The series continues. (previously: intro and part 1)

Part 2: Analysing a trust-aware internet transaction: del.icio.us network

In Part 1, we analysed a typical transaction on reddit, an article aggregator with the principal function of recommending you interesting articles to read when you are bored or just in need of some news.

Today, we look at a service with a very similar premise - del.icio.us network. While the premise is exactly the same (give you a list of articles which might be interesting), and while the basic notion is similar (a disconnected set of people basically ‘vote’ on stories), the actual implementation is completely different. Specifically, the way trust is interweaved into the the network feature compared to reddit’s system is entirely different.

Where reddit seems to actively try to eliminate trust as a factor (it is for example impossible to see who votes for what, only comments and submissions can be found, though not easily) - del.icio.us network works solely on trust relationships.

Let’s revisit the same transaction of part 1, but this time with del.icio.us network.

del.icio.us recommending me something to read

I go to my del.icio.us/network page. I will need to trust the operators of del.icio.us, which can be problematic, as del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo, a business. Businesses, in theory, have no morals. Fortunately in practice I can take off my paranoia hat and trust healthy competition - google does not point me to any convincing evidence that Yahoo is trying to surreptiously hawk political views or allow unmarked advertising. I’ll trust this site - enough, at least, to let it recommend articles to me.

The network page is a lot like any reddit page - a bunch of articles, some with very obvious descriptions, some less so. There’s some extra fluff (total number of del.icio.us users who bookmarked a given article, and a tag list). While potentially interesting, from a trust point of view this information is just as useless as reddit’s article score.

The next issue of trust is, for each article that appears here, if I can actually trust that I should give it my due attention. This is where del.icio.us/network differs from reddit and digg: An article is on that page ONLY because one of my direct connections thought it was sufficiently cool to bookmark it. I trust those people I manually add to my delicious network. Thus I can directly trust the articles that show up on my network page. The exact mechanism of trust is left to the user; I may trust one of my network contacts because they are my friend. I may trust someone else because I like his blog and the articles he links to there seem interesting. Regardless of why I trust my network contacts - the point is that I personally trust them.

The final step of trust is - once I decide to read an article, can I trust that the operators of the server that hosts the article are trustworthy? This step is also much more adequately addressed: One of my personally trusted contacts saw fit to go through the trouble of bookmarking it. At least a modicum of due diligence has probably been applied.

From a trust point of view then, del.icio.us/network is on the up and up. There is no problem here - trust-wise, this system will not collapse under the weight of its own popularity. Of some schmoe manages to sign up for a del.icio.us account and starts bookmarking spam, tripe, and drivel, I don’t even notice.

Basically, my network is a wheel: I’m at the center, with all my connections arranged around me, feeding article recommendations to me.

There’s even a responsibility system built in: If one of the users in my network keeps bookmarking crappy articles, I can remove them. One common problem with responsibility (a.k.a. karma systems - scores for users) is that the trust issue isn’t addressed at all: The karma of any given user is again determined by untrustable, unaccountable masses. Removing someone from recommending articles to you completely is much more effective from a trust point of view.

Trust is neccessary… but not sufficient

Unfortunately, though, just because you built a system that maintains trust in the transaction, doesn’t mean your idea is any good.

Some problems with del.icio.us:

• Traffic - once you run out of articles, there are no more. On reddit and digg, there are always more stories to read because the pool of submitters is much larger.
• GroupThink - If all the users in your network read the same blogs, work in the same area, and have the same thoughts, your network is very unlikely to bring you new ideas in new topics, or well written arguments for viewpoints you do not hold. In practice large communities suffer just as much (Digg and Reddit have of late sported front pages where every single article is either extolling the virtues of one Ron Paul, presidential candidate for the 2008 elections in the United States of America, or taking the mickey out of George W. Bush).
• Rating - While on reddit each article has a score and thus you can sort them, on del.icio.us an article is either on your network page, or it isn’t. Once your network produces more articles than you can handle, there is no way to prioritize them usefully.

Fortunately, trust can help us out here, if you apply some more of it to del.icio.us network. None of the steps I’m going to explain here have been implemented by del.icio.us yet. It would make for a much better experience if they would.

A wheel does not a network make!

By acknowledging that a network is more than just a wheel with spokes, these problems can be addressed!

In the ‘wheel’ view of a del.icio.us/network, I can actually check out the networks of friends, check out people THEY have deemed fit to add to their network, check out what those people have been posting, and if I like it, add it to my network. That’s one way of solving a dearth of articles: Just add more people to the network.

So, instead of a wheel, I can treat delicious as a connected network:

There’s really no reason why this can’t be done automatically. Anytime I’m out of articles, so to speak, it should be possible to just say: Go to the ‘next layer’ - give me articles recommended by friends of my friends. Trust is more or less multiplicative, after all: If I trust Jack, and Jack trusts Joe (I don’t know Joe), I can trust Joe to some extent. Once 2 layers no longer give me enough articles, I can go to a third layer, ad nauseam.

We can solve the other problems in a similar fashion, but a more holistic approach solves them all.

First, we establish a scoring system on a per-article basis, dependent on the network. The network of del.icio.us basically consists of users, connected to each other (each connection represents someone being in the network of someone else). Now add the articles themselves to this network: Anytime I bookmark an article, I am connected to the article directly. Anytime a friend of mine bookmarks it, I’m connected to it through my friend.

It is of course possible that I’m connected to an article in a number of ways. A friend of a friend bookmarked it, a colleague’s brother’s girlfriend’s classmate bookmarked it, and one of the bloggers read by someone whose opinions I admire bookmarked it, for example. In the network this is represented by the network by having 3 different ‘paths’ I can take to arrive at the article.

These paths can be distilled into one final personalized score. Each connection takes a chunk of 80% out of the total score - so a friend’s friend’s friend, 3 steps, is .8 * .8 * .8 = 0.512 in total score. For multiple different paths, you can’t just sum them up (or you could end up with a score above 100%), but there are a number of algorithms (naively: of all paths, take the highest scoring, divide by 2. Take the next highest scoring, divide by 4. Take the third highest scoring, divide it by 8, ad nauseam, then add them all up. This number can never exceed 100%. Another way of doing this is to consider each link in the network as a resistor in an electric circuit. Multiple resistors placed in a series multiply their resisting effects and thus reduce current. However, multiple resistors placed in parallel lessen the effect, but, whatever you do, you can never get more power out than you put in. Now replace resistors with links on the network and you have an algorithm!)

This scoring/recommendation algorithm can even be extended to del.icio.us users: The score of a user is then entirely dependent on how well he’s connected to your own network (though relying too much on this can lead to GroupThink!).

Such a system solves all 3 problems. To wit:

Traffic

Research in social networks finds that usually social networks are virtually completely connected. There’s a path from any one person to any other. Thus, it’s possible to derive a score for every article and you can just keep reading indefinitely, though, of course, as you keep reading, each further article has a lower score.

There’s some excellent research by GustavoG on the social network of Flickr (also a web app that allows you to set up a network of friends). Very pretty pictures of tightly interwoven networks, such as this one:

Flickr’s demographics in January 2005. Click on the image for the full story and more graph images.

Rating

As already explained, any given article is no longer a simple yes/no proposal: Articles recommended by a number of your direct friends rate highly. Articles only recommended by one distant link (A friend’s friend’s friend, and that’s it) rate lowly.

GroupThink

This is where it gets very interesting. Because everyone builds their own unique community, GroupThink is no longer a virtual guarantee. For example, on digg or reddit, if a well written article that happends to put a ‘taboo’ topic in a good light (like Java, Microsoft, George Bush, traditional media, and a few others), or a ‘holy’ topic in a bad light (Ruby on Rails, web2.0, digg/reddit itself, Apple, Linux, and a few others), chances are very high it gets drowned out in the noise of the crowd. Even if all the people whose judgement I actually trust did vote it up, I never see it. Contrast this your own unique community, where articles at least have a chance.

There are two forms of GroupThink: Accidental and intentional. On both Digg and Reddit, you occasionally see a post imploring to put an end to the flood of the latest meme-of-the-day posts. Ironically these also get voted up with some frequence. Clearly then not all GroupThink is actually desired by those experiencing it. In a social network this GroupThink is eliminated; you can simply hunt down which elements in your network are fielding the majority of an onslaught of a certain meme, and toss them from your network or at least lower your level of trust in them.

The other type is intentional: Where a reader actually wants to read more about the same topic over and over again. There’s not all that much to be done; trying to force reading other things onto such a person is tantamount to censure and very hard to distinguish from forced propaganda.

In practice, in real life, GroupThink is somewhat rare, because you have friends from many places. Colleagues, family, old school buddies - friends of people you’ve dated that you kept in contact with, etcetera. If these real life bonds also exist in your del.icio.us network, ostensibly the chance of GroupThink is much reduced.

I could be wrong, but a system like that sounds like the ultimate source of articles. As much or as little as you want to read, resilient to GroupThink, nearly impossible to spam, and ever evolving to your tastes. Unfortunately, as far as I know, nothing quite like it exists just yet.

… or does it? The remarkable quality of the early phase

A version of this ultimate article recommendation engine did exist, briefly.

reddit itself, meets this system! At least, it did, in the first few months after the launch. The users of reddit back then amounted to a single connected social network. A number of important features weren’t there (all votes are equal instead of being attenuated by the distance in ‘friend links’ from you, for example), but on the whole this was it. If you happend to use reddit in those days, or you know someone who has (I fortunately managed to catch the tail end of those days), you may hear about or remember the amazing quality of articles.

This idea actually can be observed in many budding social networks. For a little while, Orkut (google’s ‘myspace’) was a trove of excellent networking opportunities. This was back when Orkut required very scarce invites.

Invites are an excellent way to keep the size of a social network into the efficient phase as long as you can, but of course it does restrict growth - by its very definition that’s how it manages to keep the efficiency of the social network high. In fact, a number of more or less ’secret’ smaller social networks that work on invites and a strong sense of responsibility (a misbehaving user gets kicked, and the one who invited the abuser also gets kicked!) have been running strong for years. The one problem with that tactic is that it can’t scale.

A trust network can!

The final part 3 will be posted the day after tomorrow (Friday evening). In it, expanding this idea to other walks of the web and of life in general, the importance of identity in such a trust-bound world, and how Identity 2.0 and open APIs are the beginning of a brave new world. As an encore, part 3 will also briefly discuss a problem I’ve so far omitted: Doing all these scoring calculations is computationally speaking extremely difficult. spoiler: There’s a way out of it, more or less!

To continue reading, go to part 3.

As promised, today part one of a series on trust.

Part 1: Analysing a typical web transaction: The Reddit Breakdown

Flashback to a year ago. Reddit is relatively new and has a limited but very active userbase.

I go to reddit.com. I will need to trust the site which implies I need to trust its operators, as it is impossible to trust a computer (they do what they are told, without questioning orders, hence it’s folly to trust a machine implicitly). This will be referred to as Trust #1.

Trust #2. I see an article on the front page, with 100 votes. I need to trust those who have voted that this actually means it’s a good — I basically need to trust that this score number has any meaning.

Trust #3. I follow the link and read the story. I trust that the story doesn’t lie and that any further action I take, like bookmarking it, or recommending it to others, won’t get me any surprises (I’ll need to trust the site author that he didn’t e.g. linkjack the content if I’m going to share it with others, for example).

In the early days of reddit, all 3 forms of trust are more or less met to my satisfaction. Here’s a break down:

For #1: The mere fact that Paul Graham recommends these guys is good enough; I trust Paul Graham. Not very much, I don’t know him personally, but he has a lot of reputation to lose if he recommends a bunch of swindlers. Thus I trust Paul Graham’s judgement enough for me to be satisfied here. Note here that it’s possible to trust someone purely on what they have to lose.

This is an example of trust-by-chaining (I trust the operators of reddit because Paul Graham trusts them, and I trust Paul Graham) and trust-by-buy-in (By recommending them, Paul Graham has effectively placed money (the value of his reputation) on the table which he will lose if reddit is swindling my time by e.g. making crappy articles look highly rated for cash. Paul Graham has a certain level of buy-in to this recommendation). He could be wrong - but trust doesn’t need to be perfect.

For #2: This is where it gets interesting. I trust the votes (back then) because reddit was only known to those ‘in the know’ - the first redditors were personal friends of Graham and the authors of reddit, and had personal buyin not to screw it up for their friends. The userbase then exploded outwards like a viral infection but elitism kept the quality high for quite a while. Those who just post lolcats all day and ‘abuse’ the site by downvoting well written insightful articles that don’t happen to coincide exactly with a voter’s viewpoints, for example, didn’t happen, because the vast majority of the redditors, by mere virtue of being so in the loop that they knew about reddit in the first place, don’t do that sort of thing. There’s also the issue of intent: There’s very little to gain by gaming the site. Unfortunately, trolls and social rejects exist, but as a rule there are far less negative influences if there’s nothing to be had. Back then there the user base was too small and too new and thus flew under spammer’s radar.

This is an example of trust-by-chaining, but without me actually seeing the chains: I trust the authors to only have friends they recommend reddit to who are known by them to have a modicum of nettiquette. This type of trust isn’t very ’strong’, but I don’t need much just to accept a recommendation to read an interesting article. Note that trust is multiplicative: If I trust Jack for 80%, and Jack trusts Joe for 80%, I can trust complete stranger Joe for 64%.

You may realize at this point that the ‘trust from elitism’ argument no longer applies to reddit, nor to digg - they are too famous now. It also explains why almost all ‘open’ social systems, where every user’s vote has an effect, start off stellarly well and always drop off. From kuro5hin, to digg, to reddit.

For #3: This is a bigger problem. The only practical ‘proof’ you have for the majority of links (specifically: Every link to an article on a site that you aren’t familiar with) being trustworthy is the personal recommendation of the original submitter. I don’t trust the voters enough to expect them to have done due diligence on the trustworthiness of the operator of the linked article. For the same reasons as #2, in general this trust was at least satisfied to some extent in the early days.

Fast forward a year.

Reddit is now so famous, the trustworthiness percentage of any one vote has dropped to absolute 0. Not 0.00001, there’s nothing left. The value of a normal redditor’s vote is extremely low, and some of the redditors are actively abusing the system, voting their own blogs up just for the traffic, posting their own linkjacked material, voting other stories down just so that their own has a better shot, etcetera. These cancel with the very low value of the vote of an unknown internet user, resulting in a value of absolute 0. The value of a vote is also not negative (which would mean I could just read the most negatively rated articles!) because the same scammers would force the equilibrium back to 0 if reading the most lowly rated articles ever became a useful way to use reddit.

A trust level of 0 is the only trust level which is utterly worthless. The information available to me for any given recommendation from reddit is: The ’score’ (upvotes - downvotes) + the username of the one that posted the article. The practical value of knowing that 150 more reddit users thought article X was good enough to vote it up versus down, coupled with the fact that user ‘foobar’ thought it was good enough to post to reddit, assuming I don’t know ‘foobar’, is valueless. I might as well pick a completely random web link to read - it’s a lottery.

There is no such thing as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ unless you meet the stringent requirements for this: No attempts to screw up the system (or those attempts are symmetric and thus cancel out), and no practical way for mob mentality to form - no way for each individual of the crowd to be influenced by the rest of the crowd. Reddit and digg definitely do not meet the qualifications and thus there is no trust to be found by knowing “a bunch of” random people’s opinions happend to coalesce. Hence: The recommendation has no value. It is worthless. Practically, this will probably manifest itself as sucky submissions, and this is in fact exactly what’s going on. The function has changed - it’s a rolling window on the current meme of the web, no longer a site that recommends interesting articles.

There are ways out of this dilemma. Specifically: If I did trust the user ‘foobar’ directly, for example because I remember that his submissions have been excellent so far, I’m satisfied for Trust #2 and Trust #3 and I can go read the article (A form of trust by past performance - inductive reasoning is behind the assumption that he will continue to do so. It’s certainly not worth 100% trustworthiness, but it’s enough for article recommendations). Unfortunately that completely goes against the idea of popularity aggregators and as expected both digg and reddit make it very hard for you to work in this manner. There’s no easy way to mark someone as a ‘friend’, for example.

A site which actually works almost entirely on that principle (articles recommended by people you already trust) is del.icio.us, the online bookmark service. You can add people as ‘friends’ and watch the stuff they bookmark in your inbox. While each link does list the # of random users who also bookmarked that link, no amount of ‘votes’ (in the sense that bookmarking is a vote) will make a story appear in my del.icio.us inbox until someone in my personal circle of friends (obviously, people I trust) personally bookmarks it, thus allowing transfer of trust: I trust my friend, he apparently trusts the link he just bookmarked, and thus I trust the link.

Lots of startup ideas I hear about base themselves on the notion that the opinion of random unknown people has an intrinsic value. The problem is, in the early stages of a startup, they do, because the people from whom you cull the opinion aren’t actually unknowns: They are tied to you by your viral marketing scheme. Your startup is doomed to fail unless you can manage to toss some form of trust in there, for example by allowing users to reduce the site experience to just those people they personally trust, or by explicitly staying small.

To continue reading, go to part 2.

The rapid degeneration of the quality of the posts on digg, reddit, and other aggregators highlights a serious misunderstanding prevalent amongst lots of web2 startups.

All Transactions are based on trust. Even trivial transactions, like someone (or something) recommending a site for you to read (reddit, digg, delicious’s inbox, your flickr friends stream, your RSS feeds, your homepage, google search results). Misunderstanding this leads to websites that get killed by their own success.

I’ll explain how Trust works on the web and how you can build webservices that don’t get killed by their own success by keeping trust a central part of the system in a series of posts.

Post 1: I’ll first give an extensive use case to show how trust permeates all transactions, highlighting why any social network with no notion of an actual ‘network of trust’ behind it cannot become famous without swiftly plummeting to abysmal quality as well - I’ll analyse a ‘transaction’ of me going to reddit (it’s a lot like digg if you’re more familiar with that), and break it down into atomic little bits of trust.

Post 2: A similar service, yet from a trust point of view very different: del.icio.us’s inbox system. I’ll analyse it in the same vein, and then propose a way to expand it to scale in traffic and ease of use without compromising its implicit trust system.

Post 3: A missive on the significance of the Facebook API, how OpenID and the concept of ‘identity 2.0’ can also help us out, and one view of the future of the web and society in general.

This series of posts has been inspired in part by Deborah Schultz‘ presentation at The Next Web 2007. It’s 31 slides with lots of pictures to look at. Won’t take you more than 5 minutes to click through, and it sets this series up quite well.

I’ll post the first part of the series tomorrow, so in the mean time, here’s her presentation:

To continue reading, go to part 1.

These are glory days for those interested in computers, particulary: Programmers.

The big five (google, yahoo, microsoft, ebay, amazon) are buying more than one company a week - google alone is picking up startups left and right. These are actual sales; unlike the dot com bubble of the late 90s, you become an actual millionaire, not just on paper. If you want to splurge, it’s up to you. There won’t be a VC with veto power of large financial transactions to rain on your parade and ride your startup into to the ground.

However: there’s a lack of programmers in this land of opportunity. It’s so bad that I openly oppose ’stealth mode’ (not going public with your startup idea until you are ready to launch it) - there are so many ideas and so few implementors out there, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Only if you have some specific marketing goal that justifies stealth mode should you go for it; don’t do it just because you’re afraid someone’s going to rip off your idea. It doesn’t happen, not right now.

It’s even worse, in fact - You don’t even need an idea! You can just take a successful idea, and localize it to your own country. You can rip off just about everything, and while you may not exactly be hailed as a visionary paragon, apparently you don’t get sued, you do get popular, and you do get bought. You don’t even need design skills though I’m sure they help.

You just need to know how to program, on your own. That’s about it.

This get-rich-quick-scheme actually works, and if you’re a (good) programmer, you’ve got most of the skills you need to toss your name into the hat already. What are you waiting for?

If you listened to any of the tales of riches and fame, spun by the golddiggers of the first internet bubble (from 1995ish to 2000), you may have caught one persistent theory:

The micropayment story.

A seminal paper written in 1995, called the Digital Silk Road kicked off a veritable zoo of startups intent on making micropayments work: Facilitating payment on the order of 5 cents to less than a tenth of a cent for near trivial content. Back then blogs weren’t hip yet, so the usual suspects back then were online newspapers and web comics. This list isn’t exhaustive:

FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, BitPass
Source: Clay Shirky

Any of those sound familiar to you?

No, me neither - and I’ve had an interest for small payments for quite a while now. All of them failed. All of them failed quickly.

As you may know, three of the four current fourstarters are involved to some degree or another with a new payment-based startup: Tipit.To. I’ll let the homepage of tipit explain what it’s about.

So, why mess with small payments when they don’t seem to work? I found a few articles which explain the reasoning better than I can - saner souls who have made some very logical arugments as to why the original idea of micropayments can’t work. Fortunately almost none of the arguments actually apply to tipit - on the contrary, most of them actually mean tipit is going to work.

Around 1996, Nick Szabo posted, as far as I know, the first serious argument against micropayments (The Mental Accounting barrier to Micropayments) which argued that there’s a fundamental flaw in micropayment reasoning: Either the payments total up to insignificant amounts, but then there’s not all that much money to be had, or they do tally up to significance, but in that case you can’t claim that the cost, ‘micro’ as it might be, is accepted without much thought. There’s more to it than that, but that rung particularly true for me: even 5 cents is far too much if you’re supposed to pay that much multiple times a day, every day.

Couple of years later, Clay Shirky got in on the micropayments game, torching the viability of the whole idea by highlighting that Free content works already, and works better for handing out fame - which is what bloggers and the like are after far more than money. He argues that, in fame v. fortune, fame wins. And that means micropayments lose. Clay went up against Scott McCloud who locked a comic away behind BitPass, for 25 cents.

Recently, McCloud relented and released that comic for free, causing a revisit from Clay.

Like a breath of fresh air, this post started off a fresh discussion about how to make things better. Nick highlights one form of micropayments that do work: iTunes. Brian Will pointed out his idea for what is essentially tipit, which he described in some detail here, and Nick reviewed the tipit concept!

A long long time ago, I managed to find an IBM ViaVoice edition at a fleamarket, for one guilder. (It’s voice recognition software).

I was working on an assembler project back then, which has a very simple and small instruction set. I had a whacky plan to use the ViaVoice software to allow me to program by speaking, instead of typing. I honestly thought it would be able to program faster, it wasn’t some sort of noble goal to help programmers around the world suffering from RSI.

I guess my younger self wasn’t all that smart.

The project failed miserably, as customizing the dictionary wasn’t really possible, and you type something like MOV, or 0xFF a lot faster than you can say it.

Vista ships with a notorious and tempramental voice recognition module. Hmmmmm…. perhaps almost a decade of software improvement has brought programming-by-voice closer to reality?

Let’s check it out! (YouTube video)

“Funny” doesn’t cover the half of it. I practically fell off my chair.

NB: the sheer level of frustration reminds me of the Custom Super Mario level from Hell (swearing abounds, careful if you’re at work).

All kidding aside for a moment, the performance really isn’t that bad, and perl isn’t exactly the most natural language; it’s closer to cartoon swearing. If the software knows about the grammar and syntax of the programming language, this almost looks like it might work. The one time I ever got serious RSI indicators is when I tried to teach myself dvorak, but, certainly, the number of programmers suffering from RSI out there should be large enough that there just might be an interesting market for creating voice recognition software for programmers. I know, I know - there are far more ideas out there compared to entrepreneurs, but this particular idea should be just perfect for a Master’s thesis at my old alma mater, Media and Knowledge Engineering at the Delft University of Technology.

Yesterday evening some hours after the actual launch of Wakoopa there was the launch party at their (and Fleck’s) office in PostCS Amsterdam.

Wakoopa

Much has been written about Wakoopa already and the brief is that it is a sort of Last.FM for applications. There is a tracker (just not one for Mac yet) which updates to a website the applications that you use. According to them it will revolutionize the way you use your software.

All that remains to be seen of course, but what can be said is that the execution of the website looks outstanding. As soon as they have a Mac tracker, I will take it for a spin.

The idea seems to have originated with Robert whose friends from gaming would ask him what kind of software to use, which Bittorrent clients etc. etc. To solve these questions once and they deviced a tool that allows you to share and aggregate the software that you use.
I get these same questions and I have made a list of essential software to get friends up and running as quickly as possible on their new Macs.
One issue I have is that popularity should lead to a canon. The Mac has certain applications which are canonical in their domain like Adium and Quicksilver. There is no choice with these applications, they are must haves.

People

Lots of familiar faces at the launch event I met Tijs and James from the Roomware project who are showing their work at the ApacheCon in Amsterdam today. James also has a new site out called Beroepseer.

The guys from Fleck are busy organizing this year’s The Next Web conference which is going to be great. They have a massive amount of international registrations, The Next Web Awards (vote for Tipit.to!) and a startup arena where individual startups will be pitched against each other. The conference is taking a lot of their time but Fleck is due to release a new version soon.
I will be at Reboot then, but Reinier and Cristiano will attend to represent Four Starters there.

Four Starters and Open Beer Delft have an open invitation to attend the Amsterdam Open Coffee meetings which we will have to take them up on.

The date had been tentative for a couple of months now, but a couple of weeks ago Thomas made it definitive and announced the theme for Reboot9 (May 31st & June 1st, Upcoming). It’s going to be “Human” which contrasts with the technology as much as it doesn’t. It’s all about humans after all.

Reboot last year was a great experience and I look forward to repeating that meeting with familiar and new people and learning a lot both in the program and outside of it.

I already registered for Reboot9 some weeks ago before I graduated. Now I’m just looking for some accomodation and I’ll probably book my flight to Copenhagen in the next few days.

The Reboot site is completely renewed this year with an implementation of AnyMeta enabling social networking to support the event. My profile is still work in progress but so is most other stuff. It is cool that relations, proposals, votes and similarities can be built in the next months before the conference.

AnyMeta is a Mediamatic product which they are looking to extend to enable social networking interoperability. See the OpenCI page on the Reboot site.

The Next Web

It’s a bit of a pain to see Reboot9’s date collide with the date for the Next Web conference (June 1st). I attended the Next Web last year and the event and the subsequent party both were a blast.

(Picture by Erwin Boogert)

Last year the scene around web in Amsterdam already was quite hot and lots of people from all over attended. I met great people on and around the event and at the party later. I expect this year to be spectacularly bigger and busier with a great venue like Tuschinski and the scene being as hot as it is right now.

I would like to go to both, but given the choice I will be attending Reboot. Maybe Reinier will go and represent Four Starters.

Events

My event schedule has been cleared for most of last year but now that I’ve graduated I’m ready again to fill my schedule and maybe organize a couple of my own. Suggestions welcome.

(I just got back from Spain and I have a cold. I had not gotten around to publishing this post yet.)

I got an invitation by Daniel Spronk to have lunch at the Eight Media office in Arnhem Friday two weeks ago. I was curious to their setup and having just graduated I had some free time on my hands. Cristiano had noticed their product Soocial during FOWA but I hadn’t realized that they were based in the Netherlands.

They are situated in a nice building a small walk from Arnhem centre. Their office looks nice, cosy and heavy on the Macs (see the pictures).

Total Experience

After a tour of the office I talked mostly with Daniel, Stefan and Salmon. We discussed what we we talked a bit about what they do, why they do it and where they’re going. Eight Media started out with Daniel and Stefan in 2001 as a small web agency and has since grown to the twelve people it houses right now.

They are very big fans of Python and Django because it is a nice language (Doh!) and Django enables them to setup site prototypes really really easily. I saw a demo of a site they were making with a Scriptaculous powered live search functionality which was very rich indeed.

Soocial

Recently they started working on a startup of their own called Soocial.

Soocial creates a central repository of your contacts which you can easily sync from your mobile with SyncML but also to any other location where you might want to have access to the people from your address book. Easy and seamless synchronization is key for Soocial’s success and they are taking the mobile phone as the primary access point to solve. This means they are busy building a SyncML conduit and easy ways of distributing and installing that on a variety of mobile phones.

They also provide a web interface where you can easily view and manage your contacts. Contacts are presented with hCard markup so you can easily access your data. I believe the plan is to expose an API so anybody who wants to write a plugin for other remote stores can do so. So if you want to send your data to Outlook, Highrise or GMail it should eventually be possible.

Sociality

Once you have a listing of somebody’s contacts, you pretty much also have a very accurate map of their social circle. Address books used to be nexus of your social interaction in the pre-web era. A little book scribbled full with names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, post-its and whatnot. A very rich carrier of social information which has seen very poor digital equivalents.

In the online world social interaction has completely diverged into closed applications each with its own silo of information. E-mail started it off, followed by instant messaging —which already has never been adequately supported in addressbooks—, mobile phones with calling and texting and it has gotten completely out of hand with the current diarrhea of social networking across all dimensions.

Convergence is unlikely to come up any time soon and without that the best we can really hope for is easy and painless interoperability. Soocial is building that, but it is undoubtedly going to prove really really difficult.

Soocial’s first take on the sociality of address books is to make updates propagate through your trusted social circle. So if you enter a new cell number, all your friends will automatically have it updated on their cell phones. They are aware that the data they store has much more applications and they will work further on that after the base functionality is in place.

I think one nice thing would be for me to enter my details using an OpenID with an hCard available at the same URL or at my provider. This way I could be always in control of my own information and still tie it into their network.

Their FOWA presentation got them a lot of buzz and they are now busy getting an alpha release out to their initial group of testers. The testing group is already filled up but you can still register. I did, but SyncML is not likely to work on my Nokia 3310.

The vibe I got was that these are nice guys who definitely know what they’re doing. They have a small, fun results oriented operation and they are scaling operations and attracting new people and having fun while doing so.

It’s interesting to see what will happen and it is fun to see that the Netherlands does have its own share of startups even in remote locations such as Arnhem.