Pete Warden

I look forward to seeing updates to these feeds, though they aren't always daily. PeteSearch: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/ SimoleonSense: http://www.simoleonsense.com/ O'Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/ The various "planet" feeds (planet lisp, haskell) and "r bloggers" are always great sources of news too.

I read http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-short-links-4… today. GetSatisfaction and other major sites are using 'nofollow' (see the wikipedia article) and therefore should not be contributing to increasing the pagerank of the sites. However, tweets and certain blogs (the ones with nofollow diabled) may be contributing to pagerank. So, the lesson is, if you complain, complain on a site dedicated for that purpose.

Actually, I find this pretty creepy. See the following including a link to see what is available via email address lookup. http://jeffreykishner.com/2010/03/what-anyone-can-know-just-from-your-… http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what-can-i-find-ou… http://web.mailana.com/labs/findbyemail/

In tests I was able to get new users for around $2 each using Facebook ads. I went into the details here: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/11/get-new-users-for-… In my limited experience it's all about testing and iteration, lots of it. Or just find a feeble excuse to show a picture of a busty girl, judging from most of the ads I see on Facebook. Also, be prepared for shockingly low CTRs on banner ads like Facebook's. Even highly targeted I was seeing 0.07% on my best ads, and from talking to others that's not uncommon. Even at that low of a rate the ads were cheap enough to be worth running.

I doubt anything will happen. Stories with similar elements don't usually end with an underdog victory [1]. If the software was already released, people could create "I'm mirroring the Shazam code, come and get me Shazam!" blog posts. The news cycle would have been well-fed, and might have generated enough hype to cause the Shazam CTO to learn to leave the issue untouched. However, now someone must develop the code. It'll take time. When it is done there will only be passing interest in the whole issue. This is interesting enough that it'll get some action on blogs over the next week, but I don't see this becoming a long-term win for the original author. Just Shazam and the blogs. [1] One example is "How I Got Sued by Facebook". http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-… . It combines elements hackers love: the rights to your information, an underdog, free speech, and an interesting technical problem (indexing all of Facebook). But no public databases of Facebook user data sprung up as a result.

Did you see Peter Warden's post? He's the creator of that map. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-th…

I wonder if all this data is searchable by the NSA/CIA. I reckon it would produce a map like this for personal mail: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-th… I'm curious how the map would look for commercial mail (catalogs/bills) and packages

I have read a few posts over the years of people using s3 for exactly that. I don't have specific links anymore, but a Google search turned up an example: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/10/how-i-ended-up-usi…

Part of what’s hard about social search is that Facebook prohibits outside crawlers. But Riley said he’s confident that he can get Facebook data, because he has gotten advice from Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, and has worked with Facebook’s legal team to make sure everything’s kosher. This would seem to be a key point. Can anyone provide further details? Facebook hasn't historically shown much inclination to let others into the walled garden: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-… Why would Facebook allow this?

The article mentions scraping public Facebook data. Someone else did that a while ago, resulting in a change to their robots.txt (it's now a whitelist) and nearly a lawsuit. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-…

I was more referring to this definition from Wikipedia[1]: > Big data are datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing. Some other interesting resources: What is data science?: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html How to turn data into money: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/10/how-to-turn-data-i… O'Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/data/ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

Someone outside Facebook tried to do the same with a US map and was sued by Facebook. Data in, data out only for Facebook. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-th…

This article is really just a rehash of a tiny part of O'Reilly's roundup: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/strata-week-building-data-star.html You're much better off reading the originals, which I think have already been posted on HN anyway: http://datasyndrome.com/post/1375987697/analytic-product-teams and http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/10/how-to-turn-data-i…

link to the guy who did the work (and posted more interesting maps): http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/08/the-top-10-zip-cod…

About as invasive as the visualization of the connectedness of Americans on FB was[1]. And FB made a super-huge deal out of that. I'm curious to see how this goes down. [1]: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-th…

Interesting question. Anecdotally, I believe Facebook recently took the position that robots.txt has no legal standing: "Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission." http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-…

Disclaimer: I work for Google. People like to compare Facebook to Google as the next "company of the decade" or the like but let points out some differences: - Google received $25 million in funding [1] in basically one large round in 1999 [2]. Facebook has received a total of $2.34 billion [3] - Google was started as a project in 1996 [4], became a company in 1998 [3], funded in 1999 [2], was profitable in 2001 [4] and filed for IPO in 2004 [4]. In the quarter before IPO Google earned a profit of $79 million on revenue of $700 million [5] and had a project IPO valuation of between $20 and $30 billion; - Facebook was founded in 2004 [6] and is still a private company. Financial statements purportedly leaked as part of the Goldman investment report $1.2 billion in revenue and $355 million in profit for the first nine months of 2010 [7], equivalent to $400/$120 million (although the last quarter would be higher due to the growth factor) with a private valuation of $50 billion or more. Facebook's growth must come from increasing the number of users (getting difficult with most of the developed world already on it), increase revenue per user or diversifying their business. Diversification is hard. Most of Microsoft's money still comes from Windows and Office. Most of Google's is from advertising. Increasing revenue per user seems the most likely path. Facebook's value is in their data and the audience. They are a silo and, like pretty much all silos, that won't last, which…