Uzvy is a new website for grouping. It’s our first product. Uzvy has features and a design that make using it a lot of fun as well as more efficient and effective than current group-oriented web applications. Below we’ve described a lot of its features and what it can do…but we’d recommend visiting the site at Uzvy.com and trying it out for 10 to 20 minutes…it may seem a little strange and daunting at first but after a bit of exploration, we’re sure you’ll find it intuitive, natural, and a lot of fun!
Public and Private Groups: Let a Million Groups Bloom. Uzvy supports public groups (e.g. interest groups like django programmers or 80s music video fans) and private groups (e.g. project management or a family staying in touch). We believe that the ease of using Uzvy will lead to it being used not just a tool to aid existing groups, but we expect that users will create uzvies for any concern or interests they have in order to gather and share knowledge collectively. So if you suddenly got diagnosed with high blood pressure or just discovered 1940s big band music, you could start an uzvy on it and start connecting with others with your same interest or in your same situation (2, 3, 10, 100 minds are better than 1)!
Our idea of a group, what we can all Uzvy, consists of a Share Board and a Discussion Board. Our design of the group or Uzvy out of those two componenets (Share board and Discussion board) enabled us to create a user interface in which all of your groups can be managed in a single page!
The Discussion Board is a message board with a few alterations. Almost everything on it is click-able so as to conserve space and maximize function. To see details on a thread or to reply to it, for example, simply click on the thread title. We got rid of the subject/message distinction and simply have text content which contributes to a chat-like or real-time feel, though our design allows an uzvy Discussion Board to scale to support thousands of users (rather than the 30 or 40 of a chat room).
The Share Board is a place where you can submit any content from the internet or text and these shares can be voted on. Media that’s shared is generally embedded directly into the Share Board for immediate viewing. We’ve built media search into the share board so you can search for your favorite videos, songs and images and instantly share them. For Tech enthusiasts, the Share Board can be described as Digg-like voting/sharing functionality in a Tumblelog-like display/layout.
Create Uzvies in 60 languages. We’re working on UI Translation (right now the UI is only in English). Uzvy is multi-lingual in a sense in that you can manage all your Uzvies no matter which language they’re in via the single console page.
Multiple Profiles. Uzvy supports multiple profiles linked to a single account e.g. you can subscribe to sports Uzvies via username_sports and subscribe to work-related Uzvies via another username. Every profile also has a default anonymous profile for anonymous activity in any Uzvy you’re a member of.
Activity Streams. Uzvy user profiles have activity streams (your activities and an aggregated stream of everyone you follow). Uzvy profiles support following (unidirectional) rather than friending (bidirectional). We filter private Uzvy activity so that a user visiting your profile who’s not a member of your private uzvies will not see any activity or details of your private Uzvy membership.
Powerful Lists Feature. Our listing feature provides a way to create simple but elegant-looking lists for one’s profile on Uzvy. Uzvy lists can do more than that; they can function as a social bookmarking/favoriting tool. List items are easily searched via tags but also publicly displayed in an organized and hierarchical manner via the lists–a natural and neat system for bookmarking. One can have effectively private bookmarks or other items via creating lists on one’s anonymous profile. Any thread or share from any Uzvy can saved via a single click (on its star icon) to a list or lists.
That’s a quick run-down of what Uzvy is capable and what makes it unique…there are a several other features I didn’t mention (email digests, RSS Out, etc.) which you can explore as you start to use Uzvy more extensively.
The key to Uzvy though is the experience. While most everything you can do at Uzvy is available via a combination of other sites, Uzvy offers a grouping tool that as a whole is the best web application around for grouping and more generally for sharing and storing knowledge. We think you’ll love the experience and find it fast, funk, and very useful! Do visit Uzvy and let us know what you think!!
We’ll see you there, the Uzvy team and Hidden Reflex!!!
Two stimulating observations/reads from economics…
The Economics of Revolution and the Columbian Civil War.
How do changes in prices in Columbia’s main exports, coffee and oil, affect conflict? Surprisingly, the researchers found increase in conflict when the price of capital-intense exports rose and less conflict when labor-intense exports rose. Their thinking is this: when coffee (labor-intense) rises, a large group of people, farmers generally, benefit and thus conflict shrinks (presumably conflict is related to standards of living). When capital-intense export prices rise, e.g. oil, the profits or benefit occurs to a small group, the businesspeople who own the enterprise, and thus conflict tends to increase in those periods (presumably the large group of laborers and others gets annoyed as others get more benefits while they continue to live in relative deprivation; also the conflict over who owns the oil and the land exacerbates as it’s proven that those resources are actually worth something).
This is the full 61 page paper (for economics departments, I would wager that one of the authors Oeindrila Dube is on the economist job market from the title of the file “Dube_Job_Market_Paper”).
Witch-Killing. Why? In a brief blog entry from FT, it points out that witch-killing is a widespread phenomenon across many countries, cultures and religions. One study has found witch-killing positively correlated with colder weather and thus crop production and food. So when there isn’t much food around, it’s time to do some witch-killing to get rid of a few mouths… For instance, it’s hypothesized that witch-killing in Tanzania is a system of ’social security’ but not as practiced in the U.S. In the practice of the West, grandmothers are not sent to the sweet hereafter, but rather grandmothers are sent to homes for the elderly. It’s unimaginable in much of India to think of sending your grandmother to be cared for by strangers not to even mention killing your grandmother…in Tanzania, though, most witch-killings are committed against older women by their own family members, the thought is that such killings may be a way to preserve resources for the young and still-working. While it may be hard to empathize with witch-killing, it’s also similarly hard to imagine what it’s like to starve to death and what happens in a famine–look at how often famines occurred in the 19th century for example and how often hundreds of thousands of people died (wikipedia list).
Here’s the entry on Witch Killings. (for further exploration, the link in the entry to Miguel’s paper on Tanzania link is broken, search for it on google and read google’s cached copy)
The Knight Foundation is distributing up to $5 million to individuals to develop web services to expand news and information delivery on the community, local, or regional level. The 2008 winners are a mixed bag…some with a bit more impressive and precise goals than others…so if you have an idea (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) for a community or news-related service with some local or regional aspect, we’d encourage you to apply!!!
…so reads a headline that you may already have read as it’s being picked up by many different papers…
India *sometimes* Really Really Rocks as Female Empowerment goes (as long as she doesn’t go to jail). A police official speaks of trying the woman for “culpable homicide” even though admitting she was defending herself. I suppose she was supposed to politely ask the man to please not rape her or recite some mantras on ahimsa…I’ll write in later posts on my encounters with Indian police and the source of skepticism…but for now we don’t know all the details of the story, if anyone in UP has a fuller update on what happened and the reaction there, let us know.
This story reminds me of an extraordinary story of a woman activist who turned bandit or dacoit and later become a member of Parliament: Phoolan Devi. If you want to learn about India in a bit of the nitty-gritty (child marriages, caste relationships, family politics, etc.), the entry on her at wikipedia is a quick but good and informative read. There was also a film made about her named ‘Bandit Queen’ which I haven’t seen and thus can’t comment on.
With a lot of talk these days of the demise of newspapers–it’s not just talk, newspaper subscriptions decline every year for most newspapers in the U.S. at least (in India, it’s probably a different story) and the evening paper did die out decades ago–it’s probably not a bad idea to look into where and how newspapers actually came into being and reflect on what really is or should be “the news.” It’s a particularly ripe time for reflection since the web is changing how we find “news”, who makes the “news”, and what we call “news” with new movements including citizen journalism, user-voted journalism, blogging or personal life reporting, social network friend news, lifestreaming, rss feeds and aggregators, and more interaction via commenting and discussion boards.
Here are three quick and hopefully stimulating reads:
A small bit of Thoreau, a famous 19th century American writer and accidental activist, who denigrates newspapers as a kind of mental pollution that move a person into an artificial “world” and away from the natural world: News is Gossip
Marc Andreeson wrote a summary of reading he did on the origins of newspapers: Birth of the Newspaper
A nice, short summary of the history of newspapers in Nevada including the days when being a journalist meant being ready to settle accusations of libel via duels with guns rather than lawyers: A Brief History of Journalism in Nevada
I thought I’d report for the benefit of the rest of the world some unique methods of wooing women from one Bharath Keshav, member of Hidden Reflex. He’s lost interest in Bangalore-born Bollywood star Deepika Padukone, but has found a new friend in the beautiful city of Mysore (former capital of Karnataka). To woo his princess of Mysore , he’s taken up two interesting tacks:
1. Reciting Poetry and Playing Romantic Songs on YouTube. In this case, he recites a poem he wrote himself and performs a song by the band Coldplay. Watch the video below. Be ready to weep.
To listen to more from Bharath, search youtube for the user “bharathkeshav”.
2. You no longer have to be born with it. Born with what, you ask? Sex Appeal! It comes in a bottle in India, and Bharath Keshav owns it. Actually, it was a gift from a few helpful friends…to bolster Bharath’s natural pheromones. (Also, with uzvy’s launch imminent, we don’t get to shower as often as we’d like…)
Girls, I’m pretty sure you’re all pretty impressed by our romantic Bharath Keshav who does reply to every e-mail. Men, if you do post romantic poetry recitations on youtube or buy a few gallons of Sex Appeal, please report your results in the comments. Happy wooing all!
