It’s from TED - the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in which great thinkers from diverse backgrounds get a limited time to talk about, well, whatever they want.

Wow.

I deliberately didn’t mention who he worked for because you might not have watched it… You can try out the demo here, although you may need a decent spec PC to use it properly.

You are invited to take part in the most ambitious facebook experiment ever…

Really ? What’s that ?

Using the Six Degrees of Separation theory, I want to see if it’s possible to contact every single person on facebook. The theory states that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people.

Ok, well this is slightly confusing. The 6 degrees of separation principle is about linking to everyone else in the world via 6 steps. That’s not really what you’re doing here.

1 Join this group.

2 Click on “Invite People to Join” from the menu on the right.

3 Select all your friends (for the experiment to work, you need to do this).

4 Click on “Send invitation”

Hold on. If someone invites all their friends, all of whom invite theirs and so on then :

1. Everyone gets spammed. A lot.
2. Eventually everyone on Facebook with any friends will have had an invite (except pockets of people in Alaska who only know eachother).

That doesn’t really need proving, it’s kind of obvious.

It’s that simple.

Err, maybe a bit too simple. How is the 6 degrees of separation tested ?

Actually, it’s not.

All that’s ‘proved’ is that everyone in the group is connected via an unlimited number of degrees. And that all 4,624,201 of its members are morons.

]]> http://spherepress.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/facebook-spam/feed/ 0 Sphere http://spherepress.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/tips-for-startups/ http://spherepress.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/tips-for-startups/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:36:19 +0000 Sphere http://spherepress.wordpress.com/?p=97 ]]> There are load of articles giving advice for startup companies, but one that caught my eye recently was over at TechCrunch.  It was actually written in response to the furore caused by another similar post which talked more about specific decisions and their financial impact. However, Arrington’s article focussed in on two key points :

• Startups Must Hire the Right People

So who are the right people and who are the wrong people? It’s not that hard to tell. They actively look for problems to solve, and then solve them. This is a personality type that is very easy to spot once you know what to look for – they have fire in their eyes. They’re warriors. I’ll take the fired up warrior any day over the more experienced but otherwise meek alternative. If you hire badly, it isn’t just that employee who’s not performing. They poison the entire organization.

• Watch Every Penny

Startups cannot waste money. If they do, they’ll fail. As I said above, they don’t probably fail, or maybe fail. They just plain fail. That means a really cheap office, to start. Don’t even think about an administrative assistant. Or flying business class. Double up in hotel rooms. And even things like telephones are probably not needed. You have cell phones and skype for that. Matching 401k plans? HAH. Three weeks vacation? Not going to happen. You cannot waste money because every dollar is an amount of time you can keep running the business before you have to shut down.

Ok, so it’s generally a fairly hardcore line, and companies are capable of being succesful with a marginally more moderated approach than some of the article suggests. However, there’s always a difference between the theoretical principles you start out with and the actual fact later. Compromise these principles too easily, or before you even start, and you’re in trouble. I’m sure the Deadpool is littered with companies which would have found themselves better off had they adopted a slightly more extreme mindset to start with.

Overall it’s excellent advice and I recommend you the full article here

First up is Daily Motion which is originally a French site but surprisingly good nevertheless. I’ll talk about it more another time. For the moment, let’s take a look at their embedded players. Embedded clips are so incredibly common these days and an area the sites will be taking increasingly seriously. Quality comparison isn’t really possible here because that’s largely down to source material.

Anyway these clips are off Jimmy Kimmel Live – a late night talk show in the US. The girl is Sarah Silverman, a well known comedian who’s he’s dating.

First up, Youtube :

OK, seriously funny shit. But then, a couple of weeks later, the response from Jimmy was aired. Over to Daily Motion for this one :

Just brilliant. 

So is Firefox that much better than Opera ? It’s not really clear how, but I hadn’t read a good comparison of the two until I found a comprehensive breakdown by Fabio Cevasco, a fan of Firefox, which you can read in full here.

Firefox users presumably stop using IE because they want a better alternative. So it seems kind of strange that, a lot of the time, they don’t actually look for one.

This picture helps sum things up.

Anyway, according to them, here are the ‘Top 10 Bittorrent Tools and Tricks’.

1. uTorrent (Windows client)
2. Transmission (Linux/Mac client)
3. YouTorrent (Torrent Search)
4. Ted / TVShows (Auto-download scheduler)
5. uTorrent’s WebUI / Transmission’s Clutch (Web-based control)
6. Speeding up Torrents / Avoid Traffic Shaping (Tip)
7. Miro (Content aggregator client)
8. Bittorrent downloads in-browser (Noob alternative)
9. Start Bittorrents over Instant Messenger (IM addon)
10. Using Bittorrent to send files (Functional)

We’ve already mentioned Ted, but it’s uTorrent who gets some serious kudos.

uTorrent is bar-none the best Bittorrent client you’ll find. It’s fast, lightweight, and full-featured. If there’s one Windows application I miss when I’m working away from Windows, uTorrent is that client.

I switched a month ago when I found Azureus doesn’t work on 64bit Vista. Turns out it was a blessing in disguise and there’s no way I’d go back now. It handles my custom RSS feeds for scheduled TV shows and allows me to log on from anywhere. Pro.

Worth a mention is also YouTorrent. This site aggregates the results from 10 or so of the biggest sites for you – what’s more it’s probably quicker than any of the search engines on the sites themselves. Clean, simple, and easy to use.

Full article here.

In my case, I’m a fan of WordPress.com, but the posting interface is a pain in the ass, especially when dealing with images. Add to that the fact that the rich text editor does not support my browser of choice – Opera – and it all starts to become a little messy.

Stumbled across a site which mentioned BlogJet so I thought I’d try it out. Wow – seriously great software. Fast setup, simple-to-use UI, and integrated with loads of blog sites. It simplifies the whole process making it faster and generally more approachable.

I’m sure that if everyone knew about this alternative then pretty much the only people who’d continue using the web interface would be Mac users. And given that the only thing they’d blog about is how good Macs are (snore), it’s no great loss.

It’s 20 minutes long - but given that he’s one of the most influential innovators of our time, that he’s retiring this year, and that you’ll probably watch at least 20 minutes of daytime TV at some point in the future, it’s probably not the worst investment of time you’ll ever make…

 ”Forcing people to buy music whether they want to or not is not a solution to this problem. The incentives created by such a system are perverse – guaranteed revenue and guaranteed profits will remove any incentive to innovate and serve niche markets. It will be the death of music.

Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea. In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.”

So yet another knowledgable person making a logical argument against an illogical idea. This will be the final post on the subject since I think the point has been made. Muppets.

You can read the full article here.

A picture is worth a thousand words so click the thumbnail for the larger version. Note that this is my actual PC, not a standard shot.

Specs, benchmarks, and internal shots to follow…