Nom nom nom...

When I wake up (around noon like the typical college student), the first thing that I usually ask myself is "What should I eat?" Living in the bay area as opposed to rural Urbana-Champaign, IL, a college town where some of my friends live, I have lots of choices when it comes to food. However, as a universal food-lover, it sometimes becomes quite difficult to actually make a decision. Sometimes the food is really good, but too far to walk to for the price that I have to pay. It's a difficult decision process to go through to find the restaurant that costs appropriately for the time it takes to get there and for the quality of the food.

However, a local startup that I've been working on called Munch On Me, will hopefully be launching very soon to help me with this decision. I personally describe it as a fusion of the best of Groupon, Yelp, and Foursquare. Every week, Munch On Me features up to 4 dishes / appetizers / drinks / desserts / etc. from certain featured merchants often at greatly reduced prices. Munch On Me aims to connect good food with great people while keeping everyone happy. Initially, the restaurants that are featured are also typically higher rated on Yelp so that users can be introduced to the best dishes of the best restaurants around them. Unlike many group-buying sites, there is no "tipping-point," and you can redeem your featured offer instantly with just a code, email, or name presented to the merchant! Merchants will also be able to push deals out on a deal feed that will be constantly updated with new deals for users to take advantage of when they are craving some pho, sushi, boba, etc. To keep up with all the "gaming" that is out there, Munch On Me also has an established achievements system for users to level up and gain badges in a competition to become the top Muncher. Who knew eating food could be a combination of cheap, fun, and yummy all at the same time??

I've been one of the original developers on the team since the startup idea was started by the CEO Jason Wang, a Berkeley alumnus, and it's always exciting to be working on a project like this that could impact how we go about our everyday lives. This semester has been crazy working on my Bounty Hunter game that I mentioned in my last blog as well as Munch On Me. I really hope it all pays off in the end. It's even more interesting taking College Writing 108 simultaneously and seeing how Munch On Me applies many of the same things we talked about in class in order to promote the business. Munch On Me has a Facebook page as well as a Twitter page that it's been trying to use to spread the word as a hyper-marketing technique. Munch On Me also incorporated some gaming elements to hopefully make the experience more addicting (although inexpensive food itself can already be quite addicting to many college students).

Although the current site at www.munchonme.com is still just a coming soon page, I really can't wait for the launch of this site. I hope that a lot of people give the service a go, hopefully not being too harsh on one of my first attempts at creating a new business. Just like our catch-phrase says, it's time to "get your nom on!"

Work hard, Play harder...

We all like to go around exploring different places, meeting new people, and eating good food. Why not turn it into a game? That's what popular applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, and SCVNGR have been doing lately, and many other companies are following suit too. Gaming has become a popular method for drawing customers to a platform. I guess some people never realized it, but just like in the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, we all love getting achievements, gaining "experience points," and "leveling up" (even if they don't have any real-world value).

I think that the mobile gaming applications selling-point is the simplicity it provides for the users. Many of us grew up in the video game era when simply blowing on the cartridge of a Nintendo game solved all problems. Games were simple back then, unlike World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and other popular games now. However, these new mobile and web gaming platforms of collecting badges, exploring new locations, and sharing with friends provide a simple way to ease back into gaming even at our older ages. No one looks twice at a 30 year old checking in to a restaurant to get a mayorship in Foursquare, but they do if they see someone of the same age wearing headphones and executing 500 actions per minute (APM is to video games as ERA is to baseball) while playing Starcraft 2. The simplicity of the mobile app games now lets the older users have a little bit of fun as well and brings back memories of their childhood when technology was simple and all their friends played video games. Since these games also have a community/competition aspect, they also create a social network within the games.

In one of my classes (CS169: Software Engineering), I'm actually developing a game-oriented mobile app as well. The codename for it now is "Bounty Hunter," and it's a quest-based exploration game. Users and merchants have the ability to create "quests" that involve checking in at certain locations, making a shout-out/review at a location, going somewhere at a specific time, taking a picture of something, and many other creative location/time based quests. The users who partake in these quests get rewarded with experience points and also potentially a physical reward like "10% off your next meal" if it's a merchant-generated quest. Statistics such as "most quests completed" and "most experience points" are used to determine rankings within friends and also globally. I'm hoping that the large community of quest-creators and quest-doers will become a hit with people of all ages.

I've based most of the design of my game based on all the popular mobile apps out right now. I went with more of a quest-based system because it works so well in RPGs. If the achievement system was such a success with mobile apps, I'm hoping that the quest system has a good chance as well. It's currently only a school project, but if I get a lot of development done during the semester I'd like to release it as a full-fledged project in the Android market. Any ideas for the application are always welcome. Hopefully, this will be the next addictive social game out on the market!

Future of Twitter

What's happening?

Twitter has approximately 190 million users since 2010, yet still seems to have plenty of untapped potential. I was actually asked during an Associate Product Manager interview for Google last semester about what I thought the future of

Twitter would be. I answered to the best of my ability at the time, however, after all the di

scussion in class about the power of social media, this question has resurfaced in my mind with many fresh ideas.

With a slogan of "What's happening?," obviously Twitter's basic premise is to let people know what's going on around the world or around a social network at any given time. However, with Facebook getting more and more support, such as the Goldman Sachs investment which valued Facebook at ~$50 billion, Twitter needs to start thinking about how to establish its platform for the future.

Social OS

After receiving a free Google Chrome OS net book on Friday (Chrome OS is a internet-only browser based operating system), I started thinking about whether or not Twitter can become an operating system of some sort as well, a "Social OS." With the proper integration into many current applications, Twitter could even compete with Facebook as a primary portal to our social network. Twitter will serve as our source of news and information, as well as a central hub for communication for many individuals. I believe that it will enhance our relationships both inside and outside our own personal social networks.

Blogging has begun to supplant traditional media as a source of news, information, and entertainment, and Twitter (micro-blogging) will continue that trend of separating the mainstream audience from traditional media. To many users, Twitter already serves as an online newspaper for certain information (sports news for me), and I believe that it will continue to spread. As Twitter develops its reinforcement learning search algorithms, search results will turn up smarter and more relevant results, instead of just the random babble that still comes out much of the time. "Targeted Tweets" will serve as focused hyper-local marketing for relevant users similar to how Starbucks targeted users in a multi-million dollar advertising campaign using Twitter as the platform. The "Targeted Tweets" will also be used to push relevant local news since Twitter is closely tied to your location through geolocation on phones. Obviously, user interface revisions will need to be done to better display these different features though since the current display is usually quite cluttered unless manually put into different lists.

In order to serve as a realistic social operating system, Twitter needs its own applications as well. These can include short note taking apps, photo album sharing apps, micro-payment apps, investment-tracking financial apps, and many more that can take advantage of Twitter's micro-media/sharing platform. These apps can be developed by freelancing developers and should be fully integrated into the user's Twitter in some way similar to installing apps on Android, Facebook, or iPhone. Currently, Twitter does not incorporate apps like how Facebook incorporates them, but I believe with the proper UI design and integration, this would be an amazing addition to the Twitter platform.

Text Tweet Messaging

I also believe that Twitter will eventually replace normal SMS text messaging. Eventually it will be the standard application on phones used to "tweet" back and forth (with the option of doing it through private channels of course) instead of "texting" back and forth. The beauty of it is that you can "tweet" with famous celebrities as well as opposed to the normal range of people that you can text with using the current SMS messaging system. I actually just sent a message to my favorite athlete, Lawrence Timmons on the Pittsburgh Steelers who also went to my high school, and he replied directly back to me. To be able to contact famous celebrities was unheard of before the age of Twitter. I think that "tweet messaging" will have its own private interface (displayed like a tweet mailbox) separate from the omni-directional tweets that are sent out now though and displayed more like a texting application, slightly different from the current "Messages" section of Twitter.

I believe that as the technology develops, this will become so common that our children will wonder how we ever survived with the limited number of people we could contact by texting. Just like how Facebook is slowly replacing standard emailing, Twitter will slowly replace texting.

Other Thoughts?

Many don't think that Twitter will survive, and some don't see it as being a very powerful tool, in general. However, I think that if pushed in the right direction and marketed correctly, Twitter could be a genuine, trendy competitor to the more widely used, but traditional, Facebook, similar to how the trendy Mac has been battling against the more established PC.

Facebook and the Privacy Debate

Interesting Statistics (Source: Facebook):

• More than 500 million active users
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
• An average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day (2.5 million overall).

Obviously with this much traffic and external collaboration, Facebook has access to a vast amount of information about its users. A very common debate is whether Facebook should actually be allowed to have this kind of information or not. Supporters of one side of the debate are worried about a single company having this much information all in one location. They worry about Facebook having access to personal information such as email, birthdays, schools, etc. However, after all these years of watching and using Facebook, I am on the other side of this debate and ask, "Does it really matter?"

My argument is that it doesn't really matter if Facebook has this information. Companies everywhere such as credit card companies, phone companies, and banks have access to your age, email, school information, etc. It's not a new trend, yet people are so worried when it comes to Facebook having the same information. Does it really matter if someone knows a few more pieces of personal information about you? Most of the information can't even be seen and maliciously used unless the person trying to view this information is already a "friend," in which case, why did you ever "friend" this person in the first place?

I understand that some people are very concerned about what others know about them. Personally, however, I don't care much about someone knowing my school, field of study, relationship status, or interests. These are things that I gladly talk about when talking to anybody, even if I meet them for the first time at a social gathering or at a bar while talking to a girl. If someone truly wanted to obtain my information for malicious purposes, there are plenty of other ways of obtaining the data that are much easier than hacking into my Facebook. Oftentimes people, especially students, post online copies of resumes on their own personal websites. These resumes typically include email, phone numbers, addresses, and other private information that can easily be used in the same manner as the information on a Facebook profile. What's the difference?

Some people may be worried about others being able to "easily" view the information in one location, but if they are truly paranoid, they should just be following common sense privacy steps. If you conduct a Google search on "Facebook privacy", some of the first results are tips for protecting yourself from information theft (10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Needs to Know). Many of the people who are most worried about Facebook privacy issues are the ones who don't understand how to protect themselves in the first place. If it's that big of a deal, they just shouldn't create a Facebook profile at all.

Facebook's social network is a huge benefit to all of us. The social plugins used to embed Facebook onto other websites are useful for connecting people of similar interests and help sites become more viral. Its machine-learning procedures allow for more targeted and useful advertising without requiring human reading of the data. There are so many benefits of how Facebook uses the information that I don't see what all the fuss is about when it comes to a few security concerns that can be seen in many other websites as well.

Even a world-renowned institution like UC Berkeley was being hacked for a few years before anyone discovered the leak. The leak potentially included access to people's social security numbers albeit not matched to the actual names. This is much more dangerous in my opinion than Facebook's sharing of information. Almost any system can be hacked (and information stolen) if a hacker really wanted to. It doesn't matter if it's banks, schools, or Facebook; our information is always at risk. So why put so much blame on Facebook? Even stealing someone's cell phone/laptop (a common occurrence on college campuses) could be a lot more dangerous if the owner didn't set a password because then the thief would probably have access to all of the owner's emails. This could subsequently be used to gain access to all kinds of accounts through password recovery methods since most devices are now synced with Gmail accounts automatically.

Nevertheless, all of this is just my personal opinion. I understand that there will always be privacy concerns brought up in this debate. However, I'd like to give a person as smart as Mark Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how he runs his website. Because in the end, even if this information is shared, does it really matter?