Disqus - Latest Comments for Minger

Re: “Racist” Super Bowl Ads written by Asian

Minger — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:26:57 -0000

The target of the joke is _a caricaturing of Chinese_, not of Chinese. That's the same kind of knowing that makes the William Shatner schtick on the Priceline ads work. William Shatner has made it. So have the Chinese, and other Asians. Celebrate -- don't hate -- the ad.

Re: “Racist” Super Bowl Ads written by Asian

Minger — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:58:55 -0000

meant to write, "The target of the joke is _a caricaturing of the Chinese_, not the Chinese."

Re: How Facebook Could be a Player in Local Ads | Charles Hudson's Weblog

Minger — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:40:33 -0000

I'm seeing ads on Facebook for Papa John. Local Papa John stores in college towns definitely depend on students. I don't remember the exact offer. They could definitely target specific days or times and offer a special time limited deal by URL.

Re: Facebook Becomes the People Search Engine

Minger — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:06:26 -0000

Nick,

Friendster's attempt at the social graph -- showing the chain of connections between any two people -- was a really cool feature but as you assert, supporting it proved to be a huge competitive disadvantage as that and failure to robustly support basic features like email compelled people to switch when a more nimble, stripped down and exciting competitor emerged. MySpace has done well avoiding the same quagmire of supporting technical social features beyond their means while instead delivering superficial but practical features like blogs and boards to their audience. That Google would pay handsomely to remedy their search deficiency makes MySpace look like geniuses. But however well their strategy proved against the hapless Friendster, it will fail them in this latest round of the social network war. MySpace is too busy monetizing eyeballs while Facebook is increasing their competitive advantage lead through deep social innovation. The deal with Google was a monetization event too -- search is a staid service to be outsourced, not a dynamic distinguishing feature. MySpace is taking a lot of lumps. I'm curious to see if they with their Hollywood dealmaking mindset can do any better than Yahoo at mounting an effective response to focused technocratic challenges.

Re: Facebook Applications Hit Saturation Point

Minger — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:18:12 -0000

From the vantage point of someone scouring the apps universe, of course you'll encounter tons of crap. Look at all the detritus polluting sourceforge. The good ones bubble up to the profiles of your non-scouring friends. A lot of these apps are written by one or two man teams of high school or college students as toys or learning experiments. "Crap" can be reframed as homework being done by a rising generation by developers. The more polished apps of the second, third, fourth, and successive waves can exploit this self-taught developer base.

Re: How Facebook Can Fix Their Ads

Minger — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:03:34 -0000

I agree with Caldwell... People are making too much of current snapshots -- the poor performance of FB's ads or supposed dominance of MySpace according to their PR. They can get the monetization right later, as long as operational cash flow is positive and covers capital programs. Take a snapshot six months from now.

Re: Facebook As An Email Alternative

Minger — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:30:45 -0000

people who use gmail tend to use gmail each other. ironically, social network messaging does not do cc and bcc, which are important social qualifiers. and email is probably easier on the blackberry or mogul than accessing fb messages.

Re: Will Facebook Be Forced to Shutdown?

Minger — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:41:02 -0000

execution is 9/10ths of the law. as great as connectu's idea was back in the day, it wasn't exactly difficult to conceive or copy. friendster was already out of the bag. if your idea is so great, code it yourself or make the key developers full-fledged partners. looks like connectu is litigating themselves a call option on the work of someone they didn't formally contract or pay. code theft is a legitimate beef. we'll have to await the economic expert testimony on how it translates into equity in fb.

Re: Facebook Notes Aggregator = Digg

Minger — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:35:01 -0000

This keen interest on implementing competitive memedigging on Facebook reminds me of that famous exchange between the ferret advocate and Mayor Giuliani on his radio talk show. Who cares about memedigging except the blogging wonks and tech geeks? Facebook surely has more broadly popular or stronger competitive advantage conferring features to implement. The difference between Scoble and the ferret lover is that Scoble has a bigger audience.

Re: Facebook Launches Faulty New Feature

Minger — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:34:20 -0000

that videos and images in the wall posts will make fb look like myspace is a superficial comparison. it's like comparing flatland to a slice of 3d space and calling them similar.

Re: Do Facebook Users Have a MySpace Mentality?

Minger — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:10:22 -0000

i think there's an implicit premise that social promiscuity must remain stable over time. this notion is wrong. look at sexual promiscuity in the us. who would have thought the free love era was possible coming out of the 50s. who would thought that we would become more sexually conservative coming out of the 60s and 70s? supposedly the kids today are sexually promiscuous again. and did sophos check the control by sampling social permissiveness on myspace? there are three populations on myspace: the socially restrictive, fake profiles that will do anything, and socially open profiles. making sweeping generalizations without a stating a model of changes over time, understanding the distinct populations within a network, and checking controls is WEAK science. hey but we can't expect too much thinking from the blogosphere can we?

Re: Has the Facebook Buzz Died Down?

Minger — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:04:16 -0000

Perhaps as with Amazon, the early hype has burned hot, but the substance will quietly grow and validate itself, ie produce solid earnings, down the road.

> Two nights ago I was speaking with my good friend’s younger brother who said that he is really annoyed by them.

I am uninstalling applications left and right, particularly the ones aggregated by Slide or RockYou. Their communications are no better than spam, and continue even when you through options not to receive them. If there is anything in the ecosystem that may not live up to the hype, it is the valuation of some of the hotter FB app makers.

Re: 2007/03/16/google-trendalyzer/

Minger — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 08:43:33 -0000

Rosling is a professor of international health, i doubt his ambition is to work for google; more likely is he to join gate's philantrophic efforts. the deal brings the trendalyzer team, not the whole gapminder foundation, to google.

Re: 2007/04/04/youtube-thailand/

Minger — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:40:00 -0000

Come on children, you think Western states are immune to these kind of cultural sensitivities? Remember that flag burning was ruled Constitutional by a slim 5-4 majority by SCOTUS. (Scalia casting the fifth vote!) And three Yalies just got arrested in New Haven for burning the flag. Some perspective, please!

Re: 2007/04/04/youtube-thailand/

Minger — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 18:06:33 -0000

UK's queen doesn't have much political power either and that didn't stop the sex pistols and their "god save the queen" from causing national consternation not too long ago.

Re: Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features

Minger — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:09:20 -0000

shame, shame Ben, how dare you parrot such an original insight without attribution!

Re: 2007/07/06/facebook-social-graph-search/

Minger — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 03:07:20 -0000

"We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles."

There's a few ideas crammed into the one sentence:

-data structures in-memory to serve the barrage of hits and cover their vast size
-unique results for each of 28 million members over the same space of users
-reverse index related to the representation of the search mapping in terms of the social graph?