Monday a week ago I visited Mediamatic on invitation from Willem Velthoven to talk about how they could fit in Portable Social Networks in their anyMeta system. This meeting was inspired by our meeting in Copenhagen and the talks we had about opening up social networks.

Picture by Matt Biddulph

anyMeta and OpenCI

Mediamatic.lab implements and maintains a series of social networking sites for the creative industries (CI) in Amsterdam. These are sites built on the anyMeta system that resemble structured wikis with a strong social dimension. They are positive towards open source, but the anyMeta system is not open source for reasons of manageability of the projects.

Seeing as that these sites have a lot of overlap in both in functionality and in the people that have an account on them, they wanted to abstract and syndicate the social stuff as much as possible. Currently people can have accounts on each of the different sites, all with the same information on them.

Seeing as Mediamatic builds anyMeta themselves and they have total control, it is very feasible for them to devise and mandate the exchange of information between their own sites. To enable the exchange between their own sites, they will use their own protocol and data format to provide for a high fidelity exchange of information. Leaving implementation details for what they are, it should become possible to use one account on any of the sites in the network.

To verify your identity on the various sites of the network they are going to enable OpenID consumer and provider functionality in the next version. This way they will have a way of distributed authentication both within their network of sites and throughout the rest of the internet.

anyMeta and the rest of the web

Having solved the problem of information exchange between anyMeta sites, they would also like to play along with the rest of the internet as far as that is possible. Being able to share public information with the rest of the internet in a logical way is also on the agenda but not so straight forward.

Making public profile information available using hCard and related microformats looks easy enough. Problems arise however because the templates are made by different people and that is the location of the microformatted markup. This means the template authors have to be educated on the subject of microformats.

Whenever I advocate the use of microformats, I always have to fight against the blank looks and criticism about the aplicability of the technology. It’s a solid Catch 22 that has to be taken on with real life use cases and benefits to extoll the virtues of a dirty semantic web. For hCard there are various uses cropping up over the internet, but for the others it is a lot more limited. Having microformatted data on sites and being able to parse that using browser plugins is a first step and essential groundwork for the real use cases and richer interaction that we all want to have.

Another plan they have at Mediamatic is to first enable the sharing of information between their sites and make plugins for some of the bigger CMS’es out there (Drupal, Joomla) so they can also exchange information with those systems.

In these use cases and in the case with the internet the issue of fidelity comes up again and again. How much information can you exchange reliably and what do you do when stuff is missing? This is an important and valid question with no ready answer; though mine would be ‘get what you can, and ignore the holes where possible’.

Other stuff

I am currently not implementing anything relating to OpenID and Social Networks but I think I would like to. One idea was to make a Facebook front-end site which uses the information in Facebook to offer you a microformatted profile. There already is an hCard application but extending this with XFN, hReview and hResume would be a real winner.

Yesterday on the O’Reilly event I heard about Yme Bosma who’s job it now is to drag Hyves kicking and screaming into the world of Open Social Networks. I wish him a lot of luck as that would be a good thing to have. I have started my own work on scraping the Hyves site but that hasn’t been as simple as I would have liked.

Four Starters is going a bit Live, as we will be reporting from The Next Web Conference, Reboot (Alper is going) and now we have also been invited to the Essential Web ‘07 in London. If you are interested in coming, have a look at our special deals at the bottom of this post.

Essential Web ‘07 will be held on the 27th of June so it is a bit further away than The Next Web Conference and Reboot, but it is another event where entrepreneurs, investors and corporations. The event is organized by LibraryHouse, a consultancy agency focusing on being “the essential source of comprehensive information on the fastest growing, most innovative ventures around Europe”. LibraryHouse has created an interesting concept with Essential Web ‘07, as they do have a panel and presentation by companies, but they have shifted the focus of the event to mainly include “raw” companies. The panel, which includes Saul Klein and Jonathan Wolf, will take a look at these raw companies and at the end of the day pick one that will win their ‘07 award.

Essential Web ‘07 might have the elegant PR of The Next Web Conference but where the latter focuses on inspiring presentations, Essential Web ‘07 offers a lot of small, new, fresh companies a change to meet big investors. Four Starters will be covering this event and showcasing the new and inspiring companies. Among the companies are Jaiku (not so raw), LouderVoice and Shozu.Tickets are £295 (inc. VAT) when you order before the 1st of June and this will become £395 (still cheaper than a ticket for the other conferences) after this date. Entrepreneurs that want to showcase their own product can also buy tickets for £95 and get some extras. If you buy a ticket via one of the links on this page Four Starters will get a share of the sale, which will keep us pay our hosting bill. Hope to see you there!

It took a while to arrange, but I am proud to announce that Four Starters will be reporting live from The Next Web Conference on the 1st of June in Amsterdam. We managed to arrange access to the event so we will be updating you with the inspiring stories by interesting speakers like Scott Rafer, Dick Hardt, Michael Arrington, Saul Klein and Felix Petersen (full list can be found here). Additionally Four Starters will be recording all the talks on video for the organizers of The Next Web, but there it is not clear yet how these will be released.

Don’t forget that in the evening following the conference we will be attending The Next Web Award ceremony for which TipIt.to has been nominated in the category . If you haven’t voted yet, then click on the banner on the right of this page and maybe you will win an Apple iPhone or a Nokia N800 Tablet! I hope to see some of you at these events, and if you want to join the fun than you can still register a ticket at the registration page (€550, 50% off for students).

This Friday we will be having a blogwalk in Amsterdam (the eleventh such edition) and I am happy to be participating.

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Yesterday we had the second edition of Open Beer Delft. Turnout wasn’t as large as we had hoped, but a good time was had by all.

The event was livecast using the WiFi present and the technology from ustream.tv which we reported about earlier.

Newcomer this time was Crijn Bouman from Epyon. Epyon is a startup company of Yes!Delft who make superfast charging batteries. Their first gizmo which is due out, you plug into the wall and it charges itself in a minute and you can then use it to charge cell phones and other small devices on the road.
They are working on getting the technology into laptops which would be a godsend. Imagine charging your Macbook battery in 1 minute.

Next week the event can go on as usual but I will not be able to make it. I am going to setup a notify mailing list for these meetings. If you want to be added to that, e-mail me or post in the comments here.

Yesterday the first Open Beer in Delft took place and it was something of a succes. Turnout may have been low with five people attending but new people were met and interesting conversations took place.

I talked to Redmar Kerkhoff who I already knew from a previous Barcamp Amsterdam and who also studies at DUT. Redmar is all over the place and we talked about graphics programming, intelligent devices, Ruby on Rails and Erlang.
I also got to talk with our other attendee Bart, who has a website (Where was it at again?) and who installed the wireless network at De Plataan.

A lot of people either could not make it today or were otherwise detained but that is not a loss to the format as there is enough interesting stuff to talk about with the people who were there. I didn’t even get to talk to Reinier because he had to leave early.

So let’s see what this grows into with some consistent attention. Next edition is next Friday and will probably start some 15 minutes later.

If you guys have any websites of yourself that you want to plug or have anything to add, put it in the comments.

On June 1st the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam will host the second The Next Web Conference. Besides announcing the winners of The Next Web Awards (where TipIt is nominated) there will also be an opportunity to attend interesting talks by speakers like Dick Hardt (Identity 2.0), Saul Klein (Skype, OpenCoffee), Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog), Felix Petersen Plazes) and many more. I was informed by the guys behind the conference that they had to really turn down many sponsors to make sure that the conference would not be a big PR-talk filled day. I expect the conference to be a great success of high quality, and I’m still doubting (money wise) if I will attend myself as I will be in The Netherlands anyway at the beginning of June.

Tickets for the conference are limited and cost €550 ex VAT. There is a student discount of 50% with only 15 passes available so I think I have to decide quickly. For people who don’t have the money or time to attend the conference there is a OpenCoffee Amsterdam meetup just the day after the conference (June 2nd).

Just to remind everyone. Late this afternoon, we will have the first version of Open Beer Delft. A networking event for web professionals and independents in the greater Delft area.

Besides the launch of this event, we will use today to formally launch this weblog.

Time and place: 18.00, het Klooster (Vlamingstraat 2)

Read the original announcement.

This article is a bit late because Wordpress ate Version 1. Please mind if it’s a bit raw.

I attended another OpenCoffee meetup this morning and again I met some nice people with some special ideas. I was amazed that I didn’t see many of the same faces I had seen last week, which means that the OpenCoffee crowd is very dynamic. I must note that with the hot weather they might have to consider a StarBucks with airconditioning to keep people coming.

There were some very interesting concepts at this OpenCoffee and I exhanged quite a few of my Moo cards (which I brought with me this time). The first person I spoke with was Jonathan Greensted from SportsDo who provides a service that allows you to track your sport activities much like the Nike+iPod system. It runs on most mobiles, uses GPS, and doesn’t need an iPod or Nike shoes. It does costs £49.95 for the mobile client and £50 for access to their online portal but then you do get a lot more than the Apple/Nike thing does.

I also had a talk with Stephan Tual from TeraPad which is basically a hosted platform for creating a site plus blogs, shops, photos, CMS, etc. I couldn’t really understand if it just focuses on professional users (small businesses) or also on individuals. The clear advantage is that it provides all the service on one hosted platform, but I wonder if that would attract many locked in individuals. In the end I think the tool is definitely very interesting for medium businesses who don’t want to do their own hosting, etc.

As usual there were also some people who didn’t know what they did, couldn’t tell what there product was because it was a “secret” (I am not kidding here, this person was there), or couldn’t show anything yet because they were still in private Alpha. One of them did really stood out though, which got my attention though still being in private Alpha. The tool is called Rememble and besides having a catchy names it helps you keep track of all those small, (un)important thing that you might want to remember.

“Rememble is an easy place to put stuff you’d like to keep even if you don’t know exactly why.

It’s an online service that empowers you to create, view, enhance, share and even co-create digital memories. You do this by adding membles to a timeline representing your life.

Membles are text messages, emails, images, video, audio clips, etc., that are stored on PCs, laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, digital cameras, and even other web services such as Flickr.”

As usual there were also the odd ones out: those people doing a non tech startup. This week I had a nice talk with Daniella from Luento Santoro, a chocolate emporium. Although not really selling her goods online she was interested in concepts like building a webprecense and blogging in a professional perspective. In the end, now that I think about it, if she ever wants to really build a webprecense with a blog she might have to look into TypePad. Maybe I should bring these two together, or maybe the already have? For now I am looking very much forward to next weeks meeting and maybe you will join me?