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Archives for July 2015

|LIVE NOW| Twitter evolving materialized views on top of the raw event system

July 30, 2015 Leave a Comment


I am excited to see Twitter get serious about intelligent material views on top of the event stream that it shows in almost-raw form to date.

At the beginning the view of Twitter was incredibly raw. As a user you would see the events posted by the people that you follow. That was kinda it.

Then the individual tweet view got a touch smarter:

  • links to @foo and #bar,
  • inlining photos and videos relatively recently.

There has been talk of a “Facebook like” filtered feed approach (which scared many users), and we are seeing some signs of this such as “What you missed while you were away”, but all in all Twitter has kept pretty darn minimal.

Immutable Data Hides Many Sins

At the heart of Twitter is the notion that a Tweet is somewhat immutable. You can’t edit it after the fact, other than deleting it entirely (and even then it is probably cached in various places and never truly gone).

This makes life a lot easier for the service and the third parties that consume it. There is no need to handle change events, or deal with the sneaky “1) get a Tweet popular, 2) edit the Tweet entirely to say something else or #rickroll” issues. However, I think that for Twitter to get to the next level it is time to make changes in the views.

What would a native Meerkat feel like?

When we saw MeerKat and Periscope jump onto the scene what did we see in our Twitter streams?

|LIVE NOW|

Not helpful, and probably incorrect. Just because video was rolling at the time the tweet was sent, I may be seeing this tweet at a later time where it isn’t the case.

If video was built natively into Twitter from the beginning, it would tell you the truth about the state of video. Imagine if you were looking at the feed when the video streamer turned off their camera. At that point |LIVE NOW| would disappear.

Other features would include:

  • A native icon would replace the text “|LIVE NOW|” in the UI
  • You would be able to tell Twitter “Tell me when a follower starts streaming”, and “Really tell me when @Bob starts streaming”

Beyond video

The video example is only one of many changes that Twitter can employ. When you observe your stream you see others emerge. I see other state examples such as:

“✌ @Reading “HTTPS: the end of an era” ing.am/p/3Lne”

Slack has changed my expectations from text input across the aboard with the ease of editing mistakes. I hit enter a lot earlier with the knowledge that I can hit the up arrow and quickly edit and change the message. I now hate it when I make a mistake in a Tweet aren’t can’t do the same.


Google is doing this well across several of their products. Google Inbox takes your email streak and makes sense of it. The emails with information on flights and car rentals are packaged together into a clean card that represents a holistic view of the trip. A better User Experience comes out of the previously disjointed emails, as Google Now had found reason out of the various data sources.

Finally, I would love smart de-duplication. When a slew of followers are tweeting, quoting, and retweeting the same content, wrap it together in a nice way. I love the fact that Nuzzel uses my friends engagement to tell me what is most popular within my network, and Twitter could do more of this itself.

State Streams and Materialized Views

If you are interested in implementing this type of separation in your own work I recommend watching Martin Kepppmann talk about state streams and materialized views.

And then you need to finish up with the master, Rich Hickey, on Value Values.

For Twitter, although we don’t see these features showing up in the UI yet, it isn’t that they aren’t world class at handling this type of architecture. I can’t wait to see Twitter changing in the coming months.

My uber selfish thinking and our lack of long term thinking in Silicon Valley

July 27, 2015 Leave a Comment


I admit it, I join the majority of the human race in being pretty crap at thinking with a long term mindset, even if doing so would be the right selfish thing to do (let alone being the right thing for a larger community).

Being around the world of high tech, especially in Silicon Valley, it is easy to be awashed in simplistic flawed logic that declares all regulation as bad, and all innovation and disruption as good. A better experience with convenience for users is all that matters.

So, I was very happy to read the Kim-Mai Cutler’s piece on The Conflict Between Policy’s Ratchet Effect And Tech’s Accelerating Speed.

If you hang out in SOMA or Palo Alto, the majority point of view at the coffee shop is a very black and white:

“Our crappy government, and the mafia’s that control the taxi medallions, are trying to hang on to a world that has already been disrupted. Move on and give me my Uber everywhere!”

You certainly can’t beat the experience:

  • Call for a ride without having to talk to a human
  • See where the cars are
  • Simple payment (no need to pull out a credit card, let alone cash)
  • See who is coming to get you, with a rating
  • Have the ability to rate the driver and for them to rate you.

The last one is a huge game changer. Before this, what were the incentives for both sides to be the best people they can be? The odds of driver and passenger ever seeing each other again are very low.

The rating system makes the micro transaction something that can effect the transactions that are to come.

The taxi cab companies didn’t innovate (in general, there are exceptions… the world is large) and instead often you jump in a cab that has a TV in your face selling ads at your captive eye balls, and a disgruntled smelly driver who is mad at you for asking about using your credit card as they want cash to not count towards taxes.

The mobile revolution came with a disruptive look at transportation, and it continues to happen as computing helps build out efficiencies (e.g. Uber Pool and Lyft Line).

This doesn’t mean that we need to let companies come in and have their way with transportation with zero regulation. Regulation isn’t evil. The free market has no soul, and we should look at the incentives to make sure that long term protections are in place.

Kim does a great job at spelling this out:

“It’s about what those pressures imply for public infrastructure like roads and the city housing stock, which are inherently much harder to scale than software.”

“There’s a real difference of ideology here,” said a source close to De Blasio’s impact study. “You have a company that believes that the free market will essentially correct any negative externalities. What if there are so many drivers that nobody can make a living or that there are so many drivers and vehicles that we have unbearable congestion? There is a world in which Uber is still making money while our traffic moves at five miles per hour.”

It also looks at the nuance and both sides:

“They added that the city instituted medallions during the Great Depression eighty years ago when 30,000 drivers trawled through the streets to earn money. “There were so many people driving cars for nickel fares that nobody could make any money. The congestion became unworkable, so Mayor [Fiorello] LaGuardia installed medallions because we had a tragedy of the commons.”

But on the converse side, policy and laws have an unintended, and sometimes nasty, effect of sticking around for years or decades even as circumstances clearly change. It’s called the ratchet effect, and it’s much easier to ratchet in favor of limits than it is to push for growth.

For instance, New York City’s cap on medallions remained unchanged at 11,787 from the end of the Great Depression on through 1996, an imposed level of scarcity that has made medallion values skyrocket to north of $1 million each until Uber arrived. Those values enabled the taxi industry to be one of De Blasio’s sources of political donations, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions.”

And comes up with the question that will come back to time and time again as we witness an increase in disruptions:

“How can companies really believe that purportedly temporary measures don’t become set in stone forever?

And on the other side, how can city governments work with companies that only selectively share data on their impact when it’s politically convenient, and which resist for months and years to pay basic taxes which sustain the public infrastructure that makes their businesses possible?

As John Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley since the 1970s, put it last week, “You have this crumbling public infrastructure, and now the Internet has made it possible to essentially skim the cream.”

There are other ways though. Nick Grossman over at Union Square Ventures favors a more modernized regulatory approach, which is permissive upfront in exchange for transparency and access to data. He has written an entire white paper about it here.

Unfortunately, these companies don’t do this. In San Francisco, both Lyft and Uber don’t share data with the city that would help it understand whether trips are merely substituting for MUNI or BART rides instead of replacing additional car traffic. Airbnb also doesn’t share data with the city, so the planning department has to resort to scraping the company’s website and using forms that are self-reported by hosts once a year.

Because of this, the regulatory process devolves into a game of brinksmanship around rigid caps and controls, which is what we all saw this week.”

Grey and Good

There is a lot of grey here. It seems obvious that with self-driving cars eventually coming, drivers have some years of making a wage, but how long will it all last, and then what?

Having people do work at the end of an API is one thing. It is very point to point. It isn’t all good and it isn’t all bad.

Uber uses technology to enable people to run their own business, or work for Uber depending on your point of view. Can we do the equivalent but enable professions not just task workers? Enable apprenticeships and collections?

We are seeing some success stories (and many perceived failures) with self organization, such as this example of nurses providing much better care with a lower overhead, and more that Frederic Laloux is cataloging:

Much is changing, and more experiments need to happen. While it is unclear what effects we will see from true automation and computers continuing on the path to super intelligence, something is going to give.

Now is the time to discuss the trade offs before we are in the heat of the moment. Eventually we may need some heat to allow meaningful change to occur at the governing level. Will it be time for something drastic such as a basic income guarantee, and a chance to take on the mission to get basic human rights to all of us?

I will try to think in this way and not resort to my usual “man, I wish <insert city> had Uber for my convenience!”

Alexa, can you please take care of my kids?

July 22, 2015 Leave a Comment


I admit to being skeptic when I first heard about the Amazon Echo. I have a phone in my pocket at all times, so do I really need a voice UI in the home that doesn’t go with me or tie into much of my ecosystem?

I have found it quite interesting to see how the Echo is used, especially by the family. That has been the key for me, as my kids (and even my wife) don’t have a phone at their hip. The other factor is that this shared input changes the entire dynamic.

I enjoy the obvious usage: I ask it for the weather, set timers, and I play music. Since voice is very much the primary input, the device handles commands incredibly well. It is comical to go back to Siri, where you can go beyond simple launching “Music” vs. “Play Pandora Robbie Williams”, and beyond that you have state to be able to have a back and forth conversation. I find myself wanting to do the same, and keep using voice with my iOS apps (e.g. “next song”, “pause”, etc).

Alexa, let’s crowd source some great jokes!

Second to music, the next most used Amazon Echo function at home is the joke-bot:

“Alexa, tell me a joke”

The kids love it, and it is fun to watch them. When a bad joke kicks in they try to get their point across by changing their actions:

“Alexa, tell me a really funny joke!”

It is a glimpse to the future to see them talk to Alexa, expecting her to understand so much more than we know she can grok right now. Where I find myself splurting out the same short actions, fearing that I can’t steer off of a path, they tweak and change to try to get a better point across.

Some of the jokes are pretty good, at least for the kids, but they do repeat and it leave you thinking that this will be a great platform to build a joke database!

If I could rate the jokes and tell Alexa when I am not a fan we could end up with an onslaught of unique humor streaming down on us. The Pandora of jokes may be best served through an experience like Alexa versus your phone.

Alexa, please listen to just me

The fact that anyone can talk to Alexa is a huge feature, but it has side effects. The kids shout at the device at the same time and fight over it. Just as we have a fingerprint with TouchID, I can’t wait for Alexa to know my voice print.

I have often wanted to turn on a restricted mode:

“Alexa, only listen to me”

“Alexa, Josh has control for now”

“Alexa, Sam can choose the next song”

“Alexa, Lucas is next, and then rotate through”

It was such a problem that I ended up tricking the tricks with slight in hand that hid the fact that I was selectively turning on and off the “mute” and only having it off when I was speaking. This allowed me to quieten the kids for a second and have them asking me:

“Dion, can you tell Alexa to play ….”

It was hard not to giggle a little at this. I can only imagine what life is like at Ben’s house with his huge family!

Alexa, please text my Mom and tell her I am here

The voice print will also allow for actions to take on context. Our house is a revolving door of neighborhood kids, and as soon as they get in they want an adult to text their parents to let them know they are here.

I really want them to be able to just tell Alexa instead of me, and have her take care of it. Alexa would need to be able to send messages, and grok who is saying this and who their “Mom” is, but learning that context once would save a lot of time.

As I think about how modern families operate the the integrations that tie up the loose ends, voice platforms are going to be great glue. Alexa has surprised me with the quality of ambient voice recognition, and I can’t wait to see what platforms come up with next.

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The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

Dion Almaer

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