Uncategorized

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Why Facebook Stopped Using Facebook Credits

When Facebook first introduced its Facebook Credits system in 2009, some pundits that believed it foretold one of Facebook’s future line of business. Those sorts of prognostications ended this week as Facebook announced it’d be phasing out the virtual currency, although it would continue to facilitate payments.

Peter Vogel explains why Facebook ended its Credits experiment:

Ironically, it’s the enormous potential of Payments as a revenue source that is causing Facebook to phase out the Credits currency. Payments as a revenue source is too important to Facebook’s future to take the risk of promoting an untested and unproven currency. To establish Facebook Credits, Facebook would have had to spend significant resources educating the public and building the brand of Credits. It’s a much easier solution to simply transact in an already established currency that users understand and utilize.

The First 30 Days

What is one year like in the life of David Chen? We’re all about to find out.

Earlier this year, a woman named Madeline released an interesting video on Vimeo. She had shot one second of video for every day of her life during the year 2011. I found the result to be unexpectedly inspiring and moving.

Several months later, /Filmcast listener and all-around awesome dude Cesar Kuriyama took to the stage at TED to unveil his own “one second every day project“, which he’d been filming every day for the 30th year of his life.

Kuriyama is passionate about the project and believes everyone should engage in it. I think the final result is fascinating, a seemingly endless series of context-less images. Context-less, that is, to everyone but the filmmaker. It’s a compelling snapshot of one’s life, a video that is evocative for the creator and intriguing and enigmatic for the viewer.

So, I’m pleased to announce that I am also undertaking this project. My birthday this year was May 20th, right around the same time I uprooted my life from Boston and moved to Seattle. Starting on that day, I have filmed one second of video every single day. Around this time next year, I’ll plan to publish the result, a chronicle of my first year here.

In doing this project, I’ve made a few observations about how best to approach it. First of all, I think this project works best when the second that you record is somehow representative of the day that you had, or at least, how you want to remember that day. In practice, this can get a bit tricky; often times the most interesting that happens to me is an interaction I have with someone else. While I can frequently “anticipate” when a good “second” will arrive, it’s often inopportune to whip out a camera and start recording. Secondly, it’s useful to record multiple seconds for each day, giving you the option to choose from a number of them. As a result, it’s also important to have a robust cataloging system for all of your “potential seconds.” Finally, I don’t have experience with this yet, but it sounds like it’s useful to create a master file for the final video, then stitch the videos together intermittently and continuously add them to that file, as opposed to doing them all at the end. Alternatively, one could also create videos for each month, then bind them all together in the end. I may end up going this path because it will allow me to release regular video content, but it also robs the final video of some of its uniqueness. We’ll see. 

As a proof-of-concept, I’ve stitched together my first 30 seconds, representing my first month here. You can find this video below:

When I began working on the project, I asked Cesar Kuriyama, “What if you do this every day for a year and the resulting video ends up being incredibly boring?”

Kuriyama responded, “That’s good! Because then you’ll look back on how boring your life was and you’ll resolve to change things.”

Not a bad point, that. I don’t know what the end result will motivate me to do. I can only hope it will show a life lived full, with love, laughter, and friends, a humble aspiration for the beginning of my new life.

[I am indebted to Cesar Kuriyama for his counsel and for helping me to establish a workflow for pulling these clips together. Be sure to check out his other work.]

Microsoft Unveils Surface Tablet

Microsoft pulled the curtain back on a bold new hardware initiative yesterday: the Surface tablet. Here’s Microsoft’s official press release on the topic. And here are a bunch of people explaining why it’s awesome:

Gizmodo says it “made the Macbook Air and the iPad look obsolete.”

Joshua Topolsky says it signifies the start of Microsoft’s “next chapter.”

VentureBeat’s John Koetsier has an unexpectedly moving write-up on this product’s significance:

There’s something quintessentially American about Microsoft. Start, grow, fight, claw, win. Get knocked down, get back up. Fight again, lose again. Get mocked, laughed at, ridiculed, and ignored. But never give up. Never say die. Never stop believing that the dream is possible … that you can do it.

There’s not much I can add to the chorus, other than that I was impressed with the secrecy that the company was able to maintain around the product. Much of the speculating by the press was either partially or totally incorrect. I certainly didn’t know what was about to be announced and I imagine the same is true of many in the company. For an organization as big as ours, they kept a super tight lid on things, and that was impressive.

It’s so incredibly exciting to be working for a company that has the entire tech press excited about a product launch. May it be the first of many.

Vulture’s Great Aaron Sorkin Interview

Great Sorkin interview by Mark Harris, with tons of memorable excerpts including this one, on the advantages of making a show for premium cable:

[T]here are no commercial breaks, so you’re not, every eight minutes, building to a sort of phony climax. Fewer episodes per season, so you’re able to do a better job on each episode. There’s another advantage that nobody ever talks about. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. And it’s end credits. Why are end credits a big deal? Because no matter what you write, the last moment is meant to resonate. And with HBO or any of the premium cable channels, it does. You have music playing, you have end credits rolling, the audience has a moment to sit there and just kind of feel the way the storytellers are hoping you’ll feel. On network TV, the last line of the episode can be, “Mrs. Landingham’s dead.” And then we cut immediately to a Nokia commercial. And so I always felt like the episode was getting punched in the face right at the end.

Unfortunately the first reviews for The Newsroom are already out and they’re not pretty. Here’s Emily Nussbaum’s take:

The pilot of “The Newsroom” is full of yelling and self-righteousness, but it’s got energy, just like “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” and his hit movie “The Social Network.” The second episode is more obviously stuffed with piety and syrup, although there’s one amusing segment, when McAvoy mocks some right-wing idiots. After that, “The Newsroom” gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping. The third episode is lousy (and devolves into lectures that are chopped into montages). The fourth episode is the worst. There are six to go.

A Case Against File Sharing

The Trichordist (via Matthew) responds to a blog post by Emily White at NPR, in which White grapples with the ethics of file sharing:

“[S]mall” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.

Wine Connoisseurs Are Basically Full of Crap

Jonah Lehrer confirms what we all suspected: when it comes to wine, most people are just guessing.

What can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight—and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips—there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best. For instance, both the winning red and white wines in the Princeton tasting were ranked by at least one of the judges as the worst.The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps explain why contextual influences—say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle—can profoundly influence expert judgment.

Mormonism and Homosexuality

The Weed writes a post coming out of the closet as a Mormon gay man happily married to a heterosexual woman. The results are surprising and heartfelt:

[W]hen talking to some friends about our situation in preparation for this post, one of them said “It’s almost like we’ve encountered a real live Unicorn!” She was joking of course. She was just saying that they were talking to something that not many encounter. A mythical creature. Someone who is gay, Mormon and married. And then as we told new friends about ourselves in preparation for this post, we told them we were initiating them into “Club Unicorn” because they had now seen something mythical with their very own eyes. I now extend that invitation to every one of you. I am not a myth. I am real.