Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Over the last few days and even weeks a few things clogged up my bookmarks folder entitled “To Blog” which I haven’t done up till now. It’s about time that I finally get them out of here, be it as a summary of sorts.

Ingmar pointed me to Zattoo, which is giving you TV on your computer and it seems to be working really well and they already have 46 channels in Germany as well as many in several other countries. I am still waiting for TV/Computer/Streaming/… to be fully integrated. I think Podcasting will fully take off once we have nocat of 3G enabled car radios with clients, and Videocasting will take off once my TV can effortlessly let me subscribe to Diggnation, News, Whatever. Zattoo might help to keep live shows available.

Dropbox is something I am starting to really love as a startup. They are using Amazon’s S3 as a storage solution and have built a nice little tool for windows and os x that will automatically sync everything you put into a special folder with your cloud based storage. Due to the fact that you can install your app on two computers you can sync several gigs of storage between two computers, and the fun thing is that you can share a special folder with another person all together. So if I put something in my “Shared with Henning” folder (could have chosen a wiser name, but this makes it easy to understand ;)) it is moved into the cloud, and when Henning turns on his computer, it will appear in his folder and everything is dandy. I really love the system they build. The opportunities are endless and that I love Amazon’s system is clear. This is a very clever way to use the service and the syncing part with revisions is great!

Friendfeed is something that is making the rounds at the moment and the Twitterati are signing up in big numbers. As I had discussions with Dirk about Noserub for ages, it all felt very familiar. The thing is that it is build by ex-Googlers and there are some things weird about it. I for one do not really feel like adding friends on the system but just people of whom I want to have access to all their feeds. As the feeds are managed by each individual user, I am always up to date on what these “friends” wright about. Then Friendfeed added search and I started adding “Friends” like crazy, choosing people that I respect and like. I have the slight feeling that it might become a form of search engine for me in the future. Using Friendfeed to follow your friends is a totally nutcase idea anyway. There are a gazillion filters missing and Friendfeed is actually not focussed enough to allow it from a mindset of the users I think.

Then there was this story on Techcrunch about MyBlogLog launching a Bluetooth type network. I am still wondering if this is a joke. The thing is that this makes MyBlogLog even more scary as a data gathering system, but mot of all I am wondering if people are nuts again. Bluetooth is not there to create a social network, something some people seem to be thinking at the moment. Aka-Aki in Germany seems to be one of those. The thing is that the amount of people you need in the network is way too high, leaving bluetooth on is a major security hazard waiting to happen, and once you are in my bluetooth range i can probably see you! People, get real! It’s a fun toy, but this is not and should not happen.

Then we had the launch of the Google App Engine. I got an account for our hosted system for Ormigo and we might be playing with it some time. Feld has a few good links about it and Tim O’Reilly is thinking whether Google App Engine is nothing more than a lock-in play. I do love the general idea of the App Engine, in that you do not have to worry about anything other than writing your code. But you do have to write it within the Google App Engine and write it in Python. So it is a kind of lock-in. But then comes Andy Baio writing about Chris Anderson launching AddDrop. AddDrop is a container for apps written with Google’s AppEngine SDK to be run directly on Amazon’s EC2. Now how cool is that!

And this brings us back to one of my favorite topics, Amazon, who announced a persistent storage feature for EC2. Before I blabber along on how cool that is, just read this from RightScale’s Thorsten vok Eiken.

That concludes my little summary for today. Have a great weekend.

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.

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.

I am wondering if I am not slowly but surely getting into problems. I like trying out things and there is a lot of great stuff out there. Aggregators of your personal life are starting to come up but this actually poses a problem.

I recently made a change in how I blog, twitter, tumble, the like. Real thoughts go in here, little notes go into twitter, which is more of a conversation. All the stuff in between now actually ends up on my Tumblr Blog. But the Tumblr Blog actually aggregates del.icio.us tags tagged linkblog, as well as flickr posts with tag moblog and my kyte.tv posts as well as qik live streams. It kind of aggregates my short thoughts.

Above that I also installed Noserub on my own server, for a large part because Dirk works at Ormigo and because I think it is one of the most interesting implementations in the open social graph movement. It aggregates all my accounts into one view. I can’t really have it aggregate my Tumblr blog because that would double aggregate a lot of stuff. It is actually more likely that I will remove some stuff and only have it take the Tumblr blog. That is actually more what goes on in my life that might interest other people than all the other stuff.

This is also one of the reasons I kept twitter out of the aggregation via Tumblr, because it’s kind of a different level that people have to be able to choose distinctly to follow.

What we really need is something that will aggregate all my feeds, and somehow allows my friends to selectively subscribe to that stream of my ideas, somehow only giving them what might interest them, maybe based on what they read. This would actually be a very fun project. There you go, another start-up idea for somebody out there. Even better would be if somebody would write something that extends Noserub to that extend. I am sure Dirk would not mind.

With that off my chest, on to some more work

Open Social Graphs are slowly gaining traction and now Dirk launched Noserub which is an open social network, something that allows for social graph portability. The idea of decentralization of your social graph becomes a little bit clearer based on Dirk’s last post in the Noserub Blog called What decentralization is all about.

There you see that you can look at Dirk’s profile on identoo.com from where you can visit mine on id.thylmann.net because I am listed as one of his friends. From there you can go to another profile that is again on identoo.com. These different nodes are now connected, and if I change something in my profile on id.thylmann.net, dirk notices on identoo.com. When I change my name in my id.thylmann.net account, it gets propagated to my other connections (in a future version ;)).

The entire system means that my social graph is my social graph. I have full portability of my data. I will also be able to move it to other services and I will be able to give access to my information to whom I please. This is really just a start, but it is looking good.