Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Oh boy. Let me summarize this post on heise for you. Firstof all to put you in the right mind, it seems that the United States Trade Representative Susan Schwag has told CNET News that as long as sites like AllofMP3 exist, the United States will vote against allowing Russia into the WTO. Strong words.

As a few more juicy items, the US worked on Russia to close the site, and Russia did, but it does not seem to be so easy. The thing is that AllofMP3 seems to be legal in Russia, and in the absence of real international copyright law, that kidn of makes it legal it seems. AllofMP3 says that they have license contracts with ROMS and are therefore legal. The industry says that they did not authorize ROMS but that only shows that all is not clear. VISA has been forced to handle credit care handling for AllofMP3. The CEO of AllofMP3 has been brought to court, but has been set free with no charges.

It will be interesting to see how this little play continues. The world is getting smaller and with it, come some problems.

Techcrunch posted a few videos from Scoble on the future of search, where he argues that Facebook, Mahalo and Techmeme will throw down Google from its mighty mountain. The full list of the videos is here. The idea is Social Graph based search. It will overtake Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!.
His first point is that you didn’t find the post through search, because the search engines do not know what is inside the video. First error there. Currently this might be true, but not in the long term. You might want to read Surviving Immortality by Cringely. Computers will become more and more powerful.

One of his big point is that Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook are SEO resistant, meaning resistant from spammers. The thing is though that everything normal people can do based on logic, a computer will be able to do eventually. Sure it is not easy, but it is something that will happen eventually. They will be getting better.

Techmeme, built a fabric by hand through linking behavior between the top blogs. This is good, but it is nothing that cannot be done automatically. It’s pretty similar to pagerank really, just that there is a person filter behind it. This is the people rank that Google has already talked about. Of course having access to a social graph, is something that helps to build this kind of trust graph. Did you know Google just hired Brad Fitz, LiveJournal fame, who is working on opening up the Social Graph, similar to what our own Dirk Olbertz does with Noserub. I shortly posted about it when I cleared my backlog. The push is going on to open the social graph up just because it really helps in creating your own search engine. Lijit is another search engine that is working on this. We are working on monetizing it at Ormigo through building a quasi-lead market that banks heavily on getting to know people and connect them with the best local merchant for their current needs.

As you notice, I really believe in the social graph bit. If I have a financial consultant, or a lawyer, a friend or even his friend, that lives in my town, might want the same one when needed. This is something that is already happening offline, but we are monetizing it online. First through allowing advertising of services through aggregation, but learning along the way how people interconnect. It’s again automated though.

One point Scoble has is that Facebook has been able to keep the seo spammers out, which seems to not be the case for e.g. Plaxo. I am not sure yet why an open social graph cannot keep SEOs out of the system. My friends are my friends and the graph increases the value of those friends for linkage.

All in all very good ideas, but I am not buying that it will replace Google.

Update: Now read this.

Once again, I have found another that I truly love. I started reading Ilium well over a year ago and stopped again because it was just confusing. I mean it starts with some small robot under water trying to get away from something huge, a group of people that seem to live in all too happy times and that can teleport (fax), and a little bit of Achilles, Troja, Zeus and other.

A few weeks ago I gave it another try and once you get over the initial hump it is amazing. When you have finished Ilium you will surely run out to buy the second part called Olympos. The only thing is that the end of Olympos is a little swift. Hundreds of pages of great story telling and in the last 100 its done. The end is good but it seems a little bit like Dan didn’t want to continue any longer, even though I wouldn’t know from the top of my head what to change, other than wanting to know more … I started to really like the characters. Whenever somebody wants ot make that into a film, it will really be the most expensive film ever

Have a good reading time. It’s thought provoking in a lot of places.

Shozu just got cancelled on my phone, I am now using ZoneTag from Yahoo! Research. The system is similar to Shozu in that it automatically prompts you if you want to post a photo you took with your phone to Flickr. The nice little thing is that it gets your cell tower id and tries to find out your location. If it doesn’t know, you can add it, and it knows it next time. Actually pretty similar to Plazes. As far as I know, they bought lots of the cell tower data in the US to make it easier there. Above that you can have some special action tags, e.g. posts to barcamp group (I can make that tag action:bc via the web interface for example) which are available to me via a list and suggested when I the first characters. All very simple to use. Here’s one of the first photos I uploaded. It includes some default tags, plus my extra “oliver” and all the geo data. Very cool indeed.

Update: and check this. You can log your location and later sync it to your photos

A kid sure occupies you. A friend likened it to watching fire recently. Really not too interesting but you just have to keep watching. I obviously didn’t stop reading though so it is time for clearing the backlog again, dumping my brain into this blog once again, trying to get back on top of things.

• The wonderful people at MOO have launched their MOO Stickers.  I already love their business cards, and this ads to the mix. Looking forward to seeing the company grow into other markets.
• The guys at Townster posted about Vibe on their Blog. Great little video!
• AOL/Time Warner bought TACODA in another deal which moves a network for ads further towards the big players, giving behavioural targeting a further push into the main stream.
• Seth Goldstein launched SocialMedia, which builds Facebook aps, already having over 12 Million Users in total!!! They are looking for a designer by the way. If you know anyone, send me an eMail or leave a comment.
• As for ad networks, check out this article on media week entitled: Marketers Turn to Web Ad Nets. Also a real relevant point for all the people out there running performance based advertising solutions.
• Don Dodge wrote about the Microsoft analyst meeting with some interesting bits. They are serious about advertising, having bought AQuantive and AdECN, having deals with Facebook and Digg. The other big pushes from Redmond are software as a service and consumer services. Big changes going on at Microsoft.
• Clickriver is online, allowing your to advertise your services on Amazon.
• Amazon has started to allow payable AMIs on their Amazon EC2 service. I have the feeling that WeoCEO might be one of them soon.
• Valleywag posted the Facebook Ratecard.
• The NU2M portfolio seems to be transferred to Media Ventures by the looks of it. Watch out for some posters near you in Germany
• Desktop Tower Defense is coming to the desktop as a mutiplayer game. God the time we will loose!
• F5 Networks bought Acopia. A good move if you ask me. They move from traffic management to a more integrated system of managing your entire server system.
• Google is tracking deeper data with AdSense, allowing them to target users specifically based on their habits. With their reach, it’s an amazing behavioural targeting system.
• Plentyoffish.com is sticking with no employees for a while with big changes in the online dating market happening it seems.
• Feld posts about the Social Graph. One of our employees is working on something to allow social graph portability and Brad, ex LiveJournal / Six Apart, now Google, seems to be going in that direction too. This will seriously be a major shift and let’s see if it happens or rather when.