Real-time Data: What I miss most about Tradesports
Reposted from Facebook:
In 2006, what is now Intrade was part of Tradesports, a company that allowed you to wager not only on political events but also sports. The way Tradesports handled markets, it was possible to wager on a sporting event while it was in progress; I could buy shares when the Saints had 4th and 1 on their own 30, and then sell them for a profit immediately after they got the first down.
What made it particularly cool however, was the fact that Tradesports would give you the minute by minute data, and you could export it into your analytics package of choice (I used Excel because I didn’t need anything fancy). From there, I could plot the results and actually measure how much the market reacted to similar events. By re-watching the game to correlate the time (I paid a friend $20 to do this part) I could determine the value of a 3rd down conversion, a missed field goal, or a touchdown.
As you’d expect, such events affected the price to a far greater degree as the game progressed. A come from behind touchdown in the final minutes caused the price to spike far more than one in the first quarter.
I was only able to do this for one event (if I remeber right it was the NFC championship). It was a passing fascination, but one i’m reminded of now as markets for political campaigns become far more liquid during real-time events (see Perry Flash Crash: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/rick-perrys-intrade-flash-crash/).
Unfortunately a major gaffe is about as specific as we can get in measuring the value of multiple specific events in real-time. The primary results aren’t efficient enough to measure returns on election night by county, and while the market on election night 2012 will be rather efficient, Presidential elections only happen once every four years.
I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting information in measuring the mood of individuals during real-time events (looking at tweets during the Superbowl to determine the intensity of emotion expressed based on certain events {Yes, Kyle Williams, I’m talking about you}). Is there a threshold for “game-changing” events, does a touchdown elicit dramatically more emotion than a field goal even if both change who’s winning the game?
Hopefully, I’ll get to play with some of these ideas. The data’s out there.
A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.
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Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.
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Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.
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Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate… plussing, or whatever it’s called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it’s a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it’d be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I’m insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.
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Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.
…
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.
…
Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate… plussing, or whatever it’s called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it’s a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it’d be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I’m insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.
Back to Blogging
After reading Joerg Mueller’s post on why programmers should be blogging, I decided to dust off my old Tumblr and use it as a place to unify those long-form thoughts previously posted directly to Facebook and Google+.
My goal is to use this space to talk about the interesting tech I come across. Given I’m writing this on Tumblr, it’s probably a good place to start.
I chose to use Tumblr because of its superiority in re-sharing, it’s dead simplicity in posting, and its clean mobile layout. It’s not as pretty as Wordpress Mobile, but Tumblr is better at compartmentalizing the way you process the data you want to share.
Those same constraints that are so helpful in allowing a blogger to share not only text posts but videos, images, quotes, links and chat also hinder the ability of a blogger to create a more customized, free-form experience. For now, however, regularity matters more than depth; a successful blog requires regular updates. Thus, in moving away from tweets and status updates, Tumblr is a nice happy medium.
