Weird Dream Starring Cameron Diaz and Ellen Page

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I had a weird dream that won’t fit into Twitter, so I might as well write it down here since my blog hasn’t seen much love lately.

This was the sort of dream where I’m watching a movie. The movie starred Cameron Diaz and Ellen Page as two roommates (or some people living in the same house) who have recently become zombified. Apparently they’re fighting to survive in a dream/cyber world with other people in the same predicament. Now that I think of it, the plot resembles a modern Beetlejuice.

For some reason, Tina Fey was cast as their PR specialist. In one scene, Page and Diaz dump off Fey at the beach, along with one of their boyfriends. Apparently they don’t want their significant others and family worrying about the fact that they’re zombies now, so they leave without a word. I wasn’t sure how the family didn’t notice the smell (maybe they were being polite).

If someone can get this green-lighted I’m sure I can fill in the rest of the details.

SXSW Panel Idea: Mashups – Noble Bootstrapping or Downright Stealing?

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I checked SXSW today and noticed that the deadline for panel proposals is tonight. I originally wasn’t going to post anything, but I sat and thought for a bit about things I know enough about to propose/speak about at a conference. I remembered the whole craigslist incident and thought it would be interesting to propose a panel discussion about the state of mashups today.

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In the past, mashups were held to a pretty high opinion. The proper mashup might be able to take two things and simplify a process to critical acclaim. I think in those days, mashups weren’t thought of as startups or businesses, just small tools that people could use. Flash forward to today and sites like Mapskrieg and Padmapper (and others like AirBnB) are being C&Ded for their terms of use violations. Something happened in the startup world that made mashups into a viable threat, which the bigger players did not approve of.

While the term “mashup” seems a bit archaic now, I think it would be interesting to revisit that term and see what it means today. Take some pioneers of mashing up and some new startups and get them talking about stuff.

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In other news, it looks like the Panel Picker requires some kind of “visual resource” like a video or slideshow or something. I don’t see how my proposal could be improved by that (it’s pretty cut and dry) so I’ll probably just link to this blog post and insert a lot of unrelated pictures of things being mashed up. CC licensed, of course.

On Mapskrieg and craigslist Cease and Desist Requests

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As I mentioned on Twitter a while back, I got a cease and desist request from craigslist a couple of weeks ago for Mapskrieg (my craigslist + Google Maps mashup for web and iOS). This request came at a pretty bad time (right before I was to move from Chicago to Ann Arbor). I quickly agreed to it and removed the app (I didn’t really have time or money to fight a lawsuit). I also added a passive-aggressive note on mapskrieg.com that you can still read if you’d like. I contacted a reporter at PandoDaily since I had seen a few other tweets about C&Ds from craigslist. He proceeded to write a pretty badly researched article (he originally was going to post that I made housingmaps.com) that got very little attention.

Fast forward to Friday and I got a tweet that Mapskrieg’s competitor, Padmapper, also got a C&D. The internet erupts in anger and I realize that I forgot to write a eulogy for Mapskrieg! While I won’t get too deep into the politics of the current situation (I kinda think it’s like complaining about getting a speeding ticket after successfully speeding for 5 years without being caught), I will write a bit about Mapskrieg since it’s kind of a nostalgic topic for me.

The success of Mapskrieg was largely an accident. It wasn’t born out of a desire to build a business or anything like that. I built it because 1) I had just been rejected for a job at Google and wanted to prove to them that I was a false negative and 2) I accepted an offer to go to Michigan for my Master’s degree and I needed to find a place to live. Mapskrieg killed two birds with one stone.

While I had intended for Mapskrieg to simply show me apartment listings in Ann Arbor (something that housingmaps.com didn’t and still doesn’t do), I found that the scraper I wrote could just as easily apply to any of the other craigslist areas in the US and Canada. I decided to go large scale and slap some Google Adsense ads on there to help pay for the server. I sent a message to Mashable and they were nice enough to do a writeup of the service. This led to other stories from Lifehacker and other cool blogs. Apparently this bootstrapped Mapskrieg to the point where it had enough Google juice to show up in a lot of search engine results pages. I learned quite a lot about SEO and advertising from running Mapskrieg as a result. I won’t go too far in detail about how much it ended up making, but at one point it made enough to pay for my rent, which was pretty sweet.

During grad school, I was too busy to add any improvements to Mapskrieg. After my first semester I realized that the page loads were getting slower and slower. Mapskrieg was slowly losing visitors. This was because I foolishly kept all listings in the database and pretty much never cleaned up or deleted old ones. The database got to millions and millions of rows or something equally ridiculous. I wrote a script that automated the process of pruning listings. Aside from a few random modifications (including porting Mapskrieg to Google App Engine, then reverting it), that was the last update I made to Mapskrieg. While Mapskrieg started to show its age (using technology from 2007 that I wrote when I was a noob), a new competitor came along that made it even more crappy looking: Padmapper.

(This is starting to sound like some kind of History Channel documentary).

While I could’ve attempted to go head on with Padmapper, I was instead having fun doing other projects like Troubadour Mobile and working at random places like Microsoft and Threadless. Mapskrieg was a really good source of passive income but I always figured that craigslist would contact me to have it taken down some day. I didn’t really want to put a lot of work into something that I had a feeling would eventually be sued. My hunch was correct as I got that cease and desist request last May.

I’m sad to see craigslist taking this kind of action against Mapskrieg, Padmapper and other sites, but I can’t say it’s too surprising. Probably the most surprising part is how long it took them to actually do it. I don’t think these sites ever operated in some kind of legal gray area; they had always been violating terms. My personal defense is that Mapskrieg was always a search engine. If craigslist wants to order Mapskrieg to cease and desist, they should also order Google to do the same. Actually, maybe Google should take the initiative and remove craigslist from their search index preemptively.

Mapskrieg holds a special place in my heart, partly because it was the one my biggest successes (so far). Also partly because the name is ridiculous. I have a feeling that putting Mapskrieg on my resume opened up doors that would’ve been closed to me otherwise. Mapskrieg did what it was supposed to do and never really evolved, but I never expected it to. If we can find a way to remember Mapskrieg in our hearts, then it will never truly be dead (plus I have a backup of it somewhere on another server).

Mapskrieg: rest in peace.

Born: May 6th, 2007.
Died: May 21st, 2012.

(P.S. If you’re interested in reading about how I made Mapskrieg, read this series of blog posts. It’s kind of an interesting look into the work ethic of 5-years-ago Hung):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13

Pharma Hacked!

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I noticed that the Google results for my blog have been showing ads for pharmaceuticals. I am not actively trying to sell drugs, so I figured this was a hack.

I ended up nuking the wp directory for this blog and re-installing plugins/images. I think the site’s clean now but it’s hard to tell since the “fetch as Googlebot” feature in Google Webmaster tools seems to show stale data. I’m not sure whether to blame Cloudflare, Google or myself.

Hopefully my Google results for this blog clear up in a few days or so. The weird part of the hack is that normal visitors are not affected. So the malware writers are apparently trying to sell stuff to Google. Of course, they’re just trying to raise their Google rank by inserting links and not being caught by being too obvious. But it’s interesting that the hack is transparent to normal people unless you check the Google cache.

Oh and sorry if you came here looking for the pharmaceuticals. You’ll just have to get them somewhere else.

Yet Another Employment Announcement (And More Moving)

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I wrote in my New Year’s Retrospective that my greatest fear for 2012 was that I would not get as much done as in previous years due to working a regular job for the first time in years.

That concern turned out to be quite prescient as within a couple of months, things quickly changed. While I enjoyed increasing my proficiency in Django and hanging out with cool co-workers, I found that I couldn’t break into areas that I was really interested in, specifically mobile. I decided to look for a new opportunity where I could grow as a mobile developer.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a new gig with Canopy (whose name is going to change soon), a spinoff of a company called LanguageMate. Canopy is based in Ann Arbor and specializes in language applications for medical professionals. I’m working on a neat tool that helps nurses and doctors communicate with patients who might not speak the same language. I think it’s an interesting space and presents a lot of interesting challenges in interface design, marketing, end user support, and other aspects that revolve around mobile development.

I believe this will be a better fit as I’m now able to work on a startup that is investing heavily in mobile. On top of that, I think it’s great that the app actually does something meaningful. Sure, a photo sharing app might sell for a billion dollars, but has it ever saved a person’s life?

Right now I’m in the middle of another move. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be back in Ann Arbor (for the 4th time) on Friday. I’m looking forward to hanging out there again, spending more time with Emily, and eating at BTB every day.

I am really thankful for all the friends I made at Threadless, and I feel bad leaving them so soon. Having said that, I am really looking forward to making a big impact at a small startup that really needs my skills. Here’s to an interesting second half of 2012!