Since mysql doesn’t support transactional table modifications (i.e. you can’t wrap ALTER in BEGIN/COMMIT) every so often you’ll get migrations that fail, putting your database in schema purgatory.

A handy way to deal with this is to run migrations manually from console like this:

ActiveRecord::Migration.add_index :commonalities, :match_id ActiveRecord::Migration.remove_column :users, :middle_name

Of course, these will run against whatever environment you started console with.

Our own Jordan Schwartz has gotten Swaggle.mobi on the cover of Mashable, sweet!

I’ve recently become re-fascinated with the ways in which I can improve the functioning of my brain through vitamins, supplements, and tricks. I’ve been practicing GTD for a while, but recently got a few books on the chemical influencers and the effects of sleep. A great introduction to the power of modifying your behavior and diet by John Medina can be found here and here.

Some interesting points include:

• You can increase your “executive function” by a factor 80 – 100% just by exercising 3 times a week for 30 minutes.
• If you learn a skill and then need to apply it creatively, your chance of doing so correctly is increased by a factor of 3 if you sleep 8 hours between the acquisition of the skill and it’s application. i.e. learn new maths skills at night, and apply them in the morning.
• you have an attention span that lasts about 10 minutes—attention must be “re-aquired” every ten minutes and only emotionally charged information can do this. i.e. when teach or presenting to others, every ten minutes inject some significant emotional information to keep people tuned in
• lecithin with choline can dramatically improve memory recall

A while ago I was inspired by the O’Reilly Radar report on the Facebook application platform to do a deeper analysis on why some applications thrive and most don’t. I wrote a paper with the results and it was just published on O’Reilly Radar as:

The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive—And Most Don’t

by Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D.

Here’s the main question: is it worth your time or money to either create a Facebook application, or integrate your existing social technology into Facebook?

To address this question, I looked at several things: What does healthy growth and success in Facebook look like? What user goals are being met by successful applications? What features help an application grow successfully? What kinds of applications have not been created yet—in other words, what are the opportunities for innovation? Finally, how much and what kind of advertising is required to be self-sustaining?

For the analysis, I took the application usage data collected by the O’Reilly crew and selected a subset of succeeding and failing applications for deeper examination, coding them by features and user goals met.

To see the results of the analysis, you’ll have to buy the report. ;) I will however share a couple of snippets:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain.

In examining each application, we spent some time with the reviews and the discussion topics, expecting that applications that were more active would have more posts by users. We found however that reviews were not reviews. Rather, the review section seemed to be largely used for users to communicate with application developers, giving their feedback and reporting bugs, and to each other about the application.

The discussion topics section was used more for users to connect to one another. What was striking, however, was that both of these sections tended to be used to a greater degree when social applications (e.g., social games) did not provide a venue for verbal interaction within the game itself. The reviews then became overloaded with demands for the user-to-user communication required to use the application. These overloaded review sections, much like the overloaded horoscope or game discussion areas, reinforce the message that people come to social sites to be social, and will twist any application into an opportunity to communicate.

Special thanks to Roger and Jimmy with the O’Reilly crew for access to your data and your help editing the paper.

In the past couple of months we’ve been devoting all of our energy to our Pathable Beta so we could do some private testing on a few events this coming month. As a part of the process we did a few interviews with event organizers when we were down at E-Tech this past week—very illuminating.

The core technologies and concepts behind Pathable, namely the tagging and social matching algorithms as well as the social badge concepts, were developed this past year and tested at several events, including O’Reilly Media’s FOO Camp, Seattle’s BizJam and the Thingamajiggr technology event. In the early stages, the social networking facility was provided by a partnership with Crowdvine. We decided a while ago however to really leverage our social matching and face-to-face integration points we needed to produce the entire end-to-end experience internally.

I’m really excited about how the Pathable online directory is looking. I’ve been obsessed with mapping out social spaces for years now and I really think this is going to be a great way to do so for not only events, but any community of practice.

This is a picture of our badges….produced on PDFs, easy to print! We have a few other cool designs in the works. People really, really do care about how they are being presented to others. I’m always surprised by how so many event badges seem like an afterthought.

I like this a lot.

he he

This is great!

Here’s a funny thread from one of my mailing lists (BCWA), generally a good group of friends, but one that every now and then breaks into a bit of a flame war:

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Subject: Generic Thread

Political opinion attached to news information. Historical reference. Snarky, funny commentary.

—Brian

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thank you for your commentary. It was insightful and I laughed.

I love you.

—E

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Snarky rebuttal. Youtube link and quote from wikipedia. Reference to previous thread. Thinly veiled personal attack.

—Matt

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Heinlein Quote.

—Steven

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Hitler comparison. End of thread.

—Matt

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Complaint to moderator.

—Steve

I was doing some back-of-the-envelope estimates of the prevalence and type of events that are found online to help our planning with Pathable. This information is hard to acquire without spending a lot of money on market research reports so I thought I would share what I found:

How many events are coordinated and/or promoted through online social software? These numbers are very rough, provided to give a sense of scale.

• 5,500 conferences online each year in the networking directory confabb
• 67,000 conferences with 4 million registrants in the registration service RegOnline
• 15 million registered users in Evite
• 150,000 estimated(1) events in the United States in Upcoming
• 250,000 estimated(1) events in the United States in Facebook
• 150,000 estimated(1)events in the United States in MySpace

(1)These numbers are roughly estimated by finding the rates of events per user across four metropolitation areas (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago) and then extrapolating to the larger population. Therefore the numbers are biased by urban rates. If any of these sites want to send me their real numbers I would be very happy to receive them.

What types of events are being posted?

I found the following types of events by scraping a week’s worth of event data in Facebook across those same four urban centers:

Looks like parties, and in particular birthday parties, are the big winners in Facebook.

This is brilliant. One of those things that actually seem obvious but somehow you never thought of it before:

Part of the interface is written in software, and part of it can be written by anyone with knowledge of the physical world, simply by using things from the physical world!

I wonder if one could hack one of them computer controlled chess games to create a poor mans version of this.

I just posted this comment on a TechCrunch article:

Heh, funny story. Back sometime in 2003 I think, a group of us made a game where you could box George W. It got virally distributed to about 100,000 people or so just by email. After a few weeks the fricking CIA called us!

We thought it was a joke, but looked up the agent in charge and sure enough she was in the Seattle HQ for the CIA, the same phone number and all. They made it pretty clear that it would be “trouble” for us if we didn’t take it down as the game, they said, could be construed as a “threat to the president”.

Ultimately, the guy whose name was on the domain name, I think it was smakbush.com, got worried and we took it down. I was stunned.

in response to a video linked there…

Update: My friend just made the game public so you can see what they were so freaked out about at http://www.ihateyoursuv.com/media2.html