soledad penadés

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You're going to love this one-month-old news (well… not) but it wasn't until today that I managed to listen to the Zuckerberg keynote at past SXSW. I had read it had generated a fair amount of discussion although I didn't know exactly why.

In any case, once you listen to the podcast you can easily understand the attendees' indignation. Roughly, it is pretty much an hour of:

Sarah Lacy:

Absolutely irrelevant or bland question | Right | A-ha | My book…

Mark Zuckerberg:

helping people communicate more efficiently … communicate … mission … communicate … efficiently … website trend … helping people communicate more efficiently… tool … communicate …
connect …

No wonder people made fun of the whole situation! There's even a cartoon!

In case you're really curious here's the podcast, from the podcasts page.

The following are hypothetical extracts from conversations with managers. Any resemblance with reality is a pure coincidence:

Case A: He lived in a bubble for the last 3 years

One day the manager started an unexpected although highly desired conversation:

I was thinking of updating the company's website… making it more modern

I was quite surprised of hearing such thing:

Me: What do you mean… updating it or completely rebuilding it?

I kept thinking on the crap which he called website, and how horrified we were each time he wanted to update it since nobody really understood how it worked. And those tables… the source chart extension couldn't cope with so many nested tables…

Manager: Ah yes, completely rebuilding it… current version looks a bit outdated, it needs to look a bit more 2006, more advanced…

I thought: "a bit outdated" he says… it looks like a 1995 website… and what about the crappy stock pictures with wrong aspect ratio… outdated is so mild…!

But I had good intentions, I wanted to help him look a bit more trendy:

Me: ahhhh! so maybe we could have it look more web2.0

I really hoped he had heard at least something about the super web2.0 trend.

Me: Have you heard something about it?

Manager: Ah yes! sure! Any web to have a look at?

Me: err…

I said to myself: I will think again twice before making assumptions next time.

Case B: Master of the buzzwords

Manager: we are gonna rebuild the current website which is a piece of shit to be honest and it looks so old and outdated and we are going to do it very web2.0-ish

I was hallucinating… admittedly the website was a piece of crap without any doubt, but I had never heard such a sincere declaration from a manager in the last years, I think. He continued his principles declaration:

next thing you guys are going to do is to have a look at a website which is a list of all web2.0 websites so you can have an idea of what I'm talking about

Oh thank you very much for showing me what web2.0 is. Had to contain my laughing spams when I saw the "web 2.0 list of web 2.0 websites" - it was one of those webs aimed to appear in digg, like "Top web 2.0 websites - the deffinitive list".
Two days later he came back:

hey guys have you seen the website?

Then he turns to the designer, without giving us time to answer:

cool can you change the current blue background with a web 2.0 blue? like that blue of flickr…

Surprisingly he turned to me and asked me:

what do you think?

I tried to not to laugh (once again) when hearing the sole idea of "web 2.0 blue" and in general the way he applied web2.0 to every possible concept. And said, kind of joking:

Well, for it to be a real web 2.0 it needs gradients. And increase the font size which is too small. And less text. There's way too much text. A couple of badges won't harm, and a big BETA on right side of the title would be superb.

Obviously he didn't understand the joke. Next thing he said to the designer was: OK can you put more gradients on it?

Sigh…

And I was there to listen to him! Although I don't have any picture as I forgot the camera and I didn't take any note as I didn't bring a ballpen (or a laptop, as the modern speech-attendants do), I'll try to summarise here the best points of the talk.

The event was held at Westminster University, on the New Cavendish St Campus. It was the first time I visited an english university so I was quite curious about how the ambience was going to be, the installations, etc. It looked all quite modern and a bit posh, but without being overhelming. Our place was the big Lecture Theatre, and it actually resembled a lot all of those american classrooms which I only had seen in the movies. It had that feeling…
Jeff was actually a very nice person, quite accessible and open to any questions and feedback. He promised to transmit all of the feedback to the working team at Amazon, as seems like these speechs are used as a source of feedback from active developers. Something like a pool of ideas for everybody. So the event was more of an open discussion between developers than a university lecture. This wasn't an inconvenient at the beginning, since the seats seemed quite comfy even if they were the austere style of classrooms seatings, but at the end after almost two hours being there my back really hurt and I was willing the people to stop asking questions and allowing me to go home! (This sensation is specially more intense if you just have been sitting all day long in work).

So now to the speech itself… he gave a good overview of how he finished working in what he works and he was quite honest "I really didn't believe I was the best person for my job". After that he introduced Amazon briefly and later, each one of the technologies which Amazon provides to the developers, either paying for the use or not. Obviously that was the longest part of the speech. I loved this sentence: "We want to open up the creativity of the developers". That is quite nice! So, the system roughly works like this: we offer you some information in a way that we both can benefit.

Allow me to remind you that I didn't take any note and my memory is not really reliable so maybe some of the names aren't exactly ok. If in doubt you'd better go and get some info by yourself!

These are the main services that Amazon offers (and I remember):

1. ECS (E-commerce Services). That allows you to retrieve data from Amazon store products. And when they say "data" they are referring to lots of data! Even images. You can then do whatever your creativity allows you in what regards to showing that information. For example as you can track the price variations in the products, there's people which has built like an Stock Market with Amazon product prices. Other people has built an application in which you add something yo tour wishlist and when it reaches a given price (or less) the system sends you an email.
2. Alexa services. You can access Alexa data. This is what is done for example in webs like alexaholic. You can evey buy your own search engine using Alexa services. He explained how this is done, in a way that your code is converted into parallelised code and sent to the search engines, and then you're invoiced depending on how many resources you used with your search engines. This is interesting since it allows you to have a certain functionalities but without having to invest in all the infraestructure and maintenance needed. Terms like Return of investment arise quickly here…!
3. Mechanical Turk. I hadn't listened about that before. It's like a way to use Distributed Human Intelligence. You create "Human Intelligence Tests" (HITs) and put a price and a maximum number of replies. Then people around the world which participate in the project decide to answer your question, being payed the amount you specify. Although this looked stupid at the beginning if you think later is a very powerful medium to get massive results without having to invest in infraestructures. He put an example with image recognition: create a HIT for classifying pictures distinguishing between them having a human face on them or not.
4. S3. I'm pretty sure everybody has listened about this storage service that is provided by Amazon. He did show us some examples built upon it, even applications which run entirely on the client side and have only persistence in S3 servers (an impressive javascript wiki).

Of all of them I would say the one which impressed me more is the Mechanical Turk! I still can't think of an immediate application for my ideas but it left me mumbling around it, which is very cool.

Also somebody asked about accessing imdb data (which Amazon owns too) but Jeff said that although it's been asked more than once, they don't have plans to allow access to that yet.
If you want to find more about all of these services you just need to have a look at Amazon Web Services. There's also the Amazon Web Services blog, which is written by Jeff, where you can find lots of examples to sites which use them, and finally Jeff's blog which obviously is more personal.

I would like to thank Dean Wilson which organized everything. It was a very nice evening :)

UPDATE 23 may 2006: Steven Goodwin provides some pictures of the event. Thanks Steven!

Following (or inspired by) Madgoblin's to do list…, no strict priority order:

• fix more bugs and add more features to xplsv.tv
• learn more about vj'ing
• do more lives (vj + music)
• experimental vj live
• really learn ruby + rails
• improve my english
• learn how to play with my new keyboard
• compose another EP for roterfleck netlabel (I have the concept and one song)
• finish blue tuesday (just will need to finish a new scene and polish and clean everything a bit) done
  
• do a demo for mac (hence use the new code for mac & pc)  done with tube by xplsv
• fr…o demo (featuring madgoblin)
• secret demoscene project, number 1 was tube demo by xplsv (done)
  
• secret demoscene project, number 2
• music for tlotb experimental demo (will be the definitive challenge, either do it or die on it!)
• create video versions of my demos and add them as motions to xplsv.tv done
  
• adapt my events list implementation to the new code, including the impulse tracker exporter
• port ppg demos to mac (current blue tuesday code works on mac and pc)
• finish tlotb web
• add tags to all elements in my home page (that means restoring back the photos, demos, gfx and txt sections)
• play with flash8 and see what can be done
• go to breakpoint06 and release something decent there (and I already have the tickets!!)
• learn more standard, usable and accessible web techniques (or be more web2.0)
• read more books
• finish the almost finished songs that I have floating around my hard disk for more than 5 years now
• do more food experiments (but stop eating so many sweets)
• help sin with his demoscene search engine (salmiakki)
• help sml with his demoscene divulgation projects (scene school & related projects)
• stop doing to do lists, and get things done! :)

What's better than a Cube? A rounded cube!

After my I-hate-all-webmails post (sorry, in Spanish), I must recognize I have found one which is pretty decent (also very mac-ish): Round Cube.

It's still in alpha but works greatly and nicely, super ajax powered… and it's so clean…!

If you want to try it, use these installation instructions. Pretty straightforward.

A MUST have - I think it'll become the web2.0 webmail program ;-)