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.

I have never been a real fan of online photo editors, but recently I stumbled upon two cool web-applications that offer some basic functionality that got me thinking. The two apps were called Picnik and Pixenate, and both offer some basic photo cropping, resizing and filtering of photos. Now, I used to hate applications like these because people made a comparison to Photoshop and any idiot who ever used Photoshop knows that this is not Photoshop. The tools can be better described by being an online iPhoto or Picasa. Here is where the fun starts.

When I first talked about Pixenate, I talked about how tools like these could change the workflow of the average photography user from “transfer from camera to pc -> edit -> upload” to something more like “transfer from camera to web - edit - publish” . This workflow with maybe some new firmware for cameras would make the process so much easier for so many people who really don’t care that much about editing. The cool thing is that the Pixenate tool can be bought to be installed to be integrated with any server.

Keeping this in mind, I was amazed to see the new features offered by Facebook since today. One of them was integration with Picnik, a flash based photo editor, without really branding Picnik as their own tool. It is interesting to see how they integrated Picnik into Facebook, allowing people to just upload whatever they feel like, not having to care about editing until the photos are uploaded.

Is this the future of photo editing for the average Joe? Is there any limit to what tools like Picnik can do that a tool like iPhoto simply can’t do better? Keep in mind that iPhoto will never be a Photoshop killer.

Cristiano and myself wanted to add avatar support to Four Starters so that people could put a face to the writer of a post or comment. There already exist some solutions for this, but something more open might be nice.

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A while back I was contacted by Felix Petersen from Plazes.com, one of my favorite tools to find wifi access. They were looking for “London City Captains”, people who were interested to represent Plazes in London. I really don’t know London that well yet, so I had to decline but if you think you can handle the job, then contact me and I will forward your details.

In the whole email conversation I did manage to get invited into the private Beta group of the next Plazes release and today I received an email from Felix with link to their private Beta. It looks really cool (screenshots on my Flickr page) and they are trying to integrate a sort of Twitter/Jaiku omnipresence into their next desktop client. So next to knowing where someone is you will be able to know what they are doing. They might just better have teamed up with Jaiku maybe.

A new feature is to let people know where you are going to be in the future, a sort of combination between places and Upcoming. Maybe (again) it would have been a better idea to actually team-up with Upcoming or Meetup to fetch this data automatically. I do like their new groups feature and I think we will be seeing a totally new and improved version of Plazes soon.

All and all I think they really took Plazes to the next level. More details might be coming as I keep playing around.

I have recently started developing with Django again and the experience has been quite rewarding so far except for some minor points which could be improved and would —I think— massively increase adoption.

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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.

A while back I made a small tool for Alper to broadcast his thesis presentation live around the world to a small amount of people using flash on a macbook. So when I was listening to the This Week in Tech podcast I was amazed to hear the technical concept of ustream.tv. The concept is basically the same as my little tool: a flash component lets you stream your audio and video to their servers and you can then refer everyone to your own personal page. They even integrated chat (which I didn’t) but it’s a bit sad that this chat is implemented in Java. I think that with all the skills they have they could have done it all in Flash. I also regret the size of the video, but with a capacity of more than 2000 streams at 1 time I think they had to make some compromises somewhere.

Maybe this will open up the ability to others to share their thesis presentations live on the internet? Maybe Oliver or Eelke want to try it out?

Mozy just released a very cool online backup solution for Mac OS X. For $4.95 a month you can get unlimited online backup, but their free version allows 2GB online backup which is enough for your basic documents. There are some cool features for Mac users including the backup of preferences, contacts, and e-mails. Files can be encrypted and if you have their payed unlimited account you can always order a backup of your files on DVD with next day delivery.

TipIt.to has been nominated for the category Beta & Stealth for The Next Web Awards. I think this is quite amazing for a company without a product (although this is obviously a reason why they are nominated in this Beta & Stealth category). I was amazed that Soocial was not nominated with all the buzz around them lately. Let’s see how far TipIt.to will manage to get in this category by all voting for them.

The award ceremony of this award will be on the 1st of June at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam.