Note of F8 Keynote

1. Mark emphasizes the bar of good apps, share and meaningful.
2. Mark demos the new profile, emphasizing on feed, easy to share and clean UI(The point is to underscore the feed)
3. Mark announced facebook connect. Digg and other two partners come to demo.
4. Ben announced Principle of Great App.
* Meaningful
-social
-useful
-expressive
-engaging
* Trustworth
-secure
-resfectful
-transparent
* Well-designed
-clean
-fast
-robust

5. Ben announced the launch of new developer website.
6. Ben announced the recipients of the FB fund.
7. Ben announced a new competition. 2 months, 10 million dollars, 25 recipients.
8. Ben announced facebook verification program, emphasizing on the quality of apps.
9. Ben announced facebook great app program, again emphasizing on the quality of apps. Like people reported already, the first two "Great Apps" are iLike and Causes.
10. Explain the reason of shutting down apps.
11. Support for openweb.

The take-home messages are:
Facebook will be more social，more share，more platform like.(of course more share of market)
Facebook will enhance the control of app quaility.

Facebook, where's the Ads?

Just saw facebook's new design. I like it! Clearly facebook is going after Twitter and Friendfeed. The status update has been emphasized a lot.

Here I only have one question: where's the Ads?

Facebook to sue Xiaonei next?

According to Financial Times, Facebook is filing a law suit against German facebook clone StudiVZ. There is some coverage in Insidefacebook and Techcrunch.

The interesting question brought up by Insidefacebook is that, will facebook sue the Chinese clone Xiaonei next? Clearly, in terms of clone, Xiaonei is a better one. There is even no "replacing Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one".
The question is, why didn't facebook sue xiaonei first? My guess is that, first, China's copyright law isn't as perfect as US, so maybe facebook doesn't want to get itself in trouble. Second, there is rumor saying that facebook has been blocked in China, due to it's highly opened platform and potential sensitive information. It doesn't sound like a good idea to mess with it by suing a Chinese competitor. Google and Baidu's battle could be a good example. Pretty much everyone agreed that Baidu plays an important role in the block of Google back to several years ago. Third, Xiaonei do have some features designed for Chinese market that facebook doesn't have, so maybe legally it's a little harder to approach the lay suit.

If like people said, you should always sue where the money is, Xiaonei is definitely a better option. They have raised $430 million this year, which seems a bigger number than StudiVZ's price(€100M). So it's likely Xiaonei will be the next target.

Or, maybe here facebook is sending a message to the rest clones: behave, otherwise I'm gonna go after you. Or...will facebook deal with it by acquiring Xiaonei? well...just a wild guess.

What's left for facebook apps?

Today, Insidefacebook has an interesting post about the most engaging categories of facebook apps, as shown below. (Screenshots courtesy Insidefacebook)

Clearly Games is out numbered, which is a little unexpected to me. It seems Social Networks is designed for fun, but is it? Think about the real life social networks. Yes we do seek for fun in our networks, hanging out with friends for fun, joining groups and participating activities for fun, etc, but we also do a lot of serious stuff in our networks, too.

So, there is still margin left in the facebook apps battle. Honestly I'm really tired of writing on walls, sending all kinds of gift, rating my friends through all aspects, doing all the surveys... and stuff. I'm really looking for something that is meaningful and functional on a daily basis to me, and hopefully generates some sort of value. So developers, think from real life, what can be done or can be improved in a social network, you'll stand out of the crowd.

Could awesome "Waterboard" be used in apps, such as iPhone?

Yestercday I saw this cool video called "waterboard" randomly on a blog. It has been there for a while though. It's really cool. In fact, it's awesome! At first I felt this was some sort of magic, but after a while, I figured this might not be that hard. I'm guessing it's basically some(a lot of) sensors and a not so sophisticated program. Then I started to think, maybe this could be applied to some sort of iPhone apps because of its highly interactive nature. Games for sure, like another NDS port, But can we think of something else? something you'd like to do with N(N >1) fingers on a screen?

------------------- Some random thoughts -------------------
This water borad makes me wonder that, if I become super rich one day, how I'm gonna decorate my house. Yes I'm gonna have one of this water board as a wall in the living room, and I'm gonna have this programmable ceiling


in my bedroom(not walls, because I'll have a big garden outside my wall glass windows). And I'll have one of those big white board wall in my studying room, which you can sketch on it. O_o....LOL

Poor Jerry Yang - He needs a hug from Larry and Sergey

This is the photos from Reuters(I don't know if it's ok or not to re-post like this. If it's not, please do let me know and I'll take them off).

I BET all of you have already seen it somewhere(If you haven't, save it to your disk...now). I know that all of you know the Yahoo-Google vs Microsoft-Carl Icahn story and how hard Jerry has been through, but it's still too hard to not mention it in a tech blog such as mine. Here I don't want to repeat the truth, but just have two points to share with you guys what I learned from this whole thing:

1. Never do your enemy any favor, never, no matter how neglectable they are.

There are two cases in the IT history that everyone should remember. One, IBM helps brand MS-DOS, two, Yahoo helps Google and outsources their search to the latter. This was said to be a bless for Google, because back to that time, although Google had been quite famous, they had some problem with their financial situation. It was Yahoo that helps the future search giant out. I couldn't really think of how Jerry feels at this time, but it must be very complicated.

2. This whole internet business changes fast, faster than you can ever think of.

Several years ago, Yahoo was like a glory, a glory in the internet history that will never be shaded. To me, that was like yesterday. But now, Yahoo is like a poor guy who used to be rich but go bankrupt overnight. How about Google? 10 years ago, I think few people knows them, really, except for those really geeky computer folks, but now they are the super star. 10 years from now on, who knows if Google will become the next Yahoo, and if Facebook will become the next Google(say...). Maybe one day you'll see a picture with Mark giving a warm hug and pat to Larry. So, the take home message is, if you want to survive in this business, always be cautious and be prepared, and don't be surprised if you see bigshot dies in one day.

By the way, for the past 5 months, I've seen Larry and Sergey for several times(basically every Friday), I've never seen Larry wearing any clothes other than his black shirt(Sergey changes this time..). Can someone tell me why?

Chinese dominate Ph.Ds in US

A post in Science indicates that Chinese students dominate the Ph.D degrees in US. The top 2 school who provides the most US Ph.Ds are Tsinghua University and Peking University, which are the top 2 universities in China. As shown in the following graph, the number of Ph.D holders from China is increasing over the past years and is now above UC Berkeley to be the top 2.

From my personal point of view, one reason that causes this could be the better visa situation in China, which encourages more and more students in China to pursue a degree in US. Another reason I suspect could be because of of the H1B visa limitation. Due to the harsh situation of getting a H1B visa, many students choose to stay in School and get a higher degree in order to win in the job market.

This is interesting to the IT field, too, because for one, it says clearly that more Chinese students are coming to US, and most of them are in engineering major. It could mean a lot to the job market, which has already been dominated by engineers from China and India. For another, Ph.Ds are the fresh blood of the academic field, which to me, will potentially affects the direction of the market. It won't have any effect in the next couple of years, but I think it's surely an interesting trends for both industrial and academic fields. Let's see if the Congress is gonna do something.

Xiaonei Apps vs Facebook Apps

A few days ago, Xiaonei, the most successful Chinese copy of facebook(so far) launched their developer platform. As social times reported, they kicked off an application competition with a total of 300,000 RMB, which is around $40,000(According to the official website, The first gets 100,000RMB, 5 second prize share 100,000RMB, and 10 third prize share another 100,000RMB). There is no doubt that Xiaonei's move is a smart move. They've been copying all facebook's feature so far except developer platform. It's now under the testing phase, and will become public in late June. In order to make your apps available by people, currently you need to apply for a permit.

Now, It's really interesting to get into Xiaonei to see what's out there. As a native Chinese, let me show you some of the apps I discovered. As you may already thought about, yes, it's pretty much a copy competition of the Facebook apps.

There are two copies of Rockyou's famous app "Likeness".





The basic idea is to send survey to friends to say their similarity.

Another popular copy is 6waves's 型男vs索女(cute boys vs pretty girls). Potentially this is quite possible to be popular in Xiaonei, because a lot of the xiaonei user's use it to find date, or to the simplest, to find pretty boys and girls.








Something funny here is, the above app even copies 型男vs索女's user profile as in their front page. The girl currently ranks No.1 in 型男vs索女.

For a long time, I don't really like people copy stuff from US to China, from Google(Baidu), to Youtube(Tudou, Youku), to Facebook(Xiaonei), to Twitter(Fanfou). However, time proves that they do work in China. Let's see what will happen this time. I guess it will pretty much become a competition of speed, a game that who copies fast, who wins.

I know there are many people in China, many of my friends, who are innovative, who are willing to do innovation. I hope they could do something to surprise the world, maybe next time. Let's fight!

Powerset and Semantic Search

Yesterday Powerset announced that they are going to be acquired by microsoft. Rumor said the deal is roughly $100 millions.

Apparently, Microsoft is hoping to compete with the search giant google, with powerset's "natural language search" technology, or the so called semantic search. I personally think this is not a bad approach for Microsoft. Recently there are some discussion over the current semantic search products. Semantic search is argued to be an alternative solution for the day to day search.

The problem with the current search engines(google for example) is that, it always gives you the most popular results, implying that the information carried by those are true and thus are what you need. This is true for many cases, but not all of them. Semantic search tries to give you a full coverage of the searched term. So to me, semantic search is good when you want to research on something, rather than find the answer, or more simply, the link.

Google indexing flash now

Today, Google announced that, with the assisting of Adobe's technology, now they are able to index the flash content. It catches some eyeball in several major blog and communities.

In the old days, where...

"In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn't mean that you can't include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won't be accessible to search engines."

Now, you don't need to worry about the SEO stuff, well, in terms of showing up in front of google's crawler. However, you still can't go crazy with it. Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

I'm a big fun of those flash based web applications. There is a demo to show you how far FLEX could go. Also, if you're a big movie fun, you probably have already noticed that most of the official movie websites are powered by flash. Just named a few: Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and Indiana Jones.

I have very little experience with flash and flex, but I'll definitely try it out sometime.

Netbeans Keyboard Shortcut - My Cheatsheet

To Be Continued...

Full screen: Alt+Shift+Enter

Search:

Navigation:
Go To Declaration: Ctrl+B
Go To Line: Ctrl+G
Go to File: Alt+Shift+O
Toggle between open docs: Ctrl+Tab
Next word match:Ctrl+K/Ctrl+Shift+K

Rails:
Ctrl+Shift+A: Navigate to view/controller

Some links:
NetBeans IDE 6.0 Keyboard Shortcuts Specification
10 Handy Editor Shortcuts in NetBeans IDE 6.0
Another One

Web Trends for 2008

Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, May 2008 Update

From: ricmac, 3 days ago

| View | Upload your own

An overview of emerging web technology trends, as covered on top tech blog ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. This presentation was given by ReadWriteWeb Founder and Editor Richard MacManus at XMediaLab, Wellington, May 2008.


SlideShare Link

Disable rails session for robot (search engine crawler)

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
session :off, :if => lambda {|req| req.user_agent = ~/(Google|Slurp)/i}
# Google for Google and Slurp for Yahoo!.
# Explore your log for more robots

* Cited from The Rails Way

Rails RJS examples and official doc

With rjs, you can call the ajax helper without specifying the html elements. Moreover, you can do whatever you want after the action(update several divs, etc.).

render :update do |page|
page.replace_html 'div1', "HAHA"
page.replace_html 'div2', :partial => 'person', :object => @person

OR, you can create a rjs template:show.js.rjs, and put the rjs code there.

In the controller, you'll then have:
def show
...
#no render at all
end

Rails will pick the right template automatically.

Official rjs docs

Handy behavior driven Rails Ajax helpers

Periodically_call_remote:

periodically_call_remote(:url => 'update', :frequency => '20', :update => 'news_block')

observe_field:
<%= observe_field :suggest, :url => { :action => :find_suggestion },
:frequency => 0.25,
:update => :suggest,
:with => 'q'
%>

Rails named route

map.purchase 'products/:id/purchase', controller => 'catalog'

can be invoked with purchase_url(:id => 1)

Rails 2.0 Root Route

The proper way of setting root route in Rails 2.0

map.root : controller => "homepage"

Two very good interview guides

I find these two posts extremely helpful.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)

Take-home message: Smart and get things done.

Get that job at google

Take-home message: Get prepared, both mentally and technically.

First shot

It has been a while since I opened this blog. My intention was to record whatever tech tips I got from the daily work for my own reference and hopefully for others who need it. And, it's also a good way for me to practice my English writing(yea...), since I'm not a native eng speaker.

It is until I started to read Steve Yegge's blog that I realized how big you could be from writing blog. Plus you can make money out of it. (Adsense, snaptalent, yahoo, etc.) So, I'm here.

Stevey's Blog Rants
Very very very good blog!
Hey, I'm actually adding his page rank...

I do have a lot of things that I want to write here, both from my previous Rails experience and my current job which is from a famous search engine company that everyone loves. The info from them is sort of sensitive though, so I'll think twice(or even more) before I post them.

That's it. I'll start to work on my Adsense account.