FlowingData points to a very interesting Facebook application called Nexus that maps the network of your friends. It’ll also indicate how similar your friends’ interests are based on their preferences about movies, music etc (if they’ve bothered to enter that data into FB).

Here’s the network of my friends:

Don’t hassle me about not having many friends. I go for quality, not quantity :)

Scientific American has a nice article about virtual economies in games like Second Life.

Tyler Cowen is unconvinced about the value for real-world economics, though:

“I’m skeptical about using virtual worlds to do economics, at least as it is now,” says Tyler Cowen, who holds the Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University. “What you do in experimental economics is you take undergraduates and put them in lab settings and play economics games and you measure the results. It’s like a created world, but it’s not in cyberspace. What makes experimental economics work is that you truly have a controlled experiment. When you have these virtual worlds, as I understand, people are not conducting controlled experiments. They’re running these onetime simulations. Whatever result you get is interesting, but you don’t know what to make of it. You’re stuck.

Personally I think the most interesting thing is figuring out what’s different about virtual economies and why. That might give some insights into how real economies work.

(HT: Lightspeed Venture Partners)

Via Digg, I found an interesting dispute between Creative Labs (maker of sound cards and other multimedia hardware) and an independent programmer going by the name of Daniel_K. The full details can be read in this thread on Creative’s support forums.

What Daniel_K did was to write and release his own set of Windows Vista drivers for certain Creative sound cards. Creative’s own drivers were apparently very buggy under Vista, and Daniel_K’s drivers fixed the bugs. You would think that Creative would actually be pleased about this, since it would enable them to sell more sound cards without going to the expense of fixing the drivers themselves. However, Creative was also selling different versions of the affected sound cards with different features. It seems that the hardware on the different cards was basically the same, but for the cheaper versions Creative had disabled some of the more advanced features in the software. Daniel_K’s drivers enabled some or all of the disabled features, thus undermining Creative’s product differentiation strategy, as people could just buy the cheapest card and have the same features as a more expensive one by using Daniel_K’s drivers instead of Creative’s. On top of this, Daniel_K was also asking for donations to support his driver-writing efforts, further irritating Creative that he was making money at their expense.

Now, of course, Creative’s lawyers have threatened Daniel_K and he has promised to stop writing and releasing drivers. The interesting question for armchair lawyers is whether or not they have a legitimate right to do this. Creative claims that Daniel_K is infringing on their intellectual property rights, like any patents they might have on their hardware. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t really speculate here, but I do know that intellectual property rights are ‘exhausted’ when a good embodying them is sold. For example, the patents that Apple has on iPods do not prevent you from re-selling your iPod or modifying it. They only prevent you from producing and selling devices that use the patented technologies.

With this in mind, it’d be interesting to hear exactly what grounds Creative has for restricting Daniel_K’s activities. However this doesn’t seem like it’s going to be contested in court. Faced with an expensive and complicated lawsuit, Daniel_K pretty much has no choice but to back down. I doubt he’s making a lot of money from donations, so the only point of going to court would be to get a moral victory, which he doesn’t seem to think is worthwhile.

In any case, the real lesson here seems to be that hardware manufacturers should not rely on crippling via software to execute a product differentiation strategy.

A couple of interesting articles for weekend reading, about competition in the blogosphere:

Wired on Engadget vs Gizmodo.

NY Times on PaidContent vs TechCrunch.

The thing that really stands out, especially from the Wired article, is the intensity of competition. If blogs were characterised by strong network effects, this could be seen as competition “for” the market, with each blog hoping to emerge as the winner later. But I don’t think network effects are that strong in blogs. Just as multiple newspapers can survive, so can multiple blogs. This suggests that the competition is more like good old fashioned horizontal competition. Strong horizontal competition usually means low profits. That’s great for consumers, and bad for investors.

I decided it would be nice to have a personal information management system where I can keep track of web bookmarks and other files in one system. I want to be able to tag resources and also group them by projects. I wanted it to be very simple and efficient to use, something like Google Bookmarks, but with the ability to keep files as well as bookmarks and a few other features.

I looked around for something that would do what I want and found a few things like 37signals Backpack, but nothing seemed to do exactly what I want, and I want to keep my data on my own server rather than someone else’s.

So I decided to roll my own. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now, and am reminded of the two key perils of programming: feature creep and perfectionism. There is always a temptation to add one more cute feature to make the system marginally better (at the expense of complexity). There is also the desire to have everything working perfectly under any kind of conditions. Both of these things make programming projects much bigger than they were initially.

To avoid these perils, I have to keep reminding myself that this is only for my personal use. I don’t want the costs to exceed the benefits …