It’s been a while and it’s somewhat too late to wish everyone a good year but Open Coffee will continue in 2008. The next event will be in Delft on February 11th, 2008 (Upcoming event).

Location: Coffee Company (large table), Market Square Delft
Time: 09:00 (till 10:00 or so)

What is Open Coffee? Open Coffee is a gathering for web and startup minded individuals to get together and talk about any topic that comes to mind while drinking some cofee. A pleasant start of the day with some familiar and some new faces talking about interesting stuff.

See you there! Post stuff you want to talk about as comments to this post.

Picture of a previous such event:

…are some pretty fine people and now they’re on a map near you. I thought I knew most of the Django programmers in the Netherlands, how wrong I was.

Now with Simon Willison’s great effort in a strongly focused site: Django People, Django people can show who and where they are.

Django developers need to band together and form a strong front against the powers of PHP and Rails. Great sites such as these support an already great community and make me proud to be a part of it.

Last Friday we had our very own Lunch 2.0 event at the Hyves headquarters in Amsterdam.

Some presentations and a lot of nice conversation with people from the Amsterdam startup scene. I look forward to the next lunch.

It looks like OpenSocial in its current form is just an app runtime to compete with the Facebook Application ecosystem. We just had a very very crowded session on Barcamp Berlin about OpenSocial with (among others) David Recordon from SixApart where we tried to create some clarification about OpenSocial and ask a lot more questions.

Big questions raised from this session include the following:

1. What does this do for the portability of social networks?
2. How are containers supposed to manage their applications?
3. What is the importance of microformats in this context?
4. How can you make your site friendly to interact with OpenSocial applications?
5. What is Google’s role in control in all of this?
6. Is this spammer’s heaven?
7. Where’s the data stored at?

There was also a lot of talk about privacy which seems to be more important to Europeans than it is to Americans and seeing as we are importing a lot of these services from the USA, we are also importing the same policies embedded in the code.

The question about what Google wants to make searchable, I think is easily answered by first people and secondly with a social graph, Google can provide users with a lot more accurately ranked search results.

Picture by bjoern

And I wondered whether you could write an OpenSocial app that retrieves your list of friends from the social network and POSTs them out to your own repository of social graph information. This way you can write a social network synch’ing tool which will extract your various social clouds from each service and provide you with added value on top of that.
The only thing you would need to do after that would be to align the various graphs by marking people in different networks as being identical.

David replied that some containers might not allow such use of their data, but the data is not theirs to begin with. My profile and friends information is mine, and social networks that do not respect that basic principle will lose me as their customer.

(And about our app, we’ve got a design and API keys, but the WiFi on the venue is proxied, so developing is a bit difficult here.)

In the Summer we had done a small series of OpenBeer events on Friday afternoons. Now that Winter is approaching we thought we would resume the series in Delft with official OpenCoffee meetings.

The idea for now is to have biweekly meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:30 somewhere in Delft. The next meeting is October 9th at 09:30 at Bacinol (Wateringsevest 38) at the office of Jeroen Visser.

Join us webprofessionals in the Delft area to have some coffee and discuss business and events.

We have an upcoming event and a Google Group you can subscribe to if you want updates on the event.

See you guys October 9th.

Jyri is liveblogging the meeting and Robert has promised to do a writeup after the fact.

Yesterday we had the FOWA roadtrip drink with Ryan Carson in café de Jaren. It was a nice gettogether for the Amsterdam based crowd.

During the raffle Maarten Lens-FitzGerald won the free ticket to FOWA. He will undoubtedly have a great time at the conference.

It’s great to have visitors in Amsterdam and showing them the Dutch scene. Amsterdam will have a PICNIC just before FOWA which is a strange event in many ways.

This Monday night in Amsterdam there’s going to be another road trip drink for a big Web event in Europe: The Future of Webapps. Check out the road trip site (Upcoming) there are quite some people coming out to hang out, chat about webapps and say hello to Ryan Carson.

The location for this event is set in Café de Jaren just like the last one with the O’Reilly people for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin this October. Come say hello and join us.

Future of Webapps

The Future of Webapps looks to be an event with a great lineup of speakers scheduled this October 3-5 in London. Cristiano from Four Starters is going to attend and covert this event for us.

More people on Portable Social Networks

Yesterday Pascal tipped me off about a brainstorm session by some notables about Portable Social Networks.

They’ve got the stuff on the microformats wiki page right now.

On BarcampCologne (which I’m unfortunately going to miss) there is going to be a lot of activity around this subject, seeing at least the first release of Noserub (German post) a social network aggregator.

Here in the Netherlands Robert had also whipped up an implementation of this concept and he’s planning to hold a meeting around this same subject in Amsterdam. After my talk with Willem, we had agreed that PICNIC could be a nice event in or around which to embed these kind of meetings/devhouses.

And there’s going to b a Social Network DevCamp in Richmond sometime after.

I wrote about this earlier and it’s nice to see it getting adopted all over the web.

Dutch Hyvers

On the other hand, the leading Dutch social network is hinting at opening up its information to the outside world (Dutch article). It’s one of the largest silos of presence, profile and relation information in the Netherlands and as such is incredibly valuable. For now it has been hindered by a complete lack of applications from the outside and arguably amateurish development from the inside.

Yme Bosma —the guy leading the effort— looks like a decent sort and I’m curious as to how this will work out. Things that would be nice:

1. Microformat (hCard, hReview, hResume and XFN) all content on the profile pages of Hyves members.
2. Allow people to set their presence in Hyves using an API.
3. Adopt an existing widget platform for integration in Hyves pages so the amount of widgets available will increase and developers can develop against a target.
4. A smart implementation of OpenID providership would be nice. Log onto third party sites in the Netherlands using your Hyves username.
5. Full application development inside the platform such as is possible on Facebook, judging from the current matureness level of Hyves, looks like it’s too far away to be realistic.

What’s next?

I think hResume and hReview are missing from the spec on the microformats wiki. I will add those today or tonight (I’m not completely sure what the procedure for editing is). Both should be optional but both could add much of the same information already contained on all those sites in a richer and opener fashion.

This does get my hands itching to implement some of this myself but it’s a bit of a conundrum what to implement. I know what the players already in the sphere should implement, but how do you get into the game?

(Posting has been a bit sparse lately. Summer is partly to blame for this. Expect lots of stuff from end of August onward and have a great summer.)

Four Starters will be in Café de Jaren in Amsterdam this afternoon attending the O’Reilly meetup. Maybe see you there?
Pictures will be up tonight.

Update: The pictures are up on Flickr and it was a great event. A nice mix of people in Amsterdam who kept it real and who had lots of interesting conversations. Also the two people present from Blognation the Netherlands, which should launch any moment now.

I hope Brady and Jennifer came out with a lot of insight on the Dutch perspective to startups and the internet and that they can piece all of these various European fragments together in what surely looks like what will become a great expo. See you in Berlin… maybe.

dConstruct

And furthermore I just registered my attendance for dConstruct this September in Brighton.

Get your tickets while they’re hot.