Written on April 27, 2008 – 11:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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San Francisco was flooded by Finnish companies last week. They’ve teamed up to organize a meeting at the uber-hip restaurant Foreign Cinema to meet with well-known web professionals as Loic le Meur, Scott Rafer and Howard Rheingold. Boris and me were there and really enjoyed meeting all these ambitious entrepreneurs who prove that Finland’s technology industry consists of more than just Nokia. This week I’ll highlight some of the companies, starting with XIHA Life. This is the world’s first multilingual social network, targeted at people living outside their home country.
Howard Rheingold speeching during Finnish meet-up
Juhani Polkko, VP Business Development, told me users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they understand or want to learn, and the content on the site is filtered based on the preferences. So imagine that you’re an English-speaking person from Germany and have a friend in France. When you check out his profile, you’ll only see the English content on his site. The French comments and messages have been filtered out.
I like the idea of their service, as learning other languages or keeping up with the ones you speak a bit are valuable assets. Moreover, the numbers of languages they offer is impressive (see below). Though I’m slightly disappointed Polkko and his team have built another social network. Why didn’t they create an overlay service on top of existing social networks?
Polkko: “We are initially building a niche social network and target the people who have the natural need to use multiple languages in their everyday life, like expatriates and exchange students. The next step is to create mash-ups for content from other social media websites and apply our language recognition and filtering algorithms. This is somewhat limited because you would need to build the algorithms inside other networks such as Facebook, but they can be applied to all the content which is available through open APIs and XML-feeds, or other content which the users own the rights to.”
So whether you like XIHA or not, these Finnish guys do offer us a glimpse of the possibilities when social networks adopt open standards. We could filter out content we don’t understand and use every network in our own language - without excluding other people. Let’s hope it’s not an utopia.
Written on April 26, 2008 – 8:26 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When going to an enormous event as Web 2.0 Expo you know on beforehand that some keynotes and sessions are sponsored. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw company presentations of Yahoo, MySpace, Automattic and Dash. Yet what DID strike me was the quality of the non-sponsored parts of the program. Like O’Reilly’s passionate talk (more about that later) and the funny, witty and motivational speech of mr. Fake Steve Jobs himself, aka Dan Lyons. This Forbes journalist is a genuinely funny guy who managed to work an audience in a way that was rather impressive for that time of the day (really early).
Dan Lyons
Lyons presented as himself. For one time, he didn’t act like he was Steve Jobs. After making a couple of jokes to warm up the audience, he made a fool of people who tend to overreact when it comes to social media. “I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you’re never going to get back,” he said. “Please don’t Twitter attack me.”
Lyons started Fake Steve Jobs partly out of boredom - “Writing about guys like IBM all the time is … dull”. Yet he was also driven by fear - the media business was changing. Bloggers were winning ground on print media. So he started to join the other side: “I’m not old enough to retire”. He applied for Forbes online and was rejected.
“Please remember”, Lyons asked the audience, “Forbes said no. That’s very important”. Still Lyons couldn’t stop thinking about starting a blog. The idea of imitating a CEO first appeared in his mind when he noticed most CEO’s would act like they were writing a so-called transparent blog, yet all they did was spamming us with PR talk. Lyons: “What if somebody would go nuts?” That somebody turned out to be Steve Jobs, as “he takes himself too seriously and has no sense of humor. (..) When Jobs launched the iPhone he said Apple is changing the world. Come on, it’s a fucking cellphone.”
Fake Steve Jobs had the same attractive power on people as the real one, as Lyons built up a readership of 90,000 people in just six months. Moreover, people from all over the world started a man-hunt to track him down. The man leading the hunting masses: Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes. After another rejection from Forbes.com, Lyons sent Karlgaard a line - offering to write for Forbes. “He wrote back, ‘Oh, Fake Steve, you’re a genius, we’d love to hire you.” As Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons finally got his job at the online venue of Forbes.
The blog is a “life-changing” publication for Lyons. “I wake up excited every morning”. What he digs the most about his blog is that people actually build characters in the comments: “people with nicknames like Fake Vladimir Putin are performing on my blog”. According to Lyons, this kind of interaction is THE power of Web 2.0. A beautiful media future is lying ahead of us. We’ve built a strong foundation for the online dream, and it will get better “when the big media companies jump in”.
So all the funny remarks aside, Lyons did have a clear message. “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore loose sight.” Since with the online revolution, the media experience becomes bigger, wider and richer. There are plenty of opportunities there. “We, the Web 2.0 attendees, are in the eye of the storm. No, we’re creating the storm”.
Lyons suddenly transformed a sharp and funny talk about his blog in an inspiring and motivating message to all the new media creators out there.
Written on April 25, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg just told the audience at Web 2.0 Expo that Wordpress.com has launched a “(possibly) related functions” option. Mullenweg: “We have over 10 million pageviews a day to permalink pages. After you’ve read the article on a permalink page, you might get lost due to the bad navigation. It isn’t a good experience.” So Mullenweg and his 19 Automattic employees developed a function that suggests possibly related articles from your own blog, and then from some other blogs who have also turned the function on. “It’s like advertising, but with content”, Mullenweg said.
Automattic teamed up with Sphere - the widget service who does the same for the whole blogosphere - and is planning to offer it to the self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs too. Mullenweg believes the service will be successful, as “who hasn’t lost a day due to the YouTube’s related videos?”. I absolutely dig this move by Wordpress - as obvious at it is - since it allow smaller bloggers to get their writings out there. It’s the democratization of the medium and makes sure good quality content doesn’t get lost.
By the way, check out this cool photo blog theme called “Monotone“. It adjusts the page to the color and width of the photo and Mullenweg seemed to be pretty proud of it.
Written on April 25, 2008 – 2:50 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Do you tag your photos on Flickr? If you are a loyal tagger, you may consider yourself member of a small groups of Flickr users. One that has however, “an outsized influence on the overall Flickr experience”, said Kakul Srivastava, director of product management of Flickr. During the “Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience” Web 2.0 Expo session, she discussed enhancing the user experience through tagging and geotagging.
In the practice of tagging, she sees four levels of sophistication, namely:
- First there is the “I exist” level. You just tag pictures to make them findable for yourself
- The second level is all about making your photographs findable for others. You want those Flickr users to know you exist
- Thirdly: wow! You find other people exist too! Let’s interact! So you start annotating your friends by adding tags. We should thank Facebook for this, as they made tagging people normal.
- The fourth level of sophistication consists of tagging objects within pictures.
So what’s the results of all this happy taggin’? According to Srivastava, “sly Russian mathematical magic” will take place. That might sound rather abstract, so let me name some examples. Because of extensive tagging, the Flickr algorithm can start clustering tags so that the meaning of a certain tags is disambiguated. Let’s use a classic example here: are you looking for the Hilton in Paris or for a Chihuahua-carrying utterly famous blonde?
Another example of taking tagging to next level is checking hot tags. By doing this, you can see what’s hot and happening, and where. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that last week’s hottest tags in the US was “popemobile“. This has a link with the last advantage Srivastava mentioned: geotagging. 68 million Flickr pics are geotagged, thanks to clustering you can multiply that number four of five. What leaves the Flickr community with a stunning 100,000 places on the world that can be viewed by checking out related Flickr photos.
So where do we go from here? Srivastava polled some people from her team and predicted that tagging objects would become more popular and complex. The metadata is becoming more structured, making it able to look for specifics types of airplanes - to name an example. Also, interaction in tagging is here to stay. But what I consider to be most important consequence of good-tagging behavior is the ability to see what trends are emerging throughout the world. Like the popemobile tag, some tags - or clusters of them - will tell stories, maybe even news. And that’s what makes a structured web really fascinating.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Triggit, launched during the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco offers extremely simple to use ad management for user blogs. Instead of signing up at all the different ad programs you simply install one JavaScript code snippet which will enable drag & drop advertisements (and other content) into your blog or webpage.
The technology looks very cool and needs to be seen to realize how simple it actually is. Check the video for a demo. In short it means that you install some JavaScript which will enable you to drag and drop ads directly into your sites, WYSIWYG style.
You can actually move Adsense Ads around the page, pick a different background color and resize the ads. Then when you save the ad it’s variables are saved on the Triggit website and the Javascript dynamically inserts the ads in your site when it is reloaded. Very intuitive and easy.
The company presentation was very funny and vibrant and they rightly won the audience vote for most exiting presentation and start-up.
I can easily see this being adopted by both smaller and bigger ads. Quickly inserting an ad somewhere is something we would all be interested in. The prospect of just moving ads around without worrying that you break HTML code sounds great.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Any other ideas for using email as an interface?
Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:16 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
We just watched a videotaped presentation by Jonathan Zittrain who is the Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford Internet Institute. His book titled “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It” seems like something we all want to read. a few quotes:
Jimbo Wales:
“Jonathan Zittrain does what no one has before—he eloquently and subtly pinpoints the magic that makes Wikipedia, and the Internet as a whole, work. The best way to save the Internet is to turn off your laptop until you”ve read this book.”—Jimbo Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig:
“This book is fundamental. It will define the debate about the future of the Internet, long after we haven”t stopped it. Absolutely required reading.”—Lawrence Lessig, Professor, Stanford Law School, and author of Free Culture and The Future of Ideas
More information and a complete review as soon as we read it. Or buy it yourself at Amazon.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 5:59 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Web 2.0 Expo took off today with a classic on-the-couch interview. John Battelle from Federated Media Publishing asked Marc Andreessen a couple of questions about his Netscape adventure, the industry landscape and browsers. Andreessen is a famous software engineer and the brains behind Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape. When building what turned out the foundation of the Internet - the browser - he and his team didn’t expect the future of the browser would look so bright.
“It’s far better than anybody thought. Many of the early ideas have lasted - like javascript -, which has been amazing. Cookies for example, we made that up during a weekend. When we tried to figure out how we could check whether a visitor had visited the website before, we asked “What about this cookie thing?”. And after a couple of years it became popular and caused discussion whether they’re a big threat to user privacy or not. It was a very rapid implementation of something that lasted really long.”
Andreessen continued with giving some examples, and I have one absolute favorite: the back and forward button. Andreessen: “We just needed something to navigate with and created these two buttons. We expected somebody would figure out something better later. But now everybody uses it, it’s even integrated in applications like iTunes and Mac OSx.”
Generally, Andreessen said that creating the browser was a half-way step. “However, the persistence of the browser has been amazing. For now, there’s no incentive to create a service that is not accessible through a browser, as you’ll take a big chunk out of your possible audience. (..) There’s a whole generation of kids communicating through browsers with services like Facebook. I think it will be another fifteen to twenty years before another step is taken”.
Predicting the future of such an innovating industry is quite a bold move. Yet when we take in consideration that early adopters have moved the largest part of their digital life to the browser, there’s all the reason to be excited about Firefox and co. Not feeling it yet? Have a look at the most used software at the statistics page of our sponsor Wakoopa to see the impressive numbers.
Although there’s always the chance we’re all missing something. Like Andreessen said: “The one thing I’ve learned from that hectic period with Netscape, was that big shifts and revolutionary developments are never foreseen, by anybody and everybody”
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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. (
