Facebook has cut spam by 97% in the past year. An impressive feat even for a tech company with their vast resources.
Facebook defined spam as anything that shows up in your feed that you don’t really want to see. Remember all those farmville messages?
How would the company or government of yesterday deal with this? The US would declare war on it, Canada would cook up a bunch of poorly enforced laws and corporations would embattle developers in a gargantuan “acceptable usage policy”.
Facebook simply focused on the output. If no one was clicking like, and no one was clicking on the app, they automatically disapeared posts by that application. They focused on what desirable outcomes are (clicking for more detail, adding the application, interacting with that friend after seeing their post). Naturally this forced developers to align their practices with messages that users actually cared about. Facebook was able to shorten their AUP by 50%.
How can this be applied to you organization, school or government?
http://www.fastcompany.com/1721252/how-facebook-killed-spam
You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.
— Un-Manage Your Employees, an article for My Business by yours truly on the self-managing teams at 37signals.
We live in a world of action driven by thoughts from our head; yet we are creatures of the heart.
Now we have a hint: Another new Apple patent suggests an iPhone (or iPad, etc) could get a second SIM tray-like port on one side, into which you’d slip the little golden chip segment from a modern credit card. The neatness of this idea is impressive: All the credit card makers need do is slightly modify their existing cards so you could pop-out the chip in the same way you do when you get a new cell phone SIM card delivered (which does come in a credit card-shaped plastic carrier, if you remember). All the security and ID and—more importantly—control over card numbers and distribution to customers—would remain with the card issuer, disrupting their business model less than other solutions would.
I was inspired by Tim Ferris’ technique for testing potential titles for his new book using google adwords.
He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed a Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle. Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.
His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.”
Take away
I am beginning to wonder if all our conversion buttons, product names and key phrases should be tested using adwords before their deployment to our pages.
Anyone else know of ƒunctional ways of using adwords to test phraseology?
Based on my research this year here is my advice:
1. Do not say them to anyone. Research shows that the effect of your brain mistaking the saying for the doing is stronger than the social obligation created by announcing your plans.
2. Start as soon as you come up with your ideas as any cognitive dissonance you exhibit now will carry into the new year and foil your positive habit building efforts.
3. Don’t focus on goals!! Focus on habits for habits lead to the achievement of goals.
4. Remind yourself that we are fundamentally motivated by curiosity, challenge and passion. Money, looking sexy and being powerful won’t successfully motivate you. They decend from having the right balance of the above.
I wanted to collect some of my learnings on how ubuntu/debian manages scripts at boot time.
First, /etc/rcRUN-LEVEL.d/NNname is a series of directories that are symlinked to the /etc/init.d/name actual boot script.
So, if you want a service or program to run at boot time first create the script at /etc/init.d/servicename and chmod it to be executable. You can find an example at /etc/init.d/skeleton
Set the appropriate runlevels directly in the script. The defaults should work for most users.
then run sudo update-rc.d servicename defaults and the appropriate symlinks will be added for you.
When you’re constructing your boot script, the LSB header tells update-rc.d what runlevels and what ORDER to run your daemons in. For our use which will be a onetime execution before self-destruction on the first boot of a vm template we want all other services to start first so we will add a ” Required-Start $all “
Add the additional physical disk
sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb
sudo vgextend ubuntu /dev/sdb
sudo lvextend /dev/ubuntu/root
sudo resize2fs /dev/ubuntu/root
