Archive for February, 2008

A look on the Most Visited Sites in Portugal

Published
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nesrait
on February 25, 2008
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This post is an attempt to capture the portuguese web landscape.

I’ve juggled with the data available at Alexa (dropping some sites along the way) to come up some groups that might give me some insight into what my fellow countrymen/countrywomen are doing online.

Because some entities are hosted under other domains (e.g. gmail.google.com) the data concerning the visits to the subdomain get concentrated on the domain. So big companies are ranked higher without any chance of knowing what assets are contributing to it. A portuguese example is the Expresso newspaper that is hosted by the ISP Clix. :\

Search Engines | Portals | Webmail | Internet Infrastructure

Another good name for this group would be “Homepages”. These are the starting point for looking up stuff on the Internet or just browse through the available services (webmail, recent news, and in some cases classifieds).
Social Networking Sites | Community Sites

After opening the browser and getting past the homepage it’s time to go to our all time favorite site. Depending on the person this might be a social networking site or one’s blog.

According to Alexa, Hi5 is the most visited site in Portugal. I think this makes perfect sense in that each “add me as a friend” and “someone wrote something on your profile page” emails all contribute to turn a regular email check into a hi5 visit (and probable browse).

Video Sharing Sites

YouTube ranks 4th in Alexa’s list and I bet most visits happens during work hours. In the mind of many portugueses (I reckon) the workplace is that place where you have to go and be at if you want to get your pay check. So… while you’re there you might as well make the most out of it. :) And after you’re in, it’s hard not to checkout the “Related Videos” which happens to be a recursive feature. :P

Adult Video Sharing

Incredible! So far, I’ve only came across YouPorn. :o

This gives a new meaning to the concept of User Generated Content (UGC)! It’s the realization of a long dream for every teenage boy: “free porn” as in “no-credit-card-involved free”. The short term consequence: bye, bye, porn industry!

Humm… could this also mean the extinction of the father-son talk? And stepping away from sexuality, just how much is the Internet taking over the role of parents in teaching their kids? :|

Gaming Sites

A sugestion for a new definition of “Work”:

The thing people do while waiting for the next turn in an online game.

The definition would sound better if I actually had played any of the first few games. So far, I’ve stayed clean. :P

One thing that surprised was that the last two sites offer flash-based games, but without any built-in social features! :o

I believe these sites are on the top 100 mostly due to a younger crowd. Think about it! The games load fast and they are colorful, simple and addictive, so their bound to capture kids attention and keep it(!). And for the parents… “flash-based” means no installation and no virus to worry about. And finally! The lack of social features ensures a predator free haven for their kids to play in. :)

Well… at least this is what I think. ;)

Information Sources

This list concerns vertical portals that reflect people’s interests.

A quick look shows us the leading interest: SOCCER! The fact is that portuguese people breath, eat and shit soccer (at least most of them… I must have been homesick the day they assigned soccer teams to each child in kindergarden :)).

Other than soccer, the other interests seem to be technology, gaming and cars. I argue that some of listed sites (Techzone, Autohoje) are timely visited by people gathering information about products.

Movie | TV Series | Software Download

Yesterday I went to the cinema with some friends. While we where driving there we got a SMS from another guy we invited to join us. His message said:

Get the movie of the Internet. That’s what I do. :P

And according to this listing, he’s not the only one! :)

Online classifieds and Auctions | Vertical Search Engines

I kind of messed up this grouping… but hey, you’re getting it for free so don’t bitch about it. :P

Having “Net Empregos” on the top 100 can’t be any good.

Image Sharing

Hadn’t a clue that image sharing sites where so highly ranked. Actually, “sharing sites” seems to be all over.
Mobile Phone Related

I was very surprise to learn about Wixawin and celldorado! A big market getting bigger by the day! ;)

Online Banking

This could be a boring category but the fact that it has entries is quite cool! Go Portugal! :)

Governmental Sites

lol… The first entry is the site of the Ministry of Education and contrarily to what it might seem it’s presence on this list is not a good sign! Things aren’t going very well due to recent reforms and the popularity of the site might just be the result of an horde of teachers trying to desperately understand what the government is deciding to do with their lifes. :P

Anyway, it could have been worse. At least there’s a site where they can desperate over. :)

The second site belongs to the “Ministry of Finances” and I think that one is doing a good job (they’ve learn their lessons about “scale”). :)

My Conclusions

After looking at all of these sites I think I’d sum up the portuguese Internet usage habits as:

  • In the morning:
    • checking for emails;
    • reading the soccer news;
    • turn MSN Messenger;
    • play a bit of travian or ogame;
  • Mid-morning:
    • receive a link to some video on youtube (via IM);
    • browse youtube for a bit;
    • send the video via email to some friends;
  • After lunch:
    • coffee break;
    • checking emails;
    • browse the youtube videos we got in the emails;
    • travian/ogame;
  • Afternoon break:
    • online banking to pay the bills;
    • track a sale on miau.pt (it’s the portuguese eBay);
  • Late Afternoon:
    • check which movies have finished downloading;
    • check for new TV Series episodes;
    • interact social with friends social networking sites;
    • go into anonymous mating mode trying to get a partner;
    • on failure… turn to video sharing sites for confort.

And that’s that. Let the conversation begin! :)

I’m looking forward to get your feedback (that means you!). Do you agree with the groupings, have you learned about any new sites in this list? Which sites do you normally visit? Shoot away! :)

Christopher Allen on the Dunbar Number

Published
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nesrait
on February 19, 2008
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I’ve transcribed part of a IT Conversations talk on the Dunbar Number and decided to share it. :)

I just wrote down the part (> 9m35s) where Christopher Allen shares his ideas on group sizes, related problems and the relationship between group size and the need for different tools to sustain the group’s communication.

Here goes:

It’s really easy to form a group. Up to ten, twelve people and it gets increasingly harder and harder and harder to maintain cohesiveness compared to smaller groups when you’ve got groups that are 150-200 people.

My own personal hypothesis is that the size of groups can have a profund impact on how the groups behave, and how they work and what tools will work for them.
My own hypothesis is that there seems to be these two nodal sizes. There’s one that’s sort of between 5-11 or so, groups that behave in a particular way, and there are certain group processes and software that seem to work very well for them. And then we have another one that seems to peak around 50 people and drops off torward the Dunbar number.

But then we have this little interesting valley of around 13,14,15 where these small group processes don’t seem to work and these large group processes… you don’t have enough people for yet. Some people call this the judas number - all of the sudden the group starts breaking up, can’t work/function very well at 13.
I’ve found this is in many, many different things, I’ve seen it in conferences, I’ve seen it in companies. The company where I’m doing Angel investing that’s at 13-14 people, I know I have to watch them very carefully. They either going boom and go up to like 20-25 people and start being successful or they’re going to collapse back down to a more sustainable small team size.

So, how do we identify group size problems?

The most important to identify too small… is that there’s insuficient critical mass, you’re unable to sustain a conversation, people kind of talk and aren’t listening and you kind of feel like you’re alone or that no one is responding.
Another thing that can happen even when there is conversation is that you have group think or echo chamber, that’s when everyone is saying the same thing. “Yeah, I agree with you. Bush is a terrible president.” “Oh yeah, Bush is a terrible president”. There ain’t any actual information exchange happening.
So that’s an example of too few.

Too many… the most obvious is too noisy. And we’ve all experienced this. How many have you belong to a mailing list that was great and everyone thought “Oh my god. I have to be a member of this member list.” and now the mailing list is too noisy and it’s not worth participating in.

Another category of recognizing too many people is this lack of trust or unequal trust.
One of my theories about the Dunbar number, what causes the Dunbar number is that we lose that innate internal trust that we have in our heads and we start having to rely on external things…. “Did you give me has much of your time, did you called me back as often as I called you”. You start measuring whether or not you’re getting the results that you want from your community rather than just saying “The community works, this is fun”.

The clicks and bad gossip is another thing that’s a classic sign of a group growing too big.
Inappropriate politics… I think there’s always going to be politics. It’s the nature of the beast.
But it can get inappropriate. It can get where the politics so much dominate the discussion that it becomes bad for the group. And that stuff can be a sign of too many people.

Other social contract/construct failures… flames, trolls, tragedy of the commons.

Mapping between group size and communication tools

Intimate Social Network

  • yackpack

Small Groups

  • chat rooms
  • teleconference with back-channel
  • cooperative editor - SyncroEdit
  • flat discussion lists
  • blog shared online as private
  • team blogs (at most 9 people)

Medium Groups (50)

  • instant messaging
  • avatar chat
  • threaded discussions lists (enabling people to divert into different subjects)
  • wikis

Large Groups (> Dunbar number)

  • For software that is beyond that number you have to get out of unstructured trust. Where you trust that other people are going to participate. The trust that other people are going to give equal value to the value that you gave to the group. You have to put more trust built into the software.
    So that includes things like reputation filtering, things like slashdot, advogato, or wiki which is another way of you having multiple workspaces.
  • Public blogs… > 150 readers
  • MySpace - social network was a feature of the product, not the fundamental offering of the software.

There you have it. Hope you make the best of this information. :)

Interpreting Feedback - Digg and Pownce stories

Published
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nesrait
on February 13, 2008
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Two interesting presentations by Daniel Burka and Leah Culver:

No added value on my part, just spreading the word. :)

2003’s E-Mail Tales

Published
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nesrait
on February 11, 2008
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While reading Many-to-Many’s archives (2004 at the moment) I found some unrelated links which I could help but relate. :)

The first is E-mail’s special power where Jon Udell suggests:

Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that some malign force knocked all the Internet mail servers permanently offline but left everything else intact. How would we cope?

Funny enough, in October 2003 such a maligne force did appear. (lol) With the maligne force enacted by an Internet worm. And guess what! The results wasn’t quite the expected one: 48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity<- Yeap, you’re reading it right, that’s Productivity. :)

An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992.

And then there’s the case where the “maligne force” coming don’t on email is… your boss: Firm bans e-mail at work :)

“Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by e-mail proliferation — the ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect.”

P.S. - By the way, E-mail’s special power is it’s unique ability in supporting the dynamic/ad hoc creation of groups simply by adding/removing people from a message’s CC list. Hint to the gmail folks: I keep having hitting ‘Reply’ instead of ‘Reply to All’ (thus breaking the group messaging) and I think it’s not all my fault. :)

Looking back it’s funny to read about predictions about the demise of email when now (2007) everything seems to revolve around it (Inbox 2.0 anyone?). My take is that email is a legacy technology that doesn’t provide for control over one’s personal data (your privacy lies on the receiver’s end) and should be replaced as soon as possible.

Patent Overload

Published
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nesrait
on February 3, 2008
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Long time no blog (the job offer post didn’t count :P).

I’ve spent the last few days doing an invalidity search for a “beverage dispenser” using google patents. I’ve went back and forth over the last century using up all my search skills to the point of being pretty sure no “beverage dispenser” was left unturned.

Google is working pretty well to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful! The useful bit isn’t quite there yet. :| Strangely enough in google patents they messed up the centerpiece: the search results!

You start off your query with a nice “beverage dispenser” and hit Search which gives you back the default 10 result per page + 10 pages to explore.

You start clicking away and on page 9 you realize that you don’t want any results containing “coin”. So “beverage dispenser” -coin it is. Search!

What the hell?!? Blue links? :o Yeap, you’re fucked! The resulting patent urls are encoding the search string so all the patents you’ve already searched are bright blue again, justing begging for another click.

What else? :| The search engine doesn’t tell you how many patents it found and limits the results to 600 patents. The best way to get around this is to sort the results by date and when your 600 results are up use the advanced search to place a filter on the date period you’ve already explored.

Humm… What else to bitch about? :\ Nothing really! Compared to esp@cenet Google Patent search really really really ROCKS! A very nice piece of engineering on google’s part! Congrats! :)

Next step: adding semantics to the data and firing all patent officers. :P

And now for something completely different (which I found amidst the “beverage dispensers”)!