Archive for the ‘web’ Category

“Fighting Spam at Flickr” at Web2.0Expo

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

I recently had the giddy honor of speaking at the 2010 Web2.0Expo in San Francisco. The topic was simple – spam. I shared some insights (or I hope they were insights, anyway) about combating the spam problem on a social website – something I had been doing quite a lot of since joining Flickr. The slides are now on Slideshare and embedded below.

Thanks to Brady and the rest of the w2e team for putting together a great conference. I didn’t get to go to as many sessions as I would have liked due to having to spend most of my time in the speakers lounge preparing, but the ones I did go to were excellent.

Things I forgot to say in the talk/slides that are important:

  • Keep track of recent rates for ALL activity that your users do. This gets a bit expensive in terms of storage, but if you prune the data furiously, it can be made sustainable. Having that information is key – it can be used at pretty much every step of spam mitigation. Also, be smart about this – if messages can be deleted from a table, don’t use that table to do the counting. Nobody I know has EVER done that……

  • Rate limit everything. There’s usually a sweetspot right between what 99% of real users will actually ever do and spam-land.

Anyway, here are the slides. Enjoy!

Fighting Spam at Flickr

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i’m branching out: c, python, maybe even java…

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Though I had made my mind up a while ago to start seriously hacking other languages besides PHP, I saw something today that really reinforced that decision: average programmer salaries.

Erlang $99,000 (added 8 June 2008) … Java $79,000 Python $78,000 Perl $77,000 Ruby $74,000 COBOL $73,000 (added due to demand)
JavaScript $72,000
ColdFusion $64,000 (8 June 2008)
Delphi $64,000 PHP $64,000 …

Yikes!

Posted in dev, php, software, tech, web | No Comments »

on Yahoo! – let’s all take a deep breath

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Yahoo! continues to take heat from the “blogosphere” and the press. Most recently, Arrington complained that Yahoo! has no focus and that they have no idea what they’re doing.

That’s funny. Because a week ago, he reported that they have a 22% market share in search. You know who else has a similar share in their market? GM. Yahoo! is still profitable. Yahoo! is still growing at 7-8%/yr. Last I checked, that’s a pretty healthy business.

I’m not saying Yahoo! is perfect – everyone knows I do my fair share of bitching and moaning. But to say that Yahoo! is “done” because the CEO looks tired in the middle of a highly publicized, nasty takeover battle is reaching at best. I realize that the only way bloggers can differentiate themselves from the maintsream media is by having extreme opinions and foaming at the mouth, but in my mind this article has about as much substance as Valleywag’s blaming Filo for Yahoo’s “troubles.”

Arrington’s complaint that Yahoo!’s “focus” is too broad seems silly. How many multi-billion companies just do one thing? Where is the outrage at Google basically inserting themselves into every market they can possibly think of?

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microsoft walks; popcorn stock down

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

The popcorn industry took an unexpected hit as the drama surrounding the potential acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft ended abruptly.

Back to irrelevance.

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twitter has bad code push; world ends

Monday, April 21st, 2008

As a person addicted to the internet, it is fascinating/terrifying for me to watch others who are even more addicted. Check out the getsatisfaction.com thread about Twitter’s recent cache issue:

I am one of those users who has ceased to exist on Twitter’s timeline for a lot of people. Really weird. Feel like I’m tweeting alone. Like I’ve been muted. So not fun. Any idea when this will be fixed?

This one is at least partially in touch with the world outside her monitor:

And here I thought all my buddies had simply decided to walk away from ‘technology’ for a while and enjoy their weekend ‘offline’. Hoping to see this get fixed soon.
silly I’m sad, but this ‘outage’ gives me an excuse to focus on other things…

Of course, some people use Twitter for journalistic ends:

No pressure guys-but Tuesday is Penn. Primary and Web 2.0 and New Comm Forum kick off next week too. of my 2000 plus followers, only a handful can see me. They all think I’m dead.

but that’s not Twitter’s problem. That’s your own problem.

Another voice of sanity:

!@#$ you all. Seriously. Twitter is FREE. You haven’t paid a cent to use it. You still don’t pay a cent to use it. It’s not a god given right, it’s not a utility. Don’t like it? Stop !@#$-ing whining and build your own social network. Go buy a server, install Rails, set up one of the open source Twitter clones, and take your stupid friends and your whining with you.
sad I’m irritated.

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