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VERITAS Software and The Gone List.

Early in the Summer of 2005 a colleague of mine at VERITAS Software started calling me with daily information about who left the company and which groups were adding new hires most quickly.  He was an individual contributor engineer without access to senior executives, yet he had more of this type of information than anyone at the company including the head of Human Resources!  How was that possible?  So I took him out for coffee to find out the source of his information.  

What I found out was amazing (remember, it was 2005).  An ingenious engineer realized that all of this data was available to every employee in the company — we all had access to Vdir (the VERITAS directory) through Vnet (the VERITAS intranet) and LDAP.  Unfortunately, it was impossible to turn that raw data into information just by looking at a bunch of pages.  Humans are notoriously bad at preserving the fidelity of massive quantities of atomic bits of data and then scanning for changes over slices of time.  But it turns out that computers are extremely good at this sort of task.  So this engineer wrote a program that produced an UNOFFICIAL daily summary of all changes to Vdir and sent the results (called the Gone List) to any VERITAS employee who wanted to subscribe via email.  

The email had: total current employee count including contractors (a number that many executives have trouble getting just prior to conference calls), employees removed from the company database (all departures, listed by office location and function), employees added to the company database (new hires, listed by office location and function), and existing employees with new departments, locations, and names (who got married).  Just after I found out about the list, it was shut down.  Rumor has it that HR didn’t like the the Gone List and shut it down. 

Facebook introduces the News Feed and the Mini-Feed.

On September 5, 2006 Facebook introduced the News Feed and the Mini-Feed.  Here is my edited summary of the post (note the bit about Mark adding Britney Spears — you’ve got to love a company where a PM makes fun of the co-founder & CEO in a press release about a new feature):  

“News Feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups…News Feed and Mini-Feed are a different way of looking at the news about your friends, but they do not give out any information that wasn’t already visible…These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web. We hope these changes help you stay more up to date on your friends’ lives.”

News Feed is the Gone List for the Facebook community.  And I agree with Ruchi Sanghvi (the product manager on these features), that this is unlike anything else on the web (circa September 2006).  There is a good chance that when history is written, Facebook’s greatest contribution to the web will have been News Feed.

Vitality everywhere.

According to Webster’s, the definition of vitality is, “the peculiarity distinguishing the living from the nonliving.”

What the Gone List and News Feed did was bring distributed bits of “nonliving” data to life by aggregation around an ontology (directories, in both cases).  Then they simply developed a model about what database changes would be interesting (who’s gone with the Gone List, who’s single now with News Feed) and presented the information to users in once place (email with the Gone List, Facebook homepage with News Feed).  

To be clear, the underlying concept goes back a long, long time.  Anything that pushes changes out instantaneously plays on this idea.  Stock price changes, RSS feeds, and “news” alerts all play on the same concept.  But understanding that any database change [linked to some ontology] could result in interesting information was revolutionary.  While a number of firms have figured out just how powerful this metaphor can be (LinkedIn, Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, Plaxo), the vast majority of the world has yet to embrace the revolution.  

Therein lies the opportunity.

Idea:  Autofrais —  News Feed for the rest of us.  

1.  Develop platform that accepts inputs in an open format (XML?) with a set of user-defined attributes (e.g., author from directory + location, group, keyword).  Encourage “developers” to attach as much ontological information as possible (e.g., a corporate directory).

2.  Allow developer to describe rules / model through which the data will be filtered.  For example, an in-house corporate IT developer could build a model to automatically share all employee departures and additions with everyone in the group from which they departed / joined on the homepage of the corporate intranet everyday (now that’s information that would get me coming back).  Or a user-generated web site could munge their [tagged] content with the Facebook social graph through Autofrais + Facebook Connect as their new homepage.

3.  Build A/B testing platform to allow third-party developers to optimize content based on end-user click-throughs or some other objective function.  This isn’t required with small data volumes, but with growing data volumes some prioritization system will be required to separate signal from noise.

4.  Develop simple templates to allow developers to deploy a solution with minimal input (e.g., News Feed wizard which walks users through simple creation process where I can pick from UI templates, colors, etc).