Dharmesh Shah's Blog

The following ideas are small changes/enhancements to the interface that I think would make the Tivo even better.  Note that none of these require any changes to the hardware (they’re all software-based ideas).  I don’t expect the folks at TiVo to be following this blog, but thought I might spark an interesting discussion amongst other TiVo users that have a software development background.

Making The Tivo S3 Even Better

1. Create Season Pass from Tivo Suggestion:  This one seems so simple, I’m surprised they didn’t do it.  As most of you know, TiVo provides a simple “recommendation” feature whereby it observes your past viewing habits and automatically records shows it think you might like.  These show up in the “TiVo Suggestions” area.  But, there’s no way to pick a show in the suggestions area and then automatically create a “season pass” from it.  Other than voting the show up or down, you can’t indicate your desire to watch the suggested show regularly from then on in.

2. TiVo Suggestions Page Icon:  Currently, when looking at the list of suggestions in the Tivo Suggestions area, all you see are:  a standard “Tivo” icon (which indicates that the show is a Tivo suggestion), the title of the show, the date of recording, and in some cases, the logo of the channel it was recorded from.  First off, showing the Tivo icon is redundant here.  All the shows in this area are TiVo suggestions.  Instead, it would be helpful to show an icon that either indicated the degree to which TiVo thinks I will like this show (one, two or three thumbs) or an icon indicating whether this is a new show I’ve never watched before, or a show that I have watched, at least partially before.  

3. Add “Play From Beginning” Option:  This is standard fare on ReplayTV.  When selecting a show to play that has already been started, TiVo (correctly) gives you the option to “Resume Playing”.  But, there is no way to start the show from the beginning.  Though this may sound like an “edge case”, it is common enough (and easy enough to understand) that there is little harm in adding it on the list of commands when selecting a show.  

4. Don’t Exit The Guide/Tivo Central Pages!  This is a pet peeve, but it’s a big one.  Here’s the deal.  I watch TV in the background when I’m working.  One of the nice things about the TiVo Central screen is that it cuts the sound off (and the video, because it’s a static text-based page).  I use it as a quick “pause everything, including the sound” mode.  This is great.  But, TiVo, in its infinite wisdom will automatically exit this screen.  Sounds comes back on, video comes back on, etc.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from the TV in “TiVo Central” mode and have it rudely start playing TV again when I wasn’t expecting it.

5. When Entering Letters, Provide Wrap-Around:  One area most of these types of devices struggle with is providing data input for text fields (like in Search).  TiVo generally does an OK job with this providing an on screen keyboard so that each individual letter can be selected.  One little thing that they should support is the ability to scroll to one “edge” of the screen and have it “wrap-around” to the other edge.  Makes getting around the screen easier and faster.  Great for “power users” but even neophytes will figure out what’s going on in about 10 seconds.

6. When Deleting A Show, Allow Up/Down Voting:  When deleting a show, there is a final “confirmation” screen that comes up to make sure you really want to delete.  That’s fine.  But, on this screen, TiVo should provide the ability to up/down vote the show (this is one of the most common places from which to want to down-vote shows).  Even a tip that this feature is available here would help.

7. Space Use:  Somewhere in the system (probably on TiVo Central), there should be some indication of how much space is currently being used by user-specified recordings and TiVo suggestions.  

If any of the above sound unreasonable or silly, let me know why.  Would love to read your thoughts in the comments.  If you have any ideas of your own, please leave a comment.

I discovered an interesting change in the last few days at reddit.com.

 

Seems there was a software upgrade recently and there’s some “intelligence” going on as to whether or not submission of new articles start with one point (the “classic” behavior) or start with zero points.  

 

I’m not sure yet what the algorithm is based on.  Here are some possibilities that reddit may be using to make this determination:

 

1. karma level of the submitting user
2. frequency of posting of the reddit user
3. frequency of posts from the website for which an article is being submitted (i.e. domain name)
4. prior “track record” of articles submitted from the website before

 

If you have better theories, please leave them in the comments.  Would love to hear them.  I found this change curious (and there may be other changes that have gone in as well).

 

 

I was on vacation last week and decided to take “The Broker” with me.  Having been in grad school for a couple of years, I hadn’t read much fiction recently so thought I’d start getting caught up.

Must say, despite being a “guilty pleasure”, I didn’t find this book all that pleasurable.  Insufficient plot, characters were OK.  I find myself being somewhat bored through about a third of the book as not much was happening other than the fact that the lead character was hiding out in Italy.

Not much else to say.  Though I’ve liked some of Grisham’s prior work, this one just didn’t do it for me.

Warning:  This is very basic game theory, so if you’re expecting an exhaustive analysis, you’ve come to the wrong place.

The phenomenon we’re trying to analyze is that of “link love” between websites (primarily blogging sites).  Link love, quite simply, is when some website links to some other website.  I’m not talking about reciprocal relationships whereby both sites agree in advance to link to each other, but the random, unplanned case.

Let’s assume we have two players in this game.  Player A and Player B (like real game theorists, my creativity when it comes to naming random characters is astounding).  For purposes of our discussion, we’ll assume that both players are behaving rationally and in their own interest.  We’ll further stipulate that “in their own interest” means increasing their search rankings through engines like Google.  Clearly, there can be other things the players are interested in, but I’m writing the hypothetical, so I get to make this crap up.

Player A and Player B both manage reasonably popular websites and write content for them.

At some point, Player B happens upon Player A’s site and finds the content there of interest (Player A is writing on a related topic).

So the question is, what will Player B do?

Here’s an approximate line of reasoning:

How Player B might think of this (we’re in the mind of Player B, who is talking to himself):

1. I like the content over there on Player A’s site.  It’s good stuff.  I’m going to give her some link love and link to her.
2. In a small way, this helps Player A increase her rankings – which is a good thing for her.
3. Perhaps someday, she’ll see some traffic from my site, and reciprocate by linking back to me.
4. This will raise my search rankings.
5. But wait…when Player A already has a link from me, she is benefiting by the search ranking increase.
6. If I were Player A, would I reciprocate and link back?
7. If she did, then the value she would be getting from my inbound link would be diminished by linking back.
8. I read somewhere that Google penalizes these kinds of “back and forth” links (so it reduces the impact of the linking either party gets).
9. So, if I were Player A, and I saw this inbound link, I’d leave well enough alone.  Simply by reciprocating, I’m diminishing the value of it.
10. So, Player A won’t link back to me – it’s not on in her interest.
11. So, I’m not going to link to her, because by doing so, she is less likely to link to me than otherwise.
12. And even if I did, the best I’m going to do is come out “even”.
13. I’d rather just wait for her to find me, hope that she doesn’t go through this same line of reasoning and links to me.

Big Warning:  This is a gross, gross oversimplification.  There are lots of other variables at play – and I don’t claim to understand the details of the Google algorithm.  But, I think a mini version of the above “game” goes on all the time.  There are variations of the game (especially when there are more than on two players).  Complexities arise also when the two players are asymmetric (i.e. one is an “A-list” blogger and the other is not).  

I’m a user of FeedBurner’s excellent RSS service for many of the blogs I write or host.

I’ve also become fond of Reddit (partly because they’re local Cambridge guys and are really nice).

I’d love to put these two pieces together and have a cool FeedBurner “flare” that can be used to track/submit to Reddit.  Similar to the Digg one that does a similar thing.   If you don’t know what a “flare” is, or are not a FeedBurner user, you can safely ignore this article.

I’m offering a $100 reward (via PayPal) to solve this problem.  I’d do it myself, but have too much other stuff going on.

Here’s a link to the API:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/api/feedflare

My only requirements for the $100 reward:

1. Has to work and show the current reddit “points”
2. Has to be developed in ASP.NET (with source)

First person to submit a working Reddit flare that meets the two above points gets a $100 to their PayPal account (and my personal thanks).  Simply comment to this article or on Reddit itself if you have something working.

Thanks to those that give this a shot.

Business 2.0 had an article today naming “The 50 People Who Matter Now”.  These are what they call “the most important people in business”.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/technology/50whomatter.biz2/index.htm

From the article: The names presented here weren’t selected on the basis of fame, net worth, or the accomplishments of yesteryear.  Instead our goal was to identify people whose ideas, products, and business insights are changing the world we live in today…”

On the list, at #34 is David Hansson of Ruby On Rails fame.  I can’t figure out why.  Don’t get me wrong, I accept that Ruby is a very elegant language (but David didn’t create that) and from what I have seen of Ruby On Rails, it is a well thought-out framework that goes a long way towards making web development fun and productive.  But, I have a hard time accepting that this warrants inclusion in the list of the top 50 people that are “changing the world we live in today”.  Is building a web development framework (however elegant) on top of an existing language (however cool) really enough to be considered to be on of the most influential people in business?  Though RoR has an almost cult-like following, does it really matter all that much?  Outside of 37signals (where David is a partner), are there any other products built on RoR that are somehow changing the world and how we experience it?  Does RoR cause non-programming types to all of a sudden want to build great software that wouldn’t have done so otherwise?  I don’t think so. 

What makes this even more troubling is that the magazine went on to specifically name people that they think don’t matter.  Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment is listed as one of the people that don’t matter.  Their reason?  Because the PlayStation 3 is late and Sony is launching another format war with its Blu-Ray high-definition video disc.    Others that “don’t matter”, according to Business 2.0 are Steve Ballmer (CEO of the largest software company in the world) and Linus Torvlalds (creator of Linux).

Nowhere on the list are any academics, researchers and authors that are changing how business is done and teaching the business leaders of tomorrow. 

Somehow, my guess is that if you randomly polled thousands of business leaders, few would even know what Ruby On Rails is or who David Hansson is.