Disqus - Latest Comments for Jesse Farmer

Re: How Advertising Works, and Why It Won’t For Facebook

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:56:07 -0000

Matt,

That's not really how "advertising" works, that's only how search advertising works. As you point out right in your article, the paradigms for print, TV, and radio are totally different.

The key thing to understand about advertising is that ad-supported businesses are part of a two-sided market. I wrote an article about Web 2.0 and Two-sided Markets that has a diagram illustrating the principle.

Basically ad-supported companies work by reselling attention to advertisers at a price that is higher than what it cost them to acquire it.

The reason ads won't work on Facebook is not because there's no "intent." There's no intent on TV, either, or on large branded websites, but they still pull in CPMs two orders of magnitude than what you can expect to earn on Facebook.

Rather, they don't work because of the sort of attention Facebook gets. You're right that's it all about staying in touch and communicating with friends. The consequence of this is that people are paying attention to other people, not to the ads floating around their page.

The engagement point is the person, not the page.

- Jesse

Re: Facebook Platform: Thinning Of The Herd

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:24:16 -0000

Hey Nick,

Thanks for the mention. In my follow-up article I actually discuss the hype cycle, too.

I guess my original post made me sound more bearish than I actually am.

Re: Facebook Platform: Thinning Of The Herd

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:39:16 -0000

Oh, no problem, I just published the article like 30 minutes ago.

I was just worried because of the game of telephone that went on as people responded. Some people took my article to mean such silly things as "Facebook is dying," even though I never wrote that and the data in no way implied that.

Re: Decisions Without Data | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:25:37 -0000

Timothy,

I should've added a footnote, but I agree. You can basically make your measurements as complex as you want, but there's some point of diminishing returns.

You could, for example, measure the effects of the ads on the growth of your userbase and then make some sort of "net present value" calculation.

Really all you need is enough data to make an informed decision — some data is better than none.

Re: Interview Questions: Shuffling an Array | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:00:27 -0000

cc,

You're right about the first point, but not the second. Both self.size and size work because we're inside the Array instance.

Re: Interview Questions: Shuffling an Array | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:39:02 -0000

rue,

That's not really true, though. In fact, that "solution" violates multiple requirements of the problems.

One, it's not in-place. Two, whether or not the distribution is uniform depends on the sorting algorithm that <tt>sort_by</tt> uses.

Re: Amazon, the Tech Company | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:58:41 -0000

Says the guy who's been working at Yahoo! for the last three years. :P

Re: The Best Facebook Ad Network | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:59:59 -0000

Rex,

Thanks for the correction. I'll update the blog post.

Re: Interview Questions: Loops in Linked Lists | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:22:31 -0000

Vidar,

The first time I was asked this question I was unable to give that answer, too. I don't think it's a very good question, personally.

Good interview questions have multiple levels or some sort of path the interviewee can be lead down. You either know this solution or you don't. I didn't, and that's probably just because I've never had need to know if there's a loop in a linked list.

Re: Interview Questions: Loops in Linked Lists | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:34:15 -0000

If I want to see how people think I ask them questions with many moving parts rather than a very small question like this. In my mind questions like this are designed to see whether the person has a basic level of programming competency or not, but since the exercise has an "ah-ha!" solution it's not very fair.

In that vein asking how to reverse a linked list is better if you're going to be asking questions about linked lists.

In general if I'm not testing basic competency I want real-world examples. So, if I were hell-bent on asking about cycle detection I'd think of a scenario where cycle detection is an important part of the system (e.g., a question about dependency trees).

Re: Easter Eggs in Facebook Chat | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:41:29 -0000

Satish,

Yeah, I need to update the article. <tt>:v</tt> is now Pac-man, and there's also a robot emoticon: <tt>:|]</tt>

Re: The Future is Discovery, not Just Search

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:40:07 -0000

Matt,

Hmm, interesting. Is it just the case that search and discovery are distinct now but will meld over time?

Keyword search is unnatural, IMO, but natural language search isn't the solution.

I guess the root is "I want to find something." You have varying ideas of what you want to find. The less you know the more likely discovery will proffer a solution, and the more you know the more likely search will.

As both technologies mature the transition between the two becomes less clear. Is that how it is going?

The prototypical examples of search and discovery are Google and StumbleUpon. Serendipity is part of discovery — learning about a new band for the first time, finding a movie I can watch ten times in a row, etc. It's not party of search, where I know by-and-large what I want.

Re: Easter Eggs in Facebook Chat | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:47:50 -0000

evan,

Good to know! I wondered why this thread was getting so much traffic from the SA forums.

Re: The Future is Discovery, not Just Search

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:29:17 -0000

Brandon,

Discovery isn't just about "more things like this," and neither is StumbleUpon. Rather, I go to StumbleUpon with no agenda other than "I want to find something neat." At least that's why I use it when I do.

I don't know what I want beforehand, though, because if I did I could just go to Google and find it. That's why I call serendipity a "mechanic" of StumbleUpon.

What you're arguing for is a refined type of discovery, not something that isn't discovery. Just as search was improved from the directory-and-keyword-based search engines of yore (e.g., AltaVista), discovery will be improved from its current model.

NetFlix provides a good example of this kind of "improved discovery." There are tons of movies I want to see, but I'm really bad at noting them. By the time they're out on DVD I've often forgotten that I wanted to watch them in the first place. NetFlix knows my preferences well enough that it often recommends them to me. Serendipity!

It even recommends movies I never heard of but wound up really liking. Just the other day I watched If...., which I doubt I ever would have seen without discovering it through NetFlix. I certainly couldn't have searched for it and found it.

Re: Easter Eggs in Facebook Chat | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:36:21 -0000

the best,

Yep. I added them to the blog post. Thanks!

Re: Interview Questions: Loops in Linked Lists | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:35:35 -0000

Jim,

1) I never said it ran in constant time. I said it took constant memory, which is true.

2) <tt>has_loop?</tt> expects a Node object to be passed in, so it should never be nil. In a real-world situation I'd of course have exception handling, but the examples were meant to be illustrative rather than complete.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: Facebook job puzzles: Prime bits | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:06:39 -0000

Andres,

For powers other than 2 you need to break it down into several contiguous ranges. You have one range more than there are ones in the binary representation of the original number.

For example, if the number you're looking at is 10110 then the ranges are 00000-01111, 10000-10011, 10100-10101, and 10110. There are three ones and four ranges.

Each range corresponds to fixing one of the bits, starting from the left-most (most significant) bit. So the first range has no fixed bits, the second has one, the third has two, etc.

We subtract from our calculation the number of fixed bits. So, if the range we're looking at is 10000-10011 we're interested in numbers of the form 100xx. The only prime numbers that are suitable here are 2 and 3. That is, we can have at most three 1-bits.

But there's already a fixed bit (that one on the far left side), so if there are three 1-bits then that means there must be two 1-bits in the xx section. Thus we get 2C(3-1), because we're choosing the number of combinations in the xx section such that there are three 1-bits for the whole string.

Hope that helps,
Jesse

Re: Learning Erlang

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:57:25 -0000

Joshua,

Yeah, I'm using the TextMate bundle, actually, but it's hard to translate that into a GeSHi plugin. I found one on the web but it's only the front-end — the guy doesn't actually provide the plugin source.

If I can't get it there I'll just write my own.

Re: Help, Facebook’s Hacking Me! | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:40:56 -0000

Anatoly,

Look at the privacy page. There are no references to any specific applications.

It applies to any and all applications I haven't explicitly granted or denied access to my information. It says that right in the text of the page: "The following settings apply only to Facebook Platform applications to which you have not already granted access or explicitly restricted."

I can do three things with applications: whitelist them, blacklist them, and set the default access policy. The Application Privacy page, which is the section you're quoting, lets me set the default policy.

I've set it so, by default, applications can only get my profile photo. If a friend installs an app I haven't whitelisted or blacklisted that's all it can access.

Re: Help, Facebook’s Hacking Me! | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:51:06 -0000

Robin,

I'll eat my words if there's one instance of identity theft aided by this technique. IMO it's too complicated, the benefit is too little, and it's too easy to mitigate if it becomes known.

I see, for example, people getting their Facebook accounts phished on a regular basis and spamming their friends with ring tone offers. People who have access to a real, live account can do much more damage, e.g., they can get people's emails and phone numbers, which is simply impossible with the API.

Re: Help, Facebook’s Hacking Me! | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:32:38 -0000

Matt,

First, their title sure as hell is sensationalist. Facebook wasn't "hacked," unless you consider someone violating an end-user license "hacking." No technical controls were circumvented. The headline is there to get pageviews, period.

Second, the TOS was not usurped, it was violated, and the programmer was not clever. The Facebook API supports this behavior, for heaven's sake! That's why the TOS forbids it and why there are two mechanisms by which end-users can control the level of access applications have to their information.

Third, I did read the article.

Fourth, RWW was wrong on the facts, just as the BBC was. Read the third paragraph in their story. I'll reproduce it here:

It's possible for a malicious Facebook application, like the one used in the news story, to masquerade as a game or a quiz. And unlike protecting yourself from phishing emails, it's not simply good enough for you to "know better" yourself - if even one of your friends installs the app, your details get stolen too.

This is simply wrong. Facebook's Application Privacy page is there precisely for this purpose. I can stop my friends' applications from accessing my information. The level of control I have is surprisingly granular, actually.

But yes, most users aren't savvy enough to move beyond the default settings, and most don't read the fine print. Of course I understand that.

At best the evidence supports an argument that Facebook users are at risk to have some of their person details stolen by third-parties. Given that I know of no instance where this scenario played out, at least the "severe" scenario painted by the BBC and RWW, I'm not too worried and Grandma shouldn't be either.

In short, all of this is intended behavior. Facebook anticipated it two years ago when they first launched the API and put several levels of control to prevent it. Both the BBC and RWW, by talking about "exploits," "attacks," "hackers," etc. are just ginning up an empty story to get pageviews. Simple as that.

Re: Network Programming in Erlang | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:55:59 -0000

Blaxter,

Glad to be of service. There's a real lack of information about Erlang on the web outside of the official documentation.

Re: Network Programming in Erlang | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:24:40 -0000

Greg,

A truly devastating argument. ;)

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:49:11 -0000

Karl,

I don't know if that's true — the decline between Jan. 31st and Feb. 2nd is just so well-defined. In fact, January as a whole was the best month for the Facebook platform so far.

I included a timeline in the spreadsheet and lots of stuff began happening right around then. On the 16th Facebook began instituting all these new rules, and other platforms finally began implementing OpenSocial 0.7 which included proper distribution channels. Before that OpenSocial was a joke.

The decline in app activity happened right around then, too. If you correlate the % Active App graph with the Posts per Day graph from 2/2/2008 onward you get a correlation coefficient of 0.95, for example.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:10:08 -0000

Jeffrey,

I fail to see how that's a bad measure of activity on the developer forums. The question is, why are fewer developers participating?

One hypothesis is that developers know what they need to know and have stopped using the forums. Do you have any evidence for this? Even if it is true, it doesn't explain the data. Why are fewer applications succeeding today? Why was there noticeable decline beginning around February 2nd? Why don't we see spikes whenever Facebook pushes a major change? These are the things I'd expect to see if forum usage were really just a documentation issue.

Anecdotally I know that's not true — people used the forums to talk about more than just API questions. Look at how they're structured. Only 1/4 of the forum is dedicated to technical issues. In fact, the "business" section has just as many posts overall as the technical section.

Another hypothesis is that developers are becoming less active because it's harder to succeed. This seems more likely given the high correlation between application success (see the section "Facebook Application Data" for these numbers) and forum activity. Correlation is not causation, of course, so something else could be going on, but it's wrong to dismiss these phenomenon as unrelated out of hand.

Here, anecdotally, I think I'm right because many of the top developers agree with me in private. See Zach Allia there, above? He wrote Free Gifts. Since writing this article I've been contacted by a significant number of Top 50 app developers telling me I'm spot on.

So, am I crazy? Prove me wrong — don't just insist on it.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:44:16 -0000

Dave,

I don't disagree, but I what data I have in that respect I'm not free to talk about publicly. Heh!

You should write a post about it. It's all about the (virtual) benjamins.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:12:23 -0000

Jeffrey,

You didn't really address my response. Even if what you were saying is true it doesn't explain the high correlation between developer activity on the forums and the reduced level of success for Facebook applications launched today versus four months ago. Nor does it explain the sudden decline we see beginning around February 2nd in five of the seven measurements I took.

So, can you offer an alternative hypothesis that explains the data? Also, my claim is falsifiable, so I invite you to falsify it.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: Six Examples of the Long Take | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:33:19 -0000

Clayton,

I have failed at my duties! Hah. I should write a follow-up post to this. Since I wrote it several other blogs wrote articles with an even more comprehensive list. 15 examples! 30 examples! 5,000 examples!

I'm forever behind the times.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:11:33 -0000

Capri,

I'm not unsympathetic. I've personally blocked most applications, for example. This article was written from a developer's perspective, though.

I agree that from a user's perspective these are (potentially) good developments.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:50:51 -0000

James,

This report is about the engagement Facebook developers, not end users.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:54:21 -0000

Mike,

Respectfully, you are wrong. Do you spend much time on the forums? There are basically two types of posts nowadays: one, novices asking "Help! How do I program?"-type questions; and two, a handful of 5-6 "old timers" who post inside jokes and complain about how hard it is these days.

There is essentially zero sharing of information or expertise going on. It's really a no-man's land at this point.

If I may ask, how many Facebook applications have you developed, what was your level of success, and how much time did you spend on the forum? If you give me your forum username I'll look up your stats for you, too.

Re: How I Grow My Blog | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:16:20 -0000

David,

Well, ok, you say to-may-to I say to-mah-to. Things can be interesting for different reasons — I'm not trying to be a thought leader.

Re: Easter Eggs in Facebook Chat | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:13:00 -0000

Cazcade,

Good catch. I changed it.

Re: Powerset Launches. Verdict: Meh.

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:27:57 -0000

Mark,

I know. In fact, I interviewed there last year, on the day of Scott's demo at sfBeta. Adonomics was acquired before I finished the process. Say "hi" to Tim, Linda, and Andrew for me.

For the sake of argument let's ignore the fact that you've been hyping yourselves as a revolutionary new search paradigm for the last two years and look at your "enhanced Wikipedia experience" on the face of it.

Factz just isn't that compelling. I'll even use one of your hand-picked examples, Henry VII.

Ok, so I'm in a mindset where I want to learn about Henry VIII. The first thing I'd normally do is type "henry viii" into Google. The first result is the Wikipedia page. I look at the Wikipedia page and get all the salient facts I could want.

With Powerset the only real savings I can see is that I'm spared the click over to Wikipedia. Is that revolutionary? In fact, it requires I change my search behavior to get value, which is an almost sure-fire way to damn a product.

There's some value above Google, but remember: success equals execution minus expectations. Coupled with the fact that plenty of fact-based queries (e.g., "Who was the tenth President of the US?") return absolute gibberish, there's just no way I'd use Powerset.

From my perspective it feels like this was a tech demo designed to secure additional financing, not a fully-featured product in its own right. Maybe you should ask Barney what the strategic purpose of this release was.

Re: Powerset Launches. Verdict: Meh.

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:28:11 -0000

Also, I no longer work at KallOut, so I can't get you in on the beta.

Re: Interview Questions: Loops in Linked Lists | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:14:49 -0000

Shaneal,

You're right.

Re: Implementing A Suggest-A-Friend Feature | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:26:40 -0000

This is definitely true, although sometime in the last few weeks Facebook added a feedback feature so you can banish people from your suggest-a-friend list.

I'd say I banish about 90% of the people who appear.

Re: Implementing A Suggest-A-Friend Feature | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:41:26 -0000

SG,

I don't see how interests listed on Facebook have any bearing with whether or not I'm friends with them.

Besides, improvements in the algorithm would come from less locality, not more. As in the HRG approach you'd want to start learning about relationships between cohorts and components, not between individual people.

Facebook's feature is "good enough," anyhow. The main goal, IMO, isn't to improve their copy of the social graph. Rather, it's to (1) improve the experience for people just joining the site as they add their first seed friends and (2) reengage inactive users by emailing people when potential friends join the site.

Also, remember, more data usually beats better algorithms.

Re: The State of the Facebook Platform

Jesse Farmer — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:34:37 -0000

Lou,

The article talks about developer activity not user activity. Also, you can see the seasonal dips around the holidays if you break it down day by day and it's nowhere near as pronounced as the month-over-month macro trend.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: Copyright Infringement != Theft | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:57:51 -0000

Eli,

Your argument is circular.

You say that copyright infringement is morally equivalent to theft because there is an expectation that the government will protect the author of a creative work. That is, it is morally equivalent to theft because they are protected by copyright.

So what is the basis for copyright to begin with? It can't be because it is morally equivalent to theft.

Also, things are crimes independent of whether or not they are enforced, i.e., whether there is the expectation of protection by the government. If there were only one police officer in Chicago you'd have lots of unprosecuted murder cases, but they'd be crimes nonetheless, for example.

Graeme got it right: the only similarity between theft and copyright infringement is that they're against the law.

Re: Copyright Infringement != Theft | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:16:26 -0000

Eli,

You've just restated your original point. It's still circular, though. Your argument really seems to be not that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft but that copyright infringement is wrong because it's breaking the law. That's fine, but there's plenty of laws whose breach people don't find "wrong" in the sense that they find theft wrong, e.g., jaywalking, speeding, etc.

So, fine, copyright infringement is wrong in the sense that it's breaking the law, but it definitely occupies a different moral sphere in society than theft.

Moreover, the origin of copyright law doesn't rest in its potential analogy to theft, but in its own economic and political considerations.

Also, you're not going to be able to sneak in "theft" through the back door by saying intellectual property is a kind of property and therefore copying it is a kind of theft.

First, theft covers intentional deprivation of a thing, not copying the thing without permission. It's a different rule. Theft always requires mens rea, for example, whereas civil copyright violations do not.

Second, "intellectual property" as a term is relatively modern. Its consistent use didn't come about until the mid-20th century and its earliest use is about 150 years after the Statute of Anne.

Using it in that way is a dirty kind of equivocation.

You're also equivocating about what "law" means, now. If you were using a specific definition of "against the law" that is not what people usually mean then you should have stated it up front.

I don't really have the time to play this game with you, so this'll be my last reply.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: Copyright Infringement != Theft | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:15:28 -0000

Eli,

Yep.

Re: Erlang: A Generic Server Tutorial | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:29:33 -0000

Mr. Design,

What can I say? Everyone's a critic.

This tutorial was aimed at people who don't know Erlang that well. It took me a good two or three days to suss out how to use gen_server properly. The current documentation is extremely dense.

Also, I'm going to be following up with more "interesting" (read: complex) examples, so keep your eyes peeled.

Re: Erlang: An Introduction to Records | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:23:03 -0000

website,

I'm not sure if you're a real person or a spam bot, but by "a la PHP, Ruby, or Python" I meant as a first-order construct. I'll reword it so it's less ambiguous.

Re: Erlang: An Introduction to Records | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:31:17 -0000

Gleb,

Good catch. And thanks for pointing to proplists, I didn't know about them.

Re: Erlang: A Generalized TCP Server | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:44:43 -0000

Kyle,

I'm using geshi with an Erlang syntax plugin I wrote myself.

Re: Copyright Infringement != Theft | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:11:41 -0000

Alex,

The economics of copyright infringement and theft are totally different. Conflating them leads to bad arguments and worse policy.

And, for what it's worth, most copyright infringement isn't a crime. Learn the difference between a crime and a tort and then we can talk.

Re: Copyright Infringement != Theft | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:55:42 -0000

Right, they're "just" semantic differences, even though the difference between a tort and a crime means difference burdens of proof, different measures of justice, and different court systems.

*shrug*

If you don't want to make a nuanced argument that's ok by me. These distinctions matter economically, legally, and philosophically, though.

Re: An Introduction to A/B Testing | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:44:50 -0000

Douglas,

Thanks for the kind words. Will do!

Re: An Introduction to A/B Testing | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:25:04 -0000

Prakash,

Google has the Google Website Optimizer, which supports both A/B and multivariate testing, but it's fairly limited. It only measures "conversion" events.

You can't, say, segment Google Analytics reports based on GWO experiments.

Re: Introduction to Dynamic Programming | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:12:29 -0000

Jack,

I'm using a Ruby graphing library called Gruff.

Re: Introduction to Dynamic Programming | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:13:06 -0000

Horst,

Thanks. I wrote this like a year and a half ago — I'm surprised nobody has caught that yet.

Re: Network Programming in Erlang | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:13:02 -0000

Olivier,

It's somewhere in the docs, which are admittedly terrible. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Re: An Introduction to A/B Testing | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:24:52 -0000

Frank,

Give GWO a try, it might do what you need. I usually write my own.

Re: 10 Tips for Optimizing MySQL Queries (That don’t suck) | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:57:31 -0000

Angsuman,

Cool. I'll check it out.

As for the ORM stuff, I know, but I don't care that much. My interests skew towards large, denormalized data storage, anyhow. Building the next great Rails app ain't my thing.

Re: Hypothesis Testing: The Basics | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:58:20 -0000

Tordek,

The sentence is awkward, but I think it's correct.

P(O | H<sub>0</sub>) ≤ 0.05 means that if the null hypothesis is correct then there's only a 5% chance of observing what you did.

Re: Statistical Analysis and A/B Testing

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:36:05 -0000

Chris,

That's a nice video. I wonder what software they were using?

Re: Introduction to Dynamic Programming | 20bits

Jesse Farmer — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:53:52 -0000

offo,

Sorry for making you work so hard. Do you have any examples of good graphs?

Help me learn — don't just berate me.

Re: Has the Facebook platform hit its peak?

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:39:25 -0000

Simon,

I mention that argument in my article. That doesn't explain why (1) fewer apps succeed today than did in January and (2) the sudden decline up through today that began around 2/2.

What's more, Facebook is constantly changing the rules and adding/removing features from the API.

Re: Obama and McCain: How political marketing has evolved from offline to online

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:23:21 -0000

Jonathan,

I don't think it's overblown. I volunteered for the campaign during the primaries as a precinct campaign and software engineer. It's disorganized, but there's a conscious awareness of the internet and what it means.

Yes, the technology is like five years behind the times, but in a campaign you're moving at light-speed with a bunch of people with a wide range of skills and competencies, all the while trying to physically organize people across 3.8 million square miles.

Also, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is responsible for a large part of Obama's social media strategy.

Re: INSANITY: Facebook App Sells to TripAdvisor for $3 Million

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 02:53:04 -0000

You can see that the app has been posting solid growth since its inception: http://appaholic.com/display/2603626322

Re: 2008/05/07/so-are-you-fed-up-with-facebook/

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:56:53 -0000

Hey Stan,

Thanks for the mention.

I don't know if early adopters are leaving or not and my data doesn't really suggest something one way or another.

What is happening, though, is that developers are finding it harder to succeed. Coupled with Facebook's newfound distance from the community it's not hard to see why *developers* are less engaged.

With respect to the average Facebook user a few things might be happening. One, the early adopters were big drivers of the platform and they're now tired of it.

Two, applications have more-or-less saturated the Facebook userbase. This is what I think, personally, and it also aligns well with the new Facebook policies. If users have lots of apps then any new app invites are going to be more likely to viewed as "spam." As people complain about spam Facebook has to react by restricting developers.

Developers now have a doubly-hard time of succeeding. Users are rejecting certain kinds of apps and Facebook is implementing policies that restrict what applications can do.

Just some food for thought. I don't have any data on this one way or another.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: 2008/12/04/circle-of-moms/

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:01:12 -0000

@Bryan:

Hey, I'm Jesse, the guy who created Adonomics. Since I sold the site the data is no longer reliable -- the people who purchased it don't really maintain it. It makes me sad to say this, but I wouldn't trust it.

That said, Circle of Moms has 839,131 monthly active users. You can see there right here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...

Additionally, Facebook reports through its API that they have had 177,176 weekly active users. Hope that clears things up.

Cheers,
Jesse

Re: strace: for fun, profit, and debugging.

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:23:41 -0000

The masses demand action! Blogging action!

Re: Ruby threading bugfix: small fix goes a long way.

Jesse Farmer — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:18:14 -0000

My phone interview question at YouTube was "How would you build a thread scheduler?"

A stupid question for a phone interview (and the interviewer was entirely too please with himself), but I'm interested in seeing the answer from someone who knows what they're talking about, i.e., not me.

Re: 5 Things You Don’t Know About User IDs That Will Destroy You

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:38:37 -0000

Bibble,

What you said is true but irrelevant. People aren't writing insecure code intentionally, they're writing it because they don't know how these things work!

The solution isn't to rant and rave about idiot engineers, it's to design systems and libraries that are easy to understand and do the right thing, and make up the difference by educating people.

That's exactly what Joe is doing.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Jesse Farmer — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:28:07 -0000

Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it, too. There are technical solutions to this problem if they're really sincere about privacy.

But they're not. They want to give the data to people who help them and hide it from people who would use it to compete. They want to be open, but only when it directly benefits them.

In the meantime they'll selectively enforce and change the rules for their own benefit.

It's their right to control access to the site. It's the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that annoys the hell outta me.

Re: 8-Word Search Queries Up 34,000% in Last 5 Years!

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:52:20 -0000

How do you get 34,000%?

Jesse Farmer's last blog post..When in Rome: Newcomers on Facebook

Re: Why CouchDB Rocks

Jesse Farmer — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:07:00 -0000

Actually, it's a good traffic tactic. You get traffic from your first strident, possibly incorrect article, and you get more traffic from your "mea culpa" follow-up.

Re: Established iPhone Developer Writes Personal Letter to Steve Jobs

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:54:49 -0000

People just haven't found a good way or marketing applications outside the app store itself, yet. Since the app store is primarily a distribution (rather than marketing) channel, it's only natural for the prices to fall to zero.

In response to this letter I wrote about just this phenomenon, here: http://20bits.com/articles/the-099-app-store/

Re: Established iPhone Developer Writes Personal Letter to Steve Jobs

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:57:28 -0000

Exactly. The App Store solves a distribution problem, not a marketing problem.

Find places outside the app store to promote your app and drive people too the App Store. Don't be at the mercy of Apple's placement.

Re: Established iPhone Developer Writes Personal Letter to Steve Jobs

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:48:47 -0000

Because it's revenue you care about, not volume.