Hung Truong: The Blog!

i’m in like with you – Beta Impressions + Invites!

Yesterday I tried out i’m in like with you, another hip startup type thing. It’s a social network that lets you find cool people near you and play “games” with them. The games involve setting up a question and having others answer them. Like the dating game? Then you get points for being the most clever or something.

I’m not sure why this site is getting so much attention. It’s okay, but it has yet to offer enough users. There’s no women within 100 miles of my zip code!!!

Oh, and yet again, I have invites if anyone wants to try this.

Also, there was once this site called “Consumating” that was really similar. I had fun with it for a few weeks or so, but it got old. Then I went back to Facebook. I have a feeling i’m in like with you will suffer a similar fate.

Spock – Person Search Engine Beta Impressions + Invites

So I got a Spock invite from Jessica Mah and I just started trying it out today. It’s a search engine specifically designed to find people. So you type in a name, or a tag, or some other query and you’re supposed to get people as results.

The Spock about page says:

Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.

And that’s about all it says. Pretty sparse. I don’t even know what their actual purpose is. Is Spock for helping people stalk others? Myspace is better for that. Is it for building business connections? LinkedIn is better. Social networking? Either Facebook or LinkedIn, depending on how you’re networking.

For more famous people, Spock shows a decent amount of aggregated info. Like for Eddie Murphy, you get tags, photos, and links to imdb and whatnot. For less famous people, all you get is the info that’s already available from whatever site the info was scraped from.

Most peoples’ info is scraped from sources like LinkedIn or Myspace. This doesn’t really add anything useful, since you could just find those profiles on the respective sites. For example, let’s say that you want to find me on Spock. You’ll type in my name, and you’ll be presented with a bunch of Hung Truongs. You probably know something about me, so you’ll use the info that Spock has to figure out which Hung Truong is me. But since you know that much about me already, chances are, Spock won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know about me… Useless.

There are already many sources to gather information about people online. Spock just aggregates this stuff and doesn’t actually add any value to the information. In addition, there’s probably all sorts of privacy issues that need to be dealt with if Spock gets to the open beta phase. Google does a good job of removing sensitive personal info if people request it. Spock might not be so kind.

The most interesting thing I found while looking around at Spock was the $50,000 Spock Challenge. Basically, Spock is holding a contest to get developers to solve the problem of Entity Resolution and Extraction. EG how do you know a page is about Michael Jackson the pop singer vs the football player. I’m pretty sure the answer involves Bayesian statistical analysis. But I’m not about to spend my time to solve a problem for a startup that I don’t believe in.

Oh, I have 101 invites to try out Spock. So if you want one, leave a comment and I’ll email it to you. If I get around to it!

Amazon.com Wishlist on Facebook Platform

So I had the idea like two days ago to do an Amazon.com wishlist app for the newly opened Facebook Platform. I hadn’t done anything with either the platform or Amazon.com’s API, so I had a bit of looking up to do.

Still, I finished in about two days. Well, “finished” sort of, since I’ll be out of town for a week and I won’t be able to work on the thing until after that. The rest of the functionality shouldn’t be too hard though. It’s a pretty simple app.

Facebook’s API is pretty cool, but also kind of frustrating. There’s still a lot of limitations, but I guess I can understand those since it’s basically to keep Facebook from turning into Myspace. The API is somewhat well documented, but there’s a lot of bugs. Also, the developer forums seem to have about 80% script kids, and 20% actual developers. I think the saying “RTFM” should be changed to “RTFAPID” (Read The Friendly API Docs).

So yeah, if you have a Facebook account and an Amazon.com wishlist, try the app out and tell me what you think.

Snorlax Owns You!

I’ve been playing Pokemon Pearl for a while now, and I still haven’t found my favorite pokemon, Snorlax. He’s totally awesome since he’s huge! I remember giving him Ice Beam (I think) back in the original Pokemon game and he literally owned everyone, ever.

This video I found confirms my belief that Snorlax owns. And he owns hard. Just check out the play by play commentary of Snorlax helping like, everybody!

PS This is totally NSFW due to multiple F-bombs proclaiming the awesomeness that is Snorlax.

Writing an App for the Facebook Platform

Right now I’m trying to write an app for the new Facebook Platform. I’m finding it highly distracting, since I’m literally ON Facebook while trying to get work done. It’s sort of like trying to type up a term paper, while SWIMMING IN A SWIMMING POOL!

Nevertheless, it’s a somewhat simple app (nothing in NP-Complete space) so maybe I’ll have it done by tomorrow.

PS The “i can has cheezeburger?” application is probably the single best one I’ve encountered so far.