Productification

Continuous Development - That’s the way it’s done

A presentation by Timothy Fitz on Continuous Development

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Foursquare, Facebook and Geo

Great post on Techcrunch on Facebook and Foursquare including what could Foursquare do if Facebook introduces and nails Geo.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/facebook-foursquare/

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Google finally getting that Faceted Navigation is a powerful paradigm

A few days ago Daniel announced that he is joining Google where he would be focusing on changing the simplistic view of the google search (layout and all that), and today Techcrunch has a post that shows Google is flirting with the Search Options more (see screenshot below). It definitely shows that Google is finally understanding that Faceted Navigation (filtering) is a very powerful paradigm that helps users slice and dice results and help them narrow down to the result they are most interested in.

I think we will see a lot of activity from Google in this area as they enrich this functionality more and more. I can see them exposing dynamic faceting capability where based on the higher level type of information / type chosen, the facets that show up would change.

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Webpage load time as a Ranking Factor

Google has been talking about speed of their search engine as well as published how users react when search takes a longer time. Now, with a short interview with Mike from WebProNews, Matt Cutts says the speed of a site (load time) might become a ranking factor in search.

What does that mean?

- Web Site creators will be forced to ensure that their sites are faster
- Greater demand for performance and scalability gurus
- With speed being a factor in everyone's mind - Google would treat their quick response times as a competitive edge. Other search engines will have to raise the bar and focus a lot on ensuring that the search experience is super fast.

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Spot Signature Extraction - Near Duplicate Detection

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SpotSigs.ppt (2964 KB)

Work done by Stanford on Near Duplicate Detection using a technique called "Spot Signature Extraction". Seems like a decent approach for news articles. Planning to try it out on a small data set.

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User to Developer Ratio at your company?

Interesting to find that Facebook has a user to developer ratio of 1.1 million (detailed post here)!! That's definitely some motivation for the developer as how much impact does his work has on the end users. What's the ratio at your company?

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Reviews and Ratings on Web Sites

Seems like when it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html

…, the company says its ranking system already factors in the number of reviews, whether they come from experienced Yelpers or first-time reviewers, and whether those reviews were voted helpful.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/12/how-yelp-deals-with-everybody-getting-four-stars-on-average/

Real World Web: Performance & Scalability

Some slides you want to keep as a reference if you are in the business of highly available and scalable systems.

Real World Web: Performance & Scalability Slides

Localeze to add confidence scores for SMB

Localeze is now exposing confidence scores for business listings that can be used to measure how accurate the information is for a particular business.

The scores go from 0-100 percent, and are based on reconciling the information that it sees from multiple profiles. It standardizes the info,deletes multiple entries, and adds criteria such as recent updates, etc.

A company that hasn’t changed any information for eight months won’t be scored as highly as a company that constantly maintains the listing. “Time and frequency are very important,” says Olander. Most active businesses change at least some of their information every month.

Here is a original post.

Google gets into Interest Based Ad-Targeting

Google launches interest based ad targeting. The attempt is to make ads more relevant based on the preferences set by the user.

Users can add/remove their preferences with google and the Ads would be more relevant based on the choices. Google would also look at the often visited websites to gauge the interest and show the ads based on that.

Here are two detailed posts about this.