Seems that Loic once again brought a good discussion to the house that we have been having several times over though under the name of Open Social Graph. Where does my social graph reside, whom does it belong to? I am writing more and more about this first of all because it is a subject dear to my heard, second I am in lots of discussion with Dirk, one of Ormigo‘s developers, about it, and third, it is relevant to what we do within Ormigo in terms of the long term vision.
What Loic really wants is already available through e.g. Noserub. The tools is only a side project but it is getting more and more attention and due to the fact that it is open-source, you can just install it on your server. id.thylmann.net/othylmann is my account on my own Noserub Server for example. I’m likely moving that soon, because the fun thing is that all the data belongs to you, you can ex- and import it, and you can add friends simply through adding any of their URLs. In the end it is all about the Data Portability that Michael talks about in his Techcrunch Post.
Noserub is just an example implementation of what it will mean in the end. Being able to port around your data, adding friends through URLs with the help of Google’s Open Social API, and more. And you can create special RSS Feeds within Noserub allowing you to then put that RSS Feed on your blog. But the thing is that even though Loic now believes that he wants his Blog to be the center of his life again, I am not sure he means that. We still need some new Design to handle all our social life and display it for all to see. It’s too much content and actually, privacy is still something that we really need to care for.
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Decentralized Social Networks
Amazon EC2 gets Static IPs, Availability Zones and more
How I love Amazon AWS. In October there were already hints about Static IPs and now they are here. Check out the Amazon Web Services Blog post about all of the new stuff.
First of all, we now have what they call Elastic IP Addresses and the system is very cool. You get up to 5 IPs to start with. You get one via an API call to AllocateAddress, which allocates you one fixed IP that then belongs to you. Without you using it you pay 1 cent per hour. But you can then do an AssociateAddress and it is attached to a Server and becomes free, meaning you no longer pay for its usage. You can then DisassociateAddress and ReleaseAddress if you do not plan to use it at all.
Then couple that with Availability Zones, which are zones in their Network Infrastructure that are insulated from each other so that if one zone goes down, another does not (in theory, there might always be odd cases, chance if you want 
).
This really means you can do more for a high availability solution with Amazon AWS and if they now start a NOC in Germany, I will possibly never do my own Server again. But they are not here yet so we are just using it for parts of our system, and I am taking a look at Globalways.
But again, congratulations to the entire Team behind Amazon EC2 for pulling this one of. Thank you. No more DynDNS for our Ad Server 
Ormigo is a Red Herring 100 Finalist
Wohoo… Ormigo is a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Europe. We’re in nice company this year, with other services like BuyVIP, Sevenload, Amiando, cellity, Experteer, and others. We are moving ahead in big steps here to a nice new release in a few days which will make our local market focus even clearer and open up for some fun innovations going down the road.
What I want Xing to be
I am starting to figure out that the only social network I am really using often is Xing. This is for one simple reasons: It is becoming my address book. This is really what Xing should be focussing on in my mind. Marketplace and all is nice, but there is an amazing value to be created from simply making sure that it becomes my address book. Once Xing becomes my address book there is actually no synchronization problem anymore. My data store is Xing. I don’t want to Sync. I want Xing to be my address book. If there is somebody not in Xing I want to be able to add that person to my Pool of contacts and if it through social apis they will be able to get more information about them from the web. I want full access on the go, an app for the iPhone, S60 phones, Mac Addressbook Plugin, a great mobile html version, … . We are moving to an always on world and I one thing that is still not online for me is my address book. eMails are online through GMail but the address book is only synchronized between several devices.
So there you go, needed to get that off my chest. Please enhance Xing to be my address book. Always there, with everybody I have in my rolodex, in Xing or not.
Enough of the rambling. These 2 minutes writing helped get that of my chest
Looking for Developers / Producer / Systemadministrator
We are looking for a few new people to bolster our development team at Ormigo. If you know German, just go to our jobs section, but if you don’t we are still happy to hear form you. The entire documentation, trac, wiki, is in english anyway. For those not knowing what we do, we are making the local market advertisable in a scalable way, helping local merchants to gain new customers. So there is ad server stuff to do (on Amazon’s AWS Infrastructure), billing backends to handle, statistical analysis with loads of data, optimization of lead processes, design frameworks for landing pages, customer care infrastructure with loads of people on the phone, lots of micro formats, … . Most of what we have done up till now is not visible to the naked eye. The opportunities are endless, which is exactly why we chose that market.
So here is a short summary of the jobs currently advertised for the development team:
- Web Developer: Our platform is written in CakePHP and we are looking for a core PHP developer, somebody with the experience to know to write unit tests first, and code second. Knowledge with recommendation engines, ad servers, cloud computing, scaling big systems, … is always appreciated.
- Web Designer / Producer: We need somebody that knows HTML and CSS inside out, has design knowledge, understands a bit of JavaScript and possibly PHP. This has a real focus on the generation of customer contacts for local merchants, over hundreds of products, with loads of different partners running ads, … handling all of this in a scalable manner.
- System Administrator: This is actually the best overarching title that I came up with. We don’t really have titles at Ormigo, but sys admin seems to be fitting to some extent. We need somebody to take care of the servers in-house, which includes handing our Amazon infrastructure, deploy processes, customer care infrastructure, testing environment, and so on. Dependent on the person, I can see them focussing more on the stuff other than direct server management, which would be their responsibility, but possibly not doing.
So those are the main positions we are looking for at the moment. Leave a comment or mail me at oliver at thylmann.com with your documents. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you to Nokia for amazing two days
Back at home after a great day back at work, I am starting to reflect about Wednesday and Thursday at the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop. What an amazing two days. Nokia made sure that all our needs were cared for, to be able to fully concentrate on the work shop. The St. Martin’s Lane Hotel was amazing and a challenge to the senses, and this was followed by a very good dinner in the beautiful setting of the Sketch Restaurant. With some great wine, and Mojitos later at the St. Martin Lane’s bar, the evening was full of great conversations on and off-topic.
The thing is that the crowd was wonderful and everybody wanted to stay in contact afterwards. We were fortunate to have some amazing people from Nokia but also from very diverse fields in the location that helped having a free spirit and open discussions: 14 Henrietta Street.
Sadly there is not a lot more I can rave about as I can’t talk about the content, even though it wouldn’t be too interesting for all of you out there if you weren’t part of the talks to get there. Thanks go especially to Scott Hirsh who was a great facilitator, always being in the background and nudging us back on track if the excitement of one special subject got the better of us
I do not want to single out any one person from the gang that was there, so I will leave it at that, other that I have to post about my new Nokia N810 soon, thanks, which is an amazing step forward from the Nokia N770 that I already have. I am really seeing myself using it, already have stuff like a last.fm clients, media system, ssh, skype, and others installed. But more on that in another post.
Thanks for challenging discussions, great insight, and listening to the world around you! Looking forward to the next meeting.
Google’s Backdoor to Global Ad Domination
Google has released the Google Ad Manager. It’s interesting to see that they are announcing it just after their Doubleclick Acquisition closed, because in a sense, they are competing with Doubleclick for Publishers (dfp). Of course, Google’s offering is free and based on the feature list, it is very powerful for a first release. I am currently running OpenX here and just submitted a request for access, which I double I will get for blog.thylmann.net as I wasn’t able to tell them more about me. The New York Times has a nice article about what the Ad Manager is about for those not fully aware to what the ad serving market looks like.
I’d like to add one very important thing though. This is really a way to get to see more pages users view. Each page the Ad Manager is on, independent of whether Google is serving AdSense ads or not, will ping Google about the user information based on Cookies. That is a very important thing because you need to know as much as possible about surfing behaviour of people, and at the moment Yahoo!, and sepecially Microhoo, see people more often. It is not only about how many people you see, but how often you see them. Do I see 3% of their surfing behaviour or 20%. HUGE difference for targeting systems.
The interesting thing is that the system will automatically try to make you most money. So if you do not book an ad with a fixed amount of Ad Impressions to be served, Google will optimize everything. I currently don’t know, and rather don’t believe, if this will include CPL/CPO ads, in which case the system would be amazing for publishers, also bigger ones, which are missing a solution like that.
This will become one of the biggest if not the biggest ad server in a short time frame. It will be interesting to see what OpenX does with their hosted version once it is out.
Nokia Idea Generation Workshop
The invitation to the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop came in some time ago and I have now full confirmation as well as a list of other attendees for the event. The general idea is to generate ideas for future mobile products with a timeframe of several years out. With the development of a new phone taking something like 3 years, it has to be a few years out of course.
Up till now I am wonderfully cared for and all things are settled for a wonderful two days with some really great people. Sadly I will not be able to blog about the contents but can blog about everything around and who is there. That list alone will tell you that it will be ahrd for the event not to turn out great.
Mika Röykkee is one of their Nokia senior usability people coming from the S60 team and moving to the next generation products. Udo Szabo is senior product manager on the Ovi team. Urpo (Upi) Nokkonen is hardware designer and I seem to have to thank him for the N95 . Joeske Schellen is designer at Nokia focussing on wearable electronics. Damian Dinning seems to be the oversight man in concepting and planning and is largely focussing on the imaging part of it all. Sami Oinonen is in the innovation acceleration team and is responsible for co-creation activities so I seem to have to thank him for the event (and probably charlie for the invitation ). Laura Richards is one of their category and consumer understanding people (buy does Nokia have cool department names ) and Jarkko Kaislasaari is a product manager that worked on the N95. Of course we can’t leave out marketing, so Eri Kuwabara is there too. But actually we all do not need to be there because Timo Veikkola is there, and he is Senior Future Specialist, systematically analyzing the world to spot trends … Our facilitator is Scott Hirsch who seems to have worked on some interesting things.
All in all, this alone gives a great Nokia base to the meeting that will make sure that we have some very productive two days.
But who got invited? Interesting list to say the least. Dave Green is out gaming guy who also runs Snackspot, what a cool blog. Christopher Macintosh Morrison is one of the marketing people, having sold the first digital only marketing agency in London to WPP and now has a new one among others doing marketing for mobile social networks. And Mac, once you get the fire eagle beta login I’d love an invite Vilhelm Sjostrom also comes from the Advertising Agency world and is also pro Photographer. Matt Brown is interaction designer at last.fm, which means lots to learn on that front. Thayer Driver was developer at UpMyStreet, which might lead to interesting discussions to what we are doing, and is focussed on social media, gaming and web 2.0. Dietmar Müllser is part of the ISO digital photography committee, tests cameras and knows digital. Jim Griffin is the guy holding the talks about the future of music and entertainment delivery it seems. Sascha Pohflepp studying design interactions and is part of the people behind We Make Money Not Art. Rafe Blandford runs All About Symbian. Matt Hunter is Partner at IDEO and I found a fun video about where digital cameras are going. He is also a drummer, like I am, and not playing, because of a sun, like I am Sami Köykkä is a digital services consultant, speaker and author from what I could find, and Moritz Waldemeyer seems to be another interactions designer type of guy that actually seems to have an iPhone based on his blog.
I actually just posted a video on Seesmic to ask the question what you think the future phone should look like. Just to possibly get a bit of feedback.
The Future of Social Networks
I just read two competing views that are actually very similar.
First the wonderful Charlene Li from Forrester blogged that social networks will be like air in the future. She actually has a few slides available from a recent talk. In short, she believes that in 8 to 10 years you will look back to Facebook or LinkedIn and wonder what people where doing there because in the end, everything will be social.
The general idea is that the Open Social Graph is really something that we need and that the big players will be working on together because having one social graph is really to the benefit of everyone. It’s really what Noserub, which one of our devs Dirk has initiated, is all about. This means that in the end the social networks that are just there to be a social network, will die. I am already filling all my social networks with my GMail address book (not inviting people just syncing and seeing how is there) and this really means that my GMail address book is my social network.
At the same time Cringely wrote his latest piece called Antisocial. He argues that it is getting too much and boy do I agree. I can’t join the 50th group or add the 75th application or check who bit whom or what who rated. He really believes that there is just not enough value in all of them. The next big thing will come along faster than you think.
It ties in wonderfully with something I think John Battelle said recently, that these sites have to start competing on features and not on data. Because in the end, Cringely is right, and Charlene is too. Most of them that are just social networks will die, because there is no reason to have them if you have a social graph underlying your life. This is really why we have built Ormigo over a social network. We are no social network as such because that is not where the value comes from, but we are a local market place and local market places of the future will have to be built on social networks, because local is inherently social.
Our value does not directly come from the social network but rather it is one of many features. The value comes from giving you the best local merchants to solve your current problem. Social connections, analysis of the life stream of user and merchant, and so on, in the long run, will be important to do this correctly. Interesting times ahead.
Update: And yes, that means that there will be lots of features, systems, sites out there that will just use social components. This is exactly what Facebook is about. Just read this from Zuckerberg:
Beacon isn’t even a part of our ad team. It’s part of our platform team. We think these large social networking sites are going from large monolithic sites like facebook.com … to social services. A lot of them aren’t even things we’re building. Some of them are going to be inside facebook.com. An increasing amount of that is going to be outside facebook.com. What we were trying to do with Beacon was taking the first step with letting people take actions on other parts of the Web and feed back into what their friends are doing. It also ties into the ad system, because it can be an endorsement — someone you care about is doing something, that’s much more effective.
Google’s ultimate ads dashboard
This is what an article on MediaPost (my source) talks about. In the article Google’s President of Advertising and Commerce for North America, Tim Armstrong talks about Google’s future Ads Dashboard at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference. And that’s a cool crowd to talk about what the biggest threat to Agencies will be doing, especially when they really want the agencies on their side … at least until they don’t need them anymore.
What they want to bring out is a kind of dashboard that helps Agencies to plan, buy and manage all their advertising, be it search, display, radio, tv or anything other that comes. The integration helps show agencies how different parts of the mix influence each other. That is actually what GroupM from WPP is working on. Of course Google is saying that they want to help agencies, and GroupM is obviously mostly helping it’s connected agencies. I need to write a bit about GroupM in the future, seems to be an amazing place!
While I do believe that Google has nothing against the agencies because they will not be able to hire enough sales guys to do it alone, they will not be needed in the end. You might need a Creative Agency, but that will be the only ones still making a margin and not being replacable. Now already, the big clients will milk an agency for it’s last cent, knowing exactly what they pay for advertising, and being a hard bargainer. When all the agencies out there use one Dashboard to manage the ads, management, buying, and so on becomes a no brainer. They can only distinguish themselves via being more creative and being more knowledgeable to build a great integrated campaign. Trafficking is an art form (it is what GroupM does) and the thing is that the big publishers will not let a Google rid them of their direct access to the agencies and customers.
But if you will not be able to use Google’s tool to directly bid on big publishers (you might be able to use it to track them due to their Doubleclick ownership, think Doubleclick for Agencies which they already use anyway, now it will be free) where do you book? Google needs somewhere for automatic booking, especially for image ads.
That is really a threat for all the networks forming at the moment. I am talking about an AdJug, AdScale, AdBrite and so on. Either they need to develop an API to hook themselves up to the Google Dashboard, or they will have a real problem. Because Google does need all the same small to mid publishers to fill their booking engine. And with all the Agencies connected, they will be able to pay better. One thing that Google AdSense is missing now is an option to say “only accept ads with CPM over X”, which things like AdScale do. Of course, nobody has yet been able to explain to me how they do it with CPC Ads, but ok, I think it is something Google could do if they do want to reach beyond being the back fill.
Of course continuing down that line of thinking, the next extension then might mean that the big publishers will need to open up for Google’s Dashboard. And then suddenly it is all automated and then you don’t need Agencies anymore. Creative Agencies yes, but that might be it.
Yes, Google does need the agencies, but they will make sure that their tools are so easy that the agencies are easily replaced and ad management is not a margin business … not for anyone but Google that is.
Or it just stays a wining-and-dining business for a long time to come.
