SezWho.com Homepage

Yesterday was hectic — We hung out with Entrecard community (ate same some virtual Pita & chips while we were there), and saw some conversations coming from SocialSpark & CreativeWeblogging bloggers.

We saw good amount of traffic coming in — new users, new issues, new ideas and some fresh perspectives. For the code rollout which happened yesterday, we added some ‘happy’ features and inadverently added some unhappy bugs. We ignored Joel Spolsky’s Step #5. (Though, I wanna put the blame on the loss of quietness; you know, tweets, phone calls Skype, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Starbucks, and interruptions for lunch :))

To the list, here are the issues we found (most of them fixed):

• Layout issues when using custom UI (or custom CSS). While in the Entrecard chat room I advised folks to stay away from custom UI, rescinding that, this is FIXED now
• Blogspot script snafu. Due to a bug, we were just sending a key and not the scriptlet. This was happening to only a segment. This is FIXED now. We’ve resend the emails with the scriptlets to the affected users
• Profile Image upload. This was a technical issue where our local Linux system clocks were out of sync with Amazon S3 server clock. S3 allows a delta of 15 minutes. We found that our NTP server got misconfigured and was reading the wrong time zones. This is FIXED now
• WordPress 2.6. We were taking it easy on this release as it was supposed to come out early next month. To our surprise the release came out a month ahead of schedule. We are releasing a beta version of SezWho plugin for WP 2.6 (Download here)
• Blogspot latency. Our blogspot plugin has been slow in syncing up the comments and posts. We’re still working on this. Please bear with us if your published comment/post does not show up with the SezWho functionality right away. IN PROGRESS

Here are the features we’re going to work on:

• Support for multiple blogs in the same database
• Filtering out comments from the same site. Right now, you have to manually suppress them one at a time
• Merging of accounts
• Easier configuration of custom UI components like rating throbbers, stars, and boxes
• Rating layout issues. There are some themes where the layout gets all skewed up

If not for the issues, we did wanna sing some Beatles, today, but we are reserving that for Friday evening. A big thank you to everybody for their comments, conversation, and participation!

We are making 3 big announcements today

1. EntreCard: Entrecard is a blogger-to-blogger widget advertising network, has formed a partnership with SezWho that allows members to earn advertising dollars for their best comments. Below is the take of one of our common users, Lee, that summarizes things nicely:

Also see Graham’s post here.

2. Creative Weblogging: Creative Weblogging is one of the fastest growing international professional blog media networks, that is partnering with SezWho to bring reputation-driven user profiles to members. SezWho drives community engagement and traffic for bloggers by displaying their universal profiles with their contributions across SezWho-enabled social media sites. Users get the benefits of universal profiles, ratings, and comments, without giving up control of their data.

3. SocialSpark: SocialSpark is the world’s largest social media marketing network that will offer SezWho to help bloggers build and monetize their reputations based on their contributions and areas of expertise.

Welcome to the community everybody…and don’t be a stranger.

“It means that we are getting popular”

Well if this is what it means to be popular, I am not sure its a good thing.

Yesterday we came under attack from a DDOS attack…There were 10 IPs involved in the attack and they were trying to flood our servers to bring them down. We detected the attack quickly and tuned our firewall to block the attack…it took a while as we were trying to get the IPs etc. of the attackers from the same machine that was under attack.

We take the quality of our service very seriously and this was the first time we were down in months. I want to assure you that we are talking all the steps we can to ensure that such attacks do not happen again and if they do happen, they have no effect on the service. Following are the things we are doing:

1. Tracking down the attackers

2. Improving our Firewall service with a number of additional automated rules

3. Laying out our applications in a distributed setup so that we are able to communicate with the users even when we are under attack

Anything else we should do? Let us know?

I was having a swim in the community pool when Jitendra called me on my cell (I stepped out and picked up the call when the ringing became incessant).

Jitendra: Hey, Indus, where are you?
Me: Having a swim
Jitendra: Dude, sezwho.com seems to be down — There are tonnes of alerts, have you seen them?
Me: Well, I was at Midas, getting my brakes done and then jumped in the pool as soon as I reached home.

The heat of the issue dried up the swim pants and I was at home in no time. To our excitement, there were a few hosts continuously pounding our blog; making the rest of our services unavailable. On further investigation we found that we were under a SYN flood. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on the same server where other webservices live. So, pretty much the core platform was unreachable for 3 hours or so. However, the image servers, databases, etc. were OK as they reside elsewhere.

We did a few things with our blog, watched the logs, but it continued as our current firewall was not able to block the SYN flood. Hence, we tried something simple by banning the IPs one at a time. Finally, we got the issue under control (for the time being). Here’s the graph from our server monitor.

Here’s our ToDo:
1. Upgrade the firewall
2. Move the blog elsewhere on a different host (and probably a different sub domain as well)
3. Monitor network -DPARANOIA

One of our creative users, Turnip, has created a custom set of stars (actually they are turnips, rather than stars ) for rating UI. He even did custom processing stage animated gif…Really cool and he thinks it was easy (we are looking to make it even easier soon)…See below (check it out by clicking on the image) :

We love this kind of customizations and really want to make sure that we provide you the full flexibility to enable these things…If you have done anything interesting like this, let me know and I’ll highlight it here.

We just updated the Blogger plugin…following are the changes:

1. Just one hop for most pages : We were making two sequential calls to load up the data for Blogger plugins…This was causing the performance/time to load for SezWho to be kinda poor. We have fixed the issue by just sending all the data in one hop only. Take a look at the improved performance at the following blogs:

http://allied.blogspot.com/
http://melisasriwulandari.blogspot.com/
http://www.briansolis.com

2. New updated UI: We have updated the blogger UI. Below is how the integration looks now:

this puts the author profile link next to their name…if name is not present, it will revert to the earlier behavior.

What do you think? Let us know if you notice any issues.

Few months ago, we silently added a feature where a user’s activity stream can be “followed”. We simply added an RSS feed of the user’s activities as captured from all SezWho enabled social media properties. Things were calm until 2 weeks ago when Jitendra posted a HowTo on getting the SezWho activity stream into FriendFeed. We immediately got a few feature requests. We started working on some cool new things in the feed. For now, we quickly added one.

The most wanted feature was an ability to filter blog posts from the activity stream. Why? Apparently, after joining FriendFeed, the first thing people do is add their own blog in FriendFeed, hence everybody wanted the flexibility to filter their own blog posts from SezWho activity stream. Here’s how you do it:

1. The default feed url of the activity stream right now looks like this:

http://feeds.sezwho.com/activitystream/rss/Indus_Khaitan/91321

2. Add “/off=post” (without the quotes) to the feed url, which now becomes:

http://feeds.sezwho.com/activitystream/rss/Indus_Khaitan/91321/off=post

3. Yup, That’s it. Cool, eh.

We love your suggestions. Keep ‘em coming

We just release the WP release 2.1.1 some of the improvements:

- The performance for sites with a lot of comments should now be wicked fast (over 200% improvement)

- Red carpet now picks images from 5 services (not just SezWho).

Go ahead and pop it in to see for yourself … here

Below are the list of articles about our announcement:

Bub.blicio.us : SezWho Acquires Tejit

Center Networks : SezWho Acquires Tejit

ReadWriteWeb : SezWho Acquires Tejit for a Semantic Platform

Louis Gray : SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

TechCrunch : SezWho Seeks Context With An Acquisition

WebWare : SezWho acquires Tejit to expand commenter reputations

Mashable : SezWho Acquires Semantic Startup Tejit

Allied : SezWho? My Blog Life in Comments 2001-2008

FriendFeed: Louis Gray - SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

Did I miss something? Please leave in comments and I’ll update.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan Joins SezWho to Head Company’s Development Efforts

LOS ALTOS, Calif. – May 28, 2008 — SezWho (www.sezwho.com), a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery, today announced its acquisition of Tejit, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The integration of Tejit’s proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine will bring richer, context-based profile and reputation management capabilities to the SezWho service. To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversation. In this way, thought leaders emerge within and across communities based on their specific expertise and contributions.

The acquisition enables SezWho to provide more precise contextual reputation scores for contributors based on topics of conversation. In this way, users can build their reputations in specific areas increasing their social capital. Unlike comment replacement systems, SezWho augments conversations rather than replacing blog comments. With SezWho, posts and comments can be ranked across blogs, forums, and other social media. Data and content reside within the community, while users can access their universal profiles across social media sites.

SezWho has begun integration of Tejit’s semantic-analysis engine, which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content. Building on the elements of Semantic web and advanced information retrieval techniques, like entity recognition and text classification, this new technology locates the relevant discussions and content around topics of interest. The use of algorithms to rank content differs from the traditional citation-driven approach, allowing for a deeper interpretation of content and more accurate reputation scoring.

“The integration of this innovative semantic analysis technology with our own universal profiles, content discovery and reputation services allows SezWho to more closely emulate how communities flourish on the long tail as we provide more precise context-based reputation scoring for those who contribute,” said SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta. “The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users’ participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.”

The SezWho service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors, encourages more thoughtful commentary, and cultivates community engagement. Community participants use SezWho to rate one anothers’ posts and comments by indicating whether the content was useful or not. This rating is added to cumulative rankings, providing an overall score associated with individual profiles and allowing visitors to demonstrate their expertise and knowledge throughout all SezWho-enabled sites.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan will join SezWho to head SezWho’s development efforts. Khaitan began Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Tejit expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Khaitan brings a decade of software development and product management experience to SezWho. In 2003, while at Symantec, Khaitan launched the company’s first internal blog and coined the term “Writable Intranet,” which has come to represent Enterprise 2.0. Khaitan was an early proponent of syndication using feeds and contributed to the RSS 1.0 specification in 2001.

Pics etc. to follow soon.

Update: Please join me in welcoming Indus to the team

If you are at Google I/O today say hi to him … he is out there roaming around