The Steven Bao Weblog.

Name changed. I am now Mark Bao - www.markbao.com.

Ryan Allis’s book Zero to One Million is on Amazon (currently #3 in bestsellers) and he’s hoping to make it #1. Ryan Allis is an entrepreneur at iContact and at only 23 he’s built a $4 million + sales company with more than 40 employees.

Check out his book and help make it #1! Just purchased a copy myself.

The MySpace Developer Platform has launched at developer.myspace.com, based on Google’s OpenSocial spec. As the largest social network, it is ridiculous that MySpace is building upon the OpenSocial API, which, in many peoples’ opinion (including my own), is used to build not applications, but widgets.

If you’re a Facebook Platform veteran, you’ll notice the following changes:

• You create a separate profile for your application. Similar to Bebo.
• You can set homepage markup, to be shown on peoples’ homepages.
• There’s no callback URL.

That’s right - no callback URL. Here is how you build your application:

I’m not too impressed. Job terribly done.

Mozilla Labs has released an extension originally authored by Chris Beard that allows for very simple browser customization. Namely, it allows you to choose from different styles to apply to your browser, which essentially replaces the chrome background. It also works in all themes, or should. See below for example.

click to expand

But don’t take my word for it, for I am a terrible screenshotter, here’s one from Chris Beard’s blog:

Why they decided to take this as an official Mozilla Labs is not too clear to me, however they cite the following pillars of the project which is pulled verbatim from their site, viz.:

• themes today are too hard to find, install and use
• graphic designers should be able to style the browser without having to code
• Browsers can be more than just desktop software, they can include online components
• people just want their computer to be a little more fun and personal

All good points, but unless it gains a lot more more options for skinning the theme, it’s not going to be very useful for the end user. In addition, I’m not sure why it’s taken in as a Mozilla Labs project and not stay an extension, but guessed it was due to the developer of the app being an employee of Mozilla.

Edit: Looks like one interesting piece is that the active persona can be changed through the DOM via Javascript (or at least that’s what it sounds like.) Also interesting is

I can also imagine that we could use this to build some sort of badge or icon art that people could put on their blogs or Web pages that indicates their current Persona, and if people click on it they can switch to it.

Recently, Facebook released a new photo browser that doesn’t require loading and refreshing of a page to go to the next image. (Go to any photo page to try this out.) It’s essentially powered by ajax, almost all of the page, including loading comments (though adding comments is not ajax yet.) It’s somewhat indicative that Facebook isn’t going corporate — yet.

By not loading a new page and replacing current contents of the page using ajax improves user experience. However, with the percentage of pages that are just interacting with photos, Facebook is losing a large amount of ad impressions and thus losing revenue while making ux more enjoyable.

This is similar to Google’s refusal to remove the I’m Feeling Lucky button, which by itself costs Google $110 million a year (listen).

SERGEY BRIN:The reason it’s called “I’m Feeling Lucky,” is of course that’s a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you’re going to try that with one go.

TOM CHAVEZ: Basically you have $110 million of revenue loss per year associated with that button.

MARISA MAYER: You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it’s possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the “I’m Feeling Lucky,” is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people.

Join us for the Facebook Developer Garage Boston on January 17, 2008! Discuss the Facebook Platform, web dev, monetization and investing, and more here with other Facebook Developers and enthusiasts. There will be people from Facebook here as well.

If you’re a regular to the Facebook Developer Boston events, you’ll know that this is the fourth Facebook event in Boston, and there hasn’t been one in a few months. Let’s make this the best Facebook Developer event yet!

A big thanks to our sponsors, Molecular and Facebook.

Molecular is setting up at the Facebook Developer Garage as one of the meetings of a course for a web development competition at MIT. They are taking suggestions for relevant courses for the beginning stages of Facebook development at the event.

The event will be crowdsourced; your suggestions and presentations will go into the event. Let us know of any suggestions you want, or presentations you want to make. Email fbgarage[at]boston.avecora.com.

The event will be free and open to the public. See the event page and RSVP on Facebook, Going, or Upcoming. Event venue TBD - will announce on the main event page.

Yes, it’s another video — but it’s great marketing. By harnessing the popularity of the original Tay Zonday “Chocolate Rain” video (which, of course, has gone viral, 11 million views at the time of writing) Dr. Pepper promote a new flavor, Cherry Chocolate through a sequel (which is like a remix of sorts as well.) Damn, that’s a good idea.

Why not make it viral and spread it?

(via Mashable)
(track virality Google Blog Search Technorati IceRocket)

I apologize for the recent amount of video posts lately, but I couldn’t help but perpetuate (virally) this brilliant marketing video from the Singapore Media Development Authority. Kudos to the marketing team that thought of this.

(via TechCrunch)

Google’s Android Mobile OS SDK and accompanying $10 million challenge has been released. Video follows.

Auxiom has been down down for… longer than I can remember.
So where have I been?

First of all, an explanation. StevenBao.com and Auxiom.com were taken down by the host Hosting Department for “sending spam.” Very strange, and uh, frankly, that sounds like a load of BS to me. A normal host, suspecting spam being sent from a server, would temporarily suspend the account. However, being the, uh, special host that they are, HD decided to delete all of my data (files, MySQL, mail, etc.) and notify me after the fact. Nice work.

In their ToS they have a clause that describes that they will have weekly backups available. Seeing that my backups were all pretty old, I asked for one — only to be presented with that with the deactivation of my account, backups were gone also.

Uhh…

I didn’t know what exactly to do, so I picked up a temporary host with a friend, and now I’m here, trying to recover whatever parts of my blog was picked up by the Wayback Machine or Feedburner. (edit: not Feedburner anymore.)

I’m also trying to find where my original theme is as well.