Imagine having 3488 friends on your Facebook, 1492 friends on Pownce and 4452 friends on Twitter, how can you build relationship with each one of those? Ask Robert Scoble. When technology barriers is lowered, people around the world desire connections, more connections, better connections and more innovative ways of connections, which leads to a vacuum of relationships.
There are some recent posts on this subject:
Steve Rubel reflected on the important social networking tools we have been using since year 2003, ranging from Friendster, LinkedIn, Blogging, YouTube, MySpace to recent Facebook, Twitter and iPhone.
Dave Slusher announced that he finally decided to give up in the conquest for better and shinier platforms.
And Jason Calacanis declared he quit the Facebook with a quote:
Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to people’s gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to your gestures in the future
On the Internet, Robert Scoble seems to the king of connections, every cyber place he goes, there are a dozen of followers, but the question is “can a normal person handle that”?
The Internet today has shaped our life, especially the younger generation’s, towards more and more Internet oriented. Via the Internet, we book tickets, shop for goods, seek for advice, tell people our stories, and now, make connections. Thousands of web applications have sprung out for this purpose, the social networking applications. I love to find my old classmates on Xiaonei, link with speakers through Facebook and get an introduction through LinkedIn. They are still, however, the means, not the end of a relation. Human’s psychology has determined that we prefer more choices over fewer, we would like to explore more and more choices, deciding only when necessary upon events. And it is also human’s inability to choose well.
Imagine you are in a superstore, buying a bag of potato chips for your best friend, and there are 200 types of potato chips to pick from, which one are you going to choose? And if there is only 5 with their nutrition information on the back?
In this new era, where Internet as the “Information Express” has gradually change the way we communicate, and overflowing choices we have on the Internet, shall we still remember major of us are living in a physical world where a cup of coffee, a jar of beer, a bottle of wine weighs more than an email, a twit, and a Facebook friends request?
Human tends to looks at the negative and remember than they remember good things.
I doubt the validity of this statement in catholic situations, because variations in personality and constant stimulation from the society could alter the course of the human perception and thinking. However, this statement largely reflects the human nature. Up till today, there is no clear theory of the genesis of human race, and I choose to believe God created us. There are also evolutionists believing mankind was evolved from the chimpanzees and their similar races. Despite this disagreement, these thoughts converge into the conclusion that human race starts with more neutral and negative influence and process them in their life span. Let’s take a look from these two perspectives:
In the Bible when God first created Adam, God told him to avoid bad things. I read the Bible because I choose to believe in Christ. And words inside the book are precious to me, for they represent the authority from God. Skipping the process how God settled with the world, He created Adam to look after Garden of Eden. The command God gave to Adam is as follows: “(Genesis Chapter 1) [16]You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; [17]but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” This is a long sentence to read, but can you see that the emphasis is on the second half? God himself remind us more on the things we should not do, so we can remember and choose to avoid them. There are many examples and words in the Bible reflecting this idea of avoiding the wrong. However, the purpose is not to remember these bad things for the sake of remembering or avoiding, it is to Remember the bad things, while always clinging to the hope of blessing and cherish it forever once it comes.
Living situation in primeval era was way worse than now. Let’s assume human race evolved across the centuries to gradually acquire the abilities of independent thinking, vocal communication, diverse emotions etc. According to Darwin’s evolution theory, natural selection is the main method in the evolution. The question now is how much died during the course of natural selection? Knowing that various researches show that chimpanzees are the closest species to mankind, and they communicate using gestures instead of words, we can conclude for a long period of time, people do not have language or advanced mind to think independently. Comparing those time when even fire was scarce with current era when medical facility is widely available, the death rate in those times are greatly higher. The lack of recording vehicle as well as language largely limited people’s abilities of passing on information to a large community. When people near to them die from incident or illness, those living around them will suffer the negativity brought by the separation, overcome that experience and live on – avoid the same incident is possible. And this process repeats for most living groups. Most people then learned from negative things, thus wired to avoid the mistakes so that to explore more in their life.
As seen from these two perspectives, the instinct developed in us will cause us to remember bad things more clearly in our mind. We have the ability to take in negative things and convert them into alerts and things to avoid. Still I believe while we are processing the negative, we need moments of blessing and times of victory when we learn to cherish the positive and be more motivated in our lives.
When I was traveling back home from the Ping.sg Party tonight, I went on a special bar. Sitting in front of the counter, I saw this charming man smiling at me with smirk on his face. I started to wonder, who is this man, and why is he smiling at me in such a strange manner?
Sitting comfortable on my white chair,
I took a second look closer at this man:
He is still smiling, still charming to me. I was wondering if I was in the dream. “Where am I”? I cried out
Thanks to U-zyn, was born out of his room one year ago. Today, 07/07/07, instead of caring for the Live Earth and pledge for reduction in carbon dioxide, we came together to celebrate the birthday of ping.sg.
Co-Hosted by Digital Terrorist – Brennan Neoh, I could remember the event as full of laughter and fun times.
Interestingly, for all the awards that have been given away, I could only remember two people: DK and EastCoastLife. For they have received the most awards and left most memorable times for the audience.
I remembered when they were co-hosting on the stage about the most insightful blog, they constantly joked about each other on the winner. What a good cooperation!
I love DK for his insightful thoughts and humble attitude in public. We had quite a number of audience in this party waiting for DK’s presence:
DK has quite a good sense of humor, when he received his first price, he gave this speech:
tenCube, our very Singapore startup company has officially launched a mobile phone security product called WaveSecure.
The product offers several functionalities including:
Lock your phone remotely
Trace your phone
Backup information in your phone
Restore information to your phone
Wipe all the data in your phone
Here is a short demo by one of the team players, he walked us through the main features of the product: lock your phone from being used by unwanted people.
My personal review: this is a good product to have when you have many contacts in your phone that is confidential. You can make sure the minimum is leaked to whoever picked up your phone.
Things I think the software should improve: scare NOT people away with the scary tone and an non-informative screen. Provide them with the owner’s address and contact information (first contact, second contact), so whoever gets the phone could return the phone easily. REMOVE the scary sound: most people are to help, they just don’t know how to help by looking up the contact list – Help them with NO scary sound. Give them the option to call first / second contact when the device is locked up. (These can be part of the business model)
Talking about the phone, the iPhoney iPhone is my top list. Please support them as there are a large of people going to switch phone next Year
And one more thing: the current models supported by WaveSecure are mainly Nokia Models, the sad truth about people who would like to pay are largely using Treo Palm Series and BlackBerry series.
There are some interesting advertising going around, like this
Thanks to Nicky I have gotten 1 Pownce account. It dose look differently from Twitter and work different from Twitter. A brief introduction is here and a thanks to AW
Kevin Rose’s new baby. Take a ride with it If you need an invitation, do write down your email in the comments. (5 in total)
Thanks to Nic Fillingham, I am able to attend REMIX 2007, a web developer, designer and decision makers’ conference.
I went straight into the breakout tracks, you can find the information about the Keynote and opening from Jiin Joo’sblog posts.
As I was a fan of Sliverlight because of all the cool demos I saw the other day, I first joined the Silverlight development sessions.
Sliverlight 1.0 uses Silverlight ActiveX 1.0 plugin and manipulate that using Javascript and XAML. The Quick Start kit is found on Silverlight.net. Well, a simple Javascript from Microsoft file called SilverLight.js
Silverlight has windows-less mode with a change of simple parameter that is passed to the object. As Silverlight 1.0 was produced for a direct competition with Flash, most of the time you do not need Visual Studio to program, but rather solid Javascript and XMAL skills.
Extensible Application Markup Language (XMAL) is a declarative XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML. XAML syntax focuses upon defining the UI (user interface) for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is therefore separate from the application code behind it.
Just a side note, the room is filled with ASP.NET developers, let’s hope all of them are Microsoft Fan, and a few people do J2EE development, and even fewer does Python and Ruby on Rails programming. There are real gurus among source developers – they develop real good programs. Yet for a platform like Microsoft .NET, because of its extensive documentation and online support built by Microsoft MVPs, it is really easy to pick up and develop some interesting program on top of it.
Silverlight is still under heavy development, the most current version is 1.1 alpha, with C# support. But for this conference, they are talking about Silverlight 1.0 beta, the more mature version from the suffix. The emphasis they put in the conference is on design, so the speaker spent a great deal of time talking about Canvas and Brushes. For those of us who like to program a picture, Silverlight supports various type of brushes, including gradient brush, picture brush and shape brushes. The feeling of drawing using Silverlight is like composing a picture in illustration using different layers.
The speaker for that Silverlight session is Laurence Moroney, you can find more information on his blog.
We went on to talking about the video capability in Silverlight. The very first thing stuck in my mind is the word “DRM”: Laurence told us how good Silverlight support video streaming, you can even play “DRM” video through that, just use a simple tag<MediaElement>. I am not sure how I like that, though the mp3 player I have now supports DRM. But the most troubling thing is they only supports windows media player file. Which means I will have a lot of difficult in the video conversion on my Linux Box. Which reminds me that Microsoft might be coming up with a ZunePhone to support all these fun things for mobile devices. While I was fascinated about the easiness of using the video streaming capability, like locating a particular time in the video using Video.seconds.play = 5, I realized from the speaker, the video must be loaded until that seconds for you to use the property. That translates into no support for the real streaming like RSTP yet, but they are going to add MMS streaming support in version 1.1
For programmers out there, Silverlight 1.0 beta is DOM compatible, you can program the way you use to do in the web page. However, it does not support any CSS extension directly yet, which is not too bad an idea, as we do not want to see a new standard for CSS again. Creative solutions to this would be reading CSS using Javascript and operate on the DOM using the information through Invocation like SetValue() and GetValue()
Laurence:
Performance optimization is last thing Microsoft does.
Update: I am updating the recentpostsaboutREMIX 2007 to provide you with more photos, reviews and contents.
In short, REMIX 2007 is Singaporean Version of MIX 2007, which is a conference held in Las Vegas, for web developers, designers and decision makers. And PREMIX 2007 is an event organized by Microsoft and The Digital Movement to get people in Singapore aware of the core technology Microsoft is developing, and advance and easiness of the technology.
Nic Fillingham from Microsoft started the event by giving us a brief introduction to MIX 2007 and REMIX 2007, with the purpose of doing the preview event, which is explained above. If you still unsure, you can leave you comments here.
Leon Brown introduced to the audience the current shipping version of Microsoft Expression Studio, and he explained to me later that Microsoft started the development of version 2 right after the start of shipping version 1. This might be the best practice in business, but it makes a developer me happy: we can always have something new to play with: Blend 2 CTP is neat, for those of us working on the new version of Sliverlight.
Lee Brimelow, a senior design technologist from frog design, presented to us his work using Window Presentation Foundation (WPF). He started developing on WPF a year ago, which is not that long, but the demos he presented, those blew my mind away. The demos were awesome. You can write to him to ask for the code
He shared with us his experience of learning WPF: he treated WPF like Flash in the beginning, and found it hard to use until Microsoft Blend came up, and then he felt the right tools are there for the right people. According to Leon, Blend was developed on WPF for Vista, the first application that actually use WPF to develop. It really looks nice and easy to use.
The 3D performance of WPF is quite impressive: rendering 100+ 3D letters produced in real time @ >=30 fps
Lee then introduced to us Silverlight, the direct competitor for Adobe Flash, with a totally different underlying technology for Deviners (Microsoft Term: between Developer and Designer) and Wimestreamidists (People doing Window Media Streaming). Silveright has very good video streaming capability! You can check out the demos on Sliverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 has similar performance as Flash AS3, and it is believed that Silverlight 1.1 has faster running speed than Flash AS3 (*not confirmed though*).
Beau Amber has done a lot of work on Rich Media Applications before, using mainly Flash. He has built his company Metaliq based on Flash development. He shared with us that he was not keen to go for MIX2006 because he thought Microsoft was not listening, but after he went and gave his feedback, he found out that Microsoft actually listened to people’s feedback and adjusted their software for the developers! So he went for MIX2007 and presented in the keynote presentation about his baby: Top Banana
He motioned a long process of converting GPS data to XML, using a self written Binary2Text Converter ->Edit Text in Word->Save as CSV->Open in Excel->Convert to XML. If I were him, I would use .NET 2.0 do write a direct Binary2XML program.
When were listening how beautiful the program is, which includes a Vista Gadget, a 3D model algorithm to map your XML to 3D models and the ability to automagically resize the window without screwing the image, Mevlin Yuan took a photo of us watching attentively to the speaker Thanks Bro
Beau mentioned that some of the cool apps are hosted on Microsoft sever, so the bandwidth is paid for by Microsoft and they scale well thanks to live storage. And he went on talking about Microsoft Express Media Encoder Preview:
: You define a portion of the timeline, put down some makers to indicate some changes and add some effects. Click a button and wait for a short while. Walla, your video is encoded @ 512Kbps, put on a HTML page, with video controls and pictorial markers for yout to jump to any time you like. Check his blog here:
Oh man, this is really cool, you can encode and put any content on the web page automagcially! It is interesting that Beau said they were transiting from Flash to Silverlight. I think Silverlight is going to penetrate the market because of its advance in technology and ease of use because of surrounding technology, though I am still waiting for my SilverBox to come online soon.
Just to mention, all the tools you see people use to develop these demos are not free (Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Expression Suite). You gotta buy it to feel the money put in worth every penny. Yet. there are something bothering me, iPhone does not support Silverlight yet, how Microsoft is responding to that? A updated Zune that does the phone?
Anyway, here is something fun from Melvin:
Just as I suspected… “Estee Teo” is a handbag brand. Estee Lauder; Estee Teo…. makes sense…
Talking about lift span of Silverlight across the different platforms., Nic said this to me:
“Sliverlight is like XBOX360. Microsoft is committed to build Silverlight as long as RIA development needs a plugin[for different platforms]“.
If you need an invitation, do write down your email in the comments. (5 in total)
1.Static Model Rotation
2.Video Player Rotation
3.Flickr:the New Hello World Program
4.Keyboard Input -> Rotating 3D text
5. Rotating 3D circles
Track GPS data and map to a 3D skiing model
Thanks Bro
