Quick Update

I'm am clearly not fit to be a blogger. Judging by the dates on my last two posts I post about...once per year! I would say I'm going to try to do better, but who knows if that will actually happen or not. Instead here's a quick summary of what I'm up to:

-Work at RockYou is going great! I can honestly say I enjoy going to work everyday and I often find myself staying late just out of personal interest in what I'm doing. My current projects are the Hero World application on MySpace and Birthday Cards on facebook. The new Hero World app is keeping my hands full as a developer, so I've shifted into more of a PM role on Birthday Cards (which is getting more than 100k users per day!).

-I've been talking about it for over a year, but I finally started revamping Dodgeball into the app it was supposed to be from the start. It was always intended to become a RPG-lite style game where you moved up the ranks and aquired items, but I became busy with graduation and starting a new job. Unfortunately it's not such a novel concept anymore thanks to the Mob/Mafia game craze, but I just can't bear to leave it unfinished!

-If I finish up the Dodgeball revamp soon enough, I want to help one of my buddies with a very exciting iPhone app he's developing. Can't spill the details yet, but I was shocked to find out it hasn't already been done on the iPhone (seems like a natural fit). The idea is solid, take, naturally meshes with the iPhones unique features, and with the amount of enthusiasm he has for the project I'm sure it will find some degree of success.

-After Dodgeball and possibly the iPhone project, I'm going to try my hand at something completely different from the world of social network and mobile phone applications. I want to try my hand at creating a system that is able to identify people that have a high probability of being talented at a set of specified skills. Sort of a Google for people. There are plenty of obvious business applications, but I'm more interested in seeing if it's possible to get good results using publicly available data sources. It will also be fun to start with a very basic and unoptimized algorithm, and then see how the result set changes as the algorithm is refined over time.