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Blank (Media) Slate

The world is changing every day... it's like waking up each morning to a blank slate.

History of MatchmineNovember 6

An unfortunate side effect of pulling down the matchmine servers is that the page describing the history of the company I founded dropped off the map. Now that I’m out and about looking for my next opportunity, I find that I’m often retelling the origin story. I thought I might as well post the tale as it was undoubtedly an interesting path from genesis to its untimely end.

It all started back in 1995 when my brother, Mark, and I were playing around with this new thing called MP3 streaming. He had founded a biotech startup in Boston and his staff (a motley crew of bioinformaticists) kept eating up server space with their audio library. Further compounding the problem, they’d share their music files which would mean multiple copies all over the place. Let’s ignore the legality of this for now (since I’m an ardent supporter of IPR), and focus on the technical side of the story.

As Mark is a total hacker (in the “constant tinkering of a maven” sense of the term), he worked with some similar folks at MIT to create a shared music jukebox. In this way, everyone loaded their music into a central server and could listen to the full collection from their desks. The trick quickly became not “how” to listen to their music, but “what” music to listen to.

At night, then, Mark and I would bounce ideas around for how to build effective playlists. It’s no surprise that since Mark’s doctorate is in cell molecular biology (i.e. he’s

User-Centered ControlOctober 9

While reading The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow I came across an interesting section talking about an innate need to feel in control of our surroundings. The primary thrust of the book is how pervasive, and misunderstood, randomness is in our lives. In the chapter on “Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion” he takes a side step to explore some reasons why we try to overlay meaning onto mathematically random events.

What struck me was his discussion of behavioral research indicating that control, or even the perception of control, is empowering. He used this section to illuminate the very real drive we have to find patterns of meaning in our lives, and by extension to feel in control of our endeavors. For example, he references studies on nursing homes showing that residents allowed to control their environment by selecting their own rooms and decorat

Authentication, Authorization, and AssuranceSeptember 18

The deeper I dive into the various projects I’m working on the more I encounter the substantive differences between logging into a system and having the appropriate roles to access what they need. In my rough-n-ready approach to definitions as a way to discuss concepts:

• Authentication: Identifying yourself using some type of credentialing system
• Authorization: Having the rights to access and/or modify something.

In our daily lives, we’re familiar with the need to authenticate. Whipping out your ATM card and entering your PIN is a common example of telling the banking system who you are (or at least the identification of your account). In the expanding universe of online services, everyone’s inundated with the standard challenge/response prompting the entry of username and password.

What’s not as often visible is what happens post-authentication. Under the covers, systems generally track what you’re allowed to do once you’ve said who you are. This is where authentication enters the story. After entering your PIN, you can pull some cash from your bank account, but your access is often limited. For example, you are only authorized to access up to $N.

This is all very well and good, but oddly enough it glosses over a fundamental issue at the core of these transactions. Specifically, when the authentication credentials are assigned, it’s not always clear the issuer truly knows the identity of the credentialed

Open Access, Feeding, and Streaming of MatchKeysSeptember 15

We’ve been talking openly about our support of data portability for a while now. In fact, before the term had the cache it does today, matchmine came to life in 2005 as a method for embracing the user’s desire to make their personal preference data portable.

While it doesn’t seem necessarily ground-breaking today, we believe that a user’s information is their own, and they should be in control of sharing it with whomever they choose. It’s easy to talk a good game, but we’re happy to be actively marching to the beat of the openness drum with a few new features we recently rolled out:

• OpenID – One of the most annoying aspects of the proliferation of kewl sites, online applications, and distributed features is the need to create accounts in each new system. Enter the OpenID single sign-on technique that’s gaining momentum in what’s being called the “open web”. Rather than forcing our users to create yet another account, MatchKey.com and other sites within the matchmine Media Discovery Network (mMDN) now support OpenID. So you can now easily manage your MatchKey with your account at Yahoo, Flickr, and AOL as well as specialized OpenID providers like myOpenID, claimID, and Verisign.
• MatchKey Feeder – While the concept isn’t revolutionary, we’ve taken steps to learn from your intera

Freeing Locked-up User DataSeptember 5

Chris Saad recently posted a succinct clarification of the following questions related to some business issues around data portability:

• Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?
• Why make it easy for users to take the precious data you have about them and use it on other sites?
• What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?

He’s got some helpful diagrams that illustrate his point, so I suggest reading his post on “The mythical value of data lockin“. In short, though, it’s this paragraph that seems to sum it up:

Even if you are Google, and you know every search your users do, every document they write, every chat they have - you still don’t know their facebook social graph. You don’t know their tweet stream. You don’t know the books they bought on Amazon.

I wish I could remember where I first heard this quote to attribute the source, but it works as the bumper sticker (or Twitter) version of the same sentiment:

No matter how large a website is, the internet is bigger.

Basically, sites will ultimately learn much more about their users=customers when they plug into the sharing network than they’ll be giving up. Here at matchmine, of course, we’re all about enabling sites to access user interests