Picture by Robert Gaal

Yes, I gave a talk with that title at Barcamp Amsterdam III. It sounds somewhet pretentious, but I do think that things are going to change massively in the next 2-5 years.

The whole thing is up at the Tipit.to blog and I will probably give this talk at Barcamp Gent on March 29th.

An excerpt:

Free does not change everything, it has been around for a long time. Free combined with voluntary payment in the current conditions makes a lot of interesting things possible of which we are seeing only the beginning.

Read the whole thing

Last weekend we had a small barcamp in Amsterdam on the subject of Federating Social Networks, XMPP and other random musings:

I got the chance to play around with Twisted/XMPP for a bit with wokkel and it is really cool and something which could be really useful. Programming Twisted is somewhat too counterintuitive to pick up in a couple of hours.

I’m going to set aside some time to read the docs (again) and then continue on the small project of bridging an XMPP endpoint to a comet web frontend. More on XMPP later.

As it will take a moment for Melinda, Reinier, Martijn, and Sjors to get to writing recaps of their talks, it might be interesting to notify you of some of the other people that have already written interesting stuff about BarcampLondon3.

• LondonBubble - The whole LondonBubble idea was based on the BerlinBlase idea that a few guys had during BarcampBerlin. They then acted as a group to do a live coverage of the Berlin event, and so now the same Germans including a few London locals decided to do the same here. I didn’t get to adding much to the blog or twitter feed, but I did cause for some inspirations.
• Tom Morris’ Videos - I think Tom was actually planning to do live streaming, but he never came to do it. He did put some stuff online eventually which can be found on his Blip.TV profile.
• Adam Cohen-Rose’s Blog - Adam wrote a lot about BarCampLondon3 and I think he did it while attending the talks. As a result it is not that much like an actual blog and more like quick note taking sessions of every talk. Still, handy as a reference.
• Kerry Buckley - Kerry did something similar as Adam, but a bit less note-like and therefore more readable.
• Slideshow of the most interesting photos on Flickr.
• Video of Andy Budd on a Segway - Funny to watch. I actually got to drive the thing too and damn it was easy. Very impressed by the device.

I didn’t take that many photos this weekend at BarcampLondon3. Somehow photographing the same geeks over and over again becomes annoying (and they get annoyed with you). I did have fun though by actually listening to people. Hope you enjoy the photos and maybe find yourself in some.

Last weekend it was time for the third Barcamp here in London, a.k.a. BarcampLondon3. The location was the beautiful Google Office in London and the organization was brilliant (thank you Ian!). Besides all the nice food, the games of Werewolf, and riding the Google Segway, we also had some moments to present our talks. I actually knew what to present before I went, which made it easier to follow some of the other talks going on without the need to build on my own presentation.

At BarcampBerlin2 I had spoken about Yahoo Pipes and noticed that not too many people knew about Yahoo Pipes at all. Many people that had missed my talk there happened to be attending the Barcamp in London and so I decided to hold the same talk, but presenting it is as more of a walk-through/hints-and-tips session. It turned out to become quite an interesting session, with people ranging from newbies on the topic to people like Ian Forrester that I had a discussion with on the practical uses of Pipes and what was needed to make it realy handy as a tool for commercial developers.

Click To Play

I don’t have slides except for these here which I used at Barcamp Berlin, but lucky for you Tom Morris has recorded my talk on video. The quality is not brilliant and sadly you can’t see what is on the screen, but if you use my previous post on Yahoo Pipes and the slideshow as a reference I think it can be interesting to watch.

This article was originally posted on 23 November 2007 on Cristiano’s own blog. This article is technical but not necessarily complete on the details, keep that in mind. Further more, this article served as the basis for Cristiano’s BarcampLondon3 talk.

So, as you might have noticed I build my own little copy of a Lifestream, much like Jeremy Keith (Adactio) did on his website. Although it is fun to build a lifestream, it isn’t the simplest thing to do, so I took a different approach to use mine and build one using Yahoo Pipes.

The cool thing of using Yahoo Pipes is that my Lifestream is all Javascript+HTML and no server side logic (a.k.a. PHP). I gave a little talk during BarcampBerlin2 explaining what I did, but in the next few paragraphs I will hopefully explain with a bit more detail how it was exactly done, and also focus on some quirks of Yahoo Pipes that I had to work around.

[Next up: Combine Your Blog Posts]

Here’s a general run through of our experiences in the first couple of days in Berlin.

Prelude

The barcamp during the weekend before was most excellent. Brave step for our German friends to do pretty much all of the presentations in English. This is certainly not normal during Barcamps on continental Europe and presenting in a non-native language is certainly a challenge.

We played some werewolf, but seeing as we got kicked out of the venue at 23:00 (no camping!) that was stopped somewhat early. We managed to get some more time in on the second day in between some nightly exploits exploring Prenzlauer Berg.

Opening (Day #0)

I chilled out a bit and caught the Jeff Wall photography exhibit in the Guggenheim. The museum is celebrating their 10 year anniversary and I believe admission is free. Highly recommended. Then Reinier picked me up and we drove by car to the venue but we couldn’t find it for the life of us.

The venue is quite remote and it’s a concrete conference monstrosity. Getting there by car is challenging, if you take into account the completely unusable signage on German roads. People of Germany, there’s an experience which could stand to be improved.

So we had missed the opening keynote by Tim O’Reilly but we registered and caught the ignite talks among others Katie talking about their SMS backup and sharing application Treasure My Text.

We ended the day having dinner with Nicole, Jody and some others.

Day 1

On the first day of the conference we arrived a bit early for the keynote talks. I was glad we had already picked up our badges because the registration that morning seems to have been immensely crowded.

We paid visits to both the Sun and the Amazon stands on the expo floor to ask them if they could help us with Tipit.to stuff. A bit surprised that Google wasn’t represented.

The keynotes were mostly interesting. It was nice to see Kathy Sierra speak for the first time. I had been a long time reader of her blog, so most of the material was familiar but she delivered a great presentation.

There was also a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and some high up from Microsoft and Tim’s hard hitting honesty seemed to be a bit much for him but he took it in good stride. Tim exemplified a lot of the issues that we as an audience care about and which Microsoft completely ignores. It was good fun.

The rest of the talks were soso but Werner Vogels talking about Amazon’s scalable infrastructures was interesting enough. His accent gave away the fact that he is a Dutch guy. The people at the Amazon stand could only give us some vague general answers, so it would be nice to talk to Mr. Vogels.

After that we went to some sessions. The Google Open Social talk had to stand up against very high expectations and was messed up pretty badly. I think we now pretty much understand the architecture and its limitations, but some other social networks took the opportunity to turn it into a marketing frenzy for their boring application.

Having been beaten numb by stupid marketing types, I thought Matt Biddulph’s “Coding on the Shoulders of Giants” talk about Dopplr’s extensibility would be a nice breath of fresh air. I was already familiar with the material because James Governor had blogged Matt’s slides before and I have been working from those slides to make Yello Yello a more Web 2.0 savvy company.
It was nice to see Matt present it in person and it was nice to be able to ask some questions after the talk.

We wanted to rest a bit especially after the very intensive rounds of un-cricket at the Expo floor. So we returned home and ate one of the best hamburgers ever at Marienburger in the Marienburgerstraße. After chilling out a bit more at the house, we made our way to the Münzsalon for the Plazes+Netvibes party which was every bit as awesome as was expected.

Picture by katielips

Now on to the second half of the conference.

As anyone was supposed to, I gave a quick presentation during Barcamp Berlin. I decided to give a quick how-to about using Yahoo Pipes to make a lifestream like this. In the end I think it would have been more interesting to just have talked about Yahoo Pipes in general as the most people didn’t get what and how Yahoo Pipes works. An hour was way to long for my standard talk anyway so the ability to show people how Pipes works was a real joy. Below are the slides I used, and I will put on a post explaining my presentation in a bit more words soon.  

| View | Upload your own

All of the starters are now present at the Barcamp Berlin and it has already proven to be fruitful. Our first FourStarters tool has been developed just today. It actually is a freebee productivity tool for your desktop, and it is Mac and PC friendly.

Download the free tool here

Everybody has been completely swept away by the news of Google’s OpenSocial network launching really soon now. This is the stuff we have been eagerly awaiting.

Anyway the API is supposed to launch tonight, so we’ve got a drive to Berlin to digest the stuff and we —we have four pretty good developers in the same car— will try to make one really bomb application or presentation or both during Barcamp Berlin.

I have also contacted Yme Bosma, the guy responsible for the implementation of these APIs by the Netherlands’ leading social network: Hyves for access to their implementation.

We can make some nice stuff with this and I can’t wait.

Last weekend most of the FourStarters went to BarcampBrighton. Not only was it weird to see so many Dutch people there (at least 7 on 100 campers, including Reinier, Alper, Melinda, Sjors and me) but it was also amazing how smooth the open Wi-Fi was during the weekend. The last few conferences/camps I went to were a disaster when it came to Wi-Fi. Either it was tedious to get into with day passes that expired during the night, or it broke down within minutes due to overloading. The strange thing about the perfect Wi-Fi at BarcampBrighton was that there was actually no Wi-Fi planned!

The organizers of BarcampBrighton had decided attempting to set up some form of Wi-Fi would probably be futile due to their experiences at other conferences. As the decision was announced at forehand, everyone had decided to bring patch cables (except for me and Melinda, oops) so that they could hook up to the switches. It wasn’t before long though that people like Reinier had set up there own laptops to share Wi-Fi to others. This went pretty fine as there was an instant Wi-Fi reception on more than one access point, that way spreading the load.

Obviously some people had thought a bit further ahead, bringing their own Linksys/Apple routers along to make sure that there would be some kind of permanent solution before the night. This took some more time to set up but proved to be very resilient. Apparently the guys that provide the Wi-Fi at the beach in Brighton (PierToPier) had set up a very good Wi-Fi network indoor that I actually didn’t have to use all day.

In the end we were just all amazed at how we, with some landlines, could provide to a hundred people a more resilient Wi-Fi connection than most of us had ever experienced at any conference. A lesson can be learned here about geeks and their power to do things on their own, and I think we should be proud of that. Geeks in the world, unite (wireless-ly)!

It has been a while since we had some regular posts here on FourStarters. The main reasons being the holiday season, which obviously also affects us. Starting today I am planning to bring FourStarters back to speed with some interesting posts about startups, webapps, and any other software.

Next up we also plan to attend a few conferences in the next few weeks, starting with dConstruct and BarCampBrighton this week. Alper and Sjors start of by going to the dConstruct conference this week in Brighton (UK) after which they will join Melinda, Reinier and me at BarCampBrighton during the weekend.

We are hoping that Alper and Sjors are able to give us some live feedback from the dConstruct conference, including some nice photos. Highlights of the conference will be the workshops on Microformats, Experience Design, and more. I haven’t got word from Alper or Sjors yet on what workshops they were going to attend, but I guess it must be something interesting.

Although BarCampBrighton will be the first BarCamp in Brighton ever, it will definitely be a strange one with 5% of the attendees being Dutch. There were only 100 tickets available for this small and local BarCamp, so this way it is going to be an interesting experience for both us and the other people at the conference. At least with this amount of people it can’t be hard to have some live reports from the conferences.

We are hoping to see you all soon at any of the conferences.