Dogbook & Catbook
Soon after the launch of the Facebook Platform, I began working on Dogbook and Catbook. The idea was allow Facebook users to create profiles for their cats and dogs. In doing so, they could show off their pet to their friends, meet other pet owners in their area, interact with other pets, and more. After about two weeks of working on them, the apps launched. They quickly became popular - in many ways I was caught off guard. Within the first week our servers were overloaded and we had to move to dedicated hosting. During this time I learned a lot about scaling. Today, Dogbook and Catbook have over 500k users combined!
FriendSaver
FriendSaver came to me as I was working with a program called Quartz Composer (made by Apple). Quartz Composer is an application that is often used to create data visualizations and screen savers. At the time, I was using it to create a visualization - but it occured to me that it could be used to create a screen saver of your Facebook photos.
The main problem I've had with screen savers is that they can be very repetitive - they tend to remind you of the "daily grind" of things. FriendSaver is updated live - meaning that when your friends post new photos to Facebook, they're automatically included in your screen saver. Seeing new photos of your friends is a great way to stay connected - you know where they are, what they're doing, etc. And since many people have hundreds of friends, each with hundreds of photos, it is unlikely that the FriendSaver will become monotonous.
Data Visualizations
As part of my work for the Digital Cities Research Project, I was asked to create some abstract visualizations of a large amount of data they have amassed. The data (temperature, light and humidity) was collected through a series of sensors they have placed around Montreal. These animations are driven entirely by the underlying data. The actual animations can be found here: Visualization 1 & Visualization 2.
Life Is A Music Video
Lifeisamusicvideo.com came about as a project for a class I was taking at Concordia University. The brief was to develop something in flash that is really interactive and involving for the user. My idea was to involve the user not only through the computer, but also in their day-to-day environment.
I set up a webcam in a high traffic area of the Concordia Design Art Deptartment. It was set to take a picture once every second, for 10 hours a day. That amounts to 36,000 photos per day! People were encouraged to dance, jump and pose for the webcam. Then when they went back to their computers, they could use any of the images taken throughout the installment and create short stop-motion music videos, all within flash! All image processing and video animation was done on the server, and then sent back to the user. Ultimately, I really wanted the site to be easy to use, so that anyone could experiment with it, regardless of technical knowledge or "artistic ability".
The site was only up for about a month because of the nature of a physical installation. Regardless, I put together a little demo video of the site:
YouTube Surfing!
YouTube Surfing actually began as a school project, but it ultimately evolved into a lot more. At first, the idea was just to create a site that would show short segments of random YouTube videos, sort of like someone channel surfing TV. I sent it to a few friends, and some reported that they couldn't stop watching it - it was addictive. It was frustrating, too - every once in a while you'd see a video that you wanted to watch all the way through, but you couldn't. I personally had a love/hate relationship with that "feature".
I took the advice of a few friends and added a "watch list", where you can save videos to watch later. I launched the site as "www.youtubesurfing.com". I sent the site to YouTube, and a few weeks later they posted it on their Developer site. An onslaught of hits followed, from all over the world. The site continues to do well.
UPDATE #1: In January 2007, the site underwent a massive overhaul. After using the randomized YouTube Surfing for quite some time, I became frustrated by the plethora of low quality videos that I was being subject to (ie. videos of people's cats). The problem with YouTube is that it is so vast - there is likely a huge amount of material that you would like, but will never see because it is obscure and difficult to find. The new YouTube Surfing aims to solve this problem by showing you new videos based on the ones you already like. Overall, the changes have been well received. The site has since been written up in a German magazine called "Tomorrow" (see below), as well the UK Magazine .NET (article).
Neuchâtel Junior College
Neuchâtel Junior College is a prestigious Canadian school located in Switzerland. Famous graduates include Timothy Long and Sarah Ambrose. The school hired me to create a site that conveys the unique experience that the school has to offer. Today, the site is one of their top ways of attracting new students.
Course Alerts
Course Alerts (CourseAlerts.ca) started as a way to get me into a popular course at McGill. I wrote some software that constantly checked McGill's web portal to see if there were any spots available in the course I wanted. When a spot opened up, it would send me a text message. The program worked like a charm.
It occured to me that this could be an invaluable service to other students at McGill. Many courses at McGill fill up within hours of the original signup date, meaning that those who wish to get into them must check McGill's web portal at least a few times a day. But who wants to sit in front of a computer all day?
Within two weeks of writing the original Course Alerts software, I launched CourseAlerts.ca, a site that practically guaranteed McGill students a spot in the course they wanted. It was a huge success. The McGill paper loved it (front page). The Concordia paper loved it. The McGill paper still talks about it a year later. Pretty much everyone except the McGill administration loved it.
Contact Me
I now live in California and work in Silicon Valley. While you may find me in Toronto from time to time, for the most part I'm in Palo Alto. I'm no longer available for freelance work, but if you need to get a hold of me my email is:
Linkage
These links are my ongoing bookmarks from my del.icio.us. It's a good way to figure out what I'm up to...
The Archives
Stuff that's not as fresh.
