Hung Truong: The Blog!

Instapaper Friendly – WordPress Plugin

While I was testing Instascriber , I noticed that the way that Instapaper was grabbing the content of my blog was a little off. The Instapaper for Publishers page describes how you can give Instapaper a hint on what your actual content is. I looked for a WordPress plugin that does this but didn’t see anything, so I figured I’d do it myself.

Up to this point I had never made a WordPress plugin, so I had go figure that out first. It’s relatively simple and there’s a lot of good documentation out there. I just needed to hook into the “the_content” API hook and alter the content so it had a div surrounding it. The scary part is mostly that WordPress seems to give you a hella lot of control. So you could seriously eff things up with a simple plugin.

With this being my first plugin, I’m not completely sure it’s been written the right way (kinda like when you make an edit on Wikipedia for the first time). Nevertheless, I’m making the plugin available. So let me know if there’s something glaringly wrong with it. It’s fairly simple, so I’m not sure exactly what could go wrong.

I made a special page for the plugin to live at, so get it at Instascriber Friendly – WordPress Plugin. You can also download it through the internal WordPress plugin search (look for ‘instapaper friendly’).

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value – Book Review

I just recently finished reading a book, so I better write up a review so I can collect my free Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza! I read about Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value on Aaron Swartz’s 2010 Book Review (I’m trying to read as much as that dude does). Pricing has always been pretty interesting to me, so I figured a book about pricing would be a good, quick non-fiction read. Ironically, I opted to pay zero price for the book, borrowing it from the library instead of buying it.

Previously, I read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, which also concerned pricing, but mostly in the super cheap range. Priceless takes more of a psychological stab at human behavior. There are a few experiments that both books alluded to, like the Hershey’s kiss experiment. Having read these two books (and the Freakonomics ones), I kind of think I should’ve been an economist.

Priceless starts out a bit slow by giving you a crash course in human psychology. Homo Economicus is described as a human who makes only rational decisions, and only the most rational. As a model, HomoEco is probably only useful in lab situations. As the book describes, human behavior is not only often irrational, but also very easy to manipulate. Priming and Anchoring are ways to change a person’s opinion on something before they’ve even seen it.

The book gives this example. Research subjects were asked which percentage of the UN is comprised of African nations. Before that question, they were asked to give an over/under on a percentage. The percentage given was either really low (10%) or somewhat average (60%). The difference in that first question, is the percentage of African nations in the UN above or below (10/60%) affected their guess of what it actually was. The scary thing is that this works with many things, including pricing. Another experiment involved real estate and a differing list prices. Subjects (both normal people and real estate agents) were given list prices of a home and were asked to give a reasonable bid. Even the real estate professionals were susceptible to the anchoring effect of the suggested prices, though to a lesser degree.

After giving a solid scientific basis for human irrationality (specifically regarding pricing), the book goes through many short examples where the these effects were either exploited or tested in slightly different contexts. It’s all pretty interesting stuff, especially to someone who feels they are above Jedi price tricks like me though I am probably not).

There are also a few methods described to try to ward against anchoring and priming. One is to immediately set up an argument. If someone says “do you think this book is worth 26.99?” and you say “yes,” then immediately think of reasons why it might be worth less than that. This is also why you should always take a friend with you to the car dealership to argue with.

Overall I thought the book was really interesting. If you can get past all of the cognitive science at the beginning (I might’ve found it boring because I had heard about most of it before), the second half of the book is a really quick and interesting read.

Automatic Checkins in Google Latitude

It looks like Google has updated their Latitude app with checkins, including automatic notifications and checkins (and checkouts).

When I developed Checkmate, there wasn’t really a standard design for the auto-checkin behavior. Some users have mentioned that the app might work better by sending notification to check in, more like reminders. I’ve leaned towards fully automated checkins, myself.

Google seems to be taking a hybrid approach, which is pretty interesting. You get a notification the first time you arrive somewhere (probably only for places you’ve checked into before), and then an option to automatically check in after that.

I might end up building some kind of hybrid (or a simple option in settings) system in Checkmate to see if that works better in general. I wonder how Google is mitigating the cost of GPS usage in its Latitude app. I always figured that the thing keeping auto-checkin out of official apps is the fact that they run the battery down pretty hard.

Fun Trolling Facebook Polls (For Science (Actually Lulz)!)

I saw a Facebook Poll late last night that a friend had voted on. The question was something like “Which pair of shoes should I get?” The poll had twitpic.com links as answers, so the idea was that people look at the pics and let the guy decide which pair of shoes was better.

Apparently in Facebook Polls, you click on the answer to vote. And there’s no unvote (you can vote for another choice, but you can’t abstain after clicking). So people ended up clicking on the twitpic link thinking they’d see the image, and ended up accidentally voting on the poll. I fell for this, too. There were something like a couple thousand answers on that poll. I believe it’s been removed now.

I figured I could do better with a more salient question, so I made one up myself. “Which pair of glasses look better on me?” I made the question have two twitpic links, which you can view here and here if you actually copy and paste them in. I figured people are naturally judgers, and something like helping someone choose glasses to wear is an easy task (plus you theoretically get to see pictures of faces, which people just love, consciously or subconsciously).

I started the poll late last night, which probably didn’t help, but a few friends took the bait. I hope they forgive me as I did this for science the lulz! When I woke up this morning, there were currently 51 votes, from people I know, friends of friends, and even people two degrees out of my social network! I think it would be really interesting to see how this poll spreads through Facebook (assuming they don’t shut it down first).

I guess now that this post is published, any scientific value is gone (since you could be reading from anywhere and vote for my poll non-virally). The main point is that when you design systems very rigidly (in Facebook’s case, not letting people abstain from a poll, which believe it or not is a valid bit of information), interesting consequences pop up.

I’ll keep checking the status of the poll and see if it actually blows up, whimpers and dies or gets taken down quickly.

Analysis Edit:

I think another reason that this poll is so effective is that it makes it seem that the person who voted is the originator of the poll. Check out the newsfeed formatting:

The voter’s name is prominently displayed (though I blurred it) and the person who asked the question is nowhere to be seen.

Edit #1: The time is now about 12:40PM and the total number of voters has doubled to 99!

Edit #2: It’s about 1:10PM and the number has doubled again to 201!

Edit #3: The time is around 1:24PM and there’s 304 answers.

Edit #4: Alright, it’s 1:35PM and there’s 406 votes.

Edit #5: Wow. It’s 1:41PM and there’s 502 votes.

Edit #5: It’s 1:48 and there are 621 votes.

Edit #6: I’m just going to simplify my updates now…

1:53PM – 716 votes

1:58PM – 811 votes

2:02PM – 904 votes

2:07PM – 1031 votes

2:16PM – 1282 votes

2:22PM – 1442 votes

2:27PM – 1619 votes

2:38PM – 2013 votes

2:46PM – 2393 votes

2:50pm – 2604 votes

2:54pm – 2811 votes

2:58pm – 3038 votes

3:04pm – 3408 votes

3:11pm – 3861 votes

3:14pm – 4142 votes

3:23pm – 4761 votes

3:39pm – 6169 votes

3:47pm – 6806 votes

3:51pm – 7198 votes

3:56pm – 7693 votes

4:00pm – 8010 votes

4:06pm – 8624 votes

4:10pm – 9038 votes

4:19pm – 10,013 votes!

4:28pm – 11,007 votes

4:37pm – 12,009 votes

4:46pm – 13,046 votes

4:53pm – 14,009 votes

5:04pm – 15,216 votes

5:09pm – 15,886 votes (dinnertime)

5:45pm – 19,764 votes

5:55pm – 20,722 votes

6:06pm – 21,829 votes

6:30pm – 24,104 votes

6:40pm – 25,013 votes

6:51pm – 26,001 votes

7:02pm – 27,014 votes

7:14pm – 28,013 votes

7:26pm – 29,001 votes

7:42pm – 30,373 votes

7:53pm – 31,124 votes

(mini break)

9:41pm – 38,332 votes

10:14pm – 40,175 votes

10:34pm – 41,360 votes

10:50pm – 42,232 votes

11:38pm – 44,690 votes

12:12am – 46,761 votes

12:51am – 47,677 votes

1:48am – 49,358 votes

Day 2

10:10am – 53,601 votes

10:31am – 53,812 votes

12:48pm – 55,418 votes

1:07pm – 55,598

1:36pm – 55,923

2:32pm – 56,470

4:41pm – 57,559

10:36pm – 59,078

1:51am – 59,426

EDIT: Facebook finally deleted the poll, with something like 60,000 votes last time I checked.

Instascriber: Automagically Add Content to Instapaper

I just “announced” a little web app that I’ve been developing off and on called “Instascriber.” It’s basically a tool to help you populate your Instapaper reading list with stuff using an RSS Feed subscription model. If you use Instapaper a lot and use it to keep track of your reading list, you might want to automatically add new items, say from the New York Times Book section, into your Instapaper reading list. If you already know you’d like to read the content on Instapaper, it’s a pain to manually add each thing you want to read.

With Instascriber, you can just set the feed you’d like to subscribe to. Instascriber will periodically check the feed for new items and add it to your Instapaper reading list automatically in the background. That’s it. Boom!

For now, I’m considering the web app to be in beta. So let me know if you find bugs or anything.