Archive for May, 2008
Written on May 31, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Doing nothing and getting more traffic sounds like a typical spam promise, right? Well, most of the times it is. But now I need you to get past this prejudice for once - just for once! - to look with me at Scoutle. This Dutch start-up helps you to attract more visitors by just installing a simple widget - a so-called Stage - on your blog. And the best thing is.., these new visitors are probably really interested in what you have to say. Sounds almost too good to be true, so let’s take a closer look.
A Scoutle Stage
Scoutle works as follows: after you’ve installed the Stage on your blog, the service sends out a Scout - a personal webcrawler. This scout “walks through the Internet”. The more visitors you have, the more sites your scout will cover. Its goal is to find other scouts of which some might come from bloggers who have similar interests and profiles. If this happens, you’ll be notified so that you can get in touch with them. When both parties agree on a connection, they can see each others contacts. The result is a new network of bloggers who all have similar interests. They’ll probably start reading each others blogs and send out some trackbacks. So eventually, everybody gets more traffic.
The idea is really good, particularly because bloggers can just focus on creating content while some automatic Scout is looking for possible blog soul mates. When a match is made, they can enjoy each others readings. Almost a perfect execution of modern social networking.
But there’s one danger to it. Bloggers might install the Stage and send out a scout just to gain more traffic. This is not the best attitude for your users. They install the service and wait for their number of visitors to skyrocket. If this doesn’t happen quickly, they might quit the service. That’s why Scoutle may be better off with promoting itself as a service to find valuable blog contacts.
I’m going to give Scoutle a shot, and see if I’ll meet some interesting people these coming weeks. Founder Godfried van Loo told me he is eager for some feedback, so leave a comment if you have anything to add. If you’d excuse me now, I have to instruct a scout to find me some new blog friends.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 31, 2008 – 12:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some things in life seem so unimportant, yet when they change you’ll immediately notice it. An example: have you ever changed the position of your office litter bin? If you have ever did so, you probably remember you threw your garbage on the ground - on the exact place where your litter bin used to stand. Well, same goes for the Google favicon. It’s always there, you’re likely to just ignore it, but now that it has changed, it’s such an incredibly salient little thing.
The big G has changed into a small g. And though I hate to report about minor stuff like this - in Dutch we call it belly-button staring -, I had to share this interesting thought from a Google Blogoscoped forum member with you. Tony Ruscoe is philosophizing about the meaning behind this new favicon:
“Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise…? Maybe they’re going to be known as ’the little g’ rather than ’The Big G’ from now on…
GB blogger Philipp Lenssen adds:
Google continues to grow and grow, but one of their self-proclaimed core values is “Think and act like an underdog”.
I had never heard of this core value, yet I’m sure to keep it in mind. It puts the whole Google strategy in another perspective. Maybe they have even lost the European Gmail case deliberately to appear like the poor underdog (insert wink smiley here).
One thing if for sure though, the more traction your service has, the more people talk about those minor changes. During The Next Web Conference, Digg founder Kevin Rose expressed the wish to have a small number of users again. So he could make radical changes to his social bookmarking service more easily. I see what he means, as only changing your favicon can be good for 276 blogposts with hundreds of comments.
Written on May 30, 2008 – 6:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Take a look at your desk, chances are high you’ll see a huge stack of business cards. All collected at conferences, meet-ups, and Open Coffee’s. It’s actually a bit absurd: while we’re digitalizing our lives, we still use paper to create the foundation for a new contact. Project E is one of the first initiatives that strives to change this contradiction. They’ll allow you to get connected in seconds with a newly developed portable device.
Renato Valdés Olmos at the Next Web
E is a small, slick-looking, curvy white device. It’s just a matter of pressing two of these devices against each other to get connected on services like LinkedIn. Sync it to a PC or mobile device once you’re done with a conference or meeting, and all of your social networks are up to date with new contacts you’ve made.
Three Dutch designers came up with their idea during their graduate master year at the academy for art and media technology in Hilversum. I’ve talked to one of these innovative guys, director Renato Valdés Olmos. He explains the thoughts behind this new approach to social networking: “What we, and everybody else for that matter basically observed is that the Internet has made our world very small. We can connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere. This has changed our world thoroughly. Especially at a social level. Quantity of contact has taken over quality of contact. So we figured, ‘Hey, can’t we get the benefits of all these great online services and communities to real-life situations?’ ‘How can we translate these benefits and getting people closer together in physical reality at the same time?’ We still believe in face-to-face contact.”
The next step for Renato and his two partners was thinking about how to do this: “We researched connectivity between cellphones and smart phones. We came to the conclusion that there must be a faster way to exchange information.” Renato wanted to get people connected with “a device operated by a single gesture. “Exchanging contact info and social networking info with E takes as long as a formal handshake.” (more…)
Written on May 30, 2008 – 1:48 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while, our Web Tipr’s mail us a round-up with interesting start-ups from their country. Yesterday Victor Cruzate sent me a quick update from Spain. Here are three new start-ups that take a shot for eternal Internet glory.
Planetaki
Planetaki is a RSS reader and web bookmark service that allows you to create your own version of the web. Which, of course, you can share with others. Well, planet is actually is a big word, as it’s more a fancy-looking list of your desired sources. That’s exactly though what the team has in mind: “We are a small group of people who believe there is beauty in simplicity and that there is indeed a great need of simplicity on the web.”
Wolpy
On Wolpy you can share your opinion of your visited places, keep track of all the trips you’ve made, explore new hotspots and see where your pals have been. To sum it up: it’s the kind of site where you go for the anticipatory pleasure and the nostalgic feelings afterwards. The service - developed by two geek friends who met in a LAN party - is currently in Alpha.
BuBok
Every Spanish speaking user that has the ambition to become a writer can make his or hers dream come true on BuBok. They can upload their book, give it a nice and professional look and then make it available for sale. If you don’t feel the need to pick up a pen, you can always check out books of aspiring writers on this well-designed site.
The Copycat approach
The three services all look very nice, and the ideas are well executed. Yet the last start-up, BuBok, is basically a Lulu rip-off. This is actually pretty smart, as a Spanish site probably appears more trustworthy and accessible to people from Spain. I’m sure Dutch people from my parents’ generation would prefer a Dutch service as well.
The other two start-ups copy part of an idea from respectively Netvibes and Dopplr…, in English. Netvibes talks about an Universe, Planetaki calls it a Planet. Dopplr, Tripit, and a dozen of other travel services track your trips, so does Wolpy. I’m not sure whether these two Spanish start-ups will get some traction as there already are some excellent alternatives for them.
BuBok’s approach is safer: try to copy the copy cat style of some German entrepreneurs like the Samwer brothers. Just clone an English service and conquer your home market. For Spanish start-ups, the potential is even bigger as millions and millions people all over the world speak Spanish.
However, from a creative and adventurous kind of view, trying to conquer the world is more exciting. But with tons of new start-ups launching every day, the chance of becoming the next Twitter or Friendfeed is small. Good luck to these brave Spanish entrepreneurs who are willing to take it.
[WebTipr: Victor Cruzate]
More Spanish Web 2.0 news (in Spanish) on Loogic
Written on May 30, 2008 – 11:52 am
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
A few years ago it was fashionable to make fancy Flash sites that had high impact upon visiting them, fancy graphics, cartoonish displays with an arty feel. But personally speaking I don’t go back to see these sites ever again, do you?
I’m the same with movies, once I’ve seen one, I generally won’t watch it again until I have forgotten it’s plot. Thankfully that fashion seems to have passed, albeit for a few corporates who haven’t quite caught up yet.
Today we have Web 2.0 fashion. Most of us upstarts competing in this arena have aspirations for either a sellout or to grow viral traffic into the millions so that advertising can fuel growth. This time around the fashion is very sleek and polished offerings, plenty of Ajax, lovely curvy corners, with as much javascript thrown in as possible.
For all the classy styles with the fancy drop-downs, the clean looks, Ajax signup pages, there is a distant lack of ‘retention content’, but that is not the point.
The point I want to make is about proving a concept before wasting thousands on classy designs that in many cases will never be seen by more than a handful of beta testers or the developers themselves.
(more…)
Written on May 30, 2008 – 8:59 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Patrick and me are currently waiting for our morning flight to Greece. We are attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008 at the island Los. We will be staying at the fabulous Ios Palace hotel on the golden sand beaches of Mylopotas. The hotel offers free Wi-Fi in the conference area and next to the pool.
No, we are not complaining!
I’m not just attending the conference to blog about it. I am also one of the international speakers there next to Timothy Ferris (”productivity guru” and author of The 4-Hour Workweek) and Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet.), to name a few. I’m very proud to be mentioned in the same sentence as those two guys.
We will blog about the conference here (Tagged: gbc08) and we will post photos to Flickr (Tagged: gbc08) regularly too.
Written on May 30, 2008 – 12:11 am
Martin Kloos, Business consultant
Despite the occasional fuzz about Twitter, or Web 2.0 in general, lacking the ability to go mainstream, there are significant signs that Enterprise 2.0 in general is getting the attention of the enterprise more and more. Although many might argue that Enterprise 2.0 already is on the agenda of the manager, I would argue that this is still limited to a few enterprise early adopters or early followers. But as I said, this is changing slowly, which is a good sign for all of us. But we need to stay focused, as we might lose the connection with the important followers.
Ross Mayfield and beer
About three weeks ago I visited a Dutch conference on Enterprise 2.0. This conference focused solely on end users of Enterprise 2.0 related tools and concepts, and was free of charge for these end users. Free of charge, in my opinion, resulted in an entirely different crowd than say the visitors of The Next Web Conference where mainly early adopters spend a fee to network and see their Web 2.0 heroes in action. So we ended up with a crowd that had relatively fresh interest in Enterprise 2.0, but limited knowledge and could in no way be compared to a crowd of early adopters.
What struck me again during the conference is that there is an enormous crowd that is just discovering the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0 related concepts. At this point, many of these participants know not much more about Enterprise 2.0 than “the application of some tools like wikis as knowledge management initiatives” (despite the fact that there is an entire different world behind this). At the same time, there is still skepticism about the ROI and applicability of Enterprise 2.0. I sometimes think that it’s a crowd that we as early adopters seem to lose sight of too often. In this sense, spending too much time with the ‘in crowd’ who ‘get’ Enterprise 2.0 can result in serious over-enthusiasm and ‘lack of realism’.
As a relatively early adopter, despite the interesting line-up including Ross Mayfield and Andrew McAfee, I didn’t hear much news at the conference. At first I felt disappointed about this, but after I realized the aforementioned point about over-enthusiasm, it hit me that we might have to focus for a while on getting the followers up to speed before we move on to the next web 3.0, or whatever version number we want to associate with what comes next. Otherwise we all might lose an important shot at truly socializing the Enterprise…
Written on May 29, 2008 – 4:10 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last night, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld reported that Netvibes founder Tariq Krim is stepping down as CEO to work on a “new project”. “My role was to transfer Netvibes from a personal start page into a widget platform”, Krim told Schonfeld. He will remain on the board of the company and will also stay a non-executive strategic adviser. Right after the article was published, the first rumors buzzed around the web. I’ve emailed Krim to get some more background.
Krim pitching Ginger to us in his (now former) office
Krim told TechCrunch that the technical foundation for Netvibes was completed with the recent release of Ginger, the latest version that gave the site a social flavor. Several bloggers didn’t take this for granted and wrote that Krim was pushed aside by the VC’s. In an email to me, he replied to this rumors: “No, everything is fine for me. The company makes revenue and can now enter the growth stage.”
Krim advised me to contact the new Netvibes CEO, former COO Freddy Mini from San Francisco. Mini is probably happy with his new job, but the vibe in the blogosphere might temper his enthusiasm. Schonfeld called the fight of Netvibes against iGoogle and MyYahoo a “losing battle“, and some people have already linked Netvibes to the deadpool.
Mini: “They’re overreacting. Google has a great help from its highly popular search service but fortunately we have a sustainable revenue model based on both our premium Universe offer - that inserts a fully customized Netvibes with a partner site - and our sponsored placements for paid distribution of widgets. Ginger has just open to everyone at the end of April from which we expect growth in new users and visits per month.”
“All in all”, Mini writes, “the new version now available and business model is selling. I don’t think we are near any deadpool”.
The vibe at Netvibes doesn’t seem pessimistic at all. The executives even have the guts to make some bold strategic decisions. On Friday, the company will make all the technology around the widget platform open source. They’re also working on turning widgets into mobile applications. Or are these startegic decision really just moves made out of desperation?
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
