadequate. This never-ending dynamic is just a part of the human condition and the nature of power.

But in some arenas, especially when there’s a market or in repeated games (a rich area of game theory), there may be a competitive advantage to (usually) smaller players who act disruptively to deliberately increase transparency. Those players differentiate themselves by (often informally) defecting from the (often tacit) group of gatekeepers. Advantages may include potential clients tending to trust you more, wide attention, and better opportunities. If increased transparency gets a foothold, there can then follow a kind of race to the bottom as players reveal increasingly more formerly-inside knowledge. This is also a drama that has been played out many times, and it’s fascinating and educational to watch.

We’re now seeing the cracks open wide in the VC world. The rise of the VC blogger has provided us with hundreds of eye-holes through which we can get some view of the works. The VC bloggers are implicitly calling out their less open colleagues, challenging them to open up. An extreme example is Venture Hacks, written by VC industry insiders, whose aim is to “open source” VC strategy in order to aid entrepreneurs. Then there’s The Funded, which shook the VC world as formerly isolated entrepreneurs got together (and in relative privacy, no less!) to exchange opinions and experiences. While The Funded is unquestionably biased, and based on small sample sizes, part of the fuss was unquestionably about control.

I awoke yesterday with another thought about transparency, why VCs should blog, and the curious dynamics of the VC/entrepreneur dance.

VCs should also blog because it allows entrepreneurs to see who they are as people. That may sound trite, but I think it’s quite interesting.

I’ve attended probably 50 events where one or more VCs takes the stage and gives some kind of a presentation. The presentations are very often excruciatingly dull. That’s because they’re filled to bursting with VC clichés. Even when VCs make an effort to differentiate themselves they tend to use clichés! They’re active investors, they have deep experience, broad contacts, want to help management, etc. I sat in the audience at Le Web a couple of weeks ago while several investors were on stage doing their thing. I wound up laughing with the guy who sat next to me, who I’d never met before. We rolled eyes at each other, passed notes, and ended up whispering nasty and disrespectful comments during the presentation. We were obviously there because we were interested to learn more, but we were served up standard VC fare. Steak and eggs.

The interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are a wildly idiosyncratic bunch. One would therefore expect that they’d tend to highly appreciate signs of character and individuality in VCs. Meanwhile VCs tend to keep things buttoned down and insist on making dreary presentations.

If nothing else, the existing dynamics are amusing. Wild-eyed, power-hungry, idiosyncratic, unconventional, and often deeply weird entrepreneurs are trying to act straight, to project an image of reliability, stability, balance, good sense, etc., in order to get funded. Simultaneously, the VC companies the entrepreneurs are evaluating, and who partly rely on being attractive to entrepreneurs, go to lengths to homogenize themselves - in the process washing out the very thing that an entrepreneur might find most reassuring.

There’s opportunity in this discrepancy. VCs who blog about themselves, in addition to talking about their industry and flogging their portfolio companies, may have tapped into this. Allowing entrepreneurs to see what you’re like as a person is a differentiator.

I was taken to lunch at the New York Yacht Club today by Ted Carroll of Noson Lawen Partners. By some miracle I happened to be dressed well enough to just scrape in - sans jacket and tie. It’s not the sort of place too many casual NY visitors get to see. Suffice to say, they’re a little on the exclusive side.

After lunch, Ted took me up to the cup room. Or the room that used to be the cup room. You see, there’s a slight problem. No cup. The room was specially built to hold the America’s Cup. It’s perfect, and even has a little viewing platform like the prow of a boat. It’s a beautiful space. And it’s totally empty.

I’m not much of one for nationalistic pride. But I couldn’t resist a little twinge of pleasure recalling that fateful day the Australian boat won the cup after the US had held it for 132 years. Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister, appeared on TV in a bright Green and Gold kangaroo-covered jacket to declare that “any boss who fires a worker for not turning up today is a bum”. It was quite a scene. Good for yachting, I should think, just like when the England cricket team finally beat the Australians a few years ago.

Standing there in the exact spot that the America’s Cup had so immovably and confidently occupied for 132 years was really something. You could almost feel the sense of confusion and cognitive dissonance emanating from that empty space and flowing out to unbalance the entire club building. Ted took photos with his iPhone while I thought of Ozymandias, joked with the staff, and tried to sound like I was from somewhere else.

Then it was upstairs to the banquet hall and model room. There are many hundreds of model yachts on the walls and in glass cases. There are perfect models of every boat to win the America’s Cup, and yes I checked out Ben Lexcen’s famous winged keel. The accompanying plaque was careful to point out that the boat’s measurements were allowed by the rules. Unwritten: the spirit of yachting itself was shamelessly violated by the genius upstart designer from down under, but, strictly speaking, the boat was legal.

It’s quite a sight.