Probably the worst PR move Mark Zuckerberg ever did. A video conference with the UK Prime Minister is one thing, a great honor, but reading stuff during the first half of the video conference is another. He wasn’t the Mark we all know, he wasn’t the almost half a billion people using Facebook leader we all know. Have a look at the second half of this “video conference”.

No guts

You need to have guts and balls to run a country. Period. Unfortunately, the state is doing anything at its power to punish lawful citizens and praise everybody else. Try to raise a kid by yelling when he does great in school and congratulate him when he breaks a vase and you’ll create a selfish moronic monster in no time.

Extra taxes

Heavy taxes especially in electronics and telecommunications is a recipe for failure. 19% VAT accounts to almost 1/5 of the price. 23% VAT accounts to almost 1/4 of the price. This is all happening in 2010 the year no one can think life without e-retailers like Amazon.com, a tipping point in history where shopping decisions are made with a click and in between half a dollar price range.

Media and politics

Taxing media is making certain people feel uncomfortable. Collecting those taxes is about to make things ugly. To do so you need to have guts and balls but we already know the answer to that. What happens next is the introduction of new and stricter laws about those uncollected taxes which very conveniently turn into a media manipulation tool with a backdoor: upcoming elections and the need for public brainwash.

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Anything in between Matt’s and Andy’s office view will do, Aeron included.

Try if you can and while you’re there spot the similarities between these three talks by Larry Page, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

It’s been only two months since Twitter came public about the volume of the tweets they deliver every day. Back then that number was 50 million tweets a day. Fast forward 8 weeks and that number grew up to 55 million tweets a day. Announced at Chirp, among other things, Twitter growth is phenomenal. That’s why the company is working on moving to its own data center.

55 million tweets a day is like every single Greek tweeting once a day, including the homeless and ones without access to the internet at all. If you were Finn (Finland is the home of Nokia and 39% global market share) you’d have to tweet at least 10 time a day to come up with 55 million tweets a day.

Twitter will grow exponentially along with more capable smartphones hitting the market and services like Google Search enabling access to Twitter’s archive. Add geo location services and the whole mash up idea of everything being connected with everything (Foursquare with Twitter, Facebook with Twitter etc) and you’ll soon be witnessing the real time revolution before the end of 2010.

Twitter (and Facebook later on) will leads to the need of effective, non fault positive filter and algorithmic tools for sorting out noise and the birth of the first software agents living in the cloud and within your pocket.

[photo by Lou O' Bedlam]

Kevin Rose was almost right when said: “My Foursquare data will tell my life story”. The truth is, Foursquare will save Kevin’s life not just tell a story about it. Location based social networking websites are on the rage right now. Twitter is doing it, Gowalla is doing it, Google Buzz is doing it, Facebook is about to it.

Geo tagged photos are cool, geo enabled status updates and tweets are helpful but geo information streams are links to the past, the present and the future of everyone’s life. Foursquare does a pretty god job connecting people, sharing information and stuff but it’s about to save a life and you’re going to pay for that.

Foursquare data will tell a story and save a life when each and every doctor and diagnostician has access to this date. Foursquare will add a stack of substantially critical and precise amount of information to each patient’s history. It will be easier than ever to suspect toxin exposure or overrule food poisoning just by looking at Foursquare’s check ins. Let’s examine a few examples of well know valley personalities.

Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble recently became fathers. Both of them travel a lot and meet with a great deal of people. Assuming (god forbidden) their newborns have an allergic reaction. Doctors will be able to link and likely to treat the allergy when checking Jason’s and Robert’s previous check ins in the latest foodie startup in San Francisco. The tasty organic chocolate bars they bought for their kids apparently contain this variety of raspberries which is known of causing allergic reactions to kids.

Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss recently came back from a trip to China. They visited so many different places and tried quite a few kinds of tea. Assuming (god forbidden) on their way back home Kevin or Tim gets sick because of some toxin used to spray parasites in a specific area of a Chinese province. If Foursquare was available in China (i assume it’s not because of the great China firewall) doctors will be able to treat for the specific toxin right away without waiting for the lab results, because Foursquare data will reveal the exact geographical area which will lead to a long and controversial use of DDT.

A couple of years back, Om Malik suffered a heart attack. He fully recovered and he’s back into blogging like a rock star but what if his doctors had access to his Foursquare check ins of the last 4 years. Digging into the data revealed that Om’s eating habits were more on the healthy side with loads of Omega 6 and Omega 9 fatty acids rather than BBQ sauced T-bones because he visited way more fish and vegan restaurants than steak houses. Om’s diet was likely not a factor to his heart attack. The doctors will more likely suggest adjustments to his fitness program, if any, rather than a complete lifestyle change starting from food ending up to cardio sessions.

What’s cool about Foursquare data it’s the potential synergy with services like Google Health, Facebook and Twitter and data aggregation even from status updates, tweets and searches on the web about travel plans, food supplements, flower orders etc. What’s really great about Foursquare is the business model behind the idea. The company can sell data to pretty much anyone in the health industry including insurance companies and hospitals or even introduce the Foursquare Health and Foursquare Health Pro services.

With services like 23andMe looking in the insides of human body and the potential of Foursquare for locating where our body was and what it was likely to inhale, taste and exposed to, doctors are positioned ahead of patient’s history and are able to diagnose and treat faster, better, cheaper.

Needless to say all examples mentioned above were purely fictional to the consequences level, no harm intended and stuff.

Update: But would you feel strange knowing that your doctor was Googling you? The practice appears to be widespread, according to an essay in the latest edition of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry [...]

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Update: A very interesting follow up on ad blocking.

It was about time to move forward on cancer thinking and research. The Cancer Genome Project looks quite promising. Hopefully the reboot in thinking of cancer cure will help fight other diseases too. Genomes, protein folding research and hordes of engineers, poets, mathematicians, developers etc start thinking about cancer.

There is one thing and one thing only that made Nokia the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phonse and there is one thing and one thing only that is currently kicking Nokia’s ass. The company culture is engineer driven, period. Everything is build upon this very perception of reality, period. This is how Nokia introduced the world’s first mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, and this is why Nokia is losing market share and market value for the last couple of years.

Fredrik Idestam, Nokia’s founder, was a mining engineer back in 1865. Fast forward 145 years and you will realize that every product Nokia ever made was build upon that engineer driven mentality and Finn influence. Engineers and particularly Finn engineers, combine great talent and technology to build amazing devices but that’s all they do. They build stuff based on the engineer assumption of efficiency and evolution but they totally toss the experience. Engineers are happy when stuff work and specs are pumped even if they have to struggle with 15 different clicks and settings to get the hardware running. Finns are a special specimen of engineering force who don’t give a damn about any of the “in between nonsense” at all.

Nokia is blessed to be the world’s largest handset maker or to put it in other words, engineer driven or not what they do brings €5 billion worth of food to the table. It’s really hard to argue against an operating profit of €5 billion as of 2008 but someone actually did. Apple and Google both set the standards for the next generation of smartphone OS while Nokia is yet not ready to officially announce Symbian Foundation phone and get over the engineer driven design of the powerful N900 beast. Apple is already working on the 4th version of iPhone OS for the new iPhone to be announced June-July 2010 while Google is on speed with 4 major release of Android OS already. As of now, Nokia is doomed to fail on the developed world.

On the other hand, Finns measure tremendous growth and success in emerging markets which are now something like the holly grail of low end – S40 mobile phones sales and Ovi services. This is huge for Nokia and the stock price considering the size of the population and the opportunity for further expansion. It’s also extremely beneficial for the locals who now have access to information for the first time ever without asking for permission from the local authorities or the head of the village. This is where Nokia is doomed to succeed.

It would be interesting to see if this new path to financial success and opportunity to change the world as once happened with the Cityman mobile phone is the same path surrounded with the engineer only perception of reality which cut Nokia’s market share down to 38%.

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There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down.

Enable gzip compression

Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 13.6 KB:
Go to URL http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.6 KB)

Seriously, Google wants me to gzip their script on their servers? No, i guess not. I can try fetching the script every few hours and deliver it from my server but will Google like that? Will i get punished or miss a very important update?

Combine external JavaScript

There’s a bunch of Facebook Connect and local .js files. Google’s suggestions are 90% accurate.

Minimize DNS lookups

The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/swf/XdComm.swf

http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/pestaola.json?

http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?

http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

5 domain lookups in total. 2 looking for Google itself. It’s AdSense and Analytics that my blog is looking a response from. This counts for almost 50 percent of the DNS lookups Google suggests to serve from existing domains. Fetching show_ads.js and ga.js every few hours, deliver them locally and start worrying if i’ll miss an important update or get punished for doing so? Not to mention Facebook.

Combine external CSS

2 CSS files Google suggests to become one. Google is right.

Google’s obsession with speed has just reached a ridiculous point. I’m all down to speed and uber fast loading web pages but the thought of messing with AdSense’s and Analytics’ scripts it’s insane. If Google considers loading time and speed as an extra variable for PR i’m all down to that but first they need to:

1. make sure all their AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts are served from a single domain
2. explain what the complications will be, if any, for fetching-serving locally AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts
3. provide detail guidelines in Google Code like Using Google Public DNS

I’m a speed demon myself but as for now i’m three quarters angel at pestaola.gr

Update: Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet