Category: internet

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Where do I go in San Francisco?

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Where Do You Go is an interesting mashup that shows the areas you most frequent in a city, using a heat map layed on top of Google Maps. The data is derived from your Foursquare checkins.

The above image represents the areas of San Francisco I most frequent, based on nearly 400 checkins with Foursquare over the last year. Red / white are areas visited the most, while blue / green (and grey) are areas I visit the least or not at all.

This is a pretty fantastic use of one’s geo-location data and it’s something I’ve always been curious about. Just where exactly do I go all the time, and what areas do I frequent. This sort of thing might help plan further adventures to parts of the city that I neglect. I just might have to reinstall Foursquare on my iPhone after all!

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Of course, when I do finally reinstall Foursquare, what happens?

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Go figure.

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What startups are like

One of my coworkers, Sam, just tweeted about this essay on what working for startups is really like. I think it really nails what it’s like and highlights the benefits of working for one.

Some choice quotes:

Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises.

It’s surprising how much you become consumed by your startup, in that you think about it day and night, but never once does it feel like “work.”

I’m surprised by how much better it feels to be working on something that is challenging and creative, something I believe in, as opposed to the hired-gun stuff I was doing before. I knew it would feel better; what’s surprising is how much better.

Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated.

Read more at What Startups Are Really Like.

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The 7 Degrees of Retweeting

Earlier this evening, Sony announced (via Twitter) that they would be at the gdgt event this week and show off a demo of a new game.

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Sweet! From there, it kept being retweeted by members of team gdgt, just to see how far we could push it.

Two degrees:

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Three degrees:

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Four degrees:

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Five degrees:

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Six degrees (what?!):

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Seven degrees (now we’re just getting ridiculous!):

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It’s like a good old fashioned game of telephone.

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Rolling my own URL shortener

Thanks to the popularity of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, URL shorteners are popping up everywhere. Bit.ly, one of the most popular shortening services, has raised over $2 million dollars in funding!

Despite their popularity, URL shortening sites are by no means a permanent fixture on the internet. A perfect example of this was tr.im, which announced last month that it was shutting down (and taking down all the links users had generated with it). Fortunately, tr.im decided to reverse its decision soon after. However, this shows how potentially vulnerable these services are.

For fun (and peace of mind) – I decided to experiment with creating my own URL shortener for personal purposes! This would allow me to periodically backup my database of links and also serve as a way to bookmark and share content that I find interesting. Plus, I was able to acquire a fun URL as well.

Say hello to dave.ly!

If you see links from it, you know it’s from me and is something I thought was interesting enough to share! Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. I’d like to do some more things in the future as well (i.e., show a list of the most popular links).