How to make interacting robots loveable: allow them to make small harmless mistakes

The other day I was chatting on a chat service to solve some issue. These days the websites offer "instant help" with live agents. Chat bots have become very smart and progress in machine learning for symantics and ontological reasoning has progressed by leaps and bounds. An example: cleverbots
http://www.cleverbot.com/

Anyways, to begin with, I was greeted by a chat bot, which tried best to mimic humanly possible replies: with empathy and dutyfully. What I found to be cute was a typo it was making.
I think allowing the robots make small--harmless mistakes: such as a typo in this case, would make them more personable.

We expect the machines and robots to perform flawlessly. In critical sector that can be highly important. You want to avoid mistakes at 100% and be precise 100% of the time. But, think of interactive machines... so that people are not bored, it would make sense. Don't you love the sound of child making minor mistakes and going "Oh, oo!".  That kind of mistakes.

However, it has to be within the limit of being annoyed though. For example, the first mistake in the chat was OK. The second becomes kind of weird.

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Suggestion to @sitemeter

The Map link does not work. My suggestion is on how to make it functional.

Dear Sitemeter,

I am a huge fan of yours and use your sitemeter on my hobby blogs.

I have been noticing that the "map" feature has been missing for quite a long time now. 

It is as simple as putting
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?q=38.5882%2c+-121.2222 
in the Map link solves your problem!

:)

Google+ suggestion

I have a suggestion to Google+ (G+) developers.

I am sure that Google is listening to the community feedback.
The noise level must have been quite high with a lot of "great!" or "facebook killer" comments. Now that I have also seen few G+ related posts in hamrocircle. However, this post is not about great features of G+.

Idea:
The notification system of G+ is quite overwhelming (because it is new) and (a bit) annoying at the moment. The noisy notification was one of the thing which turned me off the Buzz. Currently, I have put a filter that filters every notifications from the G+.  There is an option to uncheck all the notification in the system. However, I recommend a solution that there should be an option to turn the daily digest for the notification.  This is not a new idea. Such option is available if Google Groups. I use that feature and is handy.

Abriged Email option in the Google Group.
Dai wonders if G+ team can copy that piece of the code into G+ system. 

Being able to turn on the daily digest in G+ setting will keep me updated, while not annoying me.  I would love that feature the best because I mostly like to read about the activities of my circles.

PS: I am sure that G+ is designed for lively interaction. There must be bunch of people waiting for a response to jump into it and go back and forth. I am suggesting the daily digest  for people who are interested in social interaction for educational purposes. Educating oneself about the good things the network brings. 

Google Blogger can Improve on nav-bar

Google's Blogger has potential area to be worked on and developed.

The nav-bar has been there and have been more or less ignored to the extend that many prefer to hide it instead of keeping it.

Few usages:

1. Get me the "next blog"  by similar tag/subject.  Make visiting "next blog" credit based. Put some incentives on visiting next blog.  It is similar idea to MyBlogLog or even stumbleupon, but worth trying!
2. Bring Friend connect to Nav-bar. The follow and share has been added but has not impacted the audience yet.
3. Fuse the above two ideas!

All the best!


EDIT:

They just announced a new dashboard.

Information Entropy of Your Browser and hence your online model

Your Browser is one of your identity card when you are online.
Information Entropy is a quantity depicting the information contained in the given data. Higher the multiplicity, higher the Entropy, better you are hidden in the population. The case is reverse if you want to stand out in the mass.
See some basics of Information Entropy in wikipedia here...

I found this nice article which enumerates the information theoretic basis applied to internet identity...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-theory-and-privacy

Using such theories, your uniqueness can be determined. Just like your fingerprint.
Click on the following link to see how trackable you are...
http://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes

For my case, it says:

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.21 bits of identifying information.

Now, relate it to the personally identifiable  info that we put online.
This is quite striking and revealing on how the information we put online makes us more and more uniquely available to the web. I wonder what my online model would look like as stored in Google or Amazon.
Google Model: Given his online presence, what could be his next online purchase?
Amazon Model: Given his book browsing histories and buying habits, what could be his next online purchase?
  
No wonder how serving ads is going to be personally tuned in the near future (For instance, in the movie iROBOT, as Will Smith enters the supermarket, the billboard sign changes which was already personalized for him). That should not be too far :)

Side note:
I dont think that Facebook has deployed this strategy yet. It still displays yahoo/hotmail style fixed ads.  Given all the info available with Facebook, it could be huge!!! They should work on it instead of playing with privacy policy or similar controversial items.

Everybody Tweets: Who reads then?

 
We need to have a mechanism or code where a "140 character section" can be devoted to tweeting!
Every blogger at this moment may have access to services like twitterfeed to syndicate the feed to twitter and facebook and hope a bit of publicity. Yes we do it with 140 characters :) . That is not bad if you eventually get a click through visitor. But so many tweets... what do I do with it?

Have you ever sat under a tree in the evening time?
The tweets are overwhelming like that.
When Sparkfun 100K Sale ended, I had posted some screenshots (http://bit.ly/818o5U) of the pain I was going thru, google and twitter quickly poured visitors. In that case it worked. However, in general, not all of my posts are interesting.  The pain is added in reading tweets by half cut words lik...
Somebody Please develop a plug in or script for bloggers so that bloggers can add the useful highlight in "tweet" section.

Comments on Gmail inbox

I think it may sound weird... However, I would like to spit out an idea on Gmail Inbox...
:P

I currently collect all Emails into Gmail and use nice label and superstar features along with integrated google docs and tasks features. In short: I love Gmail Lab.

How about having personalized comments in the inbox?
This would be similar to draft message but for personal use.
For example when you see an Email, your first response might be different than the final response draft you are looking before the Email is sent. Drafts are handy because it allows re-iterations. But they are gone once Email is sent out. All the secondary thoughts are vaporized at the moment the send button is hit.
Having comment enabled on Inbox Emails will allow more personal approach to the Emails. Just think of how handy the comment features are in the spreadsheet: (generally) are not printed, but are useful.

So, Gmail Team: How about having "comment" feature available in Inbox?

Watch Google Wave as everyone is looking for Bing!

Google has come up with the announcement of Wave " a new model for communication and collaboration on the web".
The online life has changed the paradigm of how we live the w3 life and communicate. Google is on the forefront of trend setters. Communication is important, and so is collaboration. Web 3.0 is going to be exciting with new innovation and competition between the big names. I am excited!

While others are still trying to learn how to make smart search, google has time to look for new features. Doing experiments. Wave will be launched by the end of this year (as they say), can't wait to see it on full throttle!

Specially, I want to have a mechanism by which We can have an online forum at which people can come and chat/collaborate; somehow better than yahoo chat room. For example I would love to host an online meeting on the web every friday evening so that people can come, join and communicate. I hold this vision for nepal physical society and its members around the world. Students from Nepal can then have direct access to seniors aboard. The potential of such meetings can never be under estimated. Anyways, that has to wait till the right time comes.

Watch the announcement of Wave!

Idea for Facebook Profile

I was wondering...
:)
Since Facebook as started behaving as twitter, I was wondering if it could also come up with some ways to have some info on who just visited my profile.
I would love to have such widget. Such widget ideas do already exist in the world. It is just matter of being able to integrate them. When I talked about the widget, I was referring to one just like the stumbleupon feature. There are similar widget in Mybloglog and Blogcatalog which shows the recent visitors...



Next would be Facebook Email(/send as private message).

You can see clear mentality behind these ... If I can not come up with new ways to impress people, I will try to clone the ideas and mix them up and sell it as cocktail!

Want to try Planet Venus ... Have no idea

I have been looking for some kind of mechanism by which all the nepali updated blogs are aggregated into the single place.For example: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mp/malayalam/blogs/

The way would be to get it thru' Planet. But, the problem is I can not find enough time to go thru it. So, I am giving out this idea...

idea: ClustrMap should improve!

ClustrMaps Team Saw ur comment elsewhere that you wanted something 'not flash, like clustrmaps but better'... can you email us what you want and we'll do it!

Details

2008-07-19 5:24 PM

Wow!


I had commented on probloggger about my dis-satisfaction of having flash-enabled map of where the visitors come from. Pics are far better.
At that time, I was simply impressed by the feedjit.
(Let me drag little, ha ha: may be feedjit people will read it too!)
But, however, feedjit also has some limitations (I am not going to discuss that in here).
In the case of clustrmap, yes, it is free and nice. Thumbs up, but hey... what is the meaning of having huge dot at the center of the map which overlaps with others.
Features you can add:

• See what the visitors visited/accessed.
• Instead of having huge dots, you can have heat map or color coded dots.
• zoom-able map

I think you guys are already busy with maintaining such good map, but those additional features will make it best one!

GOOD LUCK!

The Bayesian Drug Design

When we become sick, we are (mostly) cured by the drugs. The drugs would have to go several stages of statistical test and have to be designed carefully.
The drugs are taken or prescribed on the basis of concurrent knowledge of the state of the body or the situation. Mostly it is the best guess or estimate. We have witnessed the side reactions of the drugs and sometimes completely undesired results because of the poor inference of the situation. Well prescribers do what they see the best, but the internal situation may not be exactly the same as speculated.
Basically, the drugs consist of best estimate of the chemicals which can have the best desired effects.

This afternoon, I came up with an idea of smart Drug Design. Think of some smart drugs which can sense the environment and release the chemicals according to the situation so that it will have minimum side effects on the body and will cure the body the best way.
(I know this needs some polishing, I would appreciate comments)
Related stories can be seen at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7085154.stm

Idea for Entrecard pricing system

The price of sites displaying Entrecard have been made to work in different algorithms. "The base of 2". This has done some interesting job: It has been able to create a huge amount of discussions among the bloggers who use EC system. I have posted my views on it elsewhere.
There have been different kind of views and ideas on how to get more out of it. I was particularly interested in the discussion in the forum initiated by Josh.
His basic idea was having multiple ad-place on the same site as we do in the case of project wonderful. Good input!
I think instead of having multiple ads on the single site; we, the bloggers, should be able to have more control ... something like to allow advertisements for 6 hours or 12 hours (or hourly basis after saturation as shown in figure) and should also be able to control the maximum ad price ...

Someday, My price went all the way up to 1024! Well, this is a small blog and I don't want my visitor/advertiser to spent a huge EC credit to advertise in here. Because, the return value (which is about 35 clicks as reported by some) may not be so nice for their hard earned EC credit.
Instead, it would have been better if there would have been provision like if the ad prices goes up, simply reduce the time of appeareance. But (however) keep the maximum price to, say, 512/1024 EC credit or so.
That means the EC ecosystem will start to behave as the price goes up (with current formula/ may be with new improved formula, as I had suggested) and eventually saturates at value the user had decided and then goes into cycle of hours if above the cap.
Every one can have chance into "big-blogs" by this idea of having short time at some fixed rate.
For example: If I have to fix price: I will let it grow till it reaches 1024 per day maximum (which is rate at the end of first 10 days) . And then 1024 for 18 hours, 12, 10,8,6,2 and 1 hour. After that there can be option such as display on the 18th day 10 times at random; 19th day 4 times at random ... or slot pack!!! No one should be made to pay some weird 131072ec/day EC.
I know that it becomes ugly as we try to drag it down the road and coding simply kills.

Bottom line: Blog-o-sphere is not the ecosystem in which someone sits at the apex of the pyramid.
EC system gives chance to all for exposure, but-however, new system kinda forbids newbies and thus needs a revision.

What do you think?

An idea: Gmail conversation updates

I was reading thru' my inbox in Gmail. The gmail Notifier popped up!
I was in the middle of reading my mail, after finishing it up; I wanted to get into the new mail. As you know gmail has a feature which can update the recent inbox messages of the same category. Just by clicking "update conversation".
I was thinking of the similar idea.
What if gmail could add a line of code which will automatically update the status from
into ...


because whenever one receives the message, the current one will become the second in the inbox.Updating the number will facilitate to read new mails without having to go into inbox again and seek out the new messages.