I attended the June NewTeeVee Pier Screenings tonight, which had a great turnout. The heat lamps were burning bright, and the crowds gathered around the big screen. The theme of the night was parodies, and many of the videos were pretty funny. My favorite of the night was The Real World IKEA.

Of course, I spent most of the night taking photos. Enjoy the set!

Google recently launched Street View for Google Maps, which integrates a street level view into the map. You can view some of the streets in San Francisco (click street view in the upper right hand modes).

The technology, which was an acquisition from Stanford, allows you to virtually drive down city streets. They apply blurs and 3D mapping to the images that makes for a seamless and smooth navigating experience.

Currently, they have good coverage of San Francisco, including most of the major streets in the entire SOMA district. This brings us one step closer to being able to virtually walk down any street in the US without the computer.

Now, if only they had a real time view so that I could figure out where all the empty parking spaces are next to my apartment before leaving work.

After my brief post about HappyCampr ripping off Truemors yesterday, the people at HappyCampr replied saying

First and foremost thank u for highlighting that Happycampr is a ripped off from Truemors as mention in ur blog and truemors website.

Second do sharing ur secrets with others is the same as spreading rumors/news/gossips? Happycampr is about sharing of secrets be it ur secret place or hangouts. Does that means rumors=secrets ? What is ur definition?

[...] I did a mock up long before i got to know truemors.

So if what he’s saying is true, maybe Guy ripped off HappyCampr?

I feel like the whole rumor mill mixed with the Digg paradigm is a bit overplayed in general. Digg is clearly the market leader in social news, and, there’s nothing stopping them from adding a rumors section. Even if they don’t, rumors surface all the time in the form of blog posts that are pushed out to the front page of Digg.

It’s always amusing to see copycats in the Web 2.0 world. Mostly because it’s just so damn easy.

Is Happycampr ripping off Truemors. Both allow people to tell the world secrets that they know. And both use a Digg system to moderate the postings.

Even the graphics are similar:

Truemors is Guy Kawasaki’s newest controversial venture that was recently launched. It’s been met with criticism, mostly about how Guy has no experience in the rumor mill industry. My only criticism is that the system as it stands now is simply being used by firms promoting their own products. Not that I’m beyond that.

Today, Technorati launched a major redesign, both in the look-and-feel and the data architecture. The company is moving in a new direction, one that is focused on searching the “Live Web”, rather than just a blog search. Techcrunch and Steve Rubel both put in their two cents, and are a bit bearish about the changes.

The elephant in the room is clearly Google and their increasing index of blogs and other social media platforms. I’m skeptical that the changes will divert Technorati on a collision course with Google, but they are at least moving somewhat in the right direction. The major positive news is that the site is faster and simpler to use. Gone are the multiple search verticals within Technorati, which are replaced with one search.

But, there are still some changes that are puzzling, including a ticker of search terms “on the move” hovering at the top of the front page. It’s useless to me, and the terms are clearly out of context. Another pet peeve is the ever present popular items tag cloud on the front page. Again, most of the time it’s useless. Finally, when I put in a search query, the results are quite shallow. There are only about 3 blog posts that are on the first page; you have to click again to reveal more. As a power user, this is unacceptable–at least return as many results as Google would.

With all the talks about internal conflicts in the company, it looks like Technorati’s fate is uncertain. I know I use the site less now than a year ago.

Perhaps it would be a good buy for Google?

Okay, I must confess that there’s another reason I haven’t been updating lately. BuzzShout has just debuted after one and half months of furious one-man coding. Go check it out.

I finally got the chance to play around with Riya, the new social facial recognizer system. There were quite a few quirks, most of which can easily be forgiven since it’s in early beta.

The uploader didn’t work on my computer at home. My machine is a bit old (a 1GHz machine from 2000), but I haven’t had much trouble running other modern applications. The uploader would grind and say everything was successfully uploaded, when in fact, no pictures were uploaded.

The core functionality is definitely there. The facial recognition is fairly accurate, and I got the faces in my albums detected without too much trouble. There were about five false positives where a face was detected in an object that wasn’t a face. Given that a fair amount of faces were discovered, the false positives weren’t too annoying.

I really like the point and click interface–it makes it easy to tag single and multiple faces with people’s names. It’s still buggy, but once they get it worked out, Riya will be a valuable tool in organizing pictures. It’s really stunning how organized your albums become when metadata about people’s presence in photos are inserted. It makes it really easy to surf through and find the photos you’re looking for. In fact, I would be big fan of a desktop version of Riya that I could use offline.

Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and all the rest better perk their ears up if Riya gets big. It would be wise of them to try to get Riya’s technology licensed to them (if Riya will even consider that), because metadata about people in a picture is valuable. For these types of social services involving pictures, it might well be one of those technologies that creates a significant paradigm shift in the way people use photos to connect to others.

Riya, the media darling of the Web 2.0 community, is opening up their service to people who signed up during alpha. Rumor has it that they will be opening for the public later this week. I’ll probably be uploading some photos tonight.

The biggest question in my mind is how much time and effort is needed by the user to bring Riya’s image recognition software up to speed? And secondly, how will the difficulty level change in response to wildly different photo collections?

In addition, the sheer processing power needed by most intelligent image processing algorithms can be large. I’m sure that when they open up their service, the whole population of digg and slashdot will be wanting to parse their photos. I hope their servers don’t melt.

In the mean time, has anyone tried out the latest version of Riya, which was opened today? I’d be curious to find out your experiences.

Once again, MSN proves to be a site catering only to internet explorer users. The new Beta MSN breaks both of my favorite browsers: Opera and Firefox. It’s definitely not a pretty sight. Divs are crashing into other divs, smearing content across borders. Oh, and don’t forget the extra wide right margin which forces me to do the dreaded horizontal scroll in Opera.

Here’s what the Opera render looks like:

And here is Firefox’s view:

Lo and behold, the layout looks fine in IE:

You gotta give it to Microsoft for building a crippled browser, and then building its pages to only display correctly on their crippled browser.

hngry, one of the latest additions to the Web 2.0 gamut, aims to solve the age old riddle that beguiles many of us every night–What should I eat? Basically, you sign up and add your favorite restaurants to the database, and, when you need to decide on what to eat, you enter in criteria about your budget for the night and your preferences, and hngry will suggest a restaurant from your list that is the best match.

My friends and I have long talked about such a magical restaurant decision program. Heck, we’ve sometimes been so indecisive that we use the roll of a dice to determine our final gustatory destination. Despite this, hngry does have areas which need improvement.

First, it’s extremely tedious to enter in restaurant information. The hallmark of such a decision system would be to have accurate and complete information about the restaurants. hngry provides many data fields, including opening and closing times, favorite meals, phone numbers, and price ranges. The problem is, none of this is done automatically–you must look up all the information and type it in by hand. A better solution is for hngry to parse through online directories and automatically retrieve the requesite information when a user selects a restaurant. And better yet, the interaction between users’ databases would be able to provide even better suggestions through network effects.

The second problem is deeper, and the fate of hngry will depend on it. It’s a nice thought that an online database could pluck a restaurant suggestion for me, thereby relieving me of the stress. But, will I actually like the suggestions? Probably not. And that’s when I’ll just hit the suggest button again, hoping for a restaurant ephiphany which will seldom happen. The best that I would hope for is to reveal a restaurant which I had totally forgotten was on my list. Given the current input process, my personal utility from such an application is quite low.

The idea behind hngry is good one. But, it’s going to take some hard work to transform it to a more automated system, which will be essential.