Category Archives: Web 2.0

A small collection of big data articles

Business, Software Development, Web 2.0 May 28, 2013 Leave a comment

The clearing of the Instapaper continues this time about big data.

Let’s start with the old ones with sequoia and accel pumping $70 million into a Big Data Startup. The Market for Big Data heated up. Here is an interview by Accel’s Ping Li on why Big Data will reshape the enterprise. And I have to say, most in enterprise still do not get it. Qubit is doing it for ecommerce.

Check out this very good overview on how Disney built their Big Data Platform on a Budget. We are actually in the shovel phase, in that the tools are just coming about. Check out a good post about the general market of BI and Big Data here.

We are so hyped that people are talking about killing the term. I really liked a recent definition though that Big Data starts when you stop caring about how much data it is. :)

Blippy just Rocks!

Business, Web 2.0 December 30, 2009 1 Comment

Boy do I love Blippy! Seldom has there been a service where I am so pissed that internationalization is hard. The thing is the only account I have that works with the service is my Amazon.com Kindle account. Even iTunes doesn’t work as it is the German one. If you are unfamiliar with Blippy read this intro on Techcrunch as well as the follow up where Blippy announces tracking $1 million in transactions only one day after opening their doors. People are already talking about Blippy being the next Twitter, which is really mostly to mean that the Twitter idea is starting to be so big that it can be split up into more tiny niches, with Blippy being one.

Many people will wonder why Blippy is so good or why anyone would share all this information about themselves and I suggest, just read the stream by Leo Laporte or Matt Cutts or Jason Calacanis (who recently purchased a Canon 7d by the way) or Philip Kaplan one of the founders.

For all their credit card stuff they are using Yodlee as do most of the other things out there that interact with US bank accounts. Sadly I do not know of any such service in Germany at this time. Might be somebody that should do this but I am unsure about the German privacy laws.

To finish it off here is a video interview with Pud (Philip Kaplan). He also founded Fucked Company and Adbrite by the way. With Adbrite being so well copied all over Germany I see now reason why this will not happen soon here in Germany for Blippy, expect we don’t have Yodlee.

Actually I hope somebody will start a Yodlee in Germany and give the account access to Blippy so we keep it integrated!

Update: and just now they twittered about international support for iTunes. Germany was missing but added minutes after me telling them. Congratulations! So blippy went international in 2009! cool :)

Foursquare will fail

Web 2.0 November 29, 2009 Comments: 3

At least in terms of becoming the next Twitter. Sorry to say that. I know people are starting to rave about Twitter but the first really good post came from Jason Kincaid on Techcrunch: Watch out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo.

So let me try to explain why I think it will fail, at least in terms of the hype around it at the moment, and there are many points.

A) People will not publish where they are at any time. There is just too much of a security worry. This will remain true and is actually a very wise thing to think about.

B) We already had something very similar with Plazes, it was just missing the game, and as Jason said, the fun of Games dies down.

It’s actually very important to take a look at Plazes and their history because they too had many of the then in-the-know Angels onboard, and the entire tech/web2.0 gang was on Plazes. It was a fun system to use and you saw who was where and how close and things like that. But it never grew mainstream and it will be interesting to see if Foursquare manages to do that.

C) I am actually using Foursquare a bit now and I have to say I am still missing the point. I started using it in a travel week and hence am now a newbie in Cologne where I live, in Hamburg and in London. Why the hell did I need to switch cities? I was in a different city but this kind of feels insulting. I AM NO LONGER A NEWBIE ;) Above that I actually didn’t know what to do with it. I checked in and then what? In the last few hours somebody I know was somewhere in London. Hmm… so what?

Why is there no “Who is Near?” or “Near places of your friends?” or similar things. Sure it is still very rough and their slow growth on a city per city basis might have been a good idea. But still, I am not sure why I would rave about it and I normally rave way too fast.

D) Location is not a central thing in our lives! We do need an OS for our Computers (Microsoft) or Search for Stuff (Google) or Connect with Friends and Family (Facebook) or Feel connected with OUR community (Twitter, the new worlds IRC Channel ;) ). I am not really sure where Foursquare fits into this. If I want to meet friends I will talk to them. Weird stuff, called Phone. ;)

Don’t understand me wrong, I do believe Foursquare is fun and nice and things but it is not going to be the next Twitter.

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These little fees add up

Web 2.0 November 29, 2009 Leave a comment

We are all getting used to the idea of freemium but I am wondering if this will not implode because things are starting to add up. I really noticed when recently thinking (again) about how to restructure my services.

What is it for me:

  1. $25 per year – Remember the Milk: I am definitely keeping this one as it is really cheap and a great deal especially with iPhone Integration through ToDo.
  2. $59 per year – Vimeo: the service just rocks, period. I love how the videos end up and through the pro service I can really limit where videos are allowed to appear and keep my family videos sharable and save.
  3. $12.60 a month – Squarespace: I just wanted to ditch servers and this is probably the first one that might have to go once I find a better solution but I didn’t yet. Squarespace is really nice and if they finally get their social integration done I am starting to be really happy. It is the most expensive point though and I could just go with WordPress.com and the biggest problem would be that my tags are shared with all wordpress people. Ah well.
  4. Stopped – Flickr: I just stopped my premium Flickr subscription as I am sharing most pictures with Family on Squarespace and that is good enough. I might actually still need that somehow.
  5. $99 per year – Dropbox: I am actually not paying yet as I have a 10GB account due to an early beta membership (u 900 ;) ) but this will surely stick.
  6. €5.95 per month – Xing: For my networking in Germany still a wonderful thing.
  7. $49.95 per year – Plaxo Premium: I want my addressbook safe and I would actually love Xing to do this but they don’t. Still really not happy in this field.
  8. all the forgotten stuff: There are probably things I have forgotten as they end up coming on the bill once a year.

In the end, there will be more services like this and this is really starting to annoy me. It’s all cheap enough to not think enough but it is adding up. All the “small fees” currently end up to be over 200 USD, more if I ever get the Dropbox Account.

So what subscriptions do you have? :)

Update: I am wondering if I should not just move to WordPress.com, upload videos there, and so on. Anyone using WordPress for Videos?

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Nokia Building up a Local Social Powerhouse

Business, Web 2.0, Wireless September 11, 2009 1 Comment

This is getting really scary. First caught Nokia’s latest acquisition via Martin’s post: Nokia buys Plum. Actually that headline is not really true though as once again Nokia is buying certain assets from Plum, as visible in Nokia’s press release on the Plum acquisition. To quote:

Nokia and Plum today announced that Nokia has acquired certain assets of Plum Ventures, Inc, a privately held company which employed approximately 10 people with main offices in Boston, Massachusetts. Plum will complement Nokia’s Social Location services.

So Nokia only buys certain assets and the company employed (past tense) 10 people. As Martin notes already at least the Founder will move to Berlin. Plum themselves note that their entire team will be part of Nokia’s Social Location Unit.

The part that links several things together is that people are moving to Berlin. In 2006 they bought gate5, who sit in Berlin, and then in 2007 bought Navteq for $8.1 billion to further complete their mapping solution. Then came the acquisition of substantially all assets of Plazes in 2008, followed by bit-side beginning 2009 and completed recently with the acquisition of certain assets of cellity. All those were either in Berlin or are moving to Berlin.

So what do we have. A company that has decided that location and social is a big part of their future. This is deeply routed in the fact that Nokia has always believed and learned that a mobile phone is something very personal. That in itself makes it social and makes location important. If you then need to move fast, have 50 billion USD in revenues and 5 billion USDs in profit in 2008, and a down economy, the moves are plain brilliant.

Plazes never really took off but had a huge geek following with most every self respecting geek world wide having an account. You see the follow up of Plazes now in Foursquare, which just raised $1.35 million from Union Square Ventures, the venture company that is slowly moving up the ranks to become one of the most respected VCs in the social revolution out there. This just proves that Stefan and Felix from Plazes knew what they were doing and Nokia has them on board now, next to some developers that were doing some very good early RoRs work if I remember correctly, as this was the Basis of the new Plazes. Bit-side I don’t know, but it seems to have been a 39 people development shop. For cellity they again had this interesting “parts of the assets” type of thing they also had with Plum. For me that sounds like a Team, buy which is really what Nokia needs. And cellity was again an all star founders team with deep knowledge in the social space.

They need the people and the learnings they did in location aware applications (Plazes), Social Messaging and Networking over existing Networks (cellity) and now connecting intimate relationships (Plum). They need to not repeat the non-obvious but painful errors that these people did getting to where they are now and allow them to get a fresh start with a real budget. Remember Nokia sold 103 million mobile phones in the second quarter of 2009. That’s almost 13 mobile devices every second if I calculated that correctly. The firepower Nokia is putting together in Berlin is very credible and I just hope that they have good management, mentors, facilitators and others to bound them together as a team quickly.

As Tom Peters said, you need to destroy and start over sometimes. So now a group of people is starting over in something location aware, that connects you with your friends, via a device that is the most personal thing you carry around with yourself. They are attacking Facebook from the other side. Users using Facebook via their mobile phone are more engaged, and this is where Nokia is starting at.

One tip: The best explanation I have up till now on the success of the iPhone is that it’s the first phone that I will pull out when waiting in a short line somewhere. I wouldn’t have done that previously. So that should be the focus. No feature has any importance if it is not used.

I am really looking forward to see this unfold, with first products and/or new acquisitions. It’s a good time of acquisitions if you have the money and it’s good to see Nokia building up its software development chops.

Update 20090923: And now Dopplr.

The Evolution of my Rememberall

Web 2.0 August 15, 2009 Comments: 3

I am a technology addict, and I love trying new things. One thing that has always been important to me is how they all work together to form a greater whole. Above that, some weeks ago, together with my Squarespace move, I decided to not have personal servers anymore. Not sure how long this will hold, but I will try. Servers at home are excluded, and … a never mind, you get the point. E.g. I love Noserub, but I will run it hosted by somebody else.

But back to the main point. My Rememberall. There is so much stuff going on around you that you really need an infrastructure to keep yourself sane enough. It is probably easiest to understand how I use things by going through the day.

A) E-Mail: To start of I check my mail, yeah, I still do, and make sure only stuff I have to answer remains. Things I can answer now, are answered, things that I want to answer later remain, and things that are ToDo’s are forwarded to my private E-Mail address at Remember The Milk so they end up becoming (unsorted) ToDo’s. All else is archived directly through a Keyboard shortcut (thanks Mail Act-On). I say archived because all mails are in GMail and never deleted.

B) RSS: Yes, RSS is not dead for me yet. I use Google Reader and am very happy with it. I always read the “All Items” list, navigating through keyboard shortcuts. Especially on the iPhone, where I use Byline which syncs with Reader, I mark things as Favorite that I want to closer read later. If I already know that I like it but want to share it with the world, I “share” it potentially with note, which is automatically ending up in my Tumblr Blog at stuff.thylmann.net.

C) Twitter: Some here, I use favorites to mark things I want to read later. I am switching clients on the Desktop but on the iPhone I end up using Tweetie, even though I tried several others.

D) Read it Later: This wonderful service actually is used to add anything that I want to read later while in the browser. It includes an iPhone app that syncs via Nocat and hence I have lots of stuff to read later on my iPhone to read whenever I have the time. It also brings me to my next point. There also are two Bookmark lists for reading very shortly and reading some time, but let’s see where they end up at in a few weeks.

E) Remembering: I leave that with Evernote really. Whatever I have read and liked, whatever I think I would like to save, whatever I want to remember, it ends up in Evernote. Either through a forward in Read it Later, via a Bookmarklet or right from the Mac. And it ends up in Spotlight on the Mac too.

F) Friendfeed: I am actually not sure what to od with this now. I was actually setting it up as my personal search engine. I ended up adding people I think are emm… intelligent and as they add all their personal feeds to their accounts, I presume in the long term it will/would have allow(ed) me to get very good search results. Sadly now they have been bought by Facebook so I will have to revisit Noserub again but that is against my idea of not having a server. Maybe just locally. ;)

G) What is missing: I still need one thing that aggregates it all really. I’d like all that is being shared with notes to end up somewhere, full content, all items in evernote, all my twitter messages, all my blog posts, all my photos, whatever. It is still a little bit too distributed. But as distributed is the way of the future I am looking forward to using this setup now and re-integrating that. I am hoping for a few things for the new Social Timeline being developed by Squarespace.

So what are you using as your rememberall.

The Hubbub about PubSubHubbub

Web 2.0, Web Development August 12, 2009 Comments: 3

Ok, you have to love the name. Pubsubhubbub is simply the best name for a technology for ages, period. And it is currently pitted as the better step towards a Google Wave like future than Google Wave itself.

So what is PubSubHubbub:

A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS).

In longer terms, it is part of a system that removes the need for Google Reader to query my RSS feed every few hours to see if there is something new, instead allowing for Google Reader to be notified when something changes. The argument is that it gives us the live web and it decreases resource need. For a better into check out This Week in Google Episode 2.

I really like it and so does Anil Dash as visible in his post The Web Way vs. The Wave Way.

There is just one thing that makes me wonder. I remember a long time ago when MovableType was it, with everyone arguing that it was better to have the blogging platform publish static HTML files when you published a blog post as you are publishing so few of them in relation to the traffic that the resources are better spent there. But servers got more powerful and WordPress changed this around to say that you want easy and fast publishing, the possibility to change your design around, the switch things, which makes it better to have the publishing be dynamic. This is what I see again here. We had centralized systems and only a few of them but slowly we are getting more and we want to move around. This changes how the content should be put together. We have friends all over the place and hence on request we do not want them to come from one source but from several, which is starting to become possible due to server power and general infrastructure items like Pubsubhubbub. It’s push due to the underlying changes in how we interact with each other and what we say is important.

We somehow want near-real-time communications. The problem I see though with Pubsubhubbub is how the technology scales if you have for example 1 million friends on twitter. With a centralized system this is relatively easy. If each of your posts needs to be published to 300.000 hubs, this starts to become a pain. But with a polling mechanism it would not be live. How much resources are we will to spend for live, and who will pay the bill?

Please not all become one and the same

Business, Web 2.0 March 16, 2009 1 Comment

Ok, this is starting to get on my nerves. Venturebeat is reporting that you can now choose to have parts of your items within Facebook public, aka visible for everybody. Facebook themselves go into a bit more detail:

Just go to your privacy page and change the settings you want to the new “Everyone” option. You can opt to make one or all of the following profile elements more open: Profile, Status Updates, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Personal Info, Education Info, Work Info, Photos of You and Videos of You.

Yehaa! Another public profile. Another bit of status updates. Another place to copy more of the same. Can all you people really start deciding what it is going to be? Xing is for my professional life really, and I am very happy that they are sticking with that focus. Facebook was for my general social graph / friend connections that is beyond just business. I really like it to be more private because it can be, as it has my friend connections. I am putting a lot of stuff into Facebook, which I am also putting into thylmann.net by the way, so it is very similar to FriendFeed there for me (Oooops, another one there. ;) ). I am slowly not able to keep track anymore people!!! It would be no problem if they were all copy cats to start out with but they were freaking different!!! Grrrrr….!
At least they should all give me the option to keep everything out of the SE indizes even if it is public. And this again pushes the importance of something that is portable and really mine, e.g. my own Noserub install at thylmann.net. Because you know what? My ID, My Everything, My Life is freaking MINE. And that means that I need to be in full control and need to be able to decide what people are pointed to and move it, with all the content.
So I want a few things:

  1. Give me the option to lock out Search Engines
  2. Give me a full data export of my data in XML
  3. Somebody build the perfect life aggregator… I think Noserub is a good start

Because you know what? These things are slowly not anymore about connecting me with my friend but to keep a log of my life, and that is something completely different and something that needs to be extremely more portable.

Facebook’s new Terms of Service

Web 2.0 February 17, 2009 Comments: 2

There is a lot of rage about the new TOS from Facebook. In short, it gives all the rights (and I mean all of them) of what you share in Facebook (and what is connected to it it seems) to Facebook. With the new terms, this is even true if you delete things or your account. Mark now posted on the Facebook blog with a few words about the TOS but I am not really happy. He says that “In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.” and that is just plain wonderful. But please, reflect that in the TOS and get your lawyers in line.

I can see how the TOS came about. The lawyers asked several people what they want to do with the content and started writing. Then they asked whether they might ever use it for advertising, and people said that sure, there might be something they could do there. Would they use it after the account was deleted, sure, for mining the data would be nice and my friends still have my mails via Facebook. And in all those things go.

Duncan from The Inquisitor actually has a great post about all of this. The good thing is that he copied over the TOS from Google’s Picasa and who would have thought, the Google Lawyers managed to write something up that makes sure I remain holder of the copyright and I remain in control. And I am pretty sure that Google would be able to do anything with my content if they really wanted to, unless I delete it.

Come on Mark, you can do better than Google. Sure it makes the TOS more complicated and sure, you need to add some limits to your system, but this is what the users want.

Is Facebook the next Twitter? No, but a Platform!

Web 2.0 February 9, 2009 1 Comment

The bloggerati are slowly becoming the twitterati and if you ask the right people love for Twitter is all around you. For those of us who use Twitter daily, or like me have secured themselves a one letter Twitter nick (o), we are seeing that it becomes a lot more of our social network than a emm… social network.

I actually still believe things like Xing or LinkedIn should focus on syncing my addressbook, instead of life streams and all else. And the power of Twitter is that there are no conversations of a meaningful extent. And now the blogosphere is alight with recent news.

First of all Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation, allowing your Facebook Login to be used on other sites, which RWW thinks is wonderful news. I tend to agree and think it is a good first step in the right direction. It is still problematic that my content is locked in in Facebook. I use my mails on my own personal domain for the same reason. Still, Facebook is good and good is getting better.

The Facebook posted news of a new API to allow access to among others status items … the twitter like stuff within Facebook. So Loic thinks they now compete directly with Twitter and AllFacebook already says goodbye to Twitter. TheNextWeb thinks it is huge, and RWW has a nice little summary and more numbers and has one very good point.

Facebook is tearing down the wall. It is not trying to become the next Twitter, but it is just giving people what they feel their need to more intimately connect and are now slowly opening up the right APIs. This API is by now very rich, allowing applications to be written the upload status messages, videos, fotos, access status messages of friends, and so on. Slowly but surely Facebook is really moving where you can build a website with Facebook as a platform. If I would now want to do a focused little community I could move my video and photo storage to Facebook, do the messaging and all else.

A few good points on why this will not kill twitter can be found here on Techcrunch. In all simpleness, Twitter has a different focus. It’s really a system to send short messages and not a social network. Facebook is the other way around. Above that, Twitter is messages only and Facebook will tell me everything about my friends.

As sad as this makes me, it might be that this move allows Facebook to take the Twitter idea mainstream a lot faster than Twitter can. Twitter now has lots of apps around it and Facebook has those apps within Facebook. The problem is who wins and this is where I hope that things will slowly start to change.

There shouldn’t be the need for anyone to win damn it! I want to send all kinds of messages to all my friends. No matter where they are registered. We are still a bit of time away from this but Facebook opening up more and more and Twitter being fully stable and growing fast, the idea of openness is slowly gaining traction.

Next up I will touch on my personal social store thingie again, in which I am now using Noserub to store and index all my social life at thylmann.net.

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