Inopia

What Foursquare should do to compete with Facebook - "Go Public"

I'm sure the foursquare team has their strategy well in hand after the announcement of Facebook places and maybe this is way off base anyway, but I was suprised to see little real press analysis on what paths they might take (instead is was mainly doom and gloom - (TNW, CNN)). But it seems to me there are clear paths and one of the them could be to yank the steering wheel to one side and "Go Public" (not in the IPO sense - in the social network model sense!). 

To explain this, one of the things that always struck me as the *key* difference between twitter and facebook is: twitter is public broadcast, facebook is group narrowcast. I.e. twitter has asymmetric relations, facebooks are symmetric.

So facebook (although there is a public mode) requires both parties to friend.

This makes twitter and facebook fundamentally different - and I think means that twitter can and will continue to grow very strongly. Because of the type of data shared on facebook it's simply difficult for them to push asymetric relationships.

On location I could see the same thing happening. The "normal" way of thinking about location is "I share with my friends" - symmetric relationships. This also makes sense for security in some sense.

So it seems to me that if foursquare is able to push it's asymetric relationships - i.e. anybody can follow anyone for location information:

• it would make a big change to the service 
• but it would give it a much different utility to facebook.

broadcasting location publically has the chance to create chance meetings, to interact with locations / brands in a way narrowcasting to friends doesn't. Also facebook is unlikely to open the privacy settings much (or make the defaults public) because it is already embroilled in various privacy issues.

An example would be, people checking into a bar in Barcelona - they might post on facebook so their friends know, but they might also post on foursquare so "everybody" knows (basically this is equivalent to posting "I'm at Harry's Bar in Barcelona" on Twitter). Facebook places may allow you to do this also but the focus is different and theres a big risk of confusion between public and private settings. 

Basically a foursquare which focused on a twitter like public broadcast of location could provide a much different platform to facebook places and become the basis of different types of location aware services. You may post there "less" but you'll post there when there is some real utility to doing so like meeting new people in a bar, collecting coupons & points, getting timely information etc. 

P ≠ NP-- Greg and Kat’s blog

P ≠ NP

August 7th, 2010, 8:21 pm UTC by Greg

An email I was recently forwarded (a couple of steps removed) from Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs:

Dear Fellow Researchers,

I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts.

The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing them through a common lens. Second to this were the technical hurdles faced at each stage in the proof.

This work builds upon fundamental contributions many esteemed researchers have made to their fields. In the presentation of this paper, it was my intention to provide the reader with an understanding of the global framework for this proof. Technical and computational details within chapters were minimized as much as possible.

This work was pursued independently of my duties as a HP Labs researcher, and without the knowledge of others. I made several unsuccessful attempts these past two years trying other combinations of ideas before I began this work.

Comments and suggestions for improvements to the paper are highly welcomed.

The paper is about 100 pages, and looks serious (but being a decade away from last thinking about complexity, I am unable to give any more useful evaluation than that). I’ll refrain from posting the paper itself.

Deciding P ≠ NP is a Millennium Prize Problem and I don’t think I’d get much argument to say it is the biggest open problem in computing science.

Update: I see someone else has uploaded the paper. I should point out that in the email thread I got, Stephen Cook said “This appears to be a relatively serious claim to have solved P vs NP.

via gregbaker.ca

Would be stunning if the proof is validated. Although it wont radically alter out day to day as much as a P=NP result would have (Q mass panic since every encryption system out there would be breakable - and vast amounts of computational problems would become soluble!), it's still a big deal.

The synopsis of the proof sounds intuitive though I have no idea on many of the details. I like the idea of interconnectedness at great distance in the solution space causing the breakdown in linear algorithms. Seems like the right kind of idea that might also help people figure out if quantum computing can ever bridge this gap and how it might do so.