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A new approach to web applications: adaptive path

The Path of Least Resistance

"Two of the places I shop will let me take the product right to the checkout counter. That’s easy. Another, that I used to shop at, made me tell a clerk what I wanted, who in turn went to the inventory room. I then had to go to the sales line where they would meet me with the merchandise. Two lines. One or both was usually more than a few people deep. I don’t go back there any more. It might have been easier for them, but it was slow and painful for me.

Moral of the story, make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.

Which brings me back to George Gilder and a topic I think will be fascinating to watch play out.

George and others seem to think that unlimited choice is the holy grail of TV. It’s not.

The reason it’s not, is that it’s too much work to page through an unlimited number of options. It’s too much work to have to think of what it is we might like to watch. We are afraid we might miss something that we really did want to watch. Put another way, its way too hard to shop for shows in a store where the aisles are endless. Its stressful and a lot of work. Which is exactly why when we channel surf, or when we surf the net, we all end up surfing the same 10, 15, 20 channels/sites over and over again. It’s the path of least resistance.

It’s also why websites do anything they can to game the system on search engines to get top ranking. They know that no one is going to page through the thousands of results the search returned. Users will pick from the first page or they will pick one of the sponsored ads long before they choose to browse through even a couple pages."

(Rules of Success - The Path of Least Resistance - Blog Maverick)

Politics of Journalism

"Fourteen percent of Americans describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as conservatives. The corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent. This means that of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political position." (The New York Times)

Diamonds are for never

Classic Anil Dash

Domain Name purchase loophole?

A bizarre statement by the CEO of Network Solutions: "There's a five-day grace period with the registry when you don't have to pay, so they'll add a name for four days, run traffic, cross it, delete it so they don't have to pay for it, go back and add some more names. We've seen people who never registered more than 1,000 domains in a month register 900,000 in a day." (News.com). Why would someone go to all the trouble to actually do something like that?! It is also odd that he talks about some cheese company that is doing so great, yet never mentions who they actually are...? Or is it just that Network Solutions has zero credibility when their whole business model comes down to "we hope our legacy customers who have been with us since we were a monopoly don't notice that they now have a choice"?

A Rocket To Nowhere

"The sooner we force the agency [NASA] to confront its failure, the greater our chances of salvaging a space program worth keeping out of the current mess." (Idle Words via Anil Dash: A Big Truck With Wings)

Engineering Everquest

"On the day of EverQuest's release in March 1999, gamers flooded the 45-megabit-per-second cables connecting to Sony's server farm. Along Interstate 5, in the heart of San Diego, you can still see the scars of that deluge; they're the remains of long trenches in the pavement dug as part of a frantic push to add more lines to the Sony facility.

"Internet service providers were in the habit of oversupplying bandwidth," recalls Michael Bowen, executive director of technical operations for Sony Online Entertainment. "They didn't believe if you buy a pipeline this size, you fill it. But we filled it so much that other people in San Diego lost Internet access because pipes were so full. They scrambled to increase capacity because of us." Sony's ISP—the company declines to name it—raced to boost the bandwidth, ripping up Interstate 5 in the process.

Sony runs two other online games, PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies, out of its worldwide network of server facilities. At any given time, Sony is hosting more than 150 000 sword-wielding, laser-shooting, dragon-slaying gamers from all over the world.

"We're looking at transaction rates that rival the Visas and Wall Street brokerage houses," says Adam Joffe, chief technology officer for Sony Online Entertainment [see photo-illustration, "En Garde"]. "Thousands and thousands of transactions per second." And it takes epic levels of processing power to keep it all going.""

((ieee.org))

Virtual civilizations as lab experiments?

"For roughly a decade, people have used role-playing online games to conduct parallel lives. Raise another family. Start a new business. Build your own city. It's all possible in these virtual worlds.

Now, some economists and social scientists say these Internet worlds could be a new type of laboratory to study economic behavior, such as how consumers respond to inflation...

Where all this is heading, no one can say, but Rosedale says that insofar as people have always learned by observing the behavior of others, we may now have a social feedback system that moves faster than the speed of history.

"What's happening with Second Life and systems like it is that people are able to much more rapidly vary social systems and see the results almost instantly,'' he said.

(San Francisco Chronicle: Economists to explore world of online games / Researchers could assess players' response to change)

Don't Trust Trusted Computing

Boing Boing: Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel?