6 posts tagged “youtube”

I was finally able to log in and see something besides the down page over at Tribe.net and I've gotta say, the new look is a marked improvement over the previous one, once you get used to it.

Some additional features were added but they're not immediately obvious including the ability to add blog RSS feeds to your MyTribe.net page, drag and drop of modules on that page and tons of other new UI changes including a new, smaller, more adult-oriented masthead and an old school-look logo.

Additionally, many of the pages that had been previously buried have resurfaced again in the browse menu like Reviews and other items that had been deemed less important to be able to access easily under the previous CEO.  There's also a new my friends'  photos module, a calendar module for the MyTribe.net page and a new official Tribe.net blog that's actually an RSS-enabled tribe.  All tribes on Tribe.net have featured RSS capabilities for some time but being able to add modules to your MyTribe.net page that are feeds of your tribes is all new as of today.

There are a few items that have to be cleaned up in a point release at some point but so far, it's looking like the good old Tribe.net we all used to love with some slight adjustments to the UI and several long awaited new features.  I was salivating at the thought of being able to read my blog feeds from MyTribe.net and having the drag and drop functionality that was discussed when I still worked for the company, and now it's finally here!

To add a feed module to your MyTribe.net page, click the customize your homepage link at the top of the Home page after logging in, and then choose which module you'd like to add from the list.  The list of items is different depending on whether your configuring your MyTribe.net page or your profile.  Some new modules have been added to the outward-facing profile stable of modules as well.  More on them below.

In addition to the previously supported MyRevver video module, YouTube, and GoogleVideo modules have been added and XPSF file formats are now supported with new modules in the user profile configuration area of the site.  To see the new modules, log in and click to your profile page [the icon in the upper left corner of the page or choose profile from the My pop-up], then click the Add Modules tab and select any of the existing or new modules from there.

XPSF, for the technically handicapped, is an XML file format for sharing music playlists.  Click the link XPSF for more info on where to find these playlists, or how to create your own.

Nice work Tribe guys!  I was reporting bugs just like back in the good ol' days today.  I'm really happy that the folks there are stoked to come in to work again.  Morale had gotten pretty low there towards the end of my tenure. 

I just finished reading the Wall Street Journal article about a particular audio clip spoof that was created and posted to Digg using Ted Steven's ridiculous comments during the recent congressional Network Neutrality debate.  The senator's comments were also lambasted by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

The spoofed clip was created by Paul Holcomb, an advertising executive and podcaster on his company's boldheaded.com site.  Holcomb created the wildly popular DJ Tubular Ted Stevens Techno Remix audio clip as a comedic take on senator Ted Steven's now infamous comments about how the Internet works, slicing and dicing choice tid bits from the dysfunctional speech to fit a campy, techno-house beat. 

Oddly enough, at the time he posted the clip, Holcomb wasn't completely aware of the functional and political ramifications of the Net Neutrality debate.  Since then, the spoofed speech remix has been downloaded from his site alone over 70,000 times since he posted it, according to the article, and there's also a music video  posted by a fan of the remix on YouTube.com that has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

What's funny about all of this is, Captain Tubular Ted Stevens still thinks he's right about how the internet works [it's a series of tubes after all] and that everyone else is wrong.  Additionally humorous, Holcomb is a conservative Air Force veteran and after the audio clip went completely viral on the net, he had reporters from all sides of the issue calling him to ask if he could explain Net Neutrality for their blogs and news articles, as well as people from left wing sites like CrooksAndLiars.com re-posting the remix approvingly and MoveOn.Org proclaiming the clip as one of "10 examples of grassroots lobbying on the tube-net".  

I guess Mr. Holcomb learned a valuable lesson from all of this: you have to be careful about what you post on the tubes, otherwise, they can get all gunked up with thousands of downloads of Internets audio clips that make fun of ignorant, conservative, republican chairmans of the Senate Commerce Committee and people just might think you're a bleedin' heart liberal commie prick.  Apparently Holcomb, showing his good sense, ultimately came out on the side of Neutrality after educating himself via "the tubes".  Now, if we could only get Ted Stevens on the right path.

Darin "Commie Prick" Marshall

Myspace recently surpassed 100 million profiles and as a former measly black box QA engineer of the largely S.F. Bay Area alternative lifestyle-populated Tribe.net social networking site, my co-workers and I watched the meteoric Myspace rise occur as Tribe.net continued to be mostly a failure to launch outside of the Bay Area.  There were many good ideas floating around at Tribe in various directions but nothing we did seemed to create that viral growth that the now Fox News-owned Myspace has been experiencing for almost two years now. 

Looking back, it appears that the combination of a much younger sign up age, allowing people to hack the HTML and Javascript on their profile pages, adding a Flash-based MP3 player for song upload and playback, as well as providing a myriad of band-focused features for promoting the artist's music and shows via the Myspace events calendar and invitation system, is largely what fueled the incredible growth rate of the site.  There are probably some additional unknown factors that are important to the site's growth rate as well but the feature items outlined above, especially the addition of the Flash player and band-focused features, appear to coincide with the incredible growth that started for them about two years ago.

To celebrate the Myspace 100 million user plateau, I thought it might be fun to roast the site a bit and point out some of the many reasons that it continues to underwhelm from a technology perspective.  The opinions here are largely speculative as I'm not a web developer or designer and my opinions are based mostly on conversations I've had with extremely talented and capable web designers and engineers about the technologies in use and many Myspace articles I've read online about the site over the years;  Some of which may be partially or completely untrue.  My apologies in advance for any inaccuracies that may exist herein.

Myspace really has no web 2.0 features what-so-ever and the engine under the hood is notoriously unspectacular from what many people have said about the site's underlying core technology.  Here's my best take at the list of technological shortcomings of the site and a web 2.0 feature wish list compilation that was created based upon my experiences using Myspace over the last couple of years:

AJAX [Asynchronous Javascript and XML]: The typical web 2.0 site feature set includes functionality such as widgets or fields that load data without visibly reloading the page, allows the user to freely drag elements around on the page or enter data or search criteria and instantly receive feedback from the server to the page with no visible refresh of the entire page's user interface.  The data is populated in the correct location and the rest of the page remains static.  There are no AJAX-fied pages, widgets of features on Myspace;  It's all web 1.0, centralized portal, old school web site behavior.  Every new action requires that the page is refreshed completely.  This can be incredibly time consuming when the site is under a heavy load.

Folksonomies and tagging: Many of the new web 2.0 sites like Flickr.com, Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us YouTube and the new Six Apart product Vox in use for this blog provide support for user generated tags that can be associated with various data types such as photos, videos, posts, news articles, blogs, websites or any specific type of item that is featured on a given site.  These tags create a user defined "hierarchy" or "taxonomy" of sorts, often called a "folksonomy" that can then be catalogued and searched by tag to view or capture tag related content. 

A simple example of tagging can be seen on the site Flickr.com.  On Flickr's tags page, words like "sunset" or "architecture" can be clicked on and content tagged with those words is returned in the form or data type of photos, hopefully of sunsets and architecture. 

With any tag on Flickr.com, it is also possible to create an RSS feed of photos tagged with a particular word or phrase.  This can be useful on another website such as Tribe.net, where a user can publish a feed into an RSS-module, or in an application or online-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, NewsGator, My Yahoo!, or Bloglines, where the tagged photo content can be serialized or "syndicated" newest items first as images are posted to Flickr.  When a new photo with the tag "sunset" is added to the site by any Flickr user, that photo is now associated with that particular tag.  When the tag specific feed is retrieved by Tribe.net or Bloglines the most recent photos tagged "sunset" are collected.  The tagged photo content can then be viewed by the user of the stand-alone RSS reader application or feed aggregation site [Bloglines or Tribe.net as examples] and what is returned are photos taken by Flickr.com users of sunsets. 

Of course, the person that uploaded the photo needs to properly tag items and sometimes photos that are not actually sunsets or architecture-related photos might appear in a feed.  Additionally, items that don't have that tag associated with them might actually be photos of a sunset or architecture but without the tag, the photo isn't included in what is retrieved as a feed from Flickr.  Myspace doesn't currently provide a user interface for tagging any of its data types.  More on the Myspace and the RSS issue in the next paragraph...

RSS: Myspace also doesn't currently allow users to syndicate their blogs, photos or any other Myspace data type either.  What if Myspace users could syndicate or tag their blog entries, photos, videos, music or groups content on myspace.com so that people could subscribe to or utilize their tagging filters on Myspace user content elsewhere on the web to stay current with their friends or favorite bands activities?  Would individual profile users and musicians find that useful?  Isn't that the direction that most of these new companies are moving in?  Decentralization, RSS feeds, tagging, micro-content and data silos?  These kinds of fearures and many others, including desktop application-like behavior in a browser, and a robust web services API like eBay's or Flickr's are the kinds of concepts emerging from more and more web 2.0 sites and this is just the beginning of the madness.

Web services and APIs: Google Mashups are very good examples of Google's web services API [or application programming interface] in action.  The Google maps API combines their in-house maps technology and externally accessible web services so that outside developers can create useful new combinations that improve the efficiency of people's daily activities such as searching housing prices in a specific area or finding a restaurant close to your house or hotel.  I'm not sure that Myspace or any social networking site other than LinkedIn encourages people to be more efficient in their daily activities though;  Probably just the opposite for the most part.

Notes on a couple of interesting web 2.0 applications that some people might not be aware of: Google recently purchased the collaborative, online emulation of Microsoft's Word application, Writely, and another company's spreadsheet app so that they can offer products that are similar to Microsoft's Office suite, but that are free, collaborative [I said that already] and available online so that they can be accessed from anywhere, not just from the computer where the files are saved.  Yahoo! bought del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that is barebones yet very popular among geeky types for saving bookmarks just like a bookmark in your browser but available to the rest of the world, or just to you if you choose, at any computer with a browser on the internet that you happen to be using.  Social bookmarking is somewhat of a centralizing feature unlike some of the decentralizing applications I've been blathering about here but a very useful site none the less and del.icio.us supports tagging as well.  Myspace has no official web services or APIs for any of it's content types and again, no content tagging functionality.

Uploading MP3 files: When I first uploaded songs to my Myspace music profile, there was no descriptive help text or examples that outlined what kinds of MP3 files or what file size limits existed prior to the upload.  This was a really serious annoyance because of how long it took Myspace to report an error during the upload process.  Basically, files over about 9 MB, I never figured out exactly what the limit is, are too large and the upload process has to be revisited after the file has been re-encoded via an MP3 encoding application  from the original file at a lower bit rate that also reduces the file size, and along with it, the sound quality of the music that is uploaded to the site.  Guh.  No syndication and there's a limit of four songs total for each Myspace Music Profile as well so why would you want to syndicate that?

Search: Myspace currently has one of the worst search implementations I've ever seen.  Try searching for someone on the site and it's a virtual crapshoot that you'll actually find them or anything remotely relevant to them on the site.  By default it searches the web currently.  There is another search field that is somewhat useful if you know who or what you're looking for but it's buried on the right side of the initial search results page, provided that you clicked "Myspace" from the default "Web" search.

Most people don't save what's commonly referred to as a "handle" or custom URL that makes it easier to find them on Myspace as well [e.g., my handle: http://www.myspace.com/beliefsystems].  With a handle I can guess what the Myspace site URL for an music artist like Wolfmother or Ladytron is because they've had chosen a handle like "myspace.com/wolfmother" or "http://myspace.com/ladytron".  For people that don't have a saved handle, the user's GUID, or global user id is used and that's typically a fairly lengthy series of semi-serial, semi-randomized or encoded numbers and letters that are saved in the database that refer to a particular user.  I know this because this is what Tribe.net does and I've seen this ID in Myspace URLs many times when I visit people's profiles that don't have a custom URL.

On the search front, I did read an article today about a Google/Myspace deal that said Myspace will hand off its search functionality to Google, and Google in turn will pay Myspace's parent company Fox Interactive Media $900 million over the next three years for the privilege of being Myspace and Fox Interactive Media's default search engine.  $900 million over three years ain't too shabby for a service that cost Fox News' Fox Interactive Media unit about $580 million dollars to purchase from failed band member and myspace.com co-founder Tom Anderson and his investors.  We'll see how well the search integration turns out between the two companies very soon I guess.

Okay, so, I listed a number of reasons why myspace.com sucks and here's the second to last one...

Social distance and reputation: One of the more useful and important concepts of social networking is the concept of social reputation.  If you create a social reputation system for users of a site or service for items that were previously bought and sold as anonymous transactions you create a sense of trust between the buyer and seller.  Social reputation [hopefully] creates a network of trust that provides a path back to someone you know in your inner circle or "network" so that there's some accountability, depending on how far away from the first ring of friends you go. 

This is similar to what we see on auction site eBay with their positive feedback percentage or Slashdot's user score rating system but with social degrees for accountability and reputation as opposed to user feedback.  eBay users with very high user feedback are likely to be more trustworthy and Slashdot users with higher scores are likely to be more informative or relevant than some of the more fringe users of the site.  The basic idea is to provide a traceable reputation so that the kinds of Myspace news stories we're seeing on the 5 O'Clock news every night related to pedofiles and sexual predators wouldn't occur as often as they do.

Myspace is extremely one dimensional.  Everyone that creates an account on the site is by default friends with Tom and there's no concept of social degree or distance.  While everyone being friends with Tom makes it very easy for people like me to know the total number of Myspace profiles that exist in the system, it also flattens out the usefulness of social reputation so that you can't see how someone is related to you and decide based upon that additional information whether or not it's a good idea to add them as a friend, meet them in a park for coffee or work with them as a fashion model, etc.

The very last item on the list is simply the technology behind the site. 

Usability and load issues: Most everyone I know has commented on how slow or non-functional the site seems to be; probably related to the sheer volume of teenagers, musicians and groupies on at any given time, myself included [a musician not a groupie].  Not to mention all the video pop-ups, pimped out profiles with tiled, sparkling background photos, user customizations and Flash-based plug-ins typically implemented by hacking the HTML of a page to bend it to your will while wreaking havoc on your browser and computer memory.  The main reason for many of their failures though is the craptacular technology.  Mention Cold Fusion to a web developer or designer and watch him shiver at the thought of actually having to work with it.  Cold Fusion... very cold!

Myspace is a great resource for bands and there have been a couple of success stories [the Arctic Monkeys for instance] and it really fluffs the ego getting all kinds of friend requests from people that dig my stuff or event invitations to events that aren't even in my region but one of the most exciting things it's given me is the ability to connect with some of my techno heroes from back in "the good ol days" or bands I was into in the 80s, being a product of that decade unlike so many of the sites users.  So, there is some positive feedback on the Myspace experience.

And here some positives:  I've found many interesting and compelling new bands that liked my songs or my profile and asked to be friends.  I've had people from all over the world send me comments, personal messages or Thanks for the Add photos and text.  The mobile SMS notification feature is also something that we discussed implementing at Tribe.net a few times and Myspace has gotten that particular feature right.  I should also mention though that after the power outage in L.A. due to the early summer heat wave, Myspace stopped sending me any SMS messages about new personal messages, friend requests or event invitations for a couple of weeks.  That feature seems to be working a lot better lately however.

So, I hope Myspace gets on the technology ball, slowly migrates to a more robust technology platform and maybe someday adds a few new web 2.0 features but right now, it doesn't look like any of that is necessary.  The sheep are following the herd and the herd seems to be tearing off to Planet Myspace at an astronomical rate and shows no signs of slowing down to close the gate. 

Before myspace gets around to it, there might still a market out there for a website that is similar to myspace.com but that does what they do a lot better with robust web 2.0 features like RSS, AJAX, XHTML, a feature rich API, tagging and all of the other Semantic web buzzwords and new web design technologies us geeks are so fond of.  And while we're at it, a site that can handle such incredible growth and still keep it together functionally with very little down time, minimal database corruption or loss of user data.  Myspace has done pretty well with the database corruption and loss of user data items but downtime's another story...

I remember when myspace's "down page" used to have a PacMan game on it and I sometimes wished that the site would stay down a little longer so that I could play a little more.  Too bad it didn't stay down longer.  I might still have a job if it did.

The internet 100+ million list [from what I could find with a quick Google search]:

1. Chinese internet users
2. Skype registered users
3. MSN Hotmail users
4. PayPal users
5. YouTube videos served
6. Huawei mobile softswitch users [what the?]
7. HP Laser Jet printers shipped since 1984
8. Indian cell phone users
9. Number of Firefox downloads
10. US broadband users

And of course, Myspace profiles

I found the link to this video somewhere online recently but I can't remember where now.  I guess it took the producers of the project four hours to film all of the stop motion elements and who knows how many hours to get the sound effects all lined up and the individual frames edited and rendered.  I had an idea for a chess game that was filmed one move at a time from an overhead perspsective but this is a whole different enchilada [Update! see below the video thumbnail]:

Update!: This video has been removed from YouTube as of today but google video still has it. Must've been related to YouTube's Terms of Service changes for uploaded content that occurred recently: Google video space invaders link.  Thank you, drive thru!

Here's an unbelievably cool video of rice being arranged into patterns at different frequencies.  Not sure why this occurs but it sure is strange.  I gotta give credit for this find to Music Thing, a really kewl blog for music-related crap.  I've been way behind on my bloglines lately.  This video item was posted there on May 30th of 2006.

I love this video from youtube that highlights subtle hints in the dialogue between Star Wars characters in selected scenes that there just might be some homosexual undertones brewing between some of them; especially from the two seemingly asexual droids we all know as C3P0 and R2D2.  Combine that with the Oscar nominated Ang Lee film Brokeback Mountain and some clever editing and you've got Star Wars: The Empire Brokeback!: