New type of Social Networking Site

These days I have been using a twitter quite a lot. I've used facebook, CyWorld(A Korean social networking site), and Mixi (A Japanese social networking site), but none of them solve the problems I have: Privacy and Simplicity. Once being a friend, somehow I know where friends have been, they know what's going on me by looking at pictures, walls, etc. If I block them or apply restricted permission to them, they'd notice it because they know they cannot access some parts that they used to access before. Also they are not simple to use. If I go to Facebook, my profile looks very disorganized and very complicated in a look.

I don't know about privacy on twitter; but I think I like twitter's simplicity. Moreover, what I really like is the fact that I don't need to spend my time to do something on twitter. Whenever I want to write something on twitter, I can just open the twitter by "toggling" on the computer and write it. Or I can tweet anywhere using my phone. I don't need to spend my time in front of computer to "organize" my wall and my contacts. I think that's the strength of it. I don't need to open a browser to do something complicated.

Twitter's approach

I have been using Twitter a while, and I really like the concept Twitter makes it easy for users to tweet. You can tweet anywhere with anything: through cellphone, smartphone, stand-alone application, web application. You don't need to sit down in front of the computer to spare you time to post things. You can just "tweet" instantly when somethings comes out of your mind through your iPhone, blackberry, or even QuickSilver in mac.

New Year

It's been a long time since I blogged last time.. Yes, I don't deny the fact that I was abundantly lazy and still have a lot of posts waiting as drafts to be posted..

But I finished my one-year internship in Japan on last August, came back to school to finish my undergrad, and also got a job; I am joining Yahoo! on May, 2009. I will be working on Yahoo! Search Technologies (YST). Until that, I am enjoying 4-month break at home, helping parents' business, etc.

While enjoying my free-time, I decided to start a little project. I am going to make a web browser plugin that collects the Japanese words that I do not know the meaning, automatically retrieves meanings from the online dictionary, saves them, and later I can re-practice my memory through online quiz.

For the target browser, I think I will make it for Safari because that's my default web browser, but eventually Firefox, as Firefox is more cross-platform that can run in all major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac). 

Also, even though it starts as a Japanese word memorizer, I will generalize it as a memorizer to anything, such as English word memorizer, jargon memorizer, etc.

I will post more about this as I have some progress on the development, and also I will try to post all my pending drafts as I promised myself to be less lazy than last year...

Language Translation

I now have been for a little more than 2 months in Japan. So far I have been amused, fascinated, shocked, and surprised by various aspects of Japanese culture for the last two months, and one of them is Japanese language. I was especially surprised at how similar Korean and Japanese languages are to each other in terms of grammar and words. The grammar structures in both languages are very similar; if I read kanji in Korean pronunciation, that is exactly the Korean word; even some idioms and the expression forms are also very similar. I think Korean and Japanese languages resembles each other in many ways.
So, I have been wondering, if grammars, words, and even idioms are similar, then this would be the area where the machine learning could sneak into and work really well. As everyone knows by their experiences, the machine translation so far has basically sucked. Even if it works well, the expression might sound awkward that you would rather not use in daily conversation. This is currently the status of the machine translation. But if we tweak and apply machine learning into translation between two similar languages, then it could hopefully solve awkwardness of expressions because the computer might be able to "learn" new idioms and slangs and express the same feeling through another language if they are really close to each other.
Of course the translation between Korean to English or Japanese to English would not work well because the language structures are completely different. But I think we can somehow make a 100% perfect translation technology at least between Korean and Japanese; or any other similar languages such as German and English, French and English, Portuguese and Spanish, etc. Right now I am envisioning Korean and Japanese people having non-awkward online conversation using their own languages, or Korean people reading Japanese websites that would have been perfectly translated into Korean without awkwardness, and vice-versa, if this technology becomes true.