I just redirected my old GregsMind domain to this new one.  I moved the blog over to a new domain, which will make sense after reading the blog post above.  Welcome to the new blog, and I hope you want to follow along.

24 hours later and everyone is still talking about the Skype outage from yesterday.  And while everything is almost back to normal we should look at how important Skype has become to consumers and enterprise users. Skype recently announced that they had hit the 25M simultaneous user mark worldwide.

As of a little while ago Skype has about 16.5M users back online.  Enterprises must be squirming right now, and Skype is learning how hard it is to be an essential part of the business world.  While we are not perfect on AIM, making sure that we don’t lose the entire network is really important.  Part of the reason that AIM, and other networks like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google can handle and overcome outages or downtime is due in part to our architectures.  Having a centralized network hosted in multiple datacenters around the world allows us to quickly migrate users if we lose part of the network due to equipment failure.

In Skype’s case their own architecture was their undoing.  Skype has a system that is distributed via a series of nodes.  Machines that are in more friendly environments act as SuperNodes where Skype clients connect.  According to Skype “a handful of Windows clients failed and set off a chain reaction that brought down Skype.”  A full post mortem on the outage still needs to be done, but its clear that if Skype wants to work with enterprises it may need to rethink the backbone that powers the service.

Here is a great link describing the Skype architecture.

Here are some more stats GigaOm compiled this afternoon on Skype:

• Skype hosts about 25 million users at peak times.
• Members made 88.4 million Skype-to-Skype calls in the first half of 2010 with 6.4 million minutes of calls to landlines in the first half of 2010.
• Skype accounts for 0.57 percent of all Internet traffic.
• Skype grew by 51 percent last year dwarfing the 8 percent growth for international telephone traffic.

Here is the video from Skype CEO Tony Bates updating everyone on the outage:

Today a hedge fund announced that it was going to start tracking stocks via Twitter.  The hedge fund, The Derwent Absolute Return Fund Ltd. in London, will use an algorithm that will follow updates on the social network and use trending to determine what and when to trade.

It’s an interesting experiment, and I assume the fund has been practicing their algorithm against fake money or their own money for a while now, but it will be interesting to view the returns from the fund.  My thought on trying this is that if we start looking at who is contributing to the twitter ecosystem, can Twitter really predict the stock market, or for that matter any other event?

Yesterday Sysomos released a study done on Twitter demographics and the way users are using the service.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Users with 100+ friends have increased by three-fold to 21% since 2009.
• 22.5% of users accounted for about 90% of all activity.
• 80% users have made fewer than 500 tweets.
• Justin Bieber is one of top two-word phrases and top name in user’s bios.
• Significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio and web information in Twitter profiles.

If Justin Bieber is giving out free stock advise, then the hedge fund is sure to score!  I am impressed that users are following more people, but unless these users are creating content (original tweets or retweets), it may not help develop the algorithm.  Of course, you can have the opposite problem where spammers contribute too much content that screws with the trending.

In the experience we had with trending on AOL Lifestream we had to constantly manipulate the algorithm as spammers and general users made trends at times irrelevant.  In a later post, I am going to delve more into trending and the challenges it presents and whose social data may be most relevant in contributing to interesting trends.

Watching the movie WarGames, reminded me why I loved “playing” on computers early on in life.  I never thought I would be David Lightman, but I certainly pretended to be on my old Compaq, writing BASIC programs and “hacking” Microsoft Flight Simulator.  It got me thinking how many of today’s programmers, developers and hackers were inspired by the film?

Here are my 3 favorite scenes:

• When David goes to the university to get help in accessing the game system.  Programmers have come a long way from the stereotype they showed in that scene.
• When David and Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) show up at Professor Falken’s house and he gives them instructions to leave, he does so in logic. “find path, take path, find gate, open gate, close gate…”
• The scene where David makes flight reservations on PanAm.  It gaves us all hope that one day we could book our own travel plans online.  Of course a few minutes later the most famous scene of the movie takes place when the computer asks David, “Do you want to play a game?”

No movie about computers and hacking has come close to this one.  Now there are rumors that Leonardo DiCaprio is going to reboot WarGames and redo the movie.  For me the original was so good, why mess with a good thing.

Foursquare added the ability to share pictures when checking in to their iPhone App this morning.  I love this feature and it is good to see foursquare catch up to what we built on AOL Lifestream this summer with the ability to update your status, location and share a picture all at the same time.

Images and location are very meaningful and go hand in hand.  Way before Flickr added geo tagging to albums, we used to organize our own physical photo albums around events and places.  I used to sit and flip through an album reminiscing about where I was when the photo was taken and when.  That is what makes what we did on AOL Lifestream and what Flickr and Foursquare have done is important to me.

It also makes me wonder why Facebook has not done a better job innovating on photos.  The feature is the most popular on Facebook, and in many ways was the most significant reason why they now have 500M users, but the feature actually feels weak to me.  I still use Flickr because of this.  When I view my Facebook photos or my friends photos, dates and location are not easily viewable if at all.  I can see the comments on the photo which is great and I can see who else is in the photo with me, but I really can’t expect Facebook’s Photos feature to be a reference point for me.  If I want to easily search for a photo based on when or where, forget it.

Here is my map of all my photos:

I started reading TechCrunch 4 years ago and they provided an essential lifeline to what was happening in Silicon Valley while I was on the east coast.  It seemed the site and specifically Mike Arrington always could find a great story and break news that others could not.

TechCrunch, which in September was acquired by AOL, has always embraced new technology to better the reading experience.  In April when Facebook announced their social plugins at their F8 developer conference, TechCrunch added a bunch of different social plugins to the main page.

The two most prominent social plugins are the Like button which appears on each article on the homepage and the Like Box which is on the right rail of the homepage.  The issue is that for me on my Mac on all browsers TechCrunch loads quickly but the page becomes locked as it tries to load the Like Box.  I am unable to scroll or click on any of the page elements.

This got me thinking, are we slowing down the web with all of the social integrations we are placing on these sites?

Should I give up?  Should I care?  Can the Redskins make the fans hate the team anymore?  Since 1999, this team has been an embarrassment, and sure it is easy to point to Dan Snyder, the Redskins owner, but it goes beyond him.

This week, only a few weeks after signing Donovan McNabb to a 5 year contract extension, basically handed Donovan his walking papers, benching him for the rest of the season.  I am partial as a Syracuse grad who lived a few doors down from Don in college.  He is a great player and a great person, who was raised right, worked hard, and always competed.  The Redskins’ complete lack of respect for Donovan McNabb this season just makes me question why have I rooted for the Skins for my whole life?

How can the Redskins make a commitment to a player, and then simply tell him after 3 weeks “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”  So much of the issue is with Shanahan Family (Head Coach Mike and Offensive Coordinator Kyle), and the relationship they have had with McNabb.

Are the Shanahan’s racist?  Some might say so, as they have called McNabb weak, gutless, and stupid, something you never heard them say with Elway, Cutler or Rex Grossman, all quarterbacks they used to coach.

Are the Shanahan’s winners?  Mike Shanahan was one of the most sought after coaches last year, and his resume looked good, but was it really?  Shanahan made it to the playoffs 7 of his 17 years coaching, which is a great percentage.  His back to back Super Bowl victories were also impressive, though he had one of the best QBs of all time and had a great staff.  I believe John Elway was much more responsible for those Super Bowl wins than Shanahan.  So if you take away the 7 playoff victories from 1997 and 1998, your left with a coach who won 1 playoff game in 5 other trips.  Also, it seems like Shanahan subscribes to the theory of “let the bridges burn to light the way” as he leaves town.  His departure from the Raiders and Broncos were both less than graceful.  It looks like his departure from the Redskins may be the least graceful of them all.

I think this video captures perfectly the feelings of his departure from Denver.

So where does this leave the Redskins soap opera?  They have alienated a player who is beloved throughout the league, and have mishandled the Albert Haynesworth situation.  They have questionable coaches, and the fans are beyond fed up.  They play in the most competitive division in football.  Add all this up, and the Redskins have a long way to go to fix the mess.

I am a huge college football fan, heck I am a huge sports nut in general.  Today kicks off the 2010 Division 1-A bowl season with the amazing New Mexico Bowl pitting BYU against University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).  Woohoo?!?!

There are some great college post season tradition like the Rose Bowl, and even in more recent history the Holiday Bowl has had great moments, but lets be honest, no top Bowl moment ever can compare to the NCAA Basketball tournament.

So this week, along comes Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, saying he is willing to payoff each college or conference to end the charade that is the Bowl Championship Series.  Mark is an outside the box thinker, and in this case he is spot on.  The BCS exists for one simple reason, money.  See while the NCAA Basketball tournament is awesome for the fans and student athletes,  colleges lose money playing in the tournament due to travel and ticket costs.  The BCS and Bowls in general literally make or break athletic department budgets.  Even when you see half empty stadiums, teams are guaranteed a payout thanks to ESPN and those awesome sponsors like ‘uDrove‘ who is sponsoring the Humanitarian Bowl.

When I worked in the athletic department at Syracuse, I can remember see plaques in specific conference rooms thanking the Fiesta Bowl for providing the audio and video technology in the room.  When Syracuse made it to the Sweet 16 in the spring of 1998, the university was not sure they could send the cheerleaders or band due to costs.  Did I mention the university was giving away their bowl tickets every year, but students slept outside for NCAA Basketball tickets each year.  Things are upside down.  Fans want a tournament, but sponsorship money keeps the bowls alive and colleges coffers lined.

The format of the playoff does not matter, but breaking the cartel that is the Bowl Championship Series needs to happen.  The world needs to be spared of the Beef O’Brady Bowl featuring Southern Miss and Louisville.

With Yahoo sunsetting Delicious among a few other web properties, I think we are seeing how a company fails to capture the potential of an acquisition.  Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005, and was an early example of how Social was going to be such an important component to Web 2.0.

The social bookmarking website was an important tool in my life when I launched Open AIM in 2006.  The team used Delicious’ tagging to view common blog posts or reviews of AIM to determine what we should do with the product and platform.  Unfortunately Yahoo could not figure out how to take the utility that was Delicious and make it a product that powered other Yahoo properties.  The truth is Google Reader was able to replicate Delicious’ social features and productize them faster.

I definitely need to make sure to grab my data from Delicious before they shut it down.  It is weird to see more and more nacent Web 2.0 products get shut down.

After 6 months of waiting, the day has arrived.  It’s time to head down to Austin for SXSW to take in music, movies and some geek stuff too.  We can cover the geek and music stuff later, but this years conference gives us a bunch of eclectic movies, everything from the MacGruber premier to No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, which seems appropriate given the latest news about his gambling and alcohol issues.

Last year, The Hurt Locker premiered at SXSW, and last weekend won multiple Oscars.  There is a great panel with Quentin Taratino and Robert Rodriguez about filming gore and horror.  For the 3rd year in a row, Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show, Arrested Development) is hosting his acting workshop, which has provided 90 minutes of laughter and drama with his direction of two actors from the SXSW film program.

My suggestion to all the interactive folks is to check out a movie or a movie panel.  Spread your wings and see what is happening at one of the better movie festivals around.  You may never get to Sundance or Cannes, but Austin will give you a good idea what it is like to be at those events.