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Showing posts from August, 2009

From whence came the seeds of belief?

A you tube video prepared to sell a book titled "The Power of Faith Mother Nature's Gift" revealed that Chimpanzee societies create hierarchies of control that revolve around the "alpha" Males of the troop. The thesis of this book is that for all practical purposes the alpha male is the chimpanzee troops supreme being and this "worship" sets the seeds for the origins of religion. I might be willing to see it as possibly the source of some religions in the past but it can't explain all of them. Leaders die and are killed and if they were the origins of a worship cult the cult would likely die with them. Religions haven't done that precisely because they are not all tied to people (many religions or more generally theistic beliefs, have associated or deified people to join a pantheon of Gods but that is not the same) I think what really happened to originate religions is a lot more pedestrian. To see it we need to go back to paleolithic times,

Facebook chat block messages.

I've been using Facebook a lot lately as a central social networking location to spread the word about numeroom.com and otherwise share news and get information about my friends and contacts. I am a pretty fast typist and tend to have a lot to say on most things, as a result I've run into a Facebook chat block message in the past. When it occurred I had been chatting with a friend for just about 2 hours and I made note of the warning (see big red "1" in image) , minutes later I could not respond at all and received an ominous pink boxed message (see big red "2" in image) stating I was blocked temporarily and warning me of abuse. Since that time I had little use of the FB chat feature and several months passed, until today, I was chatting with a friend this time for about an hour when I started gettting the yellow warning messages , after about 30 minutes of trying to "slow down" as suggested by the warning I finally got the big pink box and was bl

Numeroom for business..

One of the coolest aspects of the Numeroom collaboration services is the ability for the service to be encapsulated into a securely accessible and brandable portal for user accounts that have one of the site management service plans active on their account. Site management is made possible by one of the important underlying attributes of the AgilEntity platform , multi-tenency. A multi-tenant architecture is one that cordoned off access to particular application or system functions in such a way that many simultaneous users can make use of those functions with limited awareness of the existence of those other users. When I designed the permissions system of the AgilEntity platform , the use of fine grained action oriented permissions for all instances of any managed Entity ensures that multi-tenancy would be a natural outcome of a permission based security API. All that remained was for the user interface elements of the applications built on the platform to use the permissions syste

Magpie testing results part 2

The second major ad campaign launched on the twitter powered magpie service is over and I have been pouring over the results to try and make sense out of the results and try to refine the campaign or possibly abandon the use of the service. As discussed in a previous post, I found the magpie test campaigns I ran for www.numeroom.com and for the sent2null.spreadshirt.com sites to be more efficient in targeting relevant users than the Facebook tests I performed last month, however, getting clicks to the link doesn't necessarily convert to signed up users in numeroom.com or a purchase of a product at the sent2null shop. This latest campaign shows this clearly in both campaigns which I'll discuss separately below. sent2null shop ad campaign #2 After getting a good amount of clicks for the ad service purchased I decided to fund a $40 campaign with magpie for the ad that I had run during the test campaign. The actual test ad text: Check out sent2null shop for getting custom limited

15 new languages on numeroom.com

As the beta period rolls on, we are picking up new users and getting feedback on how to improve the site. To aid providing feedback on the services offered the new feedback tab makes it easy to suggest changes. I'll be using the most voted items on the feedback page to prioritize changes so use the voting system to request the changes you most want. That said, two new changes were rolled to production last night. First, support for 15 new languages for the language translation feature: greek lithuanian finnish swedish czech slovak albanian latvian norwegian croatian maltese galician estonian bulgarian chinese (tradditional) The new languages multiply the real time interactions that can occur on the system in any free numeroom. The original vision of breaking down language barriers in order to expedite communication and understanding between people all over the world is quickly being realized thanks to the use of the efficient distributed algorithm that makes this feature possibl