Mike Industries

About 20 minutes ago, I singlehandedly changed John McCain’s opinion on gay marriage… at least as far as his MySpace page goes. Full details over at Newsvine. It’s also the top story on TechCrunch right now.

Via Valleywag comes word of an interesting technology implementation called the “Hot Captcha”. A “captcha” is essentially a test you perform in a web browser to prove you’re human. Its purpose is to keep automated bots from creating registrations and wreaking havoc on websites.

Typical captchas ask you to type a series of letters from a distorted image, answer a simple question, or perform mouse actions on objects. Users generally don’t like dealing with captchas because they require brainpower and sometimes trial-and-error, and there is no immediate pleasure gained from using them.

Enter the Hot Captcha from a fellow calling himself “frozenbear”. The Hot Captcha pulls photos of 9 women or 9 men using the open API from HotOrNot.com and asks you to select the three “hot” people from the group. The chances of picking the correct answer randomly are only 1 in 84 and you could bump that to 1 in 220 if you added a row, so the false positive rate would be extremely low.

What’s interesting to me is how effective this captcha test is, at least from my 20 or so tests. With these things, it’s not only important to make sure humans can easily pass the test but that computers cannot, and I honestly can’t imagine how a computer could programmatically determine the “hotness” of a photo. And what’s extra nice is that since you’re clicking on photos of attractive women or men, you could argue that this captcha may be the first ever that could be considered “fun” to use.

Interestingly, when I switched over to the “men” version, my accuracy went down from 100% to about 25%. I bet this effect would happen to a lot of men but not a lot of women. In other words, it seems to me that both women and men could easily identify “hot” women, while only men would struggle to identify “hot” men. Perhaps it’s because the physical traits that make men “hot” seem less obvious than the corresponding traits in women.

I wonder if this captcha could also be used as a reliable, surreptitious gender test for incoming visitors. As the operator of a social site which gives users lots of control, I’ve often thought to myself “If I could just tell for sure you were a female when you signed up, I’d probably give you ‘trusted’ status right away”. I say this not as a “ladies night” type of thing, but because the majority of evil-doers on the internet (e.g. spammers, network marketers, general assholes) seem to be men.

Though probably meant more as a joke than anything else, the Hot Captcha shows yet another function that the human brain is surprisingly efficient and consistent with that computers may never be able to match.

Butters the puppy says:
“I’m not even crate-trained yet and I am on Virb.”

So this is it. Pretty vs. ugly. Clean vs. cluttered. Class vs. schlock.

I’m talking about Virb. And specifically, its newly initiated battle for the hearts and minds of would-be MySpacers.

Those of us in the web industry have had to put up with a peculiar theory since the meteoric rise of MySpace: that encouraging people make absolute pig sties out of their home pages is the leading factor in the success of MySpace and MySpace-like sites. The theory goes even deeper in saying that MySpace itself succeeds because of its own awful design.

The first part of the theory is built on the notion that people, in general, like crap, and the second part of the theory is based on the idea that the younger generation eschews the appearance of order and professionalism in all sorts of design.

Those of us who refuse to believe such claims have our own claims. Specifically that MySpace instead is succeeding despite its woefully gaudy design esthetic. We hold that it was the only social network around a few years ago that did enough important things right in order to build up a huge lead, and since it’s built up that lead, it’s essentially stood still on a foundation that grows shakier by the day.

It was with great anticipation then that I began beta-testing a new site called Virb several months ago. Virb is the brainchild of a company called PureVolume and it’s absolutely everything a social network should be. It matches MySpace feature-for-feature and then some, but the great part about it is the thoughtfulness and style with which everything is presented. Under the keen eye of founder Brett Woitunski and the masterful design acumen of Ryan Sims, every single pixel of the site impresses. From the typography to the interactivity to the copywriting, it’s a jawdropping piece of work. It’s a place you’re proud to have a personal page on.

So what’s missing from Virb? Well, it just launched a couple of weeks ago, so really only one thing: your friends. And that is why — in my opinion — nobody’s been able to unseat MySpace yet. It’s extremely difficult to move entire social circles of people, no matter how great your offering is.

I could write a long review of Virb here but Brian Ford at Newsvine and many others have already done so, so instead I’ll close this entry with a plea:

Check the site out for yourself, and if you like it, be an ambassador in the name of good taste on the web. Invite your friends and let’s see if we can prove the antithesis of the schlock design theory: that better craftsmanship, better taste, and better effort will always win out in the end.

Here’s my page in case you want to kickstart your friends list with /mikeindustries.

Ever since replacing my god-awful Comcast DVR with a high definition Series 3 Tivo, I’ve really only had one complaint about this beautiful machine: it doesn’t support on-demand programming. In other words, even though Comcast would love to charge me $3.99 to watch an on-demand movie, I can’t do it anymore because I don’t use their hardware.

It’s a small price to pay for the greatness that is real Tivo service, but it is a legitimate disadvantage. It was with great happiness then that I noticed Amazon’s new Tivo on-demand movie service: “Amazon Unbox”.

Here’s how the service works:

1. Go to Amazon and find a movie or TV show you want to watch.
2. “Rent” or “Buy” it with one click.
3. Within 15 minutes, it begins downloading to your Tivo and is available to watch as soon as the download is complete.

To my pleasant surprise, the movie files aren’t highly compressed 500 megabyte slugs but rather super high quality 2 to 2.5 gigabyte files. To my even greater surprise, these files made their way to my Tivo in about an hour each. Not that I would evvvvver BitTorrent a movie, but the last time I tried to torrent 2 gigabytes, it took all weekend. 2 gigs in an hour is great, and my cable connection usually only peaks out at around 2 or 3 megabits. Considering a trip to the video store and back for most people is, say, 20-30 minutes, and waiting for your movies from Netflix is a day or two, Amazon’s Unbox service compares favorably in the time department.

I do have four complaints about the service, all of which I’m sure will be dealt with shortly:

• The selection seems a bit weak right now. I downloaded The Illusionist, Network, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but besides those, there aren’t many I really want to watch. Actually, there are plenty which are “Buy” only, but buying movies never made any sense to me. As of right now, Amazon lists 1799 “rentable” titles ($2.99-$3.99) and 3246 “purchasable” titles ($15-$20). My prediction? The “buy” offering will fall flat on its face and the “rent” offering will thrive. Once more titles are made available for renting, I’ll be using this service every week.
• Seeing as I’m downloading these movies faster than real-time, I should be able to start them a few minutes after the download begins… not when it ends. At that point, it’s basically true on-demand.
• You have 24 hours to watch whatever you rent, after you first hit “play”. Many people will cry bloody murder about this, but I’m really fine with it if the window were just extended to 48 or 72 hours… and I believe it will be.
• Although the video is virtually DVD quality, eventually it will need to be offered in high definition. Better compression schemes should make this easily possible before too long.

All in all, I’m loving the service so far, but I just hope their rental selection expands quickly. If you’d like to try Amazon Unbox and get your first $15 worth of downloads for free, click over to their free offer here.

Amazon and Tivo have clearly beaten Apple to the punch, which makes me wonder yet again why Apple and Tivo — such perfect bedfellows — have never consummated their love.

Following is a list of upcoming speaking engagements. If you’re going to be at any of the below conferences, please let me know so I can say hi:

April 11 — Utah Advertising Federation, Park City, UT

If you’re in the Utah area around tax time, come hang with some smart advertising people at the AdFed conference in Park City. I’ll be doing the keynote and the subject will be harnessing online behavior with participatory media.

Canceled!

June 21-22 — An Event Apart, Seattle WA

If you haven’t been to Seattle in June, it’s generally 70 and gorgeous all day and it doesn’t get dark until 10pm. If you’ve always wanted to visit, An Event Apart Seattle is your perfect excuse. This year’s conference will be terrific and I’m looking forward to my city hosting such cyber-yodas as Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Andy Budd, Khoi Vihn, and the venerable Wolf. The subject of my talk will be “Civil Disobedience in Interactive Media: Making Thoreau Proud” and I expect it to be suitably controversial.

June 27-29 — serestandar.es, Sevilla, Spain

A week after An Event Apart, I’ll be heading to the Serestandar.es conference in Spain for a talk on sIFR and breaking rules on the web. I haven’t been to Spain in about ten years and haven’t taken a vacation in almost three, so I’m excited for the trip. Also speaking will be Croftie, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Veerle Pieters, and others. Anybody know of any great scuba diving around that area? Canary Islands maybe?