Strongly Connected Components

Our last post, the review of Netflix’s security model, turned out to be a complete success with thousands of visits and downloads of the full report, and it led to conversations with the engineering team at Netflix about security flaws that we identified during our study (and which they fixed very quickly –it was impressive to see how they could react in a matter of days and rollout new versions of the entire communications protocol).

It’s been two months since that last post, and we have been absent without notice for a long time. The reason: we’ve been very busy! In addition to lots of client work, with Comcast and Pearson Education, we have been busy working on two projects for the Pomelo labs, which have also turned out to be quite successful:

• You may have already heard about the first one, Happn.in. If not, be sure to check it out. Jay has been working like crazy on it for a couple of months, and it shows. Happn.in keeps track of what people are twittering about in your city: it collects and aggregates popular phrases used on Twitter within 20 miles of major cities; the five most popular phrases each hour are posted to this site, and are tweeted three times a day to the happn.in Twitter account for each city. As I write this, there are about 98,587 people following happn.in in 63 cities!. The cool thing is that you can sign up to be the sponsor a the list for any city, for any period of time, and get your site’s URL seen by thousands of people on Twitter. If you are interested in seeing how this all works, check out the site’s About page, and if you’re a researcher and want to get your hands on this kind of data, feel free to contact Jay at jay@happn.in.
• The other project is something I have been working on with Anita, my wife. It’s called FromABirdie, and in a way it targets the other end of the writing spectrum. It’s a site where people can create an “album” and invite others to write letters for a common friend. The letters are kept in a private album that only the recipient can access and, on a pre-specified day, we send him or her an email to announce the surprise that his/her friends have created. It started as a personal website that I built for my wife’s XXth birthday, and since then it has evolved into a public service. We have seen it used for birthdays, graduations, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for a colleague that was moving, and just for fun. It’s been very rewarding in many ways, and quite surprising to see how people write long, detailed, and deep letters to their friends, something that I thought didn’t happen anymore in this age of Facebook, cell phones, and instant communications. By the way, it’s free, so feel free to use it!.

These have been two wonderful months, full of fun stuff. We have also been lucky to collaborate with the great Matt Latkiewicz,  the brilliant design mind behind Happn.in, and I’ve been working with two wonderful undergraduate students from UMass: Aaron Packard, who is helping me with the Ruby on Rails engine behind FromABirdie, and Ann Wong, who is doing great work for Happn.in visualizations using Processing. It’s been a real pleasure.

The plan now is to continue working on these two projects (nights and weekends, after we’re done with client work!) and to try to see them grow. Oh, and I’ve also been invited to attend the “Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge“, organized by the World Bank, the Census Bureau, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and I am looking forward to it. Lots of things. We promise to keep you posted more frequently!