At Devoxx the other week I spoke about Clojure, and as an example looked at how it could be used to access the Google+ public data API. Because the Google+ APIs are part of the general Google APIs Discovery Service we looked at how to process and generate functions to call this library automatically (more on which in later blog posts). However, for use now the easiest way to access any Google API via Clojure is probably via the Java client libraries using the Java interop in Clojure.

I was reminded of one of my pet social peeves as part of a conversation with one of the, astonishingly smart, Google interns. One of the most challenging aspects of social networks is that, broadly, people within companies don’t really know what “doing a good job” looks like. Depending on the organisation, social media can be part of marketing, PR, customer service, a specialised department, even IT. The aim of these departments is often mis-matched with the potential or the audience the brand has across their social media, so it is difficult to create effective performance measures.

It’s pretty straightforward to use synchronous encryption over ZeroMQ - just a case of encrypting and decrypting at each end with some previously shared key. Asynchronous encryption is a bit more interesting, as it allows signing for message integrity and authenticity, as well as data hiding. There have been some good examples of crypto over Pub/Sub (notably Salt), but not a lot of examples of direct messaging.

Had a question earlier about whether it was possible to retrieve comments from an event on Google+, and the answer is yes! As long as it’s public, you can grab it via the REST public data APIs.

The History functionality in Google+ is an interesting answer to a pretty common question of “where’s the write API?” It allows creating moments in a user’s (private) history, which can then be reshared. It’s currently in developer preview, for the express purpose of getting feedback on the API. 

It has been a long time since I touched any IOS code, so I was quite looking forward to a chance to do some when the IOS team within Google+ released the SDK into preview at Google I/O last month. Luckily, the documentation on the SDK page on developers.google.com is excellent, and covers the basics of the setup, but in part because I’ve forgotten almost everything about XCode and IOS, I thought it best to just write down what I did and what I encountered, primarily as an Aide-mémoire for the future. Anyone building a new app should follow the documentation - but perhaps some developers will hit an issue I did and get something out of this post!

In one of his talks at QCon, John Allspaw mentioned using Holt-Winter exponential smoothing on various monitoring instances. Wikipedia has a good entry on the subject, of course, but the basic idea is to take a noisy/spikey time series and smooth it out, so that unexpected changes will stand out even more. That’s often initially done by taking a moving average, so say averaging the last 7 days of data and using that as the current day’s value. More complicated schemes weight that average, so that the older data contributes less.

At the recent PHP UK Conference 2012 I had the opportunity to chat about machine learning and IR with a bunch of very smart people. One of the conversations included the always enlightening Rowan Merewood, and was around ranking Twitter friends. It’s reasonably well known that Google used to use a variant of PageRank based on who-follows-who to rank it’s Twitter search results (back when it had them). The question is, could the same kind of thing work over a much smaller set - say using it to rank the influence users I follow, in order, perhaps, to prioritise tweets?

I had a great time at the recent PHP Benelux Conference in Belgium. There was a real mix of very interesting people to talk to, and I came away from it buzzing with new ideas (and a ridiculously long todo list). Some of the conversations I had during the weekend were around technical presenting at conferences and usergroups, so I thought I’d collect a handful of the tips that were discussed into a post, and use a few of my favourite speakers at the event to illustrate them.

A lot of interesting techniques involve taking statistical samples, and using those to predict what we’ll see in the future. Usually this works pretty well, but when we’re dealing with a lot of options or if we have some options that are very rare that approach can go pretty wrong. If we go down the street and note down how many men and women we see, we’ll probably be able to use that to predict the chance of the next person we see being male or female pretty well. However, if we were counting all the species of animals we encounter, and trying to use that to predict what we’ll see in the future, we’d likely run in to a couple of problems.