WASHINGTON – “Turns out, it is a small world. The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication. “

six degrees from wikipedia.

This is stunning work. Almost as critical as finding some universal cosmic constant. Granted MSN Messenger users may not represent all of humanity. That the degree of separation converges to between 6 to 7 indicates a consensus built over multiple independent studies.

“To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher.

Six degrees bar in Leela Mumbai – a Deepak favorite

So what are the apparent limiters to presuming this number if any is universal?

1. It tracks MSN Messenger users only.

2. They are mostly concentrated in large coastal cities and populations.

3. This tracks online behavior only.

Colleague Jure Leskovec. “People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.”

Having said that, there are multiple other questions both experiential and theoretical:

(a) Is having someone on my MSN Messenger list the same as being 1 degree separated from them? I had hardly know or talk to any of them. Is there a need for weightage of connection in addition to a degree of separation?

(b) If this were all one big graph, then is it uniform (unlikely), clumpy (maybe) or foamy (like the surface of foam bubbles – the universe is).

(c) How are micro-clusters such as Linkedin and Facebook changing this?

(d) Do mobile calling and text-ing patterns (some studies have been conducted) behave differently?

(e) Would this change how online marketing is done, how money is spent and passive advertising works? Is there an ROI that finally makes sense?

(f) Wonder how the highly classified, ossified and stratified caste system in India  influences this number – would it plummet closer to 4?

- Deepak Srinivasan

Q: Where do I go to find out everything I always feared about Cuil or Haktia and have it come true?

A: 

Back to Strawberries, Muffins

“If they have no bread, then let them eat cake!” _ Marie Antoinette

Ok – so Cuil seems to have hit another low point for overfed and “who the hell knows/cares” Board and founders – and not just for returning random porn even when safe search is on (… don’t believe it? click here if ur over 18).

Sarah Carey

It is to do with the still recoverable, mindless, dot-com largesse of the senior team.

Sarah Carey (not related to the random un-porn Google returned image above)  – the whistle blowing, “Strategist to the CEO” has now told us all.  Read it all here in Cade Metz’s riveting expose’ – Quantum Porn Engine foiled by Strawberries and Muffins http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/31/inside_cuil/).

But that isn’t all. Given the continued fuss about search startups, perhaps it a sign of the markets readiness to have Google’s rule challenged – even if it means a few extra strawberries, muffins or cake.

- DS

Something to be said for context and relevance.

Enter “cuil” on Hakia’s semantic search engine and the first return from a PC magazine article says “not the catchiest name ever, but neither was Google, before it became a household name…”! Cuil’s site was, mercifully, the second result on the page.

Something to be said about semantics!

And while both Hakia and Cuil returned Google’s site with the keyword Google that wasn’t all.

Something to be said for age ranking.

Google itself was kinder to Hakia – returning Hakia.com but less kind to Cuil where the first result featured an article titled……Cuil Needs To Fix Its Technology Before It Can Get Hot!

A lot to be said for page ranking!

============================================

AND WE ARE NOT DONE YET!! EXTRAAA SPECIAL BONUS! THE IMAGE CHALLENGE!

The image challenge – plug each search engine name in Google’s image search and list the first images returned!!

HAKIA

  CUIL

Google

Hakia wins for creativity, excitement and irrelevance. Cuil wins for a mobile readable 3 column layout. And Google wins hands down for read the writing on the wall.

- DS

the Google logo in Hindi.

I used the Hindi keyboard on www.gate2home.com. Then cut and paste that on a desktop tool (u guessed it – powerpoint) that showed up ok in the Mangala font. After some pretty nifty shading, saving as a gif – the rest as they say was not history. pretty mundane stuff really.

And dont forget the music – it helped. Leadbelly singing the Midnight Special, accompanied by the Golden Gate Quartet. With that you now have my secret recipe…

Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?

Danny Sullivan’s excellent deconstruction of Cuil’s debut (launch would be generous) is instructive in as much for what its says about Danny Sullivan, as gentleman, as much as it does about Cuil, a Google for some of us.

Cuil does not seem to have just lost the second ‘l’ in the gaelic word for wisdom (Cuill). They seemed to have lost some wisdom. Bloated claims on indexed page size and relevancy, new age page ranking algorithms. three column displays to confuse us all, privacy protections, a minimalist infrastructure and truncated brand are still not strong enough arguments to unseat Google. And Danny is right about all of that. And he does his make his case politely, almost like a seasoned trial lawyer.

But I think he did miss the one big ‘Gorilla in the room’, ‘naked emperor’ issue. And that is Search is no longer a business model unto itself. The world has moved on and consumers have voted with their clicks.

With its pedigreed exec team and millions in backing, Cuil would serve itself well by looking for a better brand name. Having settled on a better one, i would recommend they stop making clones and start studying the human experience that search is a part of. Somewhere in there, staring us all in the face, is the secret to what lies beyond search.

Any takers?

History: Roshan Seth and Murabba

It was years ago perhaps – 1983 or 84 when I went with the IITK contingent to the Lady Shri Ram festival in Delhi. Roshan Seth was the guest of honor/keynote speaker. The actor had by then acquired some notoriety after his role as Nehru in the movie Gandhi by Attenborough.

In any case, true to Nehru’s uppity image, he played the snooty ‘convent educated’ anglophile by giving a perfectly accented speech. He then proceeded to go down the agenda and said something to the effect… “I know what English JAM* is but what is Hindi JAM?”.

*JAM as we all know stands for Jest-A-Minute, and Mr. Seth’s question seemed not so much about getting an answer as much as making a statement. There was a long awkward silence in the auditorium when all the ‘cats’ (as the city boys were undeservedly known as) and the ‘bihari’s (as the country boys were undeservedly known as) squirmed uncomfortably.

And then right next to me was Vach (for Vachaspati) who shot his hand in the air and yelled out “Murabba! Hindi JAM is known as Murabba!”. The whole auditorium burst into laughter and a sheepish Sheth slunk off the stage.

That brings me to what this post was really meant to be about – which was searching for Jam and Murabba in Google’s Hind Search. Read on.

Google ki khoj mein (or is it Google ki godh mein?):

Note: This is my unofficial rendering of the Google logo in Hindi. To know how I did it, mail me. Was pretty cool. Also notice the small superscript which is the phonetic equivalent for T and M for trademark.

Anyway I did get  a chance to give Google’s Hindi language search engine a test drive today. It was pretty awesome. Very well put together, fast, anticipatory and the results were very comprehensive.

The first two words I typed in English were jam and murabba! Worked great except they had not integrated their awesome translation tools into this.

It accepted inputs in Hindi and in English. When the search keywords were obviously English it offered no prompts.

When I tried inputting anything in English that phonetically sounded Hinglish or when the names were obviously Indian it prompted me with a variety of choices in Devanagari drop down. I typed in the word Shah and it offered शऱुख खान (Shah Rukh Khan as an option).

Nice job so far. But areas they could improve upon (if u know guys in Google India – do pass this on).

And let us not forget Guruji!

Guruji did a better job in having an on-screen Hindi keyboard. But getting to know they had local language search itself was hard – its hidden away on the top right like a guilty secret. They had pretty good prompting of phonetically similar words in Hindi – so assisting someone who knew hinglish but still did not integrate a translator prompting word meaningful word choices. Shah Rukh Khan ended up being spelt wrong in Hindi. And just like Google – they had no ads and their logo remained firmly rooted in English.

And of course I could never end up spelling Murabba properly on the keyboard! See, there seemed to be no easy way to type the half ‘b’ sound in Hindi, using their on screen keyboard.

Seems like after all these years we still have bridged the gap between English Jam, Hindi Jam and Murabba. Any takers?

Spot buying of remnant ad inventory is going to shake up big firms. This is not about getting stuff for less but about taking advantage of cheap inventory that can achieve premium status by being time relevant. Immediacy is the key here – to buying inventory cheap and project its relevance to a real-time ad buyer based on unfolding events. Of course assuming its done right.

A team I worked did implement a system once where ads were delivered somewhat subject to weather reports – but that fairly simple. Real-time purchase decisions will need strong tie-ins into public event assessment systems – that rapidly project consequences of sports wins, weather events, election results as well as real-time sentiment analysis and polling.

Leftover Ad Space? Exchanges Handle the Remnants. (NY Times)

Some background:

For so long it seems that advertising industry was content to run a nice clubby operation, managing large accounts with predictable spends. Small groups of alpha males (and the occasional alpha female ) would be surrounded by compliant creative communes and life was indeed good on the Serengeti!

Then came DoubleClick… the others, that automated the process of placement and delivery – but in sheer $ volumes, the buyers of ads pretty much stayed the same. Google came and let just everyone baboon have a shot at being Simba.

With large buyers real-time reporting and tracking became de rigeur, but buying inventory stayed pretty much the same clubby affair. Real-time remnant inventory exchanges, when tied in with spot buying decision systems could change that forever.

The easiest way to view powerpoint in firefox is to install the firefox extension ieTab (http://ietab.mozdev.org/).

That should let u view in the original format and layout.

But what if they had a Panaboard? Another nice Paper 1.5 product that got marketed in the dumbest way possible by Panasonic. Its basically a great big white-board with built in scanning. Once you finish writing, the sheet of white just winds around to the back and gets scanned in the process and spews a printout. Plus u get the clean dry-erase ready sheet rolled up front. Great product, good timing, dumb marketing. Here’s a big hint Panasonic … its not a VCR!  This …is how they market one of the coolest products they ever made.. http://www.panaboard.com/

Besides – I guess what many of us do is use a 3Mp mobile camera to shoot the whiteboard – but never worked too well for me even – glare, distortion and so on. Anyone had better luck?