http://dejatoi.tumblr.com/

Photo

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 21:04:58 -0400

aldrtree: Too America and good eats, happy 4th of July.

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 21:03:01 -0400

aldrtree:

Too America and good eats, happy 4th of July.

tweedsandtales: Aurora

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 21:02:44 -0400

tweedsandtales:

Aurora

Photo

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:38:00 -0400

serialthrillerinspiration: It’s very easy to be different…

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:34:32 -0400

serialthrillerinspiration:

It’s very easy to be different…

A series of photos Steve took in my office testing Photo Booth...

Mon, 07 May 2012 01:42:57 -0400

A series of photos Steve took in my office testing Photo Booth filters in 2005. Rest in peace.

– Mike Matas

Justice (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:55:03 -0400

Justice (Taken with instagram)

Post Schuylkill river run, good start to a Friday. (Taken with...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:41:05 -0500

Post Schuylkill river run, good start to a Friday. (Taken with instagram)

Invisible Children founders holding weapons with the Sudan...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:22:59 -0500

Invisible Children founders holding weapons with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Questionable.

These are absolutely amazing.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:55:59 -0500

These are absolutely amazing.

Stimulate the Economy via Facebook Data

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:20:00 -0500

For far too long, we’ve feared the dreaded Register via Facebook and making our data available to new companies. But if you believe thatinformation should be free and want to stimulate your economy, you shouldn’t. Here’s why:

If Facebook makes nearly $4 billion dollars every year with nearly 1 billion users, then they’re expected to making roughly $4 off each user. Just a few months ago, europe-v-facebook.org posted some sample documents of user’s requested Facebook data. Some of those documents are over 1,200 pages. Do you think you could make $4 ARPU (average revenue per user) off 1,200 pages worth of information on someone? Google does, and that’s why they are now offering $25 Amazon gift cards for you to give up your privacy and browsing data.

The Free Software movement tells us that information wants to be free, and many of us fervently defend that statement, and all the while, we aren’t willing to risk our “private” information. I held this belief for most of my life until I realized that (A) I don’t have anything to hide on my Facebook, and (B) I’m creating value in the sector of the economy that I want to support. Currently, there exists a dichotomy between the freedom of information and the security of privacy.

“When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving”

You wouldn’t guess it, but Richard Stallman said that. And yes, your “private” information that Facebook already sells, can help make humanity wealthier. These comments from a popular thread titled, “Start ups, please don’t force me to log in with Facebook,” illustrates just how uncomfortable people are with Facebook Connect:

I’m really hesitiant to like or authorize anything for fear of the author (or hacker) using it for malicious purposes or Facebook one day making my actions public etc. I think a lot of folks are too.

For me it’s more of a matter of privacy. I do have a facebook account but still refuse to log into any site that wants me to connect with facebook.

This is by far my largest complaint with Quora.

We need to leave this mentality behind. Startups can save money and time by standing on the shoulders of Facebook. Startups shouldn’t have to start back at square one every time. Facebook manages spam accounts extremely well, decreases the amount of time required to register, and provides startups valuable information to better your experience.

At GraphMuse, we’ve developed a tremendous amount of value from the most minimal amount of data. With just your list of Facebook friends and the connections between them, our algorithm can accurately identify all your groups of friends in which everyone is friends with everyone. This algorithm is the glue that connects your Facebook friends to your Google+ Circles, and it runs in 4 seconds (for a user with 1000 Facebook friends). Our service relies on this data to accurately determine every single member in your fraternity or sorority, so we only allow users to sign up via Facebook.

Help startups help you. Give them your Facebook data.

YCombinator Application

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:44:13 -0500

About to apply to YCombinator, I’m giddy.

Essentially two key factors resulted in me creating this blog, (1) Our YCombinator application requests each team member’s personal website, and (2) I read about the “producer diet,” which advocates you writing 500 words right as you wake up. In addition to these two factors, I figured blogging might better my writing capabilities, because as you know, Tweeting and Facebook posts don’t cut it.

So today is day 3 of reconsidering our startup. As you probably are unaware, I’m the cofounder of Greekdex with Charles Moyes, a Cornell CS/EE senior. Over Christmas break we built a majority of Greekdex, a Greek directory for fraternities and sororities to identify members and officers of other houses. While seemingly trivial, we’ve built an algorithm that given your Facebook friends and the connections between them, we can accurately determine every member in your fraternity or sorority. After some time, we’ve realized that Greekdex is not something YCombinator will be interested in, because it is too niche. They are only interested in funding/backing ideas that have the potential to IPO, and Greekdex can’t. Nonetheless, we truly believe the Greek market is lucrative with very few competitors if any.

So what are we building now? In light of our algorithm, we want to offer it, among similar algorithms, as a service. We will provide other companies the algorithm as a service, to identify “Connector” users, and providing the code to invite important new users based on their clustering connectivity such as these “Connectors.” Our algorithms are FAST, and that’s why we believe we can handle “big data.” The only other company that offers these types of services is TouchGraph, though they only have a demo for Facebook friends, their other services are offline programs.

Time to disrupt the Facebook analytics field.