It's Steve (now in blog form)

The super secret project continues unabated, but here are some recent bits to keep you up to date.

Ben has discovered Mr. Potatohead and his unfortunately placed storage compartment.  Poor Mr. Potatohead looks really surprised.

I had dinner the other night with some of the OG MySpace crew.

Does Passion Furniture differ from regular furniture in form or function?

Call center operator: “No ma’am, have you tried giving your traffic some warm milk or thorazine?”

Last night I rolled  up on the American India Foundation’s black tie affair.  Amit was being honored by the foundation for excellence as an Indian so we turned up in force to support (For those of you aware of the general rule with me and suits, don’t freak out when you see the pics.  Everything is cool).  Check out the album and shoot Amit a congrats.

We had a little shindig in San Francisco on Thursday during Web 2.0 to celebrate the launch of MySpace Music.  The event was really awesome  The old San Francisco Mint has been turned into a venue.  Check it out.

I love facilities like this.  The interior was even cooler than the facade.

Lionel Richie turned up and did a set of his hits (Why yes, Lionel, it is you that we were looking for. Time to go on stage).

The whole thing got me thinking about my situation these days.  There are moments when I still can’t believe the people I get to meet and the places I get to go.  I mean, I still feel like that dorky kid from Fresno and I’m getting to work with some of the smartest folks in the world.  I’m a pretty luck guy to do what I do.

Ok, enough of that.  Check out my sister’s triplets dressed like chickens.

Ben is a little zonked today with a stomach bug and completely ignoring me.  So let’s keep the posts coming!  Here are some of my recent pics about town.

We had a field trip- The product team headed out last week to Magic Mountain for some bbq and team building exercises.

Clearly an awesome venue with high quality, professional staff

Andrus called it. Wiley and Max are Doppelgangers.  I suspect Max is the evil one.

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt is Ken.  He’s the MC at Magic Mountain’s picnic area.  He’s had the gig for 14 years.  This is what wasting your life looks like.

Magic Mountain prohibits firearms, pepper spray, knives, and wagons.  Well done.

Ben came to the office- Ben had a field trip to the office on Friday.  Exciting activities included opening doors, closing doors, running, screaming, and saying hello.  He also met Tom (Ben previously assumed that Tom was made up).

Tesla is doomed- I imagine that it’s not ideal to launch an incredibly expensive electric sports car immediately after a market implosion.  Poor bastards.

Welcome to Neo-Tokyo- This building has been going up on my route to work for a while.  Something about the way it rises alone in a state of semi-completion along the Santa Monica corridor makes it feel like Tetsuo should come ripping by at any minute.  KANEDA!

After this morning’s vomit-tasticness I thought I’d spend a few minutes reflecting on the arts.

Peikwen is one of my favorite photographers - Peikwen is based in our Beijing office and is decidedly one of my favorite people (He was kind enough to play tour guide on one of my best field trips ever). He is also one hell of a photographer.  I was stoked that he finally added some of his shots to his profile.  Enjoy.

Luke Chueh is incredible- It’s a little unnerving how much his stuff looks like the things in my imagination.  I need to figure out how to get work to buy one of these for my office.

Check out Huck Gee- Found out about this one from Max.  I like his work. I also like that he’s from Fresno (Go No-Town!).  Check him out.

I don’t usually talk about work on here, but some of you who aren’t in the MySpace product group have been asking for an explanation of the bookstore problem.  I figured it’s something I’ve talked about with the press so it’s fair game.

One of the key concepts that makes MySpace work is social discovery.  It’s pretty gnarly in practice but sums up nicely as the bookstore problem.  When I go to Borders, there are 50,000 books on the shelves.  But they are effectively useless to me because I don’t know what I want to read.  Borders may have great search, but search only really serves as a laser beam to find the thing I already want.  I can’t ask a search engine to show me something I’ll like.  Humans are very good at that sort of question.  Machines are not.

It’s a more likely that I’ll find something good to read by going to my buddy’s house.  He only has 10 books on the shelf but he can tell me which three I’ll like.  That’s social discovery.

This is reflective of a larger trend we’re seeing on the web today.  Not that far back, our content experience was driven largely by 100 editors sitting at Yahoo.  Then Web 2.0 came along and brought a blossoming of user generated content.  Now we’re up to our ears in user generated content.  Rather than search as the primary mechanism for parsing the vastness of the web, we’re shifting to a model of user edited content.

User edited content is just like my buddy’s bookshelf.  My connection with him allows me to deal with the manageable subset of the data that he has already vouched for.  He is my content editor, not because he was selected by some company, but because I find his tastes to be resonant with my own.  And, through my friend, I’m likely to discover things I’ll love that I wasn’t even looking for.  This sort of serendipity in a social context is exactly the sort of behavior that makes a more social web really interesting.

Now here’s a picture of me kissing a moose.