Aditya Chadha

So, the talk went OK. Here’s the slides in case you need them:

If you have questions or are interested in talking about this more, feel free to drop me a note

So, yesterday, a new social search engine called topsy launched. This is probably not a big deal to most people, even given the glowing TechCrunch review, what with all the search engine hype of late having being stolen by WolframAlpha.

However, topsy is going to be amazing. And here’s why. Topsy is the first real implementation of a large scale reputation network for the general public. When google invented pagerank, they used the inherent value of backlinks to assign authority to webpages. Topsy is taking this one step further, and assigning authority (or, in their words, influence) to people. There’s an abundance of social metrics (who is linking to you, who is friending you, who is following you, who is retweeting you, who is commenting on your blog post, etc.) out there which can be used to compute influence for a particular person and I believe when topsy is done, it will get very close to assigning reputation to people.

But, why is this important? Obviously, you can’t eat reputation (yet!). Nor can you use it as currency. No, of course not. We’re not living in some magical world where Whuffie has replaced money and can actually make things happen for you. But we’re getting close. In an attention economy, what reputation does get you is attention. And, attention is valuable because it is scarce.

You could theoretically use Topsy reputation to figure out who to pay attention to, and who to ignore, based on a single metric computed from a massively aggregated set of social interactions. You could use it to calculate trust in a particular reviewers rating for a particular object. You could take it with you to your next outing and use it to figure out if a restaurant is REALLY going to be as good as they say it is.

And, this, ladies and gentleman is why topsy is going to kick ass, not because it is computing your search queries, but because it is computing your reputation.

Full Disclosure: I’ve been friends with the topsy co-founders for a long time so I know where they are coming from, however I have no details about what they’re planning on doing so all of this could be hogwash

So, I’ve been quiet here for quite a while and that’s mostly been because of all the craziness going on with my life. I think I’m finally at a spot where things have slowed down enough that I can take a step back and coherently think and talk about them, and more importantly where I think they are going to be… This is going to be another long post, so sit back and enjoy

First up, I’m no longer with outside.in — that gig’s been over since February of this year, and has definitely helped put things in perspective for me. I don’t think my creative urges were really being satisfied and that was just leading to unhappiness and discontent, which consequently played out in the oddest of ways. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the way things have turned out and looking forward to where the rabbit hole will lead.

Since my departure from OI, I’ve helped co-found my dream company, subLucid Inc and I think from my perspective subLucid is really the culmination of a two-year long effort to see what lay beyond the big giant mess that is Corporate America and the Consulting industry in general. I’ve learned a lot, most importantly the fact that I’m not cut out to be an employee at this point in my life and probably need to do this on my own (and possibly fail) to figure out what the right answer is. If there is a right answer, that is?

We’re currently running subLucid as a Rails consulting company, so if you’ve got consulting work that you’re considering farming off, get in touch! The larger goal with subLucid is the same as my larger goal in life, which is to make beautiful and functional products. Very similar to what 37signals, balsamiq, CrowdVine and others are doing.

I’ve also moved out of Manhattan for the first time since graduating from graduate school, and seem to miss it quite a bit, but I’m living with some wonderful people and burning a lot less cash in rent so the jury on whether I’m moving back is still out. I do miss walking out and being in the center of it all, though, and taking the train just doens’t cut it so almost all signs point to a return to the island at some point.

That brings me to what I’m doing along with writing ruby code pretty much 24/7 at this point. My primary focus at this point is Groupped. I’ve talked about this on the subLucid blog and the groupped blog a bit so I’m not going to belabor the point other than to say that Groupped is going to kick all sorts of ass. Hopefully I’m going to be able to launch something (not too pretty) along the lines of “if you’re not embarassed by your first alpha, you’ve waited too long to launch.” — so stay tuned! Also, I’m working with Karen, who is an awesome designer, so if you’re every looking for one, hit her up.

Along with Groupped, I’ve also started working on an idea that I’ve been interested in for quite some time, connecting the dots between humor, memes and network virality. The goal is to throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see if something sticks, and to have fun doing it. The project is tentatively titled QuitBlowingMyMind and will hopefully turn into something more interesting than a splash page soon. Once again, I’m working with some very awesome people, so I’m sure it’s going to turn out well.

The one other project, and perhaps the grandest of them all, that I’m involved with is John Geraci’s DIYCity, and its first spin-off, SickCity. DIYCity basically aims to harness technology and publicly available data (eg. Twitter in SickCity’s case)

to reinvent their cities as places that are more efficient, more cost-effective, more sustainable, and simply more livable places to be.

I’m super-excited about DIYCity since it brings together a number of things that I’m passionate about including extracting signal from large data sets, spreading automatic social and civic software, and building for the future. Very, very cool.

On the open source side of things, I did publish the Rails caching guide (and I think it’s going to become official Real Soon NowTM) and think I want to write more Rails documentation (especially since I _really_ miss the old wiki). Along with that I did start hacking on boomer, which is meant to be a rails plugin to enable usage of the Tokyo Cabinet key-value store, just like a regular CacheStore. That has languished for a while, and so should be updated soon!

And, that’s all the craziness that I’ve been upto in all the time that I haven’t written anything here, but the one thing I do want to add to all that craziness is a regular writing schedule, since I do enjoy it quite a bit (even though it is very stream of conciousness, I have all these posts that I just HAVE to get out!). Other than that it seems, that the larger picture is to help start or be involved with executing on as many creative ideas in parallel as possible. Remember, time is short!

The problem right now is that between my Rails blog, my two business blogs, and this blog, and my twitter feed, I’m not totally sure where everything goes. Ideas?