Web 2.0 Watch

Silverlight and Facebook Mashup The NBA All-Star Game

In 2007, Microsoft announced a team-up with the NBA's (National Basketball Association) NBA Media Ventures where Silverlight, MS's cross-browser, multi-platform plug-in will be used to enhance rich media for NBA fans worldwide.

The stated goal for the NBA and NBA.com is for Silverlight to provide deeper access to the NBA's extensive video archives - not just snippets of highlights, but entire games over the last four decades.

A showcase moment for NBA.com and Silverlight occurred this past weekend with the 58th Annual NBA All-Star game in Phoenix. As it happened, my cable service was interrupted last Saturday, so I was forced to watch the game on my laptop. And it was pretty darn impressive (See link below):

Two thirds of the screen is a "Mosaic" view that was also used during the Summer Olympics on the NBC Olympic website. Four different camera views were shown simultaneously onscreen, three more than were on my TV. Besides the "Host Cam" (the TV view), users could also see the arena and live feeds from other angles, including a Player Cam that takes real-time tabulations from viewers and then focuses on those players that score highest. Viewers also got to vote on the extremely popular Slam Dunk Contest for the first time, which was considerably more fun than texting via my cellphone.

The last third of the screen consisted of a Facebook status page where you can either view random commentary, Twitter-style, or login to your Facebook account and trade All-Star game observations in real time with your friends.

I admit, overall it was a great viewing experience, but when I went to full-screen mode, the picture quality was lacking, and a small performance lag was visible. It was preferable to leave the screen as you see above for optimal performance. 

Speaking of performance, I decided to turn on KITE to measure performance on both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was interesting since there were several events over the course of the afternoon and evening, peaking with the Slam Dunk Contest. The script essentially involved launching the site, switching between screens to follow the action, and logging into and commenting on Facebook. One sample of the results I pulled during this period are shown here: 

Good performance overall, except on the NY server. This likely occurred during the peak period when 5'7" Nate Robinson was battling 6'11" Dwight Howard for the dunk championship. In fact, at that point (on my live connection in NY), I experienced extreme system slowness when switching between screens. The international servers performed well though - and that is NOT a minor concern. You see, a few years ago, a NBA.com representative reported that nearly 70% of NBA.com site hits came from outside the U.S., that is a number I find truly stunning, even with the global bent the league has actively sought. The moves of players such as Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian (China), Manu Ginobilli (Argentina), and Tony Parker (France) are followed with massive interest in their home countries and contients. Hence the overseas performance of official NBA sites are as high a priority as domestic performance.

On Sunday, I tracked the actual All-Star game by running a similar script several times during the game.

The results of one sample are as shown here: 

As you can see, the user experience time was consistent throughout. But response time in China appears to be noticeable slower than elsewhere, although it was still pretty quick. I am in the process of gathering more information about user hits in China and Europe (I know that it was highly watched on TV's in China, and there are restrictions on Internet access). Overall, the Silverlight/Facebook "mashup" (strictly speaking, I'm not sure it is one, but it will do) can be considered a user and performance success.

Cloud Applications on LinkedIn (part 2)

Last week, I highlighted a few cloud applications that have made their way to LinkedIn.com Allow me to review a few other applications that are available to LinkedIn users:

Huddle Workspaces is a cloud collaboration tool, sort of a cloud version of Lotus Notes. First you join Huddle and create an account. Once teh account is established, you can create separate groups based on need and preference. Some of the options that are available include a Whiteboard function, this is a "commons" area where ideas can be laid out, annotated and edited with a audit trail. Another is Tasks - a desktop planner that can be laid out in calendar or in list format.

Not only can Word or Excel files be viewed in Huddle, they can be created and fully edited there or offline, a fantastic feature. Users can also email files out of Huddle and create discussion groups. It would be nice if Power Point docs could be created as well, but alas does not appear to be an option at this time. Performance was overall brisk, but occasionally sluggish when building a Excel doc.

Huddle gets some competition from Box.net; a collaborative tool as well, but it is mostly about sharing files with collaborators that can be Box members or visitors. There are no whiteboard features, but it has OpenBox; a suite of tools that allows users to manipulate their files in distinct ways.

For example, EchoSign is a free application that allows the electronic signing and approval of contracts, a godsend for freelancers who work cybercommute. Files can also be transmitted from the Box site to other users via Gmail, Facebook, or EFax. iPaper allows the viewing of docs (especially PDFs) without the need to download applications.

The drawbacks to Box (and to a lesser extent Huddle), is that the free service only allows for 1GB of information to be stored. There are three levels of upgrades available to users on both platforms. For a monthly charge, a user can upgrade to the storage, maximum file size, and the business option provides 256-bot security.

Another drawback to Box is that while files can be uploaded in the classic fashion, it also comes with a drag and drop option that be wonderful - if it worked. Several attempts to use the drag and drop applet on Firefox proved to be an abject failure.

There other applications such as MyTravel (which lets everyone in your network in on your travel plans - my feeling is WHY?), Amazon Readling List, a way to share your current readings with the world, and WordPress which is a rival product to BlogLink, in that LinkedIn users can sync their WordPress blog posts to their profile. But my personal favorite of the rest is Polls.

With this you can pose survey questions to not just your network, but the entire popualtion of LinkedIn. Combine that with the ability to break down the various demographics of your polling population, and you have the makings of a powerful marketing tool, or a great networking device if you pose the right questions.

On Measuring Gigapan Performance

In my cyber-travels I come across some interesting applications, but not all of them will be used by everyday folks. An exception is Gigapan (http://gigapan.org/) a website that is probably best described as a Web 2.0 cousin to SETI@home, that cute little distributed application that had us all searching for Little Green Men a few years ago.

Gigapan is the latest manifestation of the Global Connection Project (GCP), a collaboration between Google, NASA, National Geographic, and Carnegie-Mellon University. It's an interesting concept with three components: A special high-res mount that allows high-resolution pictures to be taken with a conventional digital camera, special software that constructs high-res panoramic shots, and a collaborative site that allows users to share and comment on the panorama being displayed on the site.

The gigapan object that is the focus of this column is a stunning shot of President Obama's Inaugural address by photographer David Bergman. (Don't bother looking for me, I was much closer to the Washington Monument than the Capitol building.) Made up of 200 images, it is 1.4 gigapixels (not megapixels - GIGApixels) big. As of this writing, users can access and zoom in on over 1,200 snapshots. In the words of Bergman, "it has become an international game of 'Where's Waldo'.."

What really piqued my interest was Bergman's claim that in the first five days he posted the picture (Jan 22-26), he got over 2 million views from 186 countries. At the time of this writing, there were over 2.6 million views. So...how was the performance you may ask?

Anything related to Obama and the election/inauguration has been incredibly popular on the web. I ran KITE a few times over the last two weeks to get a sense of the site performance. Essentially, I randomly checked various snapshots that covered the breadth of the panorama. In short, Gigapan definitely needs to tweak their site for high volume traffic.

As you can see,the performance could be divided in two groups; slow, and really, really slow. 

I mean 20 seconds to load from Hong Kong? And given the immense interest in this event, the global performance can not be ignored. I will say that this is consistent with performance lags some media sites showed in the week before and after January 20.

You can see that performance was slow overall, and especially so in Hong Kong and Frankfurt. New York took a pounding as well, which reflects the issues I had in accessing the images in New York from my laptop in real time.

Now these were today's results when running the same KITE performance script:

As you can see, the performance improved greatly in the US and London, but Frankfurt and Hong Kong was still lagging, despite the drop off in page visits. It is fair to ask if the foreign Gigapan servers are ready for prime time. For a more detailed look at my results, feel free to click here.

I do plan to run the script again over the next week or two, and report the results.