Problems at Facebook?

I was thinking about the whole recession thing and how it impacts Microsoft. As I worked through my train of thought, I remembered the huge 899 million Euro fine that the EU slapped Microsoft with in Feb 2008. I remember thinking then that the EU was almost treating Microsoft like an ATM (probably inspired by this post).

I wondered why in this time of recession the EU hasn't yet again tapped its ATM and thought I'd update my Facebook status to say "Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM (Microsoft) again using the same anti-trust excuse...". To my surprise, I got a little popup that said "Validation Error - A validation error occured" and nothing more informative.

Interesting. What exactly is Facebook validating, and did I have some red-herring text in there? I would expect filters for expletives, racial slurs, geo-political issues... but my status message didn't seem to violate any of those. I tried the following variants, which all failed:

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM (MSFT) again using the same anti-trust excuse..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM again using the same anti-trust excuse..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM again..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU"

"wonders..."

Ok, so it's certainly not the text of my status message that's causing this. I started poking around, and my 'Home' page seemed OK - I had news items, status updates from friends, etc. However, when I jumped to my own profile, I was suprised to find that all data I had published was blank. No wall posts, no posted items, no recent history. However, my photo albums seemed to fine, as did my profile information.

My guess is there's been some kind of data loss-ish issue at FB (a lot of their data is simply held in caches so maybe a cache and replicas blew away - perhaps Wall posts are not persisted?). Anyways, I'll try to update status again and see if stuff comes back... meanwhile, I'm locked out of changing my Facebook status...

Any guesses about what might be going on?

Update: I can't seem to be able to clear my previous status message either... the status is cleared in the webpage (local javascript clearing it, I would assume) but on refresh I see my old status again...

Update2: And we're back... that didn't last too long. Cool!

Post on The Live Mesh Blog, PDC 2008

I wrote a post on the Live Mesh Blog earlier today that talks about what I primarily work on - the Pub-Sub backend of Live Mesh. I briefly referenced that I worked in this space in a previous post where I commented on Apple's Push Notification announcements.

I've written tons of design documents, specs and tech summaries on the job but writing this post was an interesting exercise - I tried to make it readable for both the geeks and the regular folks in the audience (hence the references to the postal system). I'm not sure how well this will work... I guess feedback from the blog comments will be a good indicator of how effective the attempt was.

In addition to my awesomely smart teammates on the Live Mesh team, who I enjoy working with greatly, I wanted to send a shoutout to Tom who originally helped design a lot of the stuff described in the blog post.

For those who want more details about how stuff works behind the scenes, there are some Live Mesh related deep-dive sessions scheduled at PDC 2008. Sessions related to the Live Mesh backend architecture ("Live Services: Mesh Services Architecture and Concepts" by Abolade Gbadegesin) and backend communications services ("Live Services: Notifications, Awareness, and Communications" by John Macintyre) might be most interesting to those who were intrigued by my post on the Live Mesh Blog and are curious to know more. 

Unfortunately, I won't be attending PDC - I'll probably be busy chugging caffeine and fanning servers while thousands of new users give our new Live Mesh offerings a spin. :)

More Food For Thought About Google And Exit Polls

A couple of months ago I conjectured that Google might be able to produce a very accurate exit poll for the '08 Election. Today's post on the Official Google Blog shows some information that's very close to what I suspected they could generate - very cool. Particularly interesting is analysis of traffic from swing states. I'm sure they could do much more here - trending by counties, for instance.

In that previous post of mine, I guessed that they won't publicly release a prediction, but bits and pieces of information and trends like these are a good stand-in for a full blown exit poll.

Regret - Not Reading Enough Books!

A very regretful personal trend I've noticed over the last few years is that I've been reading a lot fewer books than I used to, and I didn't used to read too many earlier either. This applies to works of fiction, self-help books, biographies, etc - the more 'traditional' books. I'm often reminded of this personal shortcoming of mine when I'm around friends and family who read a lot - I usually have much to contribute to conversations, until the topic turns to recent/popular books and I just draw blanks.

This regret hits home even more on the rare occasions that I do pick up a book recommended by my wife or my friends (on average, once in 2 months) - I tend to enjoy these books more often than not. The last works of fiction I read were Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash - both recommendations which I enjoyed, and took about 1+ months each to read. I read much slower than most 'good' readers (my wife, who can chow down books orders of magnitude faster than I can), which means I have more breaks and more opportunities for distractions.

When it comes to non-book reading though, it's a whole different story. I'm a voracious reader of blogs, news, current events, technology, opinions and trivia. I can read a newspaper cover-to-cover as fast as anyone I know, browse through several blogs a day without realizing it and read editorials/articles online pretty regularly. Maybe reality is just more entertaining than stories, or lessons from current events are more exciting than lessons in self-help books, or maybe I just do well with 'shorter' reading.

Or maybe I'm just not comfortable with the form factor of traditional books, which is why I've been eyeing Amazon's phenomenally successful Kindle - I wonder if that's my panacea. It's not cheap though. It would be super-awesome to be able to rent a Kindle at local libraries to check it out. I would totally buy one if it let's me get back into reading more 'traditional' books.

Hmm, I'm really tempted now. Maybe I'll just cough up the dough and give this a shot. Anyone have good/bad experiences to share about their Kindle?

Surprised by Live Search

I use Live Search as my web search engine of choice, but every so often I need to use Google to find the information I'm really looking for. I was really looking for a site that gave me good side-by-side results from both engines - kind of like how dogpile.com used to work in the old days (I was surprised to find dogpile.com still alive and doing search compilation, but I really wanted a side-by-side view from only my two preferred engines).

Recently, as part of an internal Microsoft initiative, I found exactly what I was looking for - a site that runs the searches in parallel and presents them side-by-side. As a bonus, you get to vote on which engine performed better. I've been using this as my default search engine on all my machines for the last few days and I'm already pretty surprised at how often Live Search comes up with far superior answers. I guess I never paid to attention to comparative relevance and quality until it was presented to me in such an 'in-your-face' manner. Of course, there are still many searches where Google trumps Live Search. Anecdotally, I'd say I prefer Live Search about 60-70% of the time, but maybe that's just me (and it could well be my inherent bias for Microsoft products).

One aspect that simply blew me away was Live Search's ability to fetch answers for very specific things I was looking for. A lot of these are powered by something Live Search calls 'Instant Answers'. A few samples from queries I performed over the last week where I was really impressed by Live Search:

- MSFT GOOG AMZN AAPL quote vs MSFT GOOG AMZN AAPL
- seahawks schedule vs seahawks schedule
- highest peak in the US vs highest peak in the US
- calories in beer vs calories in beer
- president of somalia vs president of somalia
- Colt McCoy vs Colt McCoy

These were just some of the searches I ran last week - the Instant Answers site has other query formats you can try (incidentally, I didn't know about Instant Answers or the formats until just two days ago). One place where Google still beats Live Search hands down is showing inline maps and directions. I use this fact to give a lot of sh*t to a friend of mine who works on Live Maps - maybe one of these days I'll annoy him enough to make him go fix this stuff! ;)

Bill & Jerry, and A Lame Blog Post

You've probably seen the new Microsoft Windows TV ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The second in the series showed up last night.

When I first heard that Jerry Seinfeld was signed for the ad campaign, I wasn't really sure if he would appeal to the current generation (and I'm not sure he does). I'm a Seinfeld fan though, so I was curious what the campaign would be like. I have to be honest - the ads were completely not what I was expecting. FWIW, not many in the company had seen the ads before they were shown publicly - at least, I hadn't.

Anyways, it seems like the ads have people talking. From what I've read, the reaction seems to be neutral to leaning negative - I think people were expecting a more direct retort to Apple's Mac vs PC ads. Personally, I found the ads pretty amusing. Subtle humor, no direct attacks and entertaining. I think Bill easily outshines Jerry in both ads so far. I had seen Bill Gates act in silly videos at company meetings before, plus in his last day at Microsoft video, so I knew he can do a decent job but I didn't think he could out-do Seinfeld. There are subtle references to Microsoft products and technologies throughout the ads - pretty funny for someone close to Microsoft but I can see how pretty much everyone else might miss it. From the coverage the campaign has gotten and the pervasiveness of the ad spots, I'm pretty impressed with how much buzz the campaign has already generated. A lot of critics have complained that the ad hardly mentioned Microsoft or Windows... does it really need to, though? Bill Gates == Microsoft == Windows. No more logos/information needed.

Knowing nothing other than what I've seen on TV so far, I think this will definitely be a long-remembered ad campaign. It looks like its going to be one of those hugely successful or hugely miserable ad campaigns. Of course, given that work @ Microsoft I hope it's successful.

I wonder how many CEOs have featured in ads. I can remember a few in recent times - Chrysler, Sprint, Ford. None of those had the CEO doing comedy, though. CEOs, especially founder-CEOs, have huge brand appeal and brand recognition so they seem to be a natural fit for come-back type ads. I hope Microsoft has better success than Ford, Chrysler and Sprint are having currently, though.

Given the buzz around the ads, I was kinda annoyed when David Webster from Microsoft, who's apparently running this campaign, posted an entry on his blog trying to justify the ads - the text of the post just reeks of defensiveness. If you're ballsy enough to sanction $300 million for an ad campaign, there's no need to put up a blog post trying to justify it even before the entire campaign has run its course. His tone sounds like he's trying to save his job already - where's the confidence, man? Super lame, Mr David Webster. I think you should've just kept quiet and let the campaign do the talking (or not, if they don't succeed).

Can Google Predict Election '08 Results?

Today's post on TechCrunch about possibly predicting election results using web traffic analysis reminded me of my thoughts from a few months ago.

Over the course of election season, starting with the presidential primaries through Super Tuesday and going into the national conventions, Google began releasing increasing amounts of election-related content and services. Reading the blog posts linked above and noticing the trend from Google leads to me the conclusion that the most relevant exit-poll for November's presidential election this year might actually come from Google.

Google likely already tracks user searches and email data from GMail. Combine that with some pretty basic data mining around traffic analysis, comments on their targetted election sites and popularity of their election related content/services and you could now get a pretty good 'pulse-of-the-nation' with respect to red state-vs-blue state. My guess is that the big push around election related content and services is an attempt to not only increase pageviews, but also harness large amounts of interesting data that can be mined for various interesting purposes. Additionally, this gives them a large data set to use to refine their own data mining technologies. I strongly suspect that Google will hold on to the raw data past election time and used it as test-data to track progresses in their mining technologies. Good data to test your technologies is *very* hard to to come by, and it would be foolish to let such rich data simply fall by the wayside.

Whether they publicly release their 'exit-poll' is another story altogether. I don't think Google really has much to gain by releasing the data even if they do manage to mine it. I know I wouldn't - I would mine the data, distribute predictions among team members for entertainment purposes only, see how close I got to the result, refine my algorithms and run it over the same data again to see how much closer I am now, and repeat. Releasing the data publicly, even if it turned out to be dead-on accurate, wouldn't buy me much. If it wasn't dead-on accurate, there is some amount of geek-cred that would be lost.

I guess November will prove if my theory above is correct.

P.S. I hope you picked up on the paradox in that last sentence above... :)