Its been quite a while since I last posted but I thought it was fair time to add something. Luis had posted briefly a few days ago about the launch of 3eep our latest project that has been keeping us busy since December but as project lead I didn’t get a chance to update.

3eep is a sporting community that enables fans, players, coaches and managers to communicate, manage their teams or show their passion (even if they don’t play). We are very excited to let it see the light of day (as of course are the team over at 3eep too), for me it is something close to my heart being a rather passionate volleyball player.

For us the 3eep site is the first live implementation of our new social software platform. The platform – media::core has been under development for the past few months, taking the key elements in most social networks (blogs, forums, user management, etc) and putting them together into a solid system based on Ruby on Rails. Months ago, we started from a blank slate and so could build it directly off the cutting edge code base for Rails that became the new Rails 1.2 (luckily it went final before the launch of 3eep). This gave us great set of core functionality with things like REST web services, easy RSS/Atom integration and of course all the other features that make Rails such a joy to work with.

The 3eep site extended off this core platform and integrated all the things you see in the 3eep site. Teams, Clubs and Sports, along with the member management in MyZones. We had a lot of fun (and hard work) putting together the initial functionality for the beta. Like most of the sites we develop, it is just one point in the evolution of the site, one we are looking forward to continuing.

So what are you waiting for… stop reading this post, head over and start sharing your passion.

3eep, clubs, mediacore, ruby on rails, social media, social networks, sport teams

Web2.0 Asia writes:

Uberme, a Myspace-like blogging/social networking service from Samsung Mobile, has launched. Featurewise, it’s got the whole pakcage; videos, photos, blogs, groups, etc. But the key differentiator of Uberme might be its focus on mobile: Uberme aims to provide as good an user experience on mobile phones as on the online.

And interestingly:

All in all, the service looks similar to Myspace and Bebo. But then, none of the big name social network services of the US have established a very strong foothold in the Asian market, perhaps except for Windows Live Spaces. This gives Uberme a chance to become a big player in Asia.

There’s a reason why Myspace and Bebo aren’t big in Asia, and it’s certainly not for the lack of trying. IMHO, it’s because there’s no way to provide a generic social-networking service for such a heterogenous region. Much love to Samsung and all, but when your audience is fragmented into at least 5 major language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and English) it’s unlikely they will all ever be able to interact. And to do language-based segregation (ala Wikipedia.org) is only solving part of the problem. The main issue, in my mind, is that you can’t ever just do a direct translation if you really want to connect with your audience. There are too many language nuances that you have to eschew in favor of portability, and you lose the distinctive local flavor that you would have otherwise achieved had you focused on a smaller target.

Granted, services like Friendster have done reasonably well in Asia (at least, in the Philippines) although I believe that that was more due to the fact that there were no compelling alternatives out there at the time. Of course, when enough Filipinos had jumped onto Friendster, there was no turning back—it was standard Tipping-Point-type stuff.

Fast forward to now, and Samsung has a tough journey ahead of them. They have to somehow reconcile the multi-cultural tastes of a vast Asian market and still provide an experience that is Myspace-but-better. Perhaps using a Germanic word as the name of this Asian Myspace-killer wasn’t the best idea though, I don’t know.

This is an embarassingly late re-publishing of an entry I posted on my personal blog a week ago:

In an awe-inspiring display of technical wizardry coupled with facial hair that would make Michael Arrington pee himself, the evil geniuses at syndeo::media have somehow managed to launch two new social networks in the same week. Odysseylive.net is the revamped, restructured sequel to Mobiuslive.net, and 3eep is a community site focused on sports out of Australia. (Considering that we were only fielding a dev team of 2.5 people, I’d say that that’s a fairly impressive feat.)

Since I’m too pooped to talk in more detail about the two new products, I suggest you head on over to the sites’ respective domains and see for yourself what our mad science has wrought.

Now, if you don’t mind, this evil genius is going to bed.

I’ve just finished writing a series of articles focusing on getting a Rails development environment running on a Windows machine. This is primarily for the new people joining our team over the next few months, and explains some key concepts like Ruby language characteristics, SQL, and subversion usage. I purposely kept the programming discussion shallow as my main focus was getting our designers up-to-speed without overwhelming them with technical jargon.

You can check out the full series here:

PART ONE: Introduction to Ruby, Rails, MySQL and Subversion.

PART TWO: Ruby Installation and Language Primer.

PART THREE: Rails, MySQL and the Windows Command Prompt.

PART FOUR:  RMagick and Subversion.

There’s an interesting article on Ars Technica today about search engine startup Powerset, which is reportedly proprietor of “the most sophisticated natural language technology known to man” (developed at Xerox PARC).

On his personal blog, [Powerset CEO Barney Pell] argues that keywords [the traditional search method] are the equivalent of studying a foreign language for a year: you can get around, but can’t communicate with much richness. Searching for “book by children” and “book about children” should produce greatly different results, but search engines today generally throw out the prepositions and treat both queries the same way.

The article goes on to talk about another startup currently laboring on a similar offering, called Hakia, which is already up and running. If you try the “book by children” / “book about children” combo on Hakia, you get similar results so one could say that Hakia isn’t quite there yet either. (Interestingly enough, neither of the two results pages Hakia returned were more useful than the ones Google returned.)

The implications of natural language search technology are only as significant as the number of people that adopt them, of course. In other words, if this catches on, it’ll change the face of the search industry. Why? Because SEO/SEM will be completely screwed. I have a little bit of SEO knowledge from watching our search team at syndeo::media work, and I’m always startled by the sheer number of keywords they have to manage. If a traditional SEO gig runs to a few hundred keywords/keyphrases, try to imagine what would happen if you had to optimize for keyword+preposition combinations as well (which is what natural-language search optimization implies). Your phrases would increase exponentially. In terms of volume, I think this will render SEO too complex to be handled by mere mortals, and SEO houses will eventually have to replace personnel with big proprietary algorithms.

Whether or not that’s better for the rest of the world is not for me to say, but if the search technology truly is headed in the direction of natural-language, it’s going to be a trick for the SEO industry to survive unscathed.