That set of faces, top left: FaceMap

For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.

We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.

Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:

But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for.  We needed something wide to fill that banner space.  Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?

So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image?   Not hard at all, it turns out.

I turned to Twitter.  Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block.  It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.

Next features I’ll add:

• Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
• Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
• Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
• Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
• Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,

Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.

Google App Engine

Thanks Google, what a tasty birthday present. I’m thinking the Google App Engine is going to be a lot of fun. I guess the devil is going to be in the scaling. Haven’t read that bit of the docs yet.

2008 Predictions: Internet and Social Media

It is traditional. Writing some predictions for 2008. I’m going to focus on the Internet, social media and associated technology.

Google Search: Trust

I think 2008 will be the year when we’ll realize that we can’t have search being a closed algorithm any more. I get the feeling that it is going to be just too easy for a couple of folk at Google to work out how to pervert search a tiny bit and make a couple of billion extra in revenue. Given that you can do that, it is going to happen eventually, isn’t it, despite the ‘Do No Evil’ thing, which is just sounding more and more defensive these days.

Time to dust off that wikia vision of open search and get moving on it. Ooooh look, the are launching something on Jan 7th. We’ve only got the one Internet, and it would be a pity if we lost trust in our search results.

Also, I’ve always been really uneasy about the whole SEO thing. It feels to me like the SEO gurus are like high priests claiming to know what God is thinking.

Facebook. What?

2008 will be the year we collectively forget about facebook. And give up on social networking for the sake of social networking. My hope is that Open Social and similar will help make possible really useful applications that are socially enabled.

Web $2

You pronounce that web two dollars. I predict the end of Web 2.0 rounded corner build-it-and-think-of-a-business-model bubble. Why? Because with weakening economies in the US and Europe, VCs belts are going to tighten and there will be less money lying around for the high-risk punt at gathering a few million members to somehow later.

Those that have collected the few million members will start the money making machines. I’d predict some good old-fashioned outrage as fun Web 2 sites start to sell their members data or attention to stay afloat.

I’m hoping the focus goes back on to decent revenue-making businesses and some really good ideas emerge and start and work. And people actually pay for it and are happy doing that. People don’t mind paying for stuff, as long as they can really see the value. You need more than (another plain old) social network to pass that test.

The answer to the question that twitter is

I think this year we’ll see the answer to the question “What is twitter for?” And I’m not sure we are going to like the answer. See Web 2$ above. I’d love twitter to stay its lovely simple self, but I’m just a little worried it can’t be.

A new A-List :-)

The old A-listers will collapse en mass from spending too many long nights mumbling into seesmic and will be replaced with a new widgetized microblogging A-list that say nothing useful but say it all the time all over the place. Oh hang on, has this already happened? :-)

Reflect a moment

Tim O’Reilly comments on Google’s Renewables initiative announced this week:

The stakes are high. If our worst fears about global warming are right, we’re going to bring our technological progress to a halt unless we get new sources of clean energy. Google’s goal of beating the cost of energy from coal is critical, because coal is the default lowest-cost choice for electricity generation, and the worst from a global warming perspective.

And let’s be clear, the internet industry we know and love is a huge consumer of power. I love Nick Carr’s estimate from last year that a Second Life avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human. While Nick’s calculations are provocative rather than authoritative, he makes a good point. Our electronic lifestyle has hidden, off-the-books costs. Google is very smart to acknowledge this fact.

Thanks Tim (and Nick). Beautifully put. Point made.

And remember, if we just ignore this, we end up back at Web 0.0, with either no electricity, or no livable planet.

Get the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it again. — and make sure to watch the updates a year later. See? Climate change is accelerating. Bickering about who’s fault it is so 2005. We move on now. We fix this.