Browseology

Description

This or That: it is an age old question that pertains to people, ideas, sports teams, and so on. FastFeud.com allows users to quickly create match ups that can then be shared virally through Facebook (using Facebook Connect) and Twitter. The experience is visual, exciting and fast-paced - allowing users to rapidly interact with numerous feuds.

Each match up includes a question, two contestants and images. Users are then encouraged to vote on the match up - on FastFeud.com, Facebook and Twitter. Votes are collected and winners are presented.

When shared via Facebook, users are able to post the match up and images of the two contestants directly into their Facebook feeds. When shared via Twitter, users are able to promote their match up and voting preference to their Twitter following.

Developed for the Rails Rumble 2009 contest in 48 hours by the Browseology Team and friends from Lijit and Egg Haus with the support of Dog Patch Labs' own Ryan Spoon.

The Team

Joe Pestro (@joepestro) - Developer for Yardbarker.com and Co-Founder of Browseology, LLC
Art Chang (@kineticac) - Developer for Yardbarker.com and Co-Founder of Browseology, LLC
Kevin Olsen (@kevinrolsen) - Developer for Lijit.com (flew in from Colorado to the SF Bay Area to work on this)
Rob Abbott (@abbott) - Founder and CEO of Egg Haus

Ryan Spoon, senior associate of Polaris Venture Partners, invited the Browseology team to take part in the Rails Rumble 2009 contents.  He was extremely helpful by offering us the ammeneties of working at Dog Patch Labs over at Pier 38 in San Francisco, CA (Townsend and Embarcadero).  The Browseology team then recruited Kevin Olsen of Lijit and long time friend from Yardbarker.com to join in the development team for the contest.  Ryan connected us with Rob Abbott who became our designer for this project.  We started work at 7am Saturday morning, 14 hours after the official start of the competition, and finished with a handful of minutes left.

Thanks

Rails Rumble
Big thanks go out to the Rails Rumble organizers who put this amazing competition together, as well as all the sponsors for the prize donations and all the support.  njero, zapnap, SuttoL, to name a few of the organizers who really stepped in and helped us out.

Rails Rumble Contestants
There was definitely no shortage of community support in the #railsrumble irc chatroom.  I always saw people helping each regardless of time constraints.  Really showed the brightest side of such events!

Dog Patch Labs
Big thanks to Ryan Spoon for getting us into the competition so late in the signup process, as well as coming back really late to help us lock up the labs, or waking up really early with us to open up the labs at 6am!  Also to all the other tenants that put up with our furious coding, cursing, and random entry and exit into their awesome working space.

Kevin Olsen's Family
To Kevin's wife Julia, baby Willa, and parents for letting us borrow Kevin for 3 days!

Browseology will be taking part in this year's Rails Rumble 2009 event, thanks to Ryan Spoon and Polaris Ventures getting us a spot in the competition.

We will be working out of Dog Patch Labs at Pier 38 in San Francisco! Will be a great experience working at the location and competing with the Browseology team.

See the map for Rails Rumble contestant locations here

The One Day App event was a big success, and shows great promise.  The goal of the event is to not put on a super official Hack-a-thon, but to preserve the casual development that can produce solid products in a single 24 hour period of time.

Our first participants did a great job, and the world came away with 4 great applications.  We are now planning our next event, and would love all the previous participants and others to put in your feedback and suggestions for our next event.

Please leave your suggestions in the comments of this blog so we can easily organize and come back to them.

Here are some of the highlights we are working on already for this next event:

• We are already in the talks with some partners to provide prizes
• Prizes will include giftcards, gadgets, and something big ;)
• And deals with major PR sources for guaranteed coverage for top applications

• Partnering with sites such as Clusterify (http://clusterify.com) to organize teams before hand
• Pre-event meetups on Chatterous and other mediums to organize and meet team members

• Pre-event idea brainstorming, to go hand in hand with the team organizations

• We will setup a page with signed up contestants
• On the day of the event, we will monitor the twitter statuses for a "check in" tweet to see who's actually made it.
• Tweets from the teams will be shown as status updates under their team listing
• Results at the end of the day will be shown, including peer reviews and judge ratings

• Working with a few venues in the San Francisco Bay Area for a possible meetup that will supply plenty of nourishment throughout the day
• Other regions are urged to organize their own venues as well
• Final visit to a watering hole at the end of the day to celebrate and talk.

• Celebrity Judges from companies all around

• Use this opportunity to really connect with other hackers out there
• Support each other during and after the event
• Network and get an awesome community going in and around the One Day App event

We've put out some exciting updates to Kiwis, the URL shortener with a sweet twist that was one of the apps to come out of the One Day App event on July 25, 2009.

     

Click here to download:

Kiwis_-_Now_even_better_with_A.zip (104 KB)

The first One Day App event is now over.  We had ten applicants, and finished with four complete apps.  It sounds like there will be continued work on some of the apps. 

The Chatterous chatroom provided a great virtual medium for us to meet and talk, Wufoo forms kept everything in line, and a combination of Twitter and Posterous kept everyone informed of the big news points. 

Below are the final apps that made it through the One Day App event, and reviews will be published early this week.

Qitika
http://qitika.com/news/
"A community managed feed aggregator"
Developer: Jamie Lewis
Duration: 7 Hours

Kiwis
http://kiw.is
Beta Invite Code: onedayapp
"Sharing a website with your own sweet twist.  Shorten and share links to websites on any medium with an attached message that stays with the link forever.  No longer rely on Twitter or Twitter messages to stay attached to your links.  Embed videos, images, audio and much more to display before any website you want to link to."
Developers: Browseology Team - Art Chang (@kineticac) and Joe Pestro (@joepestro)
Duration: 11 hours

Doubleblind.at
http://doubleblind.at
"Conducts a doubleblind experiment: You will rate friendfeed posts by your friends which have been anonymized, and afterward we will reveal to you which of your friends made the posts you like, and which make the posts you don't like.  Afterward, we will apply some NLP and machine learning to the information collected. Based on this analysis, we will email you a followup summary of your tastes and preference, if you like."
Developers: Joseph Turian and Richard Reed
Duration: 18 hours

Agent 42
http://epcntr.appspot.com/agentfortytwo
"A generic recommendation engine. Give it a few examples of things you like, and it scours the web to figure out the other stuff you might like."
Developer: Kovak Team - Siddharth Mitra (@sidmitra)
Duration: 23 hours

       

Click here to download:

One_Day_App_Final_Results.zip (239 KB)

Here are the participants who have sent in a signup form.  You can signup at anytime.  We will be following all these Twitter accounts listed next to member names and retweeting the important stuff.  At the end of the day we will repost all the projects that were completed for everyone to see.  You should follow us on Twitter to get updates throughout the day here.

Team Name: Dan Newman
Team Members: Dan Newman
Location: San Francisco, CA
Web site: http://www.polyrails.com

Team Name: Browseology
Team Members: Art (@kineticac), Joe (@joepestro)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Web site: http://kiw.is

Team Name: Ryan Wolf
Team Members: Ryan Wolf
Location: Illinois
Web site: none given

Team Name: renu
Team Members: Vijay Raj
Location: Toronto
Web site: http://wildcard.vijayraj.com

Team Name: noodle
Team Members: Arun Gnanamani (@lazyarun)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Web site: http://smsnoodle.com

Team Name: Stoughton
Team Members: Simon Tuckr
Location: Sheffield
Web Site: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/simon

Team Name: Qitika
Team Members: Jamie Lewis
Location: UK
Web site: http://qitika.com

Team Name: Kovak
Team Members: Siddharth Mitra (@sidmitra)
Location: Delhi, India

Team Name: MetaOptimize
Team Members: Joseph Turian, Ph.D. (@turian)
Location: Montreal, PQ
Web site: http://doubleblind.at (not finished registering yet)

In case you missed the announcement, we are kicking off a One Day App event, where hackers start and finish a single app in a single day.  This is a world wide event, so there's no real location requirements.  See our initial announcement: http://browseology.posterous.com/start-and-finish-one-app-in-one-day-with-us-o

Here are some follow up answers to some FAQ we receieved:

Are we working on one big project, or individual ones?

We are all just working on individual ideas. Come with a few ideas that can be feasibly done in one day.

Do I need a team?

You can work on it on your own, with the support and community of us in the chat, OR team up with other people in the morning.

If I have no idea, can I still try to come?

Definitely, we will be brainstorming a lot in the morning for awhile

Will you post teams and participants to follow?

In the morning we will post all those who've submitted a signup form by 8am PST July 25th, 2009.  We will include a team name, and a twitter name to follow if that was provided.  Ideas will not be posted, but can be freely talked about in the chatroom.  We will post on Twitter updates and reposts of the important events taking place

Will these apps be published somewhere?

We will publish all the apps, links, details, finish times, etc all in one post at the end of the day before heading out to a local watering hole.  If you are a blog or PR entity and want to cover this or future events, let us know =)

Where is the meeting spot?

This first event will be completely virtual.  You should follow us on Twitter here as well as join the Chatterous chat room here to participate and "hang out"

This Saturday, July 25th, 2009, the Browseology team is going to start and finish an app from scratch in a single day.  We'll come up with some idea in the morning, something decently interesting, and develop it in one day.  Completely in one day.  Anyone also willing to take a break from their larger big projects for a day of something new?  We will put all the apps up to show the world what feats can be accomplished in a single day.  Send me a message to let me know you guys are in =)

Start as early as possible, but I would suggest 10:00am PST

All local hackers are welcome to come join us at the office (SF Bay Area)!  We will hang out, talk, and code the day away.  Once we're done in the evening, we'll head to the local watering holes for some refreshment.

This will be a fun and super casual opportunity to network and meet new people.  Let us know.

You should follow us on Twitter here to get updates throughout the day.

Joe and I want to give a big thanks for all the people who came for the Browseology Preview Launch.  Everything went smoothly and we started getting great feedback already.  We really appreciate everyone's involvement, help, and participation.

We love to hear what everyone has to say, and everything is taken seriously and into consideration.  Big new features are lining up to be rolled out soon, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming in to help validate our features and to push the development along as well.

Get a sneak peek at Browseology!