What’s interesting to me about this is that way back when I read David Siegel’s excellent Futurize your Enterprise (from 1999) he discusses many of these kinds of applications made possible by fully described semantic data. This led me to the concept of being able to search the web to pull up all photos from a physical location, say around the Empire State Building, and then stitch them all together into a single interaction point blending everyone’s photos. What really threw me about this presentation is that the way they zoomed round Notre Dame was almost identical to how I’d thought it might work. Now the great thing about this is that they don’t rely on positioning data, but instead visual reference points that they automatically detect and stitch together, so I’m certainly looking forward to the model they create of everyone’s photos from the top of the Empire State.
Update: Having played around with the online demo (which is stunning and intuitive) I was struck by the similarity to the sequence in Blade Runner where the main protoganist Rick Deckard zooms into a slightly holographic photograph of one of the replicants he’s chasing. The way the screen panned as he focussed on sections and ‘looked round’ shower curtains is totally how PhotoSynth feels in use. The future is here again.
Google have started integrating a behind the scenes feature that allows you to do an image search for faces. It’s pretty darn cool – first check out a normal search for the wonderful ‘Douglas Adams‘, now check out the same search for his face.
Of course this is now raising a lot of discussion about privacy and the amount of information Google holds, especially when combined with their new street view feature. They can now take pictures of your house, and recognise your face staring out the window. Ultimately someone is going to do pull all this data together, and personally I’d rather it was Google than Microsoft. Boing Boing raises the point that would we be more scared if the NSA or CIA were doing this, somehow I suspect they already are – as well as voice recognition on every phone call in the country for key words. Is complete public transparency better than Government sanctioned spying and private records of your movements/actions? It’ll be interesting to watch how this plays out. Google could get sued for privacy invasion but that’s a harder prospect for the current administration.
With all these amazing AJAX-ified websites these days that are so simple to use it’s amazing when you come across a site that is from a major company that just doesn’t work. In this case it’s MSN’s AdCenter. For work reasons all I needed to do was sign up and activate an MSN AdCenter account, but apparently that process is not one that is supported by the site.
At first I tried signing up using Firefox 2.0. AdCenter let me fill out the entire first ‘tab’, with username and email, but then on the second tab none of the dropdowns were populated – which made it pretty tricky to choose a credit card type. Thinking this might be a classic Microsoft “we’re only supporting IE” issue, I fired up my IE6 and started again. This time it looked more hopeful, the dropdowns were populated. I guess the “if IE then populate dropdowns” function was doing its job. Oh no, wait. The dropdowns were populated, but every time the data is submitted it tells me that fields from the first tab weren’t filled out – whereas I knew they had been. At this point I gave up, rather than go and install IE7.
Now the thought occurs that even Microsoft doesn’t want to be so stupid as to prevent paying customers from signing up, purely to increase installs of its browsers. Surely? Or am I just being way too naive? Especially as now with IE7 when you mis-type a domain name it re-directs you to the MSN Live Search automatically, thus increasing MSN ad revenues. Either way, whether MSN has done this through ‘business drivers’ (read: ‘pure malicious thoughts’) or just by sloppy UI coding it is just plain bad, and in these days of open, usable web UI frameworks it’s plain unacceptable.
Earlier tonight I was watching some hilarious sketches from ‘Smack the Pony‘, an overlooked British comedy show from the late 90s with classic sketches such as this:
Once I’d stopped laughing I realised there was something interesting going on here – the subtitles. This sketch had been recorded off a French channel so the video stream had subtitles in it, but what if I wanted Spanish subtitles? Then it struck me, that if you could put an overlay onto any video from a service like youTube that embedded subtitles you could extend the reach of any video. Maybe you could even help world peace… Maybe.
I filed this idea away for later, then about an hour later I was looking at metafilter and came across someone trying to do just this – dotSub. D’oh, beaten to the punch again. But then having reviewed the dotSub offering I still feel like there’s potential here for someone else to do a lot better. For example it doesn’t look like dotSub overlays videos from other sources, they stream them directly and embed their own pre-structured English subtitles to work from. They also don’t seem to offer a rating system for thei subtitles, which given they’re done by free from their audience seems a bit risky.
Andrew Weinreich, creator of SixDegrees and so one of the forefathers of social networking, is blogging about his latest startup meetMoi. MeetMoi is a mobile dating service that wants to get you an instantaneous hookup when you’re out and about in town. Now whether this service will replace turning up to any bar and getting drunk enough till someone near to you becomes dateable is the big challenge Andrew faces and good luck to him, but in the meantime his posts give great insight into the process of starting a business. For example you can read about how he initiated sixDegrees at the start of his entrepreneurial life.