Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

It has happened again, my “To Blog” bookmark folder has reached a size that is too big, so I need to clear some of it out, at least the smaller bits.

twittearth is a wonderful tool to leave running on your desktop and it seems an OS X screensaver is coming. By then I hope to hear about it again, because it would be a cool screensaver to use.

Want to have the photo application that will appear on MobileMe from Apple for yourself? Check out SproutCore, which is what it was based on it seems. I have to admit I still like Flickr, and the second part Funambol, could be the syncing part and push email service. I did try it shortly and I am not sold, as I am not fully sold on MobileMe. I like GMail because it is different and with IMAP I am close to push email. Contacts are synced with the Mac and then Phone and always with me, and calendar items are synced with Google Calender, … I am not sure what else I need.

Tried out Fluid already? Really nice. Create a browser for Gmail and one for Twitter, … and so on. When one crashes the rest stay up. you can also create a menu extra out of the browser. So if you create one for m.twitter.com and make it a menu extra you have your own little twitter app. Very cool.

There is a very good discussion on the future of social media right here. I do fully believe in the openness part, and it is actually the only way all the social part will really work, or at least the business models, but that means that execution counts and that is something that the big guys are really scared about. They also want a bit part of the pie and not a small part of a bigger pie, which is stupid and not how the internet works. But who am I to tell them.

Is Etsy the next eBay? Really old, and no, I don’t think so, but it is interesting to think about and there are some valid points. Congrats of course to DaWanda in germany for having picked the space and gone through hard times to get there.

The really important part in the above article though is this:

We may be witnessing the historical high water mark of giant companies in developed economies. In 1955, Fortune 500 companies generated 1/3 of GDP in America. In 2000 that had risen to 2/3. If you prefer %, from 33% to 66%. Hidden in those numbers are the countless family farms that could not withstand the onslaught of Agribusiness and the Mom & Pop shops that closed when Wall Mart came to town.

Imagine a world where the Fortune 500 share of GDP went back to 1/3 and small businesses got back the 1/3 they lost in the last 50 years.

THIS is something I truely believe in. The devide will get bigger. The Fortune 500 will get bigger and there will be a lot more smaller ones and the middle will thin out. There is still something called economies of scale but they changed a bit. This article on Re-Localization is another one that rocks. This is exactly the space we are attacking with Ormigo in that stuff if becoming more local, services are becoming more important, the the local/service/self-employed/SMBs need a system to really use online efficiently. We are learning a great deal through our customers and users each and every day, which makes this market very rewarding, as complex as it is.

Google has some new APIs for Translation. Just check out this bit for a bookmarklet. Check out the new Google Translate. Also Kayak is starting with some interesting APIs to their services.

To finish this off, check out “No Internet. Anywhere.” from Southpark.

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.

There we go. Qype is now looking for sales people to tout their Premium Listings. All of this is bound to happen via the phone at the moment because sending people around germany, france and the uk to sell those listings is a serious undertaking that even their venture funding will probably not allow. But it will be interesting to watch how Qype fares with selling those premium listings, going against things like Gelbe Seiten (Yellow Pages) and others, that already have huge sales forces. Especially with Klicktel just pushing into the same market and starting a real sales forces, this will be difficult. They probably do have some other methods up their sleeves and going to a shop saying that there are already some good ratings, is of course something that makes for an easier sell.

What this really shows is that the local market is not really won over yet by anybody. We are going really strong at Ormigo in some niches and have some extremely promising signups of other service providers that would like to get new customers (like moving a bee colony ;)). Of course we only sell people with an interest to buy, not a listing, and that turns the problem around in the sense that people buy performance. This performance is not always measurable but it is really what such a listing should bring, how ever it is measured. Possibly coupons are another idea.

Lots of people around you are doing wonderful things, and often if you need something, a person right in your neighborhood is doing exactly that thing. Right next to me there is somebody doing some really nice furniture in wood. His site about Massivholzmöbel (hard woods) is Don Hütte, and I was positively surprised. Now I need to get Frank to blog about his work, about furniture coming into existence.

Things like this drive me to really conquer the local market with something that finally works in a scalable manner. It’s really about thinking local but acting global. It’s about using what the internet is about at its core. Allowing for communication, aggregation, networks, markets, platforms, … . I seriously need to find out what else is there around me, and around my friends.

Jeremy just posted that the Yahoo! Maps API is now available for commercial use, which rocks. But sadly, they don’t have any good data for Germany yet. Did they have that, it would be a lot more usably for somebody needing something like this for Germany. I really like their Ajax API but the best API is worth nothing without data.

Google Maps at the same time announced better data and the introduction of the geocoding that people asked about. It’s street level, not house level but still. Very nice to know. But they also offer Google Maps for Enterprise for commercial use. Kick ass. Checking out Geocoding now.

Technorati Tags: API, Geocoding, Google, Google Maps, Mapping, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Maps