Dan Romero

Seems like I can't stop posting about Facebook. Oh well, at least I am not the only one.

Anyways, VentureBeat recently wrote an article profiling RockYou's new advertising network. RockYou currently has three big-time apps on Facebook: Horoscopes, X Me, and Super Wall, which according to the article:

RockYou has eight applications right now (with two more in the works) and claims to have at least one of its apps installed by a third of Facebook users, including Horoscopes, X Me and Super Wall.

This bold claim jumped out at me. So I did some quick research with my own group of friends. Out of my 414 Facebook friends, a combined 54 people had these apps installed (Horoscopes and X Me with 37 and Super Wall with 7). Not exactly 1/3. Upon further investigation, I found that the actual number of people was 35, as many of those users had installed multiple RockYou apps. I would be willing to bet that this trend is pretty common among RockYou app users, with many users having two or three RockYou apps installed on their account.

I am still waiting for an app that is actually useful to come out. So far, all the apps I've seen just make it harder to post on my friend's walls.

And speaking of posting, Facebook's recent addition of pictures/video to the standard Facebook wall makes RockYou's Super Wall king of worthless.

I think I am suffering from application overload. Here is a list of apps I use on a daily basis:

Web work:
• Trac - for software development
• Doku Wiki - general company wiki
• Highrise - contact management
• Notepad++ - coding
Day job:
• Microsoft Office 2007 - email, calendering, all other types of work
Personal:
• Gmail - all personal email goes here
• Google Calendar - calendar
• Google Reader - RSS
• Strongspace - file storage (for life)
• Mozy - remote backup (works automatically but its putting files in another spot, further spreading me out)
Social services:
• Twitter - microblog/status updates
• Facebook - social networking
• Flickr - photo sharing
• Skype - voice and video chat
• Meebo - IM
• Movable Type - personal blog
• Tumblr - linklog

Bonus: I have an Accelerator (M), Shared Hosting account, and a Connector (unused) for life from TextDrive/Joyent.

I think that it's getting to be a bit much.

Plain and simple: Facebook needs to implement RSS all over the site. Rather than spamming users with email updates (I have Gmail automatically delete them), Facebook could allow them to subscribe to a authenticated RSS feed. They could be customizable, such as new pictures feeds and individual user feeds.

As of right now, Facebook is a data black hole: information goes in but hardly ever comes out. Obviously at the end of the day, it's their data that's valuable, so it makes sense to keep more of it coming in than going out. But as the RSS adoption slowly inches higher, an increasing number of people would benefit from an RSS-enabled Facebook.

I was recently thinking about Richard MacManus recent post on why Digg needs editors (TechCrunch also posted on the issue). And there is really a simple solution: submit the content yourself. Before any of the Digg linkers find your post, simply submit your entry/post/essay/meme yourself. Now I understand that some within the Digg community might look down on this, but at the end of the day if your Digg submission is better written, everyone benefits.

Another option would be if you knew the entry/post/essay/meme was going to be huge beforehand (hint: TechCrunch and Read/Write Web) would be to partner with a Top 50 or 100 Digg user. They would become a publicity agent of sorts. No money involved (completely avoiding the ethics of paying per post or digg) as the submission would have most likely made it to the homepage of Digg to begin with. The Digg user gets another story on the homepage and the big time site gets a better worded post. Everyone is happy.

Update: Since I was suggesting to post your own content to Digg, I went ahead and followed my own advice. And here is an obnoxiously large Digg This! button for your convenience.



Additional update: Digg categorized my story as News » Sports » Other Sports. Not exactly the most relevant category.

I have been playing EVE Online since February 2006 (not very much over the last 8 months). Recommended by a friend, I was initially attracted to the vastness of the game. Instead of running on hundreds of separate servers (shards), like World of Warcraft, EVE runs on a single cluster, with 20 - 30 thousand players logged on at given time.

After a couple of months of playing the game, I became fascinated with EVE's highly complex and realistic economy. Nearly everything within the game is player made, allowing for economic opportunities on a number of levels. From miners to traders, manufacturers to pirates, it was quite obvious that the driving force behind this virtual world was its rich and dynamic economy.

Well aware of this, EVE's parent company, CCP Interactive, recently hired an in-house economist, a first of its kind for any large MMORPG. With duties including macro-economic analysis and fiscal policy, Dr.EyjoG will be providing very interesting reports in the coming months.

Moves like this are why I find EVE to be superior to other MMORPGs (even despite the recent developer cheating allegations). CCP takes EVE very seriously and strives to make the game as engrossing and fun as possible. From my own experience (and from the hundreds of thousands that subscribe), they are doing a pretty good job.

If you haven't already checked out my linklog, you can find it at blazamos.tumblr.com. I try to put interesting content up there on a fairly regular basis. As for this blog, it tends to be for longer rants/memes/essays.

I have now been using the iPhone for a little more than a week and it really is the most incredible piece of technology I have ever used. But that doesn't mean I don't have improvement suggestions.

• The default package of 200 SMS messages are definitely not enough. The SMS interface is so elegant, I found myself approaching the 200 message limit within 5 days. Make all plans $5 - $10 more a month and give everyone unlimited.
• Not as much an Apple problem as a Google one: Gmail support is horrible. When I log on to Gmail on my PC, I have most of my email sorted and filed using Gmail's labels and filters. On the iPhone, I get all my email lumped in a single inbox. For me, I am subscribed to a number of mailing lists that I browse occasionally, but on my phone they overwhelm my important email. I also receive email from (no lie) 7 different email addresses in my main Gmail account. Google needs to allow users to selectively choose which email should be sent to the phone. They could solve this problem by allowing IMAP access instead of POP, but I don't think that is happening any time soon.
• Make the Home button have a double-click function that allows me to instantly jump to my phone contacts.

I bought a case, DLO's Jam Jacket, in an appropriate Duke blue. I am also planning on ordering a cheap Go Phone to use when I am in iPhone-unfriendly environments (boats, beaches, ski slopes, pools, backyards, etc...).

I got my iPhone the Saturday morning at the Palo Alto Apple store.

• The UI is incredible. Like everyone else out there, I am in love with the "flick." It is natural feeling, like how you sort through mail or CDs on a shelf. The "zoom" feature is also well done.
• The keyboard is not as bad as I thought it would be. Like Jason Kottke, I too feel that the predictive text entry system works quite well, and typing with two thumbs is quite feasible.
• The camera takes great photos for a phone.
• The AT&T EDGE network is slow. Really slow. But browsing with Safari makes up for it. It's incredible to use when connected to a WiFi network.
• You really can move as quickly as the big hand does in the Calamari commercial. Yum, calamari.
• There are two things that I am craving: an integrated RSS reader (reader.mac.com is nice, but it only handles one feed at a time) and games. I can only imagine the fun and interesting games that developers could produce for this thing. Bejeweled anyone?

Alright, back to playing with my new toy.