Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

That’s the question that many people are asking at the moment. I thought I’d pitch in a few ideas. First I need to put a bit about Google’s Universal Search into context. It is probably best explained by Cringely’s article Risk is for Losers, but I’ll try to summarize. After you read the article, the YouTube acquisition is starting to make sense. It is really (possibly, mostly) about search. With Universal Search, Google now links among others to YouTube videos and you know what, Yahoo! or MSN wouldn’t do that, because they would not really like to send stuff over to a competing service. Of course Google is saying that they are not playing with the search engine results to favor their own services, but having one that will return most of the videos is surely not a bad thing. That’s what they paid over $1 billion USD for YouTube. To further emphasize that they are in it for the long run, you can see JenSense’s post about disabling arbitrage publisher accounts on AdSense. These are the sites that have nothing more than AdSense links on them, with which you can make a good amount of money by buying keywords cheap and getting good clickthroughs on the visits you buy, resulting in more revenue, but there are more clever methods too. In the end, that’s probably a lot of revenue for Google, in the millions if not tens of millions of USD per year, and they are canceling in the name of quality. Very good move.

But let’s return to and there are some similarities. To learn more about what happened there check out this story on CNNMoney including an interview with Founder/CEO Zuckerberg. Again in short, you can now build applications on top of the Facebook platform (they are calling it platform now ;)), integrating your applications into Facebook itself. Xing has tried their hand at an API but it does not seem to fare too well. The difference with Facebook is that they are really a platform, or are becoming one. The applications you write become integrated into the platform and now it’s just about finding out what will work best with the users. Check out this interview with Ali Partovi from iLike who are signing up 200k new members a day via their Facebook application!

This is some real value for other sites and the cool thing is that Facebook, very similar to how Google works, is very open to what runs on their site. They might build a photo app but somebody else can too and whoever wins wins. It’s actually bit more like Microsoft in the sense that they are making available the operating system and programming language. The rest is up to you.

What is really interesting is the larger view, and here I can only suggest Paul Conley’s post about the next big thing. Salesforce is really already very similar in the sense that you have a widgetized architecture (just enabled my developer account again ;)) and while it’s for work, there could possibly a lot more things that people might want to integrate there, and possibly vice versa with Facebook. This widget infrastructure will be interesting in the future and we are all not sure where it leads.

One thing to remember though is that signing up 200.000 new members per day, doesn’t really pay the bills yet. So monetization of widgets will be interesting. I do not mean a money widget, that makes money as the idea of the widget, but monetizing a widget that is not there to make money.

Really interesting times these are.

There we go. I met the founders at this years DLD and was at once thrilled by the idea. I somehow think it will work, without even fully knowing their business model. Firt business model will be getting loads of traffic via blogs like mine.

What is mymuesli? It’s a site where you can mix your own cereal. That’s it. Go with corn only, add a bit of banana and apple or something more exotic, your choice. And if you order now, every sixth package is free! So go and order and tell me what you did

Rock on guys! Great startup and a nice site!

Update: First order is out. You can find my mix right here.

This post from This is going to be BIG! right here and there are many very valid points. Let me put some down here.

The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and lightweight…  Too many people building  features, not applications, or, gasp, companies.  People are confusing design with innovation.  Just because you add AJAX and rounded boxes to something does mean you have innovated.

We are seeing a lot of this out there at the moment, just thing of all the copy cats. The thing is that you can now build stuff very fast and it might even be taken up very fast. But is it a company? We are putting a lot of effort into building a company here at Ormigo. Among others, this means we hired the right group of people that have experience in leading teams and are happy enough to do the base work now. There are some very cool companies out there, but also a lot of featuritis.

Web 2.0 is a conversational vacuum. I’ll prove it.  Unless you live in the Valley, walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user… You’ve got six hours.  Go.  Trust me, we’re talking to ourselves.  (Don’t get me wrong…  I really like Twitter…  We just need to remind ourselves about how close to the edge we all are out here.)

Yes! Thank you! We are our own echo chamber. It was the blogging world now it’s the startup world.

A lot of powerful people don’t participate.  How many VC’s out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile?  Any Sony bloggers out there?  What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside.  How about my elected representatives?  They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there?  (And not watered down campaign blogs… actual blogs written by the actual people.)  We could do great things if we weren’t so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who’ve never even heard of Kool Aid. 

It is getting there I have to say here. We have real people blogging, more and more, but it’s not an easy concept to grasp. It will make the world a better place in the long run, forcing companies to be open. But I have been saying this for a long time. The good thing about this Internet thing getting into the mainstream is that you can not as easily fake it anymore. And it will get harder.

That is really the best and shortest explanation about one part of what makes Web 2.0 special. chmod 777. Very short, very simple. Found here.

For the non-technical here. Chmod is a command in Unix to handle permissions on a file for unix. The first number is for the owner of the file, the second for the group that user belongs to and the third for everybody. 777 means everyone can read, create, write, anything. Free for all.

Great video that Bob Stumpel posted on his Web 2.0 blog. You can view it here. It’s a panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki with lots of different entrepreneurs talking about how they started, what their business models were and are now, what the good and bad sides of founding a business are and why you just have to work yourself through the ups and downs.

Great stuff to listen too and a good mix of sites that partly didn’t or still don’t have a real business model.