Wikia is getting more press the last few days as pieces of its plan are beginning to take shape.
I agree with Om though about the biggest challenge being infrastructure. You can build a great crawler, a great indexer and still not give relevant results because your infrastructure can't handle the work. Google's use of commodity hardware and in-house tools has given it a large advantage over any new startup.
The possible use of P2P technology could shift the scales a bit but until that technology becomes invisible, it won't matter.
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Werner Vogels posted a description for a research engineer reporting directly to him, the CTO of Amazon.com. Reading thru the description is pretty much a roadmap of the skills necessary for building distributed systems on that scale.
Amazon.com's website is the most well-known front end to one of the world's largest and busiest service-oriented architectures. Its systems requirements are very challenging: maintain high-availability and guaranteed performance in an ultra-scalable fashion while being very cost efficient. From webpage rendering to order pipeline workflow, from data-warehouse to distributed caching, all require unique solutions. Many of these solutions require significant innovation: often these challenges have not even been addressed in research in a production setting at the scale of Amazon.
Good stuff from Lifehacker about utilizing SMS to help with reminders, calendars, money and anything else that makes sense. The use of Twitter for things like this will more than likely increase as time goes on. I wonder if maybe that is one way they could generate revenue, charging a bit for an app or company to use their username for interaction with another application.
I think the timer bot is pretty cool and could be very useful beyond even the putting change in the parking meter example.
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A few folks this week pointed ChoreWars out to me. If you haven't heard about it, it's a site where you and others can create characters and chores and receive points whenever you complete tasks. Once you have enough points, you move up to the next level and start on the next set of chores. I find this very interesting because you are turning the boring things in life into a game, causing you to want to complete them as quickly as possible to earn your points and to keep moving forward.
Peter Merholz posted about this a few months ago. He looked at the book, Convergence Culture and the example of the Survivor community making games out of the show by trying to figure things out before it came on television. You can see that even more recently with folks who follow Heroes and Lost.
What happens if you turn things into games, if I create a 'game' for my day where I will earn some sort of point for every accomplishment? Or maybe I can turn the projects I'm working on into levels and gain experience points for each.
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A few of us at work are responding to this post about talking about those who use our applications and services and something other than users. They are just people trying to do things, that's the focus we should have.
In order to combat continually slipping and referring to these people as users, we've instituted a simple system, a punch in the arm. If you use the work, anyone is free to punch you in the arm. After a bit, you are either numb from the constant punches or you're watching yourself and the words you use.
We are just doing it among the folks who've read the post and agree with it. We figured it wouldn't be the best plan to start randomly punching unsuspecting folks.
A few nights ago, I went to the LA G33k Dinner. It's a monthly event put together by some of the same folks behind BarCampLA. It was the first time I made it to a dinner as it seemed that each month something always came up on that particular night. The same could be said about BarCamp but I'm hoping that putting it on my calendar already for October will help with that.
At any rate, I'm trying to push myself to be outgoing when in a group of people I don't know. When I was at XTech and didn't know anyone, I had a tendency to stay in the background and not start conversations or connections. However, if I was included in something, I start interacting much quicker and it's easier to do. Needless to say, I still have a long way to go but with more events coming up in the next month, hopefully it gets easier.
Another inspiration for going were the posts about BlogPhiladelphia that Dave made after going last weekend. Some really great stuff going on in Philadelphia.
All in all, I had lots of fun, talked with some very interesting people and can't wait until the next one.
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