Random Chat Review

Starting 2010 there has been a new trend in the chatting behavior with the advent of ChatRoulette and the “mediatization” of the service. However this service was not the first one to the market, actually another chat service called Omegle was already there since 2009.
But what distinguishes ChatRoulette was the use of webcams to allow users to randomly chat with each other without any registration or login; all what is required is just go to the website, accept to turn on the webcam and there you go.

The idea was fast to grow in popularity, it suffices to look at Google trends for the keyword “random chat” and note how the growth was exponential in a very short time. Notice the scale (between 10 and 20) in the graph below.

On the other hand the keyword “no registration chat” started to gain momentum since Q4 2008 with an index ranging from 5 to 8.

What does this mean?
Actually, it tells that internet users prefer easy to use website, especially for those who do not intend to make long lasting relationship. So the mysterious aspect of the randomness and the visualization of the other person have attracted people. The mere thought of “who might be the next person” gives the user a strong impulse to find what is hidden behind each click of a button.

However this comes at a cost. While in theory chatting with random people who might be from all over the world is appealing, the constant reflex of pressing the “next” button renders the experience completely useless. As a matter of fact you can rarely chat, because you are always driven by the feeling to know who is next. Besides the anonymous aspect of the service makes it open to all sort of “perversions”.

A small study
I decided to do a small study. So one early evening I opened ChatRoulette and tried for over 30 minutes to talk to someone. Then I repeated the same experience with Omegle.
Here is what I found. I will expose the Chatroulette statistics knowing that those of Omegle are similar. But first let me make some definitions that are useful to the understanding of the figures.

Appearance: is when something displays on my screen showing the peer, whether it is a man, woman, advertisement or anything else.
Repetition: when the same appearance shows more than once.
Pervert: a person showing explicit sexual act.
Video: a suspected recorded video for a person or others (not live broadcast).
Advertisement: a commercial announcement for a product or website.

So here are the results: During the 30 minutes I have seen around 200 appearances, 150 are men, among them 8 old people (look like 50 or above), 2 young boys (less than 15) and 62 perverts. There were also 20 appearances that were girls, 10 videos and 20 ads. The number of repetition was 55. The figures and their percentages are depicted in the table below.

Total	Men	Women	Perverts	Videos	Ads	Repetition
200	150	20	62	10	20	55
100%	75%	10%	31%	5%	10%	27.5%

In addition to those statistics it is important to note that the longest discussion I had made was less than 30 seconds before the peer leaves. Those discussions occurred only twice and the remaining time it was the peer who is pressing “Next” on the spot.

As you can see, although I spent 30 minutes, I talked less than one minute.
This clearly shows that these sites are not result oriented; people go there either by curiosity, or guys searching for girls who are really rare species.

Moreover, most of the videos or ads were about adults websites. This means that these websites are starting to position themselves in a particular manner. As a result this will drive away most of the people who are looking for real experience.

For this reason I believe that it won’t be long before people lose interest in those services unless some others come to the market with a different strategy aiming to favor real communications that are ‘decent’ and containing more ‘values'.

You might want to check http://www.simpleconnexion.com/ for another approach on how to meet new interesting people based on a concept that delivers value.

Shared database review

Recently I came across a startup, called FluidInfo, that is doing an interesting job. Creating a shared database!
At first one might think that this is just another fancy engineering artifact, however when he delves into the large horizons that the concept opens and the big opportunities behind, he will give it a second thought.
The concept is straight forward. The database is open for everyone to push/pull information and data into and from it. It is somehow similar to Wikipedia with some differences in few areas.

So what?
The question that follows is what will this concept, no matter how technically challenging it is, benefit the users or the industry as a whole.
To be able to reply to this question, we should first examine the problem for both users and enterprises. Let’s consider that a user is searching for a review about a certain product, such as electronic device or a car or anything else. His only tool for the moment is Google. He just enters his keywords and clicks search. Then he will have the daunting task to go through the search results dissecting them for meaningful reviews whether from experts or from the public.

Another alternative is to give Wikipedia a try. However, although Wikipedia is a respectful source of information it lacks real “quantifiers”. It can provide you with text and stories but it does not give you a concise assessment in form of a significant value. It is up to the user to draw the conclusion by himself.

FluidInfo thinks it has the solution. What it does is to create a database and open it for the public. The database is structured as objects containing tags. You can think of an object as a subject, and the tags as attributes that contain values and qualify these objects.
For example, consider an object called iPad. It might contain a tag called “satisfaction” where each user can add his own level of satisfaction. This way when someone searches for iPad satisfaction he won’t have to go through different websites to have an idea what is the general opinion of the public, all he can do is to query the iPad object for the “satisfaction” tag.
This is enormous! Think about the time that can be spared by immediately getting the results.

But that’s not all; it is much more promising than that. It might serve for endless type of analysis and the most important it allows the development of numerous types of applications especially decision-helper ones. Imagine that a company needs to take a decision based on some market data; this shared database is able to provide their application with enough figures allowing it to compute a valid assessment.

What’s the hurdle?
Having said that! It does not mean that this will be implemented the next day. To be successful, this type of shared database must appeal to the public just like Twitter did. The adoption of this idea by the public is essential and crucial, without it everything will go down the drain.
May be a good strategy for FluidInfo is to aggressively seek strategic alliances and partnerships with websites and application builders to leverage this concept and make it accessible to all internet users.

Retargeting Explained

According to statistics only 2% of website visitors will end up using their credit cards to buy something, while the remaining 98% will just have a look and leave. Of course this is bad news for website owners. Most of the case these websites pay big money to drive traffic. These checks are in majority given to Google for its notorious AdWords service.

So if you think about it for a second you will see how much money being dumped with no return on investment. Suppose you paid 1000US$ for Google AdWords, you will be shocked to know that only 20US$ will generate income for you and the remaining 980US$ will simply evaporate.

Retargeting is a solution devised to this type of problems. It consists of an agency that builds and indirectly connects a network of publishers and advertisers. The process of retargeting goes like the following:

• You go to the advertiser website let’s say Amazon.com
  
  
• Amazon will insert a special script from the retargeting agency into your browser; this script will in turn insert a cookie, known to the browser as third party cookie, with a unique id. This way the retargeting agency will uniquely identify you. This is a completely harmless because it does not gather any personal information; it simply assigns you a unique number.
  
  
• As you browse the Amazon web site and look at the different products, the script transmits those data to the retargeting agency.
  
  
• Suppose you have added a product to your basket and proceeded to checkout, but for some reasons you did not complete the purchase operation. For Amazon you are a lost customer. However, the retargeting agency knew what product you were about to purchase. Using the cookie it has inserted into your browser it will be able to identify you again whenever you land into one of its publisher’s website.
  
  
• To continue with our example, suppose you left Amazon.com and went surfing the web until you pass through Yahoo.com. It happens that Yahoo.com and Amazon.com deal with the same retargeting agency. Because of that famous cookie (inserted when you were at Amazon.com) the retargeting agency will know that you were the person who did not complete the purchase at Amazon.com and will display to you an advertisement about the product you were about to buy.
  
  
• This technique has proven effective to the advertisers in converting potential customers into buyers.

In case you need to have a concrete sense of what is happening behind the scenes, you can tell your browser to clear all cookies (caution clearing all cookies will cancel automatic login on some sites, so you will need to manually re-login). If you are using Firefox you can go to the menu “Tools > Options”, choose “Privacy tab” then click on “Show Cookies” and then click on “Remove All Cookies” in the Cookies dialog box.

Once you do that, go to Amazon.com then reopen to Cookies dialog box again take a note with the available cookies and remove them all. Go to Yahoo.com and again open the Cookies dialog and verify that there is at least one cookie in common with the Amazon.com.

If you are frightened by the above and fearing of being tracked, don’t be. Actually this is a safe procedure and usually there is no harm from that. Quite on the contrary, it might help websites know the behavior of their visitors in order to serve them in a better way.

Facebook also uses this technique with partner sites. To know what it looks like, login to your Facebook account and then without logging off go to CNN.com; chances are that you will be told what article(s) your friends liked over there.

In case all of that still make you fear for your privacy, it is useful for you to know that you can stop this by simply telling your browser to reject third party cookies. On Firefox you can go again to “Tools > Options > Privacy” and uncheck “Accept third-party cookies”.

Internet Explorer 8 has a feature called "Private Browsing" that allows you to browse the web without being tracked.

Google Wave Productivity

Are you receiving tens of emails a day?
These emails are most of the time a discussion of one precise subject; however you get this discussion in some sort of scattered rarely organized chunks.

Imagine you are planning an outdoor picnic with a group of friends on the weekend. I am quite sure that you will be emailing each other for the whole week. You will start by suggesting the day, the hour, the place, the type of food, the people you want them to join in and so forth…Naturally, every friend of yours has his own ideas and his own suggestions. Just take the four or five topics mentioned earlier and multiply them by the number of friends in the group; you will directly discover the amount of emails you will get just while trying to organize this picnic.

Now consider that you have at least two other subjects you need to take care of via email exchange and look what will happen to your inbox! With all the mess that you experience you can be sure that it has taken too long before someone is trying to bring a solution. What is needed is to put some order into this counter-productive technology that is called email.

Since most, if not all, email exchanges are centered on discussions; why not organize these discussions into threads? The idea is not new, ListServers existed for years, then later replaced by web forums. In those tools each discussion has its own thread and every participant will post his own opinion in the correspondent thread. The only problem with these services is they are public and not private. You can’t go organize or evoke personal stuff there. What is needed is something like your own personal discussion service that lets you create and conduct private discussions.

Until the creation of Google Wave this has been difficult to find. So you guessed it, Google Wave is primarily about communication and collaboration but instead of doing that using tens of scattered emails that pollute your inbox and make your life miserable, Google Wave will let you sort all this mess into a reduced number of discussions that are easily manageable and searchable.

Now let’s go back to our picnic project, instead of having tens of emails related to this subject, all you will have is one discussion in which every participant will post his opinion and at the end you will be able to easily find your way to carry on with this project.

May be Google Wave won’t replace emails in the near future simply because bad habits do not vanish easily. However I believe that people will start using it as the time goes on, especially when they realize how effective it is in handling their communication. It is also up to Google to make efforts towards providing consistent offers for businesses.

Google celebrating PAC-MAN 30th Birthday

As usual Google celebrates known and unknown occasions on its own way. This time it is remembering old PAC-MAN game that used to be famous in the eighties, at least I used to play it at that time on my Intel 8086 PC!

Although this can be qualified as ancestor game however it revives nostalgia for some people. To know more about it you can check this wikipedia article.

The concept of celebrating such occasions, was discussed in an interesting article that appeared on CNN few months ago."For Google, doodles are oodles of surprise" tells the story behind this idea.

Update: "Chomp! Pac-Man, the arcade classic, turns 30" a new arcticle on CNN talking about the 30 years old game.

Facebook Privacy Issue

Privacy is a hot issue nowadays, everyone is yelling about Facebook privacy policy and even new projects are starting to raise tens of thousands of US$ on the pledge to develop a more privacy-compliant service.
The most criticism towards Facebook privacy is the frequent updates the social network is bringing to its privacy policy. People are losing faith and trust and many are closing their accounts.To have an idea of how much people are really looking to close their accounts, you can just go to Google trends and enter the following phrase ‘delete facebook account’. What I got is the following chart.

Notice the peak in the curve after the first quarter of 2010.
So what’s wrong in that privacy policy? If you have time you can go to Facebook Privacy Policy and read over 200 lines of policy rules or you can just read a summary of it below.

In short Facebook privacy policy says the following:

• Children below age 13 are not accepted and any information about children below that age are not stored.
  
  
• Facebook will not store your password you provide to Facebook in order to import your contact list from you email account such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail…
  
  
• Facebook will log your activities on its website, which means whatever action you do on your profile will be logged. Actually every site does that. Once I called Microsoft Business Parnter support and the guy told me what I did three years ago!
  
  
• Facebook might (in my opinion this means WILL) share information with advertisers about your behavior on THEIR website! So if you click on an ad on Facebook and you went to the advertiser site and navigated N number of pages or selected this item or that item, Facebook is likely to know! However Facebook says that after 180 days (6months) this information will be ‘anonymized’ which means it won’t be associated to your account any more.
  
  
• Now the biggest issue is in third party applications:
  
  
• Facebook does not guarantee that any third party application will comply with its privacy policy.
  
  
• If a friend of yours added a third party application and gave it enough permissions, this application will be able to access any data on your profile that your friend can access by himself. So you are at the mercy of your friend wise judgment.

After reading this, if you feel you are insecure and you want to close your account. Facebook has given you a way to do that, just follow this link delete account.
Another alternative is to avoid putting online any sensitive data. This is a general rule and not only related to Facebook.

What Drives Motivation

Probably this is one of the best Youtube videos I have ever seen.
Initially I found it on Loic Le Meur blog (thanks Loic) and I was stunt by the idea!
The reason is very obvious, because I saw myself in what this video is talking about!

What it says is the following:
Studies have shown that people who make physical efforts are motivated by money rewards, however people who are into brain activities such as R&D, creativity, and the like are not really motivated by prize rewards! Of course salaries MUST be fair in order not to let them worry about their living, but if this is the only given incentive; their performance will go down the hill.
People doing brain activities actually are looking for ways to meet the challenges and acquire mastery. A typical example is the highly skilled people who write open source softwares like linux, apache and many others…

This has reminded of an old story; I was just a fresh graduate and was recruited by a startup called TrilogGroup. At that time I was a guy who is fan of compilers; I was amazed of how these pieces of software work. Since my company, at the time, was doing workflow software I thought that the best way to make this software highly customizable is to integrate in it a Javascript engine that can make calls to any Java APIs. I worked on this feature during the weekends and once I had something to show, I presented it to my employer and I was extremely happy when I was told to work on it as a priority feature in the product.

Later on, in my career, I worked on many cool stuff during my free time. However never went to the end with them because somehow circumstances were not really encouraging.

Bottom line, if you are a person who has a dream or a purpose, don't shy away from it. You can work on it at night, in the weekends, during vacations...Because believe me there is nohing better than the FEELING OF SUCCESS !

Google's gold mine!

There is no doubt that Google is one of the most successful companies which emerged from the .COMs bubble burst in the late 90s.
Its business model proved itself to be effective and viable and it was a pioneer in generating high revenues. Even well established online companies like Yahoo failed to see what Google was up to.

My own experience with Google main business model started when I developed a website for my wife to help her pass the hard pregnancy which forced her to stay in bed in the last months before delivery.

This site, www.simpleconnexion.com, was intended to be something SIMPLE to develop and EASY to use (you can guess the origin of the name).
The idea, which later I discovered that was not really new one, is to let people take a break from what they are doing and have a little chat for 5 to 10 minutes with people chosen randomly by the site itself. It is a way of distraction and fun.

The initial version took one night to finish, and since the host gave us free Google AdWords and Facebook Ads I decided to get use of these two offers.
So I put the same advertisement on the two sites that says “Chat with random people from all over the world” and waited.

In just few hours the Google AdWords’ offered credits were consumed while the credits offered for Facebook Ads took two days.
At the end, I checked the data and the difference were flagrant. The Click Through Rate (CTR) for Google was 0.65% while the one of Facebook was 0.018%! Which means an amazing 36 times efficiency in favor of Google.

To explain this difference one should look on how both sites proceed. Google is able to directly detect users’ instant needs and respond to it by displaying the appropriate ads, while facebook uses users profile to guess their needs and show them the ads.

I think we all agree that there is a substantial difference between knowing the need and guessing the need. Furthermore, knowing the users interests via their profiles does not mean they are currently looking for something, while detecting their search keywords will reveal with high accuracy what they are looking for and what they intend to do in coming few minutes or hours.

For this reason I believe that Google is sitting on a gold mine and won’t be easy for any other player in the market, namely Facebook, to dethrone it in the near future.

The real world of Meetup

Social networking is on the hype, since the huge success of Facebook and Twitter everything is oriented towards socializing.

You go to any website and you are told that you friends liked this or liked that.
Everything looks good, however everything looks virtual...

You meet people online, that's nice! Yet, for you they are still a bunch of avatars and few lines of description. Communicating with people who are thousands of miles away is appealing but the chance to meet them face to face is really slim.

This is where Meetup.com comes into play. Meetup.com focuses on people around you and in your local communities.
After all, may be the most interesting part of socializing is to really meet, face to face, with the people who are online.
People thousands of miles away might be interesting, but people in your community might be interesting and useful too.

Meetup.com offers you this opportunity to meet with people in your area through thousands of meetup groups usually classified by interest. If you like music, arts, gaming, or you are an entrepreneur you surely are going to find a meetup group in your area.

These groups organize periodical meetings, so they move you from the virtual world of the internet to the real life, where you can really see the persons, talk to them, find out more about their personalities and who knows may be you can find among them the love of your life, a new best friend or a future partner for your business.

Here are few interesting quotes from meetup members:

"Was my first time, I was really pleasantly surprised by how open and friendly everyone was, and what a good mix of ages, nationalities and people! Will def come back, thanks!"

"I had always great surprising encounter in this group. The open, friendly and international spirit makes this group a great place to come after work ! Your muss try it !"

Thanks to Meetup.com social networking is not only a virtual world.

Wordpress.com vs Blogger.com

The first task one should do when he intends to write blogs is to search for a blog host.

I directly went to Wordpress.com and opened an account then started personalizing it.
However, I was surprised of how slow the site is! I thought it might be my connection that sucks although other sites were responding quickly.

During the customization I needed to add Google Analytics, but I could not find where and how to put it. I went navigating through the complete set of menus searching for a widget or access to the HTML source code to do that but found none.
So I “googled” the question to see if there are people out there who had the same problem. Actually there were! Unfortunately none of the proposed solution worked!

I told myself I will care about that later, how about adding social button for sharing my blog.
Again, it was all but obvious, many suggestions on “google search” but none was satisfying for me.

By the time I got really annoyed and frustrated, and decided that enough is enough.

I directed my browser to Blogger.com where I used to have an old account that I have never used.
The user friendliness of the site was really impressive. There are widgets for almost everything you might think of, and you can place the widget at different places on the blog page using a very intuitive and easy way. In case you are really creative and don't find the widget that fits your need you can create your own with few clicks.

My blog was mounted in just ten minutes.

I don't know if this will annoy anyone, it is not my intention. All what I am doing is sharing this little experience.

Finally to be objective I have found (later on) the following comparison between the two services which has more facts than my own first impression experience. Check it out it is useful blogger-wordpress-chart

My 1st Blog: Sharing Experience

Hello and welcome to my first post on my first blog ‘Sharing Experience’.

Actually it took me long to decide to create a blog, because I was not sure what I was going to write in it.I am not a star, nor a celebrity, I am software engineer who spent almost 10 years of his life dealing with PCs and programming code.For me it is so fascinating because you get the feeling of creating something, something that is almost ‘alive’!However, I never thought of publishing on the web anything related to what I do, simply because I never considered that someone will really care!

This has changed when I saw the movie “Julie & Julia” that is based on two separate real stories. The movie was about Julie Powel who in 2002 “… attempts to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was published in 1961, and writes a blog to document her progress”, and “Julia Child’s time in Paris, in the 1950s, in which she learns about French cooking.”

If I have to draw one conclusion from this movie, it will be that your experience might benefit others who are searching for some answers regarding similar circumstances.

So I will try to share my experience in this blog as my career goes on and will try to post on a weekly basis.