‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the sphere
Not a blogger was whining
Like headlights with no deer
The Beta Boys had spread
Each to his own state
Where many gifts and gadgets
Were his to await
Would it be an unlocked G1
Or Kindle from on high
We dreamt of DS Lights
So tiny and nigh
But behold,
Though the Beta Base is empty tonight
All of us gone
On our cold winter flights
We can always come back
To post something here:
A link to a video
To spread some good cheer
So where have we been
This whole merry year
To start Zach reads too much
And Sean’s drowning in beer
I got to meet some lovely ladies
One of whom1 let slip
Tales of LucasArts’ layoffs
With no good titles left to ship
Brian’s taken up drumming
To help with the band
(You should buy an mp3 or two
To lend us a hand)
Nate’s gone through boys
In both series and parallel
While Matt’s still open sourcing
Projects he loves so well
We even celebrated Hanukkah
With no care for thrift
While eating hearty pizza
Over cocoa and gifts
So tonight across the city
From Bay to Breakers and all the rest
From the heart of the Mission
We give you each our very best
But what is the one thing
For which I still wish?
Just access to MOMA2
So I can be stalkerish
- 1. Of course she never called me back. Hussy.
- 2. Google’s. Not SF’s.
Techcrunch mentioned last week that Google’s Toolbar was going to start redirecting 404 pages to show a Google search box. Well, it looks like this “feature” shipped with a few bugs. Unfortunately, the redirection happens if a page fails OR if any of the iframes in the page fail to load. So pretend you are running ads from a server hosted at Rackspace and another truck crashes into their datacenter. If any of those ads are loaded through an iframe and return a 404, Toolbar will helpfully take over your entire page. Super fun! Even better, if you have the Dell branded IE, you get the horrible ad covered page seen below:
If you want to try this out yourself, here’s the HTML I used to get the screenshot above. Just toss in in a file and load it up on a browser with the toolbar:
<html> <head> <title>This is a test</title> </head> <body> This is a test of Google Toolbar's new 404 replacement "feature". <iframe src="http://asdfkljdfjkas.com"> In here is some stuff no one cares about. </iframe> Observe as Google's Toolbar "helpfully" redirects the enclosing page to a search page. </body> </html>google, programming, rant, web
The fine folks over at Adroll (including our own Brendan Doms) just launched into private beta today. Adroll is a really interesting concept for buying and selling advertising. I got a chance to play with it a few weeks ago while it was still in alpha and I was very impressed. Basically the site takes a page from social networks and blogrolls and aims to improve the online advertising experience for everyone from advertisers to publishers to consumers.
The Holy Grail of online advertising is a perfect targeting system. Advertisers and publishers want to know that their ads are being put in front of people who care (re: people who will click through and buy things) and consumers don’t want to be bothered about things they’re not interested in. Google does this pretty well using their text based relevancy scoring and a small amount of data about the consumer (IP address, language, etc). They call it AdWords and it’s made them a ton of money (AdSense is the publisher facing half).
The problem is that online there’s a trade off between specificity and readership. A website that talks about, say, Northern California Surfing is the perfect place to advertise if you want to reach surfers. But a site like that isn’t large enough to set up and negotiate advertising deals with major surf gear makers. If only there were a bunch of other surfing sites that they could band together with to form a much larger and more attractive virtual publisher. Well, that’s exactly what Adroll lets you do. Similar sites can join together into highly targeted Ad Communities and use their combined readership to attract advertisers that might have ignored them before. There are also Tagrolls, which are similar to Ad Communities, but based on the publisher provided tags, giving an alternative way to target ads. Check out an example of an Ad Community below.
In order to make trying out their service basically risk-free, you can actually use your existing ad platform in concert with the Adroll service. Simply paste in the javascript you use to serve AdSense or Yahoo or whatever ads, set a reserve price for the ad space on your site, and if they can’t match it, they’ll just display your backup ads transparently. Cool, huh?
The idea behind Adroll is pretty neat, but it’s the execution that really sold me on the product. The site design is really clean and simple, navigation is easy, and a lot of effort clearly went into the interaction design. Check out this dynamic summary text when you go to buy an ad:
Very clear and concise, right? Include the fact that Adroll discloses the cut they take for each billing cycle, and there’s a lot of transparency in the whole system for both the buyers and sellers, which in my experience is sorely lacking in the advertising world.
I’ve only described the biggest features of the site, there’s a ton more I haven’t even touched on. Here’s a quick list of some other things I really liked about it:
- Publishers and advertisers also both get an excellent reporting system that makes it really easy to see
- Referral program for inviting in both Publishers and Advertisers
- Tag based searching for advertisers and publishers
- Publishers can find advertisers they think are good matches and offer a free trial
Basically, if you’re an advertiser looking for a better way to target your ads, or a publisher looking for a way to sell your ad space, I’d definitely recommend checking out Adroll.
Disclosure: I’m good friends with their lead developer and they promised me cookies if I wrote up my impressions. However as I’m hungry right now and the cookies aren’t here yet, I think it probably balances out.
Update: TechCrunch finally has a piece up about Adroll too.
No TagsJust in time for another huge wave of FPS’s this month (Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Soldier of Fortune, and Unreal Tournament 3) I’ve got some brief thoughts on the single-player experience of the games from earlier this fall. That means I’ll leave the Team Fortress 2 discussion for another day…so that I have more time to snipe Brian in the face right now.
Portal
Not a strict shooter, but still in a first-person perspective, Portal is the most amazing puzzle game I’ve played in recent years. The personality and character built into the AI that instructs you throughout the game is incredible and hilarious. The actual levels are fun and challenging without being too frustrating, and the game unlocks some really hard and mind-bending puzzles at the end to give even the most hardcore some nice re-playability. The story tie-in with Episode 2 is also a huge bonus, and works really well once you’ve played through both stories.
Of course, the best part of the game is the way that the gaming public has carried away a couple of its concepts. First is the “Weighted Companion Cube,” which is simply an item that you must use to complete one of the levels…but the game gives it such personality (including a hidden love shrine for it) that everyone who has played the game has a huge amount of sympathy for it. Yes, I am planning on getting a plush one for myself (shown below).
The mantra “The cake is a lie” has become synonymous with the game, and there are rumors of t-shirts. I won’t tell you what it means, but that should just be more motivation to buy the game. And if you have played, then you already know that it’s true.
Finally, the ending song is the funniest finale to a game I’ve ever heard. I was literally laughing out loud throughout the entire thing. Of course, it’s not that good if you haven’t just played through the game, but it’s still worth listening to, being written by our favorite online composer, Jonathan Coulton.
Halo 3
Halo 3 is much better than Halo 2. But then again, you knew I was going to say that, as I pretty much despised Halo 2 and let everyone know what a terrible job Bungie had done on it compared to the first. That said, Halo 3 still does not live up to the first game, but it comes considerably closer than the previous sequel.
The single-player campaign is of a fairly appropriate difficulty, though I still would have preferred Heroic and Legendary to be harder. The addition of achievements also gives some more reasons for going through more than once. The main problem is just that it was not up to par with what I was hoping for.
The story is really not that epic feeling, and nothing really happens. It felt like the first game established so many new ideas and concepts and all the second two did was dilute them. I really thought they were going somewhere interesting with the whole Cortana being possessed thing. Tycho and Durandal (crazy AI that are your main source of story) were the best part of Marathon 2, but Cortana in this game in no way lived up to their legacy. The ending is also terrible. I was left with a “what?” and completely unsatisfied feeling.
In general, I just wanted more “awesomeness” and “epicness” - fast paced war-like action with alien carnage in beautiful HD surround-sound was my order, and Halo 3 gets a poor tip for its delivery.
Bioshock
Bioshock is the best FPS I have played in recent memory. It is definitely a contender for my favorite FPS of all time, at least based on my first time through. My brain puts it in league with games such as Goldeneye and Halo. The RPG elements thrown in - getting experience and spending it on upgrades for magic-like powers and skills - are a welcome addition to the run-and-gun genre. The atmosphere, artwork, music, and setting are impeccable in their attention to detail, consistency, humor, and even story. The art and the way it communicated what the game was about blew me away.
The story of the city of Rapture, told through audio diaries and radio calls, is an intricate and well-crafted piece of fiction. Themes from the game revolve largely around capitalism and the idea of the utopia. Having never read Ayn Rand, but being familiar with the general gist of her stories, I’m fairly certain that Bioshock touches on many of the same concepts. There is even a FAQ that analyzes the story and reads like a thesis, comparing it to literature with slants describing what it says about religion, gender, and race. You just don’t see those for most games made nowadays (though I’m betting Metal Gear Solid has one as well).
If you’re looking for an excellent FPS with RPG elements and the best story this side of Rapture, you owe it to yourself to go play with the Big Daddies and Little Sisters of Bioshock.
No TagsOne of my favorite things about San Francisco is that this city has a really serious biking culture. Whether it’s weekend tourers in Marin, teched-out recumbents and racers from the peninsula, or hipster fixies from the Mission, this city is full of bikes of every variety. Get all of these bikers together in the same place (along with a healthy dose of hippies, progressive city planners, and winding forest and coastal roads,) and you get an amazing environment for recreational cycling. Bikes are beautiful pieces of equipment, with a significant amount of tech and craft coming together in one package. And, if all this wasn’t enough to get me interested, what other socially-acceptable reason am I going to find to wear spandex in public?
I caught the cycling bug shortly after arriving in the city. I’m not even sure where I heard about it or how I decided that I wanted to participate. I’ve never been exposed to a strong cycling culture before, either in Boston or Billings. I could never get into running outdoors because you just can’t get moving fast enough to keep the view from becoming depressing.
I had never ridden a decent bike before, but when I took my first test-ride on a road bike, I was instantly hooked. The effortlessness of high-speed riding on a road bike is really surprising, especially when compared to the Huffys and Diamond Backs of my youth. I shopped around for a bit and ended up buying a bike that was expensive enough to make sure that I’d ride it on a regular basis. Or at least that was my theory.
That’s my bike: A Raleigh Grand Prix ‘07. It’s got really great components from the 105 and Ultegra groupsets, which is cyclist code for “all of the little moving bits.” I spent a decent amount of time reading through Wikipedia articles on cycling gear and racing bikes, and was staggered by the vast amount of domain-specific knowledge that exists. I hope you can see how this hobby appeals to tech-oriented folks. It’s like a more expensive version of Legos, racecars, and superheros all mixed together. *swoon*
And, if the sheer amount of techy aspects to cycling isn’t enough, bike maintenance and construction is also an amazing craft that takes years to learn. I had no idea about the amount of finesse and artistry that goes into making something that seems as simple as a bike wheel. I bent my rear wheel slightly out of true recently and discovered that they are straightened not by pounding on them with a hammer or squeezing them in a vice, but by carefully tightening certain spokes to pull the wheel back into alignment while keeping it round.
That’s the alwaysBETA/Olin bike team. That’s right, when I caught the cycling bug, I managed to transfer it to Zach as well. (Don’t ask about the transmission method.) Zach and I actually have identical bikes through no fault of my own, although Zach’s is almost a full 10 cm shorter. What can I say? Zach is a huge copycat. We now have identical Google bike jerseys as well, and when we go riding on the weekends, we get the “are you guys sponsored” question quite a bit.
Cycling is awesome, and I’m so glad that I decided to jump into it. My latest accomplishment is riding to work weekly from the Mission with the SF2G crowd, a 44 mile ride. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning on a semi-regular basis is a pretty new experience for me. Cycling is a fun opportunity to change my life routine up a bit, try something new, get outside more often, and get some exercise in the process. Oh yeah, and it provides an easy outlet for all of that pesky money. I highly recommend that you try it.
No TagsLet me tell you about the greatest game since Nethack. No, it’s not Team Fortress 2, as much as I enjoy stabbing people in the back. And no, it’s not Halo 3 as much as I enjoy overpriced franchises that have lost their luster and innovation. It is the one and only Dwarf Fortress - and it will reign supreme in my heart until the day Starcraft 2 comes out and I disappear into a hole to re-master the art of the dropship.
Dwarf Fortress is a difficult game to explain quickly, let alone learn how to play. It’s a mix of Nethack, SimCity, Dungeon Keeper, and the Lemmings. Also, it looks like this.
In case you can’t tell, this is a picture of a meeting hall centered at the well. There are sleeping quarters at the top, stone piled outside, and food stored in the stockpile at the bottom.
Ahhh, ascii art. See, the reason Dwarf Fortress is the greatest game since Nethack isn’t because they spent half a million dollars on a rendering engine with fancy schmancy specular effects (clearly). It’s amazing because of the depth that the game offers, even at version .26xxxx. You can build a custom fortress, an inordinate amount of furniture, floodgates, doors, traps, bridges, forges, workshops; train war animals, hunt animals for food, capture elephants for your local zoo, fend off hordes of angry mandrills, demons and kobolds; create a standing army of dwarves armed with a variety of weapons of varying quality; satisfy increasingly obnoxious demands from nobles, trade with human caravans, and best of all: build a device that FLOODS THE WORLD WITH MAGMA.
That’s right. The game has enough fluid dynamics built into it that you can dig into the mountain until you find the river of lava, build a channel that routes the lava out of the mountaing, rig up some levers that open the floodgates to the outside world, and BAM! Instant elephant stew.
If you do decide to play, start by checking out the wiki. It is your friend and the only thing that will keep you from starving to death in the winter your first time. Though a fortress of starving dwarves is pretty amusingly fun as well… if you enjoy murder.
The other excellent resource is this (absurdly long) Something Awful forum thread. It contains a quick how-to and should get you up and running.
And oh — it’s free. And there’s a new version. Which adds z-axis support… among other things. And better adventure mode support. And my head is exploding with glee over the sheer options available from this single game.
If you do decide to play and you just can’t stand the graphics, check out the tilesets available. Just remember the Dwarf Fortress motto: Losing is fun!
Elephants are not.
No TagsWe’re back! After weeks and weeks of not posting, we’re coming back with fresh posts, new beta bites and maybe even some new projects. After letting the site lay fallow, I decided it was time for us to get back into blogging. But how could we prevent the same problems from cropping up again and killing our post-rate?
It occurred to me that as a group we work on projects collaboratively. First in college and now both on our personal projects, at our various places of employment and even making dinner (see picture), most of our actual productive work is done with other people. So how could we apply this paradigm to blogging? Blogging is in general pretty solitary. You sit alone, type up your thoughts and only then put them out for other people to read. Some people talk through your ideas with another person before writing them and maybe a few people actually have someone edit their drafts, but by and large blogging is not a group activity. I thought this was wrong. My solution: Blog Parties!
Basically I just wanted to get everyone in one room and writing. There’s a big activation cost to starting a blog post, and social activities are a great way to hide these kinds of costs. Long commutes go faster if you have a friend to talk to and tedious tasks fly by when everyone is joking around. Social activities return benefits out of proportion to their costs. If I could get everyone together we would be able to bounce ideas off of each other, ask questions and even edit posts before we put them out on the internet. By making it a group social activity I hoped people would enjoy writing posts more and be more inspired to write high quality posts. All of us in a room for an hour we could easily whip up a week’s worth of content in a fun and interactive environment.
So far it’s going pretty well. Brian’s already done with his post, Sean’s well on his way and Brendan’s looking up links for his. In a few weeks I’ll write a follow up to this and let you know if we manage to keep it up. Until then, enjoy our fresh new content, comment on stuff you find interesting and come back often.
No TagsBrendan recently told me about a new blog post by Joel Spolsky about Javascript/AJAX and the future of web development. In the article, Joel claims that the history of development on the desktop is now mirroring itself on the web. He draws many excellent parallels between the past and present. In terms of optimization, portability, and UI consistency/interoperability, the current history of web applications does indeed look like the early history of mainframe/PC development.
However, Brendan then proceeded to read me this excerpt from the post:
Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.
But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.
And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.
And the NewSDK people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer Facebook/Twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.
And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.
Brendan and I then proceeded to get into an argument about whether this was a fair example to use or not. Joel has a lot of points buried in his post, but with this example, he seems to be implying that small startups will be the innovators and big companies will be caught sitting on their hands, obsolete before they even realize it because they spent too much time optimizing their applications for current technology.
Of course, when Joel looks for an example of a “big web company” to use in his large optimizer vs. small innovator example, he naturally picks Google. And, of course, I kinda resent the picture that he paints. After all, when I go to work every day, I don’t sit in my (very comfortable) googlechair in the googleplex sipping (really tasty) googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug. I go in to work and try to innovate the crap out of the stuff I’m working on. I’m not spending 8 hours a day in a massage chair reading Techcrunch and Hacker News and chortling quietly to myself.
Ok, so I don’t like Joel’s choice of examples. Big surprise. Ok, so he was just trying to be humorous. Whatever. If there’s some truth in every stereotype, there’s probably also some honesty in every joke.
I know it’s not the main point of the post, but I feel like it’s silly to suggest that a company loses its ability to innovate just because it’s big. Sure, some large companies of the past became too complacent in their top-of-the-market position and lost it all. Joel offers the example of Lotus, who originally had a stranglehold on the market with Lotus 1-2-3 and then lost it to new companies. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s an inevitability for all companies of a sufficient size.
Another way to look at it is that being large gives big companies the resources to BOTH optimize for current technologies AND innovate on the next big thing. Of course, this is really hard to do, but it’s possible.
Most new disruptive technologies are at least somewhat evolutionary instead of completely revolutionary. On the web, this usually boils down to “it works on top of HTML”. Joel’s example of the innovative SDK that provides amazing interaction with incredible speed may look like a revolutionary new technology to some, but to me it just looks like a case of creative optimization on top of current technology. After all, it’s still running in the browser, isn’t it? In this respect, having lots of experience with building things on current technology can help you to see the low hanging fruit that might turn out to be the next big thing.
Because there are so many browsers, so many web companies, three operating systems, and loads of developers, I find it very hard to believe that an entirely revolutionary technology will replace the web as we know it in the near future. Any drastic improvements that do occur will succeed because they are built on the backs of the technologies that came before and improve the experience that little extra bit, enticing everyone to switch over. If a truly revolutionary technology does emerge, it had better be able to raise the dead if it wants to attract users. “I can’t switch over because none of my friends are using it yet.” Critical mass is pretty hard to achieve when you’re incompatible with your predecessors. This is part of why the best technology doesn’t always win; a fact that seems to drive engineers crazy.
This might be a corollary to something that I’ve suspected for some time: we’ve got plenty of technology. What we need is a decent interface for interacting with the technology we’ve got.
Besides, as Robert Hoekman, Jr. says again and again in his book Designing the Obvious, it’s easier, faster, and equally effective to elevate through a series of constant small improvements instead of world-changing innovations.
We don’t need to innovate to make things better. Most often, we can elevate the standards and achieve very effective results that incrementally push the envelope.
I think the main problem here is actually with vocabulary. One man’s innovation or paradigm shift is another’s incremental improvement. A precompiled Javascript/AJAX SDK might look like an innovation to Joel, but to me it’s just the next logical step from our current ecosystem of Javascript libraries, which essentially seek to accomplish many of the same things (UI consistency and interoperability, cross-browser portability, and tweaked performance).
Every once in a while the stars align and a startup that nobody has ever heard of builds the next big revolutionary technology with just enough mojo to succeed. But every other day of the decade, the rest of us get to improve the current state-of-the-art as best we can through incremental changes on top of existing technology. Startups may have the small size, flexibility, and consuming hunger that it requires to pursue that next big revolution/evolution/whatever, but big companies who do things right should be able to optimize for now AND innovate for later.
No TagsBoy have we been busy. Ever since I started at Google, aB has been languishing in the background. But look, a post! Our author is a fellow product manager and Olin alumni, Nate Smith.
I was feeling especially close to my manager at the end of our
one-on-one meeting the other day, and I dared to ask her a more
personal question. “I’ve got sort of a strange question to ask you,” I
started. “I feel some pressure to dress like all of the other ads
product managers, but I don’t know whether it is good to stand out or
not.”
“And how do ‘all of the other product managers’ dress?” my manager
inquired.
I stumbled a bit in my response, “Oh, you know. All the men dress
like I do - with a long sleeve button down shirt, jeans, and nice
shoes.”
“Do they really?”
“Yeah, but sometimes I would like to wear something a little different.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know, like wearing flip-flops. I don’t like wearing shoes.”
“You could totally wear flip-flops. No one cares how you dress.”
“- Or ties, I would enjoy wearing ties occasionally.”
“Ties? Now that would be a little weird.”
googleDrew sent me a link to Raph Koster’s Are single-player games doomed? “just to rile me up” and it did just that. Although his original post is from a year and a half ago, he made some ridiculous claims with such faulty logic that I still feel the need to respond to it here.
At the top of my list is his statement that “the console market will be 99% connected gameplay by the end of 2008 or so”. Of course, he didn’t supply any reference or evidence for this, so let me dispel it for you. This fall is perhaps the biggest release season for games in the past three years (Doom 3, Halo 2, and Half-Life 2 and all came out in the fall of 2004). And while there are some big console blockbuster releases that are anticipated for the multiplayer - like Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, and Unreal Tournament 3 - there are also some huge games that are entirely single-player - like Bioshock, Portal, Assassin’s Creed, and Mass Effect. Do you think that in one more year will that number change so that 99 out of 100 games will be in the multiplayer category?
Also, his definition of multiplayer is ludicrous: solitaire is multiplayer because “the large crowd playing Solitaire is doing it online, whilst chatting in a chat room.”
Whilst?
He claims that just because people are talking while playing a game, or talking about a game, that makes it multiplayer. If you and I are in a book club and we talk about the book, does that mean that my reading it was a multiplayer experience? Other people participated in my reading a novel because I discussed it? I’ve heard more sense about life and shared experiences come out of high existentialist hippies.
Although there other things I could mention, the last point I want to focus on is this: “These four Myers-Briggs types [of people who prefer single-player games] represent only 33% of the American population.” Let that sink in for a minute…
Holy crap! That’s much higher than I thought! Saying that this percentage is low enough to indicate the end of single-player gaming is like some movie industry executive saying, “You know, only a third of our viewers like dramas. The rest watch actions and comedies. Hmmm…that must mean that dramas are going the way of the dinosaur! No more demand for them! We should never make another drama. What money we’ll save!” Of course, if his studio followed the advice then the other studios who kept making dramas would just have a higher market share and rake in more dough. Just because a majority of people don’t watch or play a particular genre does not mean that there isn’t demand for it, and that there won’t be continuing demand in the years to come.
Finally, we all know that the Playstation 3 sucks right now (other than as a cheap Blue-Ray player, of course). So what is going to prop the system up, keep it alive, and actually get millions of people to buy it? Games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII. Single-player games with rich stories that you can’t get anywhere else. Will I talk about these games with my friends? Sure. I already do. Does that make them multiplayer? I don’t think so.
Single player gaming will not just survive alongside multiplayer gaming - it will prevail.
No Tags