Talking with Jon Kleinberg

Had a great opportunity to sit and talk with the Dr. Jon Kleinberg today (also attended his session along with Dr. Eva Tardos last night @ Yahoo! HQ) about what we are up to at Centerd and how we are mixing the known social elements with other real-life entities that do not exist in other existing social networks today. While talking to him it occurred to me that how different entities can actually contribute to different threshold levels in the spread of social networks. If you haven't already you should really read up some of his publications, absolutely fascinating stuff!

Fatdoor is Center'd!

If you have been watching the blogosphere there were a number of blog entries that talked about the demise of fatdoor and how we are going away from local space. It's amusing to see people speculate about who we are and what we are doing. But some folks did get it right.  

The reality is that there are a couple of changes in the product name and the a little bit of execution (specifically about the way we wanted to connect people using whitepages data) from the old fatdoor days - mostly driven by the private alpha testing and our user feedback. More details on that are on the fatdoor blog and on the center'd blog.

Now, coming back to the point of we getting out of local: to set things straight, we are not getting out of local, if anything we are enhancing the local offering in multiple ways - to give you a little more detail, in more technical terms, we built fatdoor as a pure spatial index based system - now with center'd we take it a step further by extending the spatial index and coupling it with temporal index. What does it mean for our users? a well integrated system that gives ability to switch modes seamlessly from spatial (space based) to temporal (time based) while running our utility based applications. And one of those apps, the planning application, is being covered by TechCrunch this week.

But to tell you the truth, I'm flattered with the attention that is being paid to what we do :) but please stay tuned as I discuss more details on the applications and the sub-systems that we are building in coming days. And yes, also please sign-up for an invitation if you haven't already - we are very close to sending invitations.