The format was focused on sharing knowledge and talking about cool stuff that you had recently done. Twenty minutes per presentation, sort of like TED.

Besides the knowledge intensive keynotes, there were also some more active workshops, one on improvisational dance and another one on BMX biking. During a more geeky unconference the physical stuff is mostly neglected about as much as geeks tend to neglect their bodies. These two activities proved to be big hits with this crowd. I’ll let the pictures of the BMX workshop testify, and maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any pictures from the improdance workshop.

Reports and video of every workshop will be posted (in Dutch) to the Studio4Stagioni site and we will definitely repeat an event like this somewhere in the fall.

There’s a video promoting the event:

Workshop 13 juni from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

Interactive sessions of 20-30 minutes from 1:30 till end of day concluded with a barbecue. We think this could be fun and if you think the same, come join us.

Last week I attended Geekyoto in London (and visited some friends). I just had time to typeout my notes of the day with short blurbs on each presentation and pointers where I can find them. Great event where I learned a lot and took away quite a bit of inspiration.

Video’s of each presentation should become available in the near future and I would recommend watching it.

Christian Nold

Nold did a talk on local experience maps to visualize the impact of the environment on people. One very cool demo where he would map the galvanic skin response people have over locations on isomaps.

Alex Haw - Atmoss

Surveillance as an anti-architectural tool and surveillance as it relates to the body.

They made a map of all the area in a space which was covered by security cams and then got rid of all the rest (because that obviously does not matter). Showed some stuff about work space positions and efficient use of space. Also tackled domesticity and the dilemma between exhibition and privacy. Privacy could just as well be served not by building opaque walls but by putting shields in front of people’s eyes where you control up to what resolution you are visible to whom.

Also showed some work visualizing database cells into physical locations, one for the Deutsche Borse. And another one for a faculty of architecture where activity within the building would be mapped to a lightscape in a central space with fiberoptic lamps (this blogpost has pictures).

Moixa

Efficient re-usable energy. Green energy is not yet mass market. The battle between AC and DC. Pretty much everything you use locally uses a small DC current but we need to generate large amounts of AC to transport over long distances. Not efficient.

Demo of the USBcell battery which is a battery form factor chargable from a powered USB port on any pc. That way you don’t need to mess around with chargers anymore and most people have a charger device handy most of the time.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman

компютри втора употреба

During sabbath Jewish people need to observe some strange rules. They cannot change the state of anything electrical. So to work around this they have timer lights and water reboilers. Sabbath is a time when people come together and they are more focused on

They checked what the environmental impact of the sabbath is and found out that it actually saves energy. You could observe an environmentally friendly sabbath by inviting friends over, no TV, no phones, no computers, just chat and walk.

Gavin Starks - AMEE

What if all the energy data of the world was available? AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform where they collect the energy footprint of everything in the world.

Mentions this blessay by Stephen Fry.

75% of change does not require new technology
25% of change has no cost

Vincenzo diMaria - Saint Martins ID

Showed a design prototype of a trinacria box for sun dried tomatoes from Sicily for some sort of agro-tourism.

Bruno Taylor - Saint Martins ID

Talked about the nature of play in a changing public realm and why there is no play on streets right now and adult supervision most of the time. Are we creating a future of socially inept individuals? The YouTube video with the bus stop swing he mentioned.

There’s a tension between vandalism and playful behaviour. Children come at the bottom of the user hierarchy on the street level while they should be considered first.

Richard Sandford - Futurelab

Picture by Rachel Clarke

Beyondcurrenthorions.org.uk

How do we make better futures? Challenged us to think about alternative futures and to believe that we can make a difference in it. What we imagine is what gets built. Events are not predestined and an uncertain future may be a good one because we get to change things. Future literacy consists of knowledge, awareness and confidence and it should be embedded at the school level.

He also mentioned the notion of the extended present of about 200 years which stretches out from your grand parents to you and then from you on to your grand children.

Wattson

Picture by Mark Simpkins

Also saw a design demo of the Wattson device and Holmes web interface from DIY Kyoto. (explanation). It was more or less a product pitch but for a very relevant and well designed product.

Edward Scotcher

The image of Africa as tremendously behind is no longer accurate. It is a place where mobile phones, internet cafés and WiFi are all around. Traditional forms of media are not trusted and web2.0’s market for information has a large potential to create transparency.

Personal site is Moamba.net
He mentions White African blog article.

Ushahidi and Sokwanele are two Google Maps initiatives to map actual events and increase awareness in regions in Africa. As time goes on only more people will have access.

Bryony Worthington - Sandbag

Politics broke the system of emissions trading and she wants to fix it. The system has removed the individual’s ability to make a difference. She wants to remove permits from the system, destroy unused ones and lower caps alltogether.

Sandbag.org.uk is an initiative to bring emissions trading into the pubblic domain

James Smith

Can software save the planet? He makes socially responsible software like Carbon Diet and Do the green thing.

Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava

Government Barcamp crossovers. Break up policy issues into Symptoms, Actions, Objectives, Issues, Outcomes and invite collaboration.

Mentions Polywonk

How do we show support to let politicians make the right decisions with confidence?

Ben Saunders

Final talk by Ben Saunders about arctic expeditions very inspiring with great stories and pictures illustrating some of the most difficult conditions on the planet.

“Nobody else is the authority on your potential.”

Picture by kokeshi

(Thanks Cristiano for your tireless photography.)

Image via Wikipedia

So, there has been quite a bit of rumours going around about the iPhone 3G and whatever else Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at WWDC2008. I heard so many stupid and ridiculous predictions that I felt the need to write my own thoughts out and do my own predictions for you to criticise in return.

Phone 3G

I think we can be sure of the iPhone 3G launch, although I doubt the name will be the “iPhone 3G”. The 3G name focusses a bit too much on the lack of 3G in the current model and doesn’t encompass all the new features I bet they will introduce next to the speed bump. What other new features they will exactly introduce is hard to say, but one thing is pretty clear to me: there won’t just be one iPhone model anymore. This might happen this year, or next year, but the iPhone won’t stay a lonely child.

iPhone Line

Like with the Mac and the iPod, Apple has always started with one, or a few, very strong products. The limited choice introduced in these products made it clear where these products were to be placed in the market, and in return people embraced these products for there apparant simplicity, which was to me enforced by the limited choice. In time though, the strategy Apple has had was to slowly expand a product into a line, adding more models that fit into the needs of certain focus groups of customers. See the iMac which in return spawned a few more generations of iMacs but also the Mac mini. But probably more prominent is the history of the iPod (now the iPod classic) and the introduction of the iPod Mini, Nano, Shuffle, Photo, Video, Touch, and eventually the iPhone.

For the iPhone I can really see Apple adopt the same strategy. They clearly have already committed to bring the next generation iPhone to more telcos in the rumours that have been going around, and the next step is to get those people who bought a first generation iPhone to eventually upgrade to something 2nd or 3rd gen that better fits their own personal needs. This might be a iPhone Pro that has GPS, 3G, bigger screen, and all business features any CEO might wish for, or it could just as well be a iPhone Nano that is a very simplified iPhone (no wifi, smaller screen) but only a fraction of the price.

Why it took so long to make the SDK

When you actually come to think of the iPhone as a line of products, it starts to make sense why it took Apple so long to make their iPhone SDK. I don’t think they spend all that time and all that effort into making sure all their future 3rd party apps will work fine on just 1 device. I think the SDK includes a lot off little magic bits that make sure that their apps can run on any of their short-term to-be-released devices, without any issues. I don’t know for sure, but it would make sense even for the SDK to have some integrated resolution independence to solve the problems of multiple devices with multiple resolutions like you get with mobile Java Apps.

Tablet

Once you consider a iPhone line and the possibility of an iPhone Pro, you might come to think of Apple releasing an Apple Tablet. As far as I’m concerned, one thing is clear: Apple won’t release a Tablet with plain OSX on it. With their history of the Newton, iPhone, and iPod Touch they have proven that touchscreen, handheld, portable devices require a different kind of user interaction to succeed. For exactly this reason the iPhone sports a nice “big-button”-userinterface and not something that requires a stylus.

So if we would see a tablet, would it use the iPhone OSX? I don’t know, but again it makes sense in retrospect to the long development time they have had on the iPhone SDK. Another question is: would it be equipped with a “slide out” keyboard?

Keyboard

Now the addition of a “real” keyboard is one thing I have heard quite a few times, especially in combination of the rumours of a “bigger” or “pro” iPhone. it is fairly simple to destroy this rumour with 1 fact: Apple doesn’t consider a real keyboard to be better. They said so at Macworld 2007 and the current iPhone sales figures have proven to them that they were right. Adding a keyboard to an iPhone Pro or a Tablet would be like they admitted that a keyboard was a pro feature. It isn’t. so it won’t be introduced in the iPhone line any time soon.

GPS

The final little rumour that has been going around is the GPS feature. Honestly I don’t know what Apple will do about this, because although it is obvious that having the option would be preferred, it has some caveats. The first option is to have an internal GPS as this will give the most integrated experience. Obviously the issue there would be the demise of the iPhone’s battery life, as GPS uses shitloads of power to run, let alone run constantly. The alternative would be to have a nice external Apple bluetooth GPS receiver, or possibly even support for 3rd party GPS receivers. I say possibly, as the reason I would see Apple make their own external dongle is because they can be a pain to set up to work with a phone. So if Apple controls all the pieces of the puzzle (as they like to) they might be able to make the experience more enjoyable.

Conclusion

There has been loads of speculations going around and I think I highlighted some of the few that annoyed me the most, and I hope I’ve been able to explain why I think they were utter bullshit. Obviously we will have to wait until the end of the keynote on the 9th of June to see if was even remotely close. Until then, let me know if you agree or totally disagree.

Play in the city

‘the street finds its own uses for things’
-William Gibson

Skateboarding started in empty pools

Flash mobs are mass gatherings coordinated by internet en cell phones. Friction between players and outsiders is fun.

Play is a widespread cultural phenomenon. Play is a generative process which is the foundation of creative processes.

LED throwies concept. non destructive grafiti. play with the object you have with you.
instructables for mario question blocks. and photographs of the blocks in the street.

processing power changes games.
data intensity vs. processing intensity
processing intensity is better

explore the model and possibility space of a game, the exploration is fun

games can communicate arguments just like other media. procedural rhetoric arguments.
September 12. news game.

introduction of processing power will introduce procedural rhetoric to street games

ufo findings of 1967 in england

make a possible future feelable

goes on to very nicely visualize a game based on camera surveillance in the public space.

(My notes in parentheses, as always.)

How mobility is changing the social web

1. Social objects
2. Social peripheral vision
3. Nodal points

Is there something more meaningful than one-dimensional pseudo-apps poking.

Social network theory does not explain what connects some particular people and not others.
Another tradition of theory explains why so many YASNS fail.
Knorr-Cetina etc. academic literature on sociality.

Same talk about social objects which shoudl be the foundation of your social network. A common thing to gather around which is of interest to multiple people.

Good webservices allow people to create social objects that add value.

Mobil edevices make it possible to caputre slices of reality that people couldn’t capture before. Flickr has solved the cain of pain in photgraphy. Mobile phones and mobile camera’s and text messages have greatly decreased the friction for people to participate. Video phones are doing hte same thing for video.

iPhone 2.0 has the same potential as the microscope had on the natural sciences. A new species and a new world which people were not aware existed before. Really usable and really programmable mobile devices may cause a similar breakthrough.
Barcodes and RFIDS enable connecting physical objects.

Define your verbs as a site and claim the interaction that way.
Person x verb x object
Assess new sites with new startups and new objects.

Theories:
Actions - Alexei N .Leontiev
Speech acts - John R. Searle
Communicatve acts - Jürgen Habermas
Utterances - Conversation Analysis

How to use this social theory in designing services.

Actions leave traces on the web. Som eactions are voluntary, others are auat-generated. Facebook newsfeed is a social peripheral vision.
Seeing what will happen next.

(e.g. Facebook friends feed: you see a picture at a certain party and next you see that two of your friends have broken up.)

No awareness of other people’s intentions make for bad decisions.
Gaming and 3D worlds have taken SPV to a much higher level out of necessity.
Kids growing up with these games are going to expect the same UI conventions while they are doing the same work they do.
Object lockers and activity aggregators.
Google has a tremendous scaleof aggregation. Exposes new questions.

Pattern recognition. There are lot of patterns in the information. Nodal points is from Idoru. Getting all data on somebody and being able to detect somebody’s future.
Q: What shoudl i be aware of that’s happening around me?
Feeding content back to you on mobile. How do we know which information to give back at what time? Minimize disturbanec, maximize utility.

Portals move from Pagerank to ‘Facerank’. Your proximity towards others with social proximity, physical proximity, shared taste, shared objects. Ultimate personal attunement. How is this algorithm going to work?
Algorithmize: social capital, want, need, know, talk.

1. What is your object?
2. What are your verbs?
3. What are your nodal points?

Q: How do you evade the need for commercial parties to control your experience, keep you in and squeeze you.
Users should be able to hack ontop of the data. Customize their view and be able to take their content and do with it whatever they want. And also federated models for interop.
(Horror scenario: When Google applies the interaction design of Las Vegas to our social experience.)

Q: Are activity streams the nodal points?
We.re getting infromation overflow. (LIke Friendfeed etc.) A nodeal point serves out the stuff relevant right then.

Q: What is Jaiku doing right now?
Jaiku in Death Valley. Developing Jaiku on App Engine port tok priority and after that new exciting features will be rolled out. And also working on real social features in Google.

(Live blogged notes. My notes in parentheses.)

North American cities are broken. Web development user experience is algorithmic. Wants to have better experiences for ubiquitous computing.

Influences:
?
Christopher Alexander
Bernard Rudofsky

The city arises from the bottom up. Worried about the city disappearing in large scale urban development. The repeating module of doom. Franchise cookie cutter city organization.

Junk space, privatized commons and non place. No order, no logic. Privatized commons.

Public spaces get wrapped up in commerciality and private law applies. No freedom of speech and assembly.

Public space is deliberately being made unpleasant. Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, and jittery. Surveillance, hard to get there, hard to stay there.

People withdraw from the city into their mobile devices. Technology gets blamed for it but they afordit but the environemnt itself sends us into the warm embrace of personal devices.

We’ve lost something and everybody feels it. Nostalgia is for suckers. Do not lamment about how things used to be better.

Rediscover the city in all its fun, organic ways relevant to the current age.

Ubiquitous: embedded, wireless, imperceeptible, multiple, postGUIU, depolyed in everyday life, vastly expanded user base

These technologies are going to engage literally everybody. Massive effects for interfaces and for scalabality. Everywary is already affecting the way that the city works.

Networked processors show up at every scale. At the scale of the body, at the scale of the room, street, city. biotelemetry transported from your body is captured and it becomes a social object. It has a lot to do with representation, and how we are in the world, a lot to do with culture and fashion.

(Body media)

Networked processors in the street. Traffic light countdown. Next tram coming up. Simple additions which improve the quality of life in the city for many many people.

Information about the city can e visualized differently. Sociality, poltiics and class can be visualized from transportation and other map represetations. Th einformation can be made available on demand. Why doesn’t TomTom do more of this?

Information processing dissolves in behaviour. The octopus in Hong Kong people found out that you do not need to touch your RFID card. You can put your bag over it in any way you want. Discovered interaction collectively by the people. THe complete transaction happens in a third of a second. A stations throughput can be increased tremendously and by extension the city.

Outputs at the building envelope in response to data. Architecture that is impossible without computation. Circulation and public trasnportation can be regulated based on real time demands. Mobility is a utiltiy. Cities which understand this are cities which are going to gain immensely.

(How to sell this? Dependent on computational sensing.)

Quaryable objects and objects in the city having open APIs. Build mashups from the information.

A city that responds to the bhaviour of its residents and other users in something like real time.

(Build Arduino sensers and actuators on an XMPP server.)

Constantly evolving and opens up the social space again.

Metropolitan life.
What is mapped is what can be sensed and sensed cheaply. (Important if you want to play with it yourself.) Sense of time and place which are different much longer and wider than would be possible without mobile communication.
The Big Now, to see what is happening everywhere right now.
The Long Here, objcets have a history, antecedents and a provenance
Differntial permissioning without effective recourse in real time. What do you do when access is denied? Code is law.
Rights of use and enjoyment. THese rights are an artefact of when it was impractical to track this use accurately. Under the new circumstances you can be billed for your actual use.
Technology is tailored to each city with its history and geography. Thre aren’t one sie fits all solutions. Congestion charge works well.

(Congestion charge is not in effect yet in NL because of widespread stupidity.)

How do you cope with exploits and attacks of the system. emergent behaviour which is unpredictable.

a HOWTO for the real-time city:
need a practicle, livable, humane and possible city

1. build beautiful seams with apis in hardware and software
2. underspecify as designers, cannot predict everything, otherwise they will be brittle and won’t be an utility
3. You should go from flâneur to consumer to user, somebody who engages and makes his own personal experience of the city.

Ambient informatics will help us make better choices but awareness cuts both ways. Entirely new behaviours will emerge. (Little Brother style subversion.) Are we going to get passive consumerism, or genuine read write urbanism?

The answer is up to us as designers, consumers and citizens.

Register at the site and have fun. I myself unfortunately won’t make it but many of the other usual suspects (and I hope some new faces) will be present.

It seems the position is already filled by people probably more qualified than myself, but maybe some other notable person is looking for a similar curator.

What makes me think I’m qualified? I’m curious and I read voraciously, I speak a smattering of languages, have competencies and interests in the alpha, beta and gamma sciences, can learn complicated stuff and explain it simply and clearly, am quite capable with a computer and most new media and I don’t mind going out and getting physically into people’s faces for that contact or deal.

Per assignment contract also negotiable. Interested parties can contact me on alper at this domain.

Some speculate that Microsoft will try to install a more take-over friendly board in June. Some speculate that Microsoft is letting Yahoo’ stock fall so they can retry later at a better price.

Both of these are incomplete speculations; after all, if the offer is off the table, how does microsoft install a new board? And how does a dip in yahoo’s stock price help microsoft? After all, if they put the offer back on the table, the stock prices will immediately rise again.

The answer to both of those questions might be the following idea, which so far I haven’t seen on any blogs:

In the movies, the CIA sometimes has ‘front companies’ - companies secretly owned by the CIA through a long line of other front companies and individuals, for business. The idea is not totally unheard of; plenty of corporations are actually conglomerates of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of smaller (but very real) companies. if you were to map out the ownership of all those subcompanies it would make quite a picture.

Microsoft can have many front companies if it wants. And those front companies can buy yahoo stock. At its current lowered price. Microsoft is also rumoured to be behind SCO’s attack on Linux; its far less of a leap to consider microsoft leaning on friendly companies to buy some yahoo stock as well.

Because at the end of the day, buying yahoo is all about controlling some stock. The more stock microsoft controls (either through front companies or through friends), the less of a percentage of the rest of the yahoo-stock-owning world needs to be convinced that microsoft is the future for Yahoo. The stock holders decide the board. For hostile takeovers, Microsoft needs to control more than 50% of the stock. That’s a lot easier to get to if 25% of all yahoo stock is already under your control.

I’m not streetwise enough in the finance sector to actually figure out if microsoft has front companies and if those are buying yahoo stock right now. However, if you have a vested interest in the Microhoo future, that’s where I’d look to see if Microsoft threw in the towel or if its just switching tactics.

So I got to see Iron Man last friday with a load of movie buffs/comic geeks, and even though I am not that much of a comic geek, which would make this look like yet another comic book adaptation in the first place, but I….LOVED…. IT!!!!

Iron Man is a funny, well thought out movie, which happens to stay way clear of many of the common comic book interpretation mistakes that Hollywood has made in the past. Most of all they made sure that stuff doesn’t like too much like it was all done in CGI, which for me made the movie so much more believable

The actors were very well picked (Robert Downey Junior as Tony Stark/Iron Man and Jeff Bridges as his mentor) but I don’t think they will stand up against Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as The Joker in the upcoming The Dark Knight movie.

Iron Man wasn’t the best movie though that I’d ever seen, but looking back at movies like Spiderman 2 and 3 this is just so much in a different league, so go and watch it!.

TIP: Make sure to stay seated until past the credits for a little but very important extra!

Stopbadware is designed to stop spammers and other evildoers online, but in doing so it is causing a lot of collateral damage and blocking a site such as ours which has been mostly spamfree for most of the time.
This is a situation where the cure is worse than the pain. An arbitrary and unmotivated verdict is being cast without our awareness and there is very little we can do about it. Kafka could not have written this as well and even though rules of due process have been greatly relaxed in the USA, we didn’t expect the same low standards to be applied to our website.

We have a number of issues with the stopbadware.org process:

1. We are blocked arbitrarily, in the reports posted on stopbadware.org not once does it mention which parts of our website were in question and what they were guilty of. Stopbadware lists Google as the reason we are blocked and Google says it gets the lists from Stopbadware, so we are in an infinite loop. Suppose I have a very big content filled site, how am I supposed to find the offending links without decent reports?
   And if those reports are a work in progress, how about not blocking sites until you have your operation in order? We think we have fixed the problem as far as Four Starters is concerned, but without detailed violation descriptions, we won’t know for sure. I have written a detailed complaint to the stopbadware Google Group.
2. Having fixed any violations we could find ourselves, we have asked our site to be reviewed for reinclusion but this has taken days already without any word. Getting on this blacklist seems extremely easy, but getting out is somewhat more difficult. We are annoyed that Four Starters is unreachable (our traffic is in the basement), but imagine that this is your business’s website that’s in the doghouse.
3. Blocking is also unilateral without notification to us (we had to hear it from people sending us the screenshot) and without possibility for appeal. Seeing as getting off the list is so difficult and slow, the possibility of appeal should reasonably be an option.
4. Blocking a site does not solve any real problem. For phishing sites it may be somewhat reasonable, but in our case the report does not even say that we host badware, no it says that we link to sites which may host badware. Blocking us on that ground seems like shooting a nuke at a butterfly.
   If people do not want to read our site, give them the choice. Firefox does no such thing and cedes the entire site to the spammers.
5. Lastly I do not recognize that badware is a problem, at least not for people who are visiting our site. Most people reading Four Starters have a Mac or Linux based system and/or are computer savvy enough never to go to the bad parts of the internet. So we are being punished because a large part of the internet is stupid. Again this does not strike me to be a sound principle to run a blacklisting operation.

Stopbadware tries to reach a noble goal but currently it is striking out too broadly and in doing so it is doing more harm than good. Furthermore it does this based on an authority which I do not recognize using a process which is broken. If arbitrarily gagging sites is what it takes to fight spam, then maybe it’s not worth it.

I hope that in the following days our ban is lifted and you can read what I have written here.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

Anyway, this week I read this great article on elevators: “Up And Then Down”. One part in it was particularly enlightening:

Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. […] In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. […] Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

This explains many interactions I have had with elevators over the course of my life where this button never worked and where I always wanted it to work, immediately. I hadn’t really considered this explanation blaming it mostly on shoddy engineering or interface design—which it of course also is.

About the culture of riding an elevator and the politeness norms, I think most of those are lost on the Dutch. But that’s another story.

Fixed identity

A key point in the story is how cellular phone numbers provide a fixed piece of identity for people in societies where many things are usually unclear and people are on the move.

Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.

This is pointed out as a good thing enabling people in developing countries to have the same Just In Time moments as we here have been used to for a while. We generally use them to organize meetings more efficiently and it increases our effectivity and up to dateness.
The kind of information people lower on the pyramid need to exchange is usually much more vital and so of a larger relative worth. Access to that information leads to direct and large increases in their income, wellbeing and general control of their lives. The article is packed with examples and numbers.

Virtualized SIM

Many people use their fixed identity as an enabler for transactions, but for certain transactions a requirement could be the ability to shed your identity easily, take a new name and move shop to a different place.

For instance for the prostitutes advertised in cell phone booths around the world from the article:

The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Those people do not want a fixed identity that is traceable to a single account. A combination of the anonymity of the pay phone and the freedom of the cellular phone may be useful. Maybe not only for illicit purposes, but also for people who do not want to be tied to a single telco or need some other increased flexibility.

Innovations that help people take on multiple mobile identities are already springing up with multi-band multi-SIM phones, not only for business travellers but also used by residents of developing countries where plans have large disparities for different use cases.

This makes you wonder if the whole concept of the SIM-card, the modern day passport of the mobile citizen could not be completely virtualized. Instead of a phone with multiple SIMs inside, it could contain a virtual SIM driver that communicates with a server and retrieves appropriate SIM images as needed by usage, location an cost efficiency.

Fortunately this is not going to be necessary because freedom is being effectuated by flat rate data plans and VOIP clients on various phones (see for instance Fring). But I’m still waiting for the moment that I can buy a generic device and get a simple plan to connect it to the cloud wherever, whenever.

And secondly the trailer for FIFA Street 3 which is a jaw dropping mix of tricking and street soccer. The site for the game: fifastreet3.com is a pretty impressive but mostly confusing and useless display of Flash, 3D and gaming.

I do that one hand backflip (macaco as it is called in capoeira) pretty well; hell I’m doing one on this picture, but I’ve never tried kicking a ball with it.

One of these was the Next Web conference, a great startup event where a lot of interesting people from the European and American startup scene were present. The conference was complicated for me slightly because Eelke and I volunteered to shoot a report of it for Frankwatching, one of the Netherlands’ leading Web 2.0 blogs.

The report is in Dutch but there are some choice bits of English interview in there, especially a Q&A with Robert Scoble which cuts pretty much to the essence of what he told us at The Next Web. It is up at Vimeo:

Frankwatching @ The Next Web 2008 from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

I’ve never done something like this before, but I’ve wanted to for a long time. This was a great opportunity. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, very tiring and I learned a lot. I have a lot more respect for (video)journalists now.
I expect to do more with video in the future especially for travelblogging and ambient recording and I’m thinking of getting a Flip.

The Next Web was a great conference with a spectacular ambience fitting the growing European startup scene. I didn’t hear a lot of new stuff from many speakers. I like my speakers in depth, on the edge and interdisciplinary because I learn the most from those. But maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

We had a lot of fun making this movie:

Tipit.to Startup Pitch (English) from Alper �ugun
This is a rough cut, we’ll put up a better version during the course of the week.

So if you like it and want to help us, you can vote for us at pitchstorm.tv. There’s a poll on the page but you can only vote after you register in the box on the top. The registration sends a confirmation mail which can take some time. Once you get that, you can login and cast your vote.

Thanks and see you at the Next Web!

What Zemanta does is fairly simple, which is probably why it’s such a great tool. Zemanta offers a plugin for Firefox that recognizes when people are editing a Wordpress, Blogger, or TypePad blogpost. On these platforms Zemanta then adds a few features to the interface, enabling people to easily add images, articles, links and tags to their blog post just by clicking the suggestions made by Zemanta.com.

The Zemanta Interface (click for large view)

To set an example, this blog post has been enhanced with the help of Zemanta. I wrote the article and in the end just clicked on the things I wanted to add in the interface, like the links for Wordpress and Seedcamp, the images, and the “other articles” at the bottom.

Zemanta’s business model is to eventually be able to sell the links shown in the suggestion engine to third parties, going for a kind of AdWords model where the adds might be in the blog post directly. It is a difficult question to answer if this will eventually become more of an annoyance than a service, but for now I think the signal to noise ratio of the suggestions is nothing to complain about.

For now Zemanta is only available as a Firefox plugin, but more platforms will be supported in the feature.

Still something was missing: a hard separation of the life/work boundary —knowing myself, who am I kidding?— and seeing other people during the day. Thus started the quest for an office. Eelke also freelancing and just back from Berlin wanted to split an office. With two people as a start and open to add more people and co-workers as space allows, this could be pretty cool.

I have been calling various people on and off for the last two months in the Delft area. Arranging office space is a full time job by itself. There aren’t many opportunities around here and we are quite picky which makes for a difficult search.

We don’t need much it has to be cheap, near or in city center, with internet, electricity, and a lock on the door. We don’t need most of the traditional office amenities, like a receptionist, telephone lines, decent furnishing, in house catering, and parking spaces. This should be easy, right?

Bacinol

Bacinol, picture by Didier Brouwers

Interior of Bacinol, office of Vizi

There is an old industrial building at the skirts of city center called Bacinol which is a hotbed of young and creative entrepeneurs. Its lease is also very low which would have made it pretty awesome. Unfortunately and predictably it is completely full.

At the end of the year it is going to be demolished because of the construction of a railway tunnel. A part of the tenants are going to move to a building on the other end of city center at Hooikade 13. There is a severe lack of space in Delft for the kind of people that Bacinol caters for, tearing it down and replacing it by a building similar in size does not solve anything.

Last week there was a discussion at Bacinol about the need for creative spaces and the prospective offers there will be. There seems to be some stuff happening but most of it is bureaucratic and at least one year out, if not much more. One of the conclusions was that there is a great need for temporary (i.e. risky) lease constructions for the modern networked business that is happening now. Most of the people I talked to were too mired in bureaucracy or their own problems, that I’m not expecting any real solutions to come out of it.

Traditional corporate

We also hit some of the traditional avenues just to see what prices are about like. Anything via conventional realtors in the city center is priced ridiculously. It boggles the mind and tells you how much of a markup you are paying on your services just to be able to visit posh city center offices.

There are corporate agglomeration buildings on various locations outside of town. Besides being outside of town, these building offer all the traditional office amenities we don’t need, are quite expensive and are pretty much all full as well.

We hit one likely location in city center, which looked like it could have been interesting, but we were then snagged by an archaic Dutch arrangement for the lease of office space. Offices are usually let according to a 5+5 years contract. Which means you enter a contract to lease the space for five years and after those five years are over, you are allowed the option to lease it for another five years. Ejecting out of the contract befor the five years are over, is difficult. We could try to enter into a contract as a limited liability company and deflate that when we wanted out, but I think that is called bankrupcy fraud.
This is of course great for real estate owners who are practically guaranteed a solid lease for at least five years and it probably is also great for shopkeepers who want to stay in one place. It’s not so great for the here today gone tomorrow creative internet business we are in.

Alternatives

One of the alternatives we have not fully explored yet is to take office in an anti-squat building. This seems ideal from a space and cost perspective. We do not really need the long term security. Many people say an offer ‘is only valid until the end of the year’ which is plenty long as far as I’m concerned. I’m willing to take office somewhere for as short as six weeks.

We had such a brief lease the week before last when we spent two days Pascalle her old room which Eelke had furnished as a temporary office:

For just two days it still had the vibe of an office, a goto place for work related stuff and an affirmation of the reasons we are looking for an office.

The guy who lets out Bacinol has several other offices around town, where he caters to young starting technology companies. In fact he is just about the only person in Delft who does. I called him again an he’d just got an empty space of 18m2 at the end of the van Leeuwenhoeksingel (bordering the Zuidwal). This week I took a look at it and it seemed to fit our bill pretty well. A bit small, but it will do for now.

So we will probably sign the lease and move in next week.

Elsewhere

How is this situation elsewhere? I know space in Berlin is pretty cheap that you can get awesome office in the city center affordably. I hear that the UK is rife with archaic claptrap when it comes to regulations and lease agreements.
How are situations in let’s say Denmark or the US?

I consume a lot of media. Books, music, news, internet radio, audio and video podcasts, movies, and most importantly: television series. I know that at least Reinier shares this interest in TV series with me (just ask him about Firefly and he won’t shut up) so I decided to give a write-up of one of the series that has kept me busy the last few weeks.

Life on Mars

Life on Mars is a 16 episode (2 seasons) BBC drama about Sam Tyler (played by John Simm), a Detective Chief Inspector for the Manchester Metropolitan Police, who has an accident and wakes up in 1973. The big question is if he is in a coma and dreaming it, if he is dead, or if he travelled through time.

Back in 1973 he joins the force as a detective inspector and finds that he has trouble fitting in. His boss, Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister) is an alcoholic, racist, sexist, homophobe that never learned to do an investigation by the book. This makes stuff very interesting for the viewer with Sam and Gene often either punching each other or co-punching another. Not to mention the weird hair cuts and cloths to add to the effect of the viewer wondering wether Sam really ended up on Mars.

What I personally like about this series is that it is only 16 episodes of ~52 minutes, while still feeling as a complete and finished story. I mean, the secret of any good ending is to both end the story properly while still leaving some things to fill in to the viewer. Most series fail on this and betray the viewer by either not finishing the story or making the end to weird, but Life On Mars is quite the contrary. It is not surprising therefore that a spinoff series “Ashes to Ashes” has been taken up and is now being aired on the BBC.

Both seasons of Life on Mars are now available on DVD and in the UK iTunes Store (sorry, no iTunes tv-series in The Netherlands yet). I expect “Ashes to Ashes” to become a similar success and will maybe do a write-up of that later this year. For now I end my review with this interesting and funny snippet of video from the series where Sam is having one of his hallucinations and imagines himself in a 70’s children tv show.

Picture by Gertrud K. under a Creative Commons license

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The program has no real big names and looks very European. I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised and to see what makes a European perspective. I’m most interested in the 2 minute pitches for the startup rally, so I will probably be reporting on those. In startups I’ll be looking for added value, originality and transnational ambition.

I’m a little bit disappointed that the iPhone SDK does not allow you to write software that runs in the background. Only apple’s own software (such as iTunes, which obviously continues to run even when you are not browsing iTunes on your iPhone) has that privilege. Many words have been written about this limitation. That last link in particular sparked my imagination.

Instead of reflecting on the fairness of the background thing, I thought I’d dive into the kind of application you could write if you could run your iPhone software in the background. A bunch of app ideas after the fold!

The basic ingredients

The iPhone has a little more hardware than most phones. Just in case you didn’t know about them, these are the capabilities of the phone that are used in the app ideas:

• It’s a phone, so I presume it’s almost always in your pocket or at least nearby.
• There’s a gyroscope in there, measuring the way it is currently located. It knows if the phone is being shaken, if it lies on its side, straight up, etcetera.
• The iPhone has GSM, bluetooth and WiFi support, and should be able to analyse signal strength for all of those.
• All iPhones have a data connection which can be established quickly.
• The iPhone knows your contact list, your agenda, and, via its data capabilities, it can pluck information about your friends on websites like jaiku from the web.
• It has a microphone and a photo camera, not covered by a lens cap.

Sleep tracker

Using a combination of pattern recognition, the gyroscope, and light intensity as measured by the iPhone’s camera, it should be easy to determine when the iPhone’s user is sleeping. A track record of your sleeping time can be useful for lots of things.

Step Counter

I bought my mother a step counter for christmas. It’s a simple little device that you clip to your belt. It just counts how many steps you make while wearing it. The iPhone could do the same thing by using the gyroscope, and it could also recognize other exercise patterns, such as bicycling and walking stairs. This is not just a novelty: Recent research shows that believing you are doing exercise is a crucial factor in losing weight. Hotel Maids (who run half a marathon each day) who did not consider their daily work routine as exercise remained fat, whereas those of that set who were told by a nutritionist that they were spending lots of calories during work hours got thinner. If you do any amount of walking for your job, this would help. No one wants to stick a step counter to their belt. But, an iPhone in your pocket is cool.

Presence

Everyone and their uncle already covered this so I’ll be brief: Using information from cell towers and local WiFi access points, the phone knows where you are and can upload this to services like fire eagle so that your friends know where you are. The iPhone can also tell you about nearby events and nearby friends.

Calculate your interruption tolerance

One big issue with presence info is that a lot of the things you can do with that involve ‘push notification’ - the iPhone has to somehow get your attention to tell you about a friend’s twitter, or that a friend is nearby, or that the store you are walking past is having a sale on an item you need. Sometimes (actually, often) you are in a hurry and such interruptions are only annoying distractions. I have in fact turned off jaiku notifications because the times when I welcome these interruptions are rare, and most messages aren’t urgent anyway.

The iPhone can help here. Between analysing your gait and knowing your agenda it should be possible to make a good guess as to how open to interruptions you are. If I’m just walking around, wasting some time before a meeting (the iPhone knows because it realizes I’m very close to the meeting location but I’m 20 minutes early, for example), I would welcome just about any trivial detail. On the other hand, if I’m near my meeting location, 10 minutes late, and I seem to be jogging, the last thing I need is a message informing me what Alper is having for lunch.

Couch Potato defender

By analysing your position and your location around the house (which may require multiple stationary bluetooth devices or two WiFi connections to triangulate to that precision), it can figure out that you are watching TV. By interfacing with the channel guide it can figure out what you are watching and when the show is over. TV can suck you back in, and before you know it you’ve spent 3 hours watching TV when you only meant to spend one. By turning off the TV right after your show is over, it helps you avoid such things. There would have to be some way to turn off the TV via the local network which as far as I know doesn’t exist just yet. A WiFi remote control? Even without that feature it can just beep at you that you are exceeding the amount of time you intended to spend in front of the TV.

Smarter Alarms

In the same vein as the interruption intolerance program, alarms can be made a lot smarter. If you are already at your meeting location, you don’t need a loud alarm. If on the other hand you are still clearly 2 hours away from your destination, for example because of an unforeseen traffic jam or delayed trains, the alarm should beep you earlier than usual and inform you of your transportation options. I know Alper was thinking about a website to help you carpool or avoid traffic and use the train instead if its particularly bad. Complete integration with your agenda and your current location via the iPhone would be even cooler.

So why can’t you do background apps

The big concerns about allowing apps to keep running in the background is battery, and phone resources. I used to own a smartphone and if you load it down with enough fancy programs, at some point your phone won’t last a day on a full charge, and apps that used to be speedy slow down to a crawl. Invariably, the advice given by the smartphone’s manufacturer is to clean it out, or even reset it entirely. That’s because most smartphones don’t have a good way to manage running processes, and too many gimmicky things are chewing up too many processor cycles.

Apple wants to avoid this from happening, and not allowing background apps at all (along with vetting every application that you release via your online store) is a quick way to accomplish it.

That doesn’t mean the problem cannot be solved in a different way. You can sandbox applications, giving them only (very) limited access to the phone’s resources, accounted for on an hourly basis, for example. A background app that eats about 5 seconds of full power CPU time every 2 hours doesn’t do much harm. You can also allow apps to exceed the limits (or even allow them to go into the background in the first place) after asking the user. In order to avoid the ‘endless security popups’ fiasco that Microsoft Vista suffers from, you can hide an option to even allow apps to ask in the first place somewhere deep in the settings. Geeks will find it, and when mere mortals see the cool things you can do with background apps, the rest will follow.

Fortunately, there is such a thing as a roadmap. Just like it seems reasonable to believe that the iPhone was always meant to have an SDK, but that it is being rolled out in phases, there is no proof that apple has already decided that background apps will never happen. Perhaps they want a few more months to get it right. Releasing new features over time is after all a much better idea compared to toiling away for years and then releasing it all in one go.

Consider this post a fine reason to start asking for an extension to the iPhone SDK, just in case this isn’t on apple’s roadmap, in other words!

Picture by Alper

This pretty much rules out a client such as the Jaiku mobile client which sends your status updates to a server and gets your buddies’ statuses. But yes there will be ton of useful applications nevertheless.

The single app model reminds me somewhat of my old Palm Vx which also had the concept of a single foreground app. It still is one of the most usable handheld devices I have used with loads of applications available for it. I used it intensively as the wear and tear on the picture probably shows.

Of course this was before the age of connectivity, so a background app could not have done much anyway and later versions of the Palm OS allowed for MP3 playback in the background while you were doing other things.

Palm is all but forgotten now, let’s see how the iPhone does.

Last year also marked the start of The Next Web weblog which is a Dutch based startup blog by the guys of Fleck and Wakoopa based in Amsterdam.

Four Starters had come to occupy much of the mission of a startup weblog mostly out of coincidence. Three quarters of our editors have always had a strong interest and some participation in startups. That and us being prolific bloggers, made us a de facto startup blog. This isn’t just true for startups, but many of us also have a strong interest in web development, microformats and photography.

Having pushed ourselves into the corner of startup blog, we felt halfway obliged to cater to the audience we got that way and writing this blog began to feel more and more like work. Especially because we wanted our writing to pass the high standards of quality we would like to read ourselves and not play the quantity/linkdump game some other blogs pass off as content.

Added to that is the fact that our part-time commitment cannot compete with more professional weblogs nor should it strive to do so. A weblog like The Next Web has a broad strategy and employs people to produce content for it.

Relaunch

So we have decided to go back to the core of Four Starters, which is a group of friends combining their English language blogs to write about stuff they think is cool or cool stuff they have done.

That way we will be writing about more different stuff more frequently and try to show our view and share our opinions on stuff on the internet. Because our interests are still aligned heavily with startups and events, expect to see more of that but also more about photography, programming, music, art and other topics (and I hope strong opinion).

Let us know what you think of this change of direction and what you would like us to write about. We have more than 150 subscribers and we feel we’re obliged something to you for the attention you are giving us.

The conversation sparked by the writing has always been one of the highpoints of this blog so anything which would continue that, would be great.

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either �0.79 or �0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.

Price Discrimination

Price discrimination like discounts, prize draws and beta programs is a very common tool for companies, and especially very powerful to small independent developers. Although price “discrimination” might sound like a “bad” thing it is often considered a good thing for business and customers, allowing the developers to bootstrap a community around their products, and enabling customers to get a financial incentive to try out the product in the first place.

The unique distribution model posed by Apple makes me wonder if these things would still be possible. I did a quick dig on the Apple iPhone Developer Centre website and couldn’t find much more info besides “you set the price, and we take 30%”. How would a developer give away a limited amount of his application for a discounted price? How would a software house be able to give away a free copy of their software to a “price draw winner”? How would one give special discount to their own employees? Most of all, I think these potential problems would disable any initiatives like MacHeist unless they were initiated by Apple themselves.

Beta Testing and Custom Build Software

Some of the above questions involve “limited distribution” to certain people. This might sound very uncommon but is in fact a very common practice. One of the most popular ones is possibly the idea of giving out Beta copies to a selected few. This doesn’t seem possible at the moment with the iPhone SDK, making development much more boring. A second thing is custom build applications for business to business. Imagine a small software house wanting to build a custom version of their own software for their business customers, enabling full integration with their existing software. In the current iPhone deployment model, any software becomes instantly “public”.

It seems there are some unanswered questions about the iPhone application distribution model and its implications and we will have to wait for the iPhone2.0 software to ship in June to know the answers. Still, it is wise to keep in mind that you might want to change your development cycle accordingly to fit Apple’s needs.

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

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.

I met Jeroen at last year’s Reboot and I couldn’t miss this interesting and affordable event right in my backyard.

Design research in branding

Andr� Weenink of design firm Booreiland was the first presenter and he presented his findings on research in design branding by applying generative techniques.

His research forced on getting insight into the user experience of customers of Sissy Boy and he did this by having a representative set of customers of the company create artefacts that they thought were Sissy Boy.

There are several techniques to do design research: question customers with interviews, questionnaires or other means, observe customers in construed or natural surroundings and deduce principles from their behaviour. Andr� opted for a third technique to let his participants create their ideal vision and in doing so communicate with their experience.

The things that were generated were diaries, graphics, collages and other objects in workshops with the selected customers. From the stuff that was created principles and patterns were deduced by Andr� which he then translated in a brand identity and a visual vocabulary that could be used by Sissy Boy in their future communications.

The advantages of these generative techniques are that they are fun, they allow for empathy with the user and co-creation with users and different departments of the company. The result is not a boring report which is thrown over the fence but a rich set of human created data.

Downsides are that it is an intensive process involving a lot of effort and creating a lot of material that needs to be synthesized. The reach is limited by the selection of the number of people, physical presence required for some steps and no use of online facilities.

One of the questions that Andr� asked the audience was how to use online means within a process such as this. This discussion quickly strayed to various designers being very concerned by the integrity of their design process and the influence of the designer and the various departments in the company on the end product.

Generative techniques in interaction design

I think it is a more interesting question to ask how to use generative techniques in interaction design for the web. A lot of design for the web uses the first two techniques, question and observe, to gain insight into the requirements and wishes of their users. Users are observed and then interaction designers, web designers and developers fit what they have seen into the structures they are familiar with.
I haven’t heard of generative techniques being applied so much. Having users create their ideal vision of a website seem to me to be an opportunity to create websites which are better attuned to users’ wishes and open to free and fun interaction.

A generative technique for webdesign would be to ask users what they would like a website to do for them. So what kind of a web experience would users design if they could do it themselves? I think the results of such a workshop with prospective users could be very interesting and revealing. Especially because users are in no way constrained by technical feasability and only somewhat by pre-existing concepts.

Probably none of the resulting concepts could be created outright but the design synthesis of those user wishes would probably result in a website that is better attuned to users and more fun for them to use. Users increasingly want to make their own web experiences and at least have a say in them. Most websites currently are very boring and constrain themselves to what is easy to create in rails. I think this is a gap that should be bridged.

Flash and HTML, tips for a happy marriage

Bob Corporaal showed that since Flash8 the external interface and javascript bridge part enable reliable and direct communication between Flash and the DOM. He then proceeded to show how you can use communication with javascript to solve gross deficiencies in Flash.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

I see how the techniques he demonstrated fix real problems but mostly these are problems not worth having. Flash is so ridiculously crippled that by using it you break pretty much everything: text selection, scolling, text resizing to name just a few extremely basic features which are missing in Flash. By talking to the DOM it is possible to fix these problems piecemeal but you can never be sure you’ve got every one of them. Most regular Flash developers don’t even bother with fixing the basic stuff let alone make an accessible and progressively enhanced version. To sum it up: things which are not easy to do in your platform are essentially absent.

Mark Wubben then showed an example of progressive enhancement using Flash and sIFR to display custom fonts on pages. Mark himself admits that it is a hack and should be used sparingly, but at least he takes care to have the Flash break as few things as possible. Web fonts are already working in current builds of Safari and Opera and display any font you like using native rendering. There is some discussion going on about font piracy but that is mostly academic.

IC Pixel Art

Arjan Westerdiep gave a presentation on how he creates pixelart. You can see some of his work on his site Drububu.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

Curious was that he had written a C program to calculate the differences between subsequent frames of his animations to save on space so as not to use Quicktime. I am pretty sure that Quicktime with most current codecs already implements its own highly optimized version of differential image compression or motion compensated video encoding but this presentation was not really for asking about whys.

Why do people create?

Gert Hans Berghuis from internet firm Fabrique talked about the rationales for user generated content.

He listed a number of reasons to the question: Why do people generate content?

• because they need something
• because of curiosity
• to come to terms with emotions
• to come to terms with their surroundings
• to do good, to contribute
• for recognition
• to be part of a group or greater whole
• to show off knowledge/skills
• to reflect
• to make money

This is a pretty generic list of motivations which can be used to explain many actions including why people create works.

He also discussed intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. It is believed that adding an extrinsic motivation for something for which there was an intrinsic motivation, kills the intrinsic part. Some sites which rely on crowdsourcing have tried to incorporate some sort of revenue sharing to keep the users happy, but these systems both destroy intrinsic motivation and stimulate gaming the rules.

I think anybody creating content on a website should keep in mind that they are in fact sharecropping on somebody else’s land and they have hardly any standing if the owner of the lands decides to sell it or make broad sweeping changes. Sites usually try to make their users happy, but sometimes different motivations can take over. Users have the single recourse of taking their activities elsewhere, though currently it is the question if they can take their data with them.

That session was the last after which the event was concluded with drinks and dinner.

The UX Cocktail Hours are a networking event for the IA and IxD crowds frequented by tremendously nice and knowledgeable people. As an aspiring experience professional it’s great to get to know them and pick their brain.

Every session is hosted by a company who get the chance to present their experience practice and various things are presented. I must say I pretty much always take home something which I use or refer to later on (it’s nice like that).
Philips showed a lot of stuff about how the go about designing experiences and we got to see the process how they developed a competing MP3 player to the iPod which was pretty interesting (not to mention revealing).

The next session is at TomTom and as I have a more than passing interest in transit data, I think that could be very interesting indeed.

Last week we saw the launch of Tipit.to, the Dutch startup by Reinier, Jeroen and Alper. Tipit is a webservice that allows anyone to give a small tip (starting at 1 cent) to anyone. Tips are aggregated before payed and a similar system is used for payout. This makes it way more easier to pay a tip using Tipit than having to go through the PayPal process for every 10 cents you want to pay someone.

Why tips?

So why would you leave tips? Well honestly there are numerous reasons, but I always like to think about it as a good anti-advertisement measure. Most sites show Google Ads simply because the income they get from it pay for the server bills, which doesn’t mean they feel happy to have to show their users advertisement. Instead, a Tipit button on a website could allow users to make simple and easy donations, eliminating the need of advertisement.

Creative uses

There are obviously other reasons to have a tipjar besides preventing advertisements, and since the launch last week we have already seen a few uses that were pretty creative. The most notable is Lauren, who’s house burned down and is now looking for some money to get his life back on track (photos and videos here, or tip him here).

How to join?

Setting up your own tipjar is pretty easy, just go to Tipit.to, sign up, create a tipjar, and place the nice button on your site. In contrary to other services like Paypal they don’t need an awful lot of info about you before you can set up an account, and in contrary to services like TipJoy they pay out real money.

Is tipping the future?

I personally think we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I think we all hate to see them around anyway. Add on top of this that many people are starting to feel more and more invested in the sites they use day in and day out (see Flickr users vs the Yahoo/MS news), and tipping is definitely going to be hot in 2008.

I implemented some fixes and extra functionality both in hAvatar and in hKit so the entire page renders correctly now. One important update is that it now correctly finds the representative hCard for a page when there are multiple hCards.

That being done I release a new version 0.3 as an archive and into the mercurial repository.

Get it like this:
hg clone static-http://alper.nl/hg/havatar/

Microformats wiki page

The avatar on this page is not displayed using this plugin because of some obscure Solaris bug.

For the coworking space we want to have a 20-25m2 office (space to be negotiated) in Delft’s center where we can both go every day to keep our semblance of office hours, exchange ideas and create a space where people can find us.

I’m aiming for 2-4 people in the office to start with, preferrably with some fixed people but with some flex spaces as well. If that goes well, we can always expand.

If you know of anything suitable or if you are interested in joining us get in touch. We think it can be a lot of fun and add to our creativity and productivity.

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:

To summarize briefly: Roomware is a piece of middleware to facilitate the running of software in a physical space. This most directly involves Bluetooth and RFID like applications which by their nature are limited to a specific area.

You set up a Roomware server and it handles the communication to and from the devices. My small project for the afternoon (we had some ideas for projects which would have been hard to finish) was making a badge clubs can put on their website to show who are in the club at a given moment. With the messaging functionality that was developed the same afternoon, it would even be possible to send your friends at a club messages.

Technically simple, the concept demonstrates how close physical computing has become. The Roomware server does a great job removes the heavy lifting in interfacing with libraries for Bluetooth and RFID.

A great next step would be to add an XMPP layer on top of the roomware server. This way you could theoretically connect your Adium to some clubs of your choice, and see people entering and leaving in your buddy list and even message them.

The only problem is what to use as a unique identifier as your Bluetooth name. I’m a proponent of using a URL but a lot of people do something like their Hyves username or their Twitter name. Fortunately this distinction is mostly blurred using Google’s new Social Graph service.

I like the vibe of devhouses and building something in a strict time limit, but working solo puts limits on your reach. Next time it would be great to work in a team and build something as a group.

I hadn’t been at the OpenCoffee meetup here in London since probably June or July, as at a certain moment you know everyone. As I wasn’t looking for an investment, or to invest, or to work for some of the companies, explaining why I was there was starting to get harder by the day.

A few weeks ago though, some people wondered if I was coming to the OpenCoffee, and so I decided to give it a try again. It was a refreshing encounter as the crowd seems to have changed a lot. The venue is still the horrible 5th floor cafe in the Picadilly Waterstones, and the size of the crowd has slightly diminished, but still there seemed to be a strong vibe of the entrepreneurial spirit.

I talked to the guys from Veedow a few days before the OpenCoffee already. Their product is a social shopping portal that I haven’t really played with yet. I have always been a bit skeptical about products which sound too much like other products I know, but these guys actually seem to have a real business model and the funds to work it out.

Lastly I talked to Pete Smith of SongKick who contacted me because I talked to his colleague about half a year ago. their product is now a real product and up there for all of you to try out. The idea? “Track concerts and song dates of you favorite bands”. The business model? A bit unclear at the moment but probably affiliate deals and such.

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.

The principle is simple. If you comment somewhere and you leave behind a URL (be it a blog one or an OpenID) and we can follow that URL and find a representative hCard with associated picture for you, it means we can present that picture as your avatar.

It works just as well as most avatar standards out there, it’s distributed and built on top of a proven microformat and gives people a benefit for publishing an hCard on their blog or elsewhere.

Development

Writing that plugin didn’t prove to be too difficult. Integrating Drew McLellan’s hKit library into Wordpress was a bit harder due to my limited experience with PHP and its bizarre quirks.

That hurdle passed I have been using the plugin on my own blog and Cristiano is using it as well. We’ve only had problems running it on this weblog most probably because something on the Solaris installation we are running is interfering (I have no clue what). You can test the plugin yourself on this test weblog.

There are some ideas in here which are similar to those of DiSo in their wishlist for a wp-openid-avatars plugin.

Release

After having spent some due dilligence testing and refining this plugin, I think it’s ready to be released and tested by a larger group of people. The plugin will not do much without you editing your theme as well and making a decision about the presentation of the avatar images.

Alternatively if gravatar() is not defined yet, it will define itself as the gravatar function as well. So a theme which relies on gravatar can expect this plugin to support it.

Get a zip with the plugin in it here, or you can checkout my repository:
hg clone static-http://alper.nl/hg/havatar/

Feedback, suggestions and patches welcome. Caching and resizing are issues that have to be solved in the future.

I found a plugin called identikit which covers a lot of the same ground but is mostly in French. hAvatar is a simple and pure microformats based approach.

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

The day at the Plazes HQ started with a brief explanation of the API (video) and a day of hacking with access to the plazes devs so any problem could be fixed very quickly. Peter Rukavina, Plazes’s advocate, had flown over and he wrote a detailed wrapup of the event.

Plazes — the service

Plazes the service still has the underlying foundations of the geopresence that it started out with those couple of years ago: Plazing yourself based on the MAC address of the connection still works. At a certain point this mechanism proved too limited and they opened it up so anybody could plaze themselves anywhere.

A further consequence of this opening up became that the use case of a plaze was no longer to claim a plaze and show your presence. After the re-launch the focus was put on creating Activities (current or future) and spreading them to your friends. Activities naturally have a location (Plaze) they are associated with. People participating in an activity duplicate it and add it to their own stream of activities.

This is considerably different from what Plazes once was and other sites in presence currently. It looks like Plazes is competing more directly with a site such as Meetup.com than with a site like Twitter.

For presence and some co-ordination, I use Jaiku right now because most people I know are on it, because it has a nice flow, it is simple and serves a need. I don’t know if Plazes would score enough on all those points for me to become a highly active user again.
A lot of people I know are on Plazes because it was an early service providing a lot of fun and some benefits, unfortunately most of them have become mostly inactive on the service.
The flow of Activities is unclear for me and I think overly complicated with the worst problem being the fact that if I participate in an activity, I get a duplicate for myself. I understand why it works like this, but the presentation of it manages to confuse me.

Planned activities create iCal output for easy integration in your calendar (just like Upcoming and Dopplr do), which is reasonable. In a more ideal world I could create the activity directly from my calendar because in most cases that will be the leading source of future activities, not the other way around.

Another feature that would be nice for APIs would be event triggered calls so I could execute a piece of code every time I plaze myself (to update my location in Jaiku, Hyves and associates). But there currently are hardly any scaling web applications that do this properly (hint!).

Geographical browsing was a feature that was very nice in the old Plazes. This allowed you to see people in the area on a map or interesting Plazes in the area on a map. Though actual use was very limited, one very real use case was to find WiFi hotspots in the area.
The activity focus of the new site has pretty much done away with it all. I remember sitting in a hostel in Istanbul and trying to find interesting Plazes in the area which was pretty impossble. Using the API some or most of this functionality should be recreatable.

Mobile applications are of course very much of interest for any location based service, and Plazes’s new API with the arrival of more and more capable devices could combine to create a nice offering.
I have started to build an Android app which would get your friends’ locations and display them on the builtin MapView. This is more a good excuse to try out Android, than to create an actual finished product.

Web application focus is essential given the very many use cases that Plazes potentially provides. They have chosen for Activities as the central focus for the site, but with the API anybody could build another site using the same data fulfilling other needs with different views and interactions.

Technical Details

I spent the day reviving my Plazes maps widget that I had made on the previous Plazes API. That version would have still worked nicely if the API hadn’t changed, the current changes in the API forced me to rewrite it within the constraints of the Apple Dashboard environment.

Because of cross site restrictions, a pure JavaScript approach was no longer feasible. Fortunately Widgets are pretty much unlimited in functionality if you delve into the subject matter. You can write your own Objective-C code and bridge that from JavaScript or as I did, you can execute shell commands. I used that functionality to construct the proper cURL strings as they are given in the API documentation, and call them using the widget.system() call.
Widget.system gives you a lot of power, but the associated callback mechanism is somewhat weird. The resulting JavaScript code turned out to become something of a kludge.

That and the limited debugging facilities of Widget development (I don’t have Dashcode installed yet. I would be interested to hear if development is improved dramatically with that.) and some issues with XML parsing (I was surprised that jQuery does not have a default way of parsing an XML-fragment.) took up quite some time.

I will do some touchup work to the widget and cleanup the resulting code. Then I’ll publish it to the Plazecamp site and a public Mercurial repository for anyone to play with. I think it will serve more as proof of concept code than that it will have an actual real use for now.

Wrapping up

The API is a valuable and essential addition to Plazes which has a lot of very valuable data and an interesting new focus. It remains to be seen how people will use it, but a day’s of hacking at the Plazes HQ was fun and proved that a lot of stuff is possible.

Being back in Berlin is always nice and I’m beginning to feel more and more at home there. There were a lot of nice people at Plazecamp and I also met the people behind Soundcloud which promises to be a very interesting music startup indeed.

After the Saturday, we spent some more time in the city and drove back in a personal record on Sunday evening. Also thanks Katharina for letting Tijs and me crash at her place.

For those of you who cannot attend but are interested in geopresence, you can participate remotely.

Expect a more detailed report concerning: geopresence, mobile applications, web application focus, geographical browsing and competition in the presence space after the weekend.

Consuming Experience has kindly recorded this and a lot of other talks from Barcamp.

This is a rich topic and there is a lot to say about it. As I watch Reinier presenting it on the video, I see him explaining the examples we came up with and ideas pop up in my head of other examples, of how he could have told it better or how I would have told it differently.

Watching a video of a presentation you gave or helped prepare is immensely educational. I of course already ‘knew’ this, but usually it rewatching yourself present isn’t practiced very vigorously. This convinced me that it is completely worth it, probably time and time again.

For the new year we will also be rethinking the focus of this weblog to take the pressure of and make it more fun for us. There are already a lot of techblogs out there, and I don’t think we want to add more to that mix.

If you have any ideas what you like, what you didn’t like and what you would like to see more of, please tell us in the comments.

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend �35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

Buying

I bought my iPhone in the Apple Store in Regent Street here in London for �269. I had to pay with a credit card, which you might see as a security issue, but I don’t think it is. They also wanted some of my details, which I didn’t want to give obviously. The guy filled in some bogus details instead, so I guess it wasn’t that important. I haven’t gotten any message about why I haven’t “activated” my iPhone, and I don’t think I will ever get one.

Activation

Before you can use the iPhone, you will have to activate it through iTunes. But to do that you need to buy the expensive O2 contract you don’t want to buy, so this is not really an option. Firmware 1.1.2 is not hackable at the moment, but people found a solution by forcing iTunes to restore your firmware to 1.1.1 which can be “HACKtivated”. After this you can then do a hacked upgrade to 1.1.2 and use all the new features.

In other words: you can easily activate and use your UK iPhone as a sort of iPod Touch without any phone features. The easiest way to do this is to follow this extensive tutorial here. This tutorial uses the TIFF exploit discovered in firmware 1.1.1 to activate your iPhone (Apple swiftly patched this exploit in 1.1.2, which is why you will have to downgrade to 1.1.1 first these days). The tutorial works by using the site jailbreakme.com (this also works for an iPod Touch), which also Jailbreaks your iPhone.

Jailbreaking

So besides activating your iPhone, Jailbreakme.com (as the name says) also Jailbreaks your iPhone. What this does is opening up your iPhone for installing new applications on it. It does this by pre-installing Installer.app on your iPhone, which allows you to download and install different packages (much like tools like APT for Linux do) which allow you to do cool things like have an MSN client, or a Twitter/Jaiku client on the iPhone.

Some people might not want to Jailbreak their iPhone, but only activate theirs. This is perfectly possible, but I have no idea how. I wanted to install more applications so I used this method. For warranty issues surrounding Jailbreaking see the section on warranty.

Unlocking (a.k.a Using it as a Phone)

So the real reason you bought the iPhone is to obviously have the perfect phone. The truth is though, that at this moment you can’t use the UK 1.1.2 OOB iPhone with just any sim!. The reason for this is that the new bootloader/baseband firmware is virtually unhackable. In the past you were able to patch the baseband firmware using tools like AnySIM to make it accept any sim card, but unfortunately the new baseband is inaccessible, so you can’t use AnySIM software. Whatever you do, don’t try to use AnySIM on a 1.1.2 OOB iPhone as it might lead to having to restore the entire phone again.

There are some hopes though for unlocking this iPhone. The upcoming 1.1.3 firmware will probably also ship with an update to the baseband firmware. This means that by looking at this update, hackers could figure out how to do the same thing and patch the firmware with their update. This is probably why most hackers have given up on trying to hack the current baseband and just wait for the next update.

If you don’t want to wait, there are some options though. First of you can always use a UK O2 sim in your iPhone as it is only locked to the O2 sims, not to the iPhone in particular. I bought an O2 Pay&Go sim and it worked after a bit of tweaking. Somehow I had to go through the entire restore to 1.1.1, activate, upgrade to 1.1.2 process before it worked. Probably you will have to do this because even the hacked activation process needs to be done with the SIM you want to eventually use. There are some workarounds but they didn’t work for me.

You don’t get EDGE on Pay&Go (just GPRS), but with a bit of tweaking you could even get that to work on the iPhone. Beware that I do not know if a German 1.1.2 OOB iPhone will take a UK O2 sim, or vice versa. Maybe someone could confirm this for me?

A second option is to buy a pre-programmed SIM like TurboSIM. Although expensive, they do work and will probably always work, whatever Apple does to the iPhone firmware. The idea behind these sims is that you attach them to your normal sim, and together they will let you call over your own network, while pretending to be an O2 sim to the iPhone. There are a few brands of these sims, but I would stick to the original TurboSIM or the so called StealthSIM. It seems that most of the other brands are either fake or just rebranded TurboSIMs.

Warranty

I took this shot below at the Genius Bar a while back when I was there to get my Macbook fixed. It has some interesting details. To sum things up:

• Your iPhone can only be serviced in the country where you bought it. In other words, a UK iPhone can not be fixed in Germany, even though this is very unlike Apple, and even weirder as both countries sell iPhones.
• Whenever you hand in your phone they will restore your firmware, meaning it will lose all third party applications and unlocking software you might have used. Obviously, as long as the current firmware your phone uses is hackable, this is a non-issue.
• The third point in big capital letters is a warning from Apple saying that software like AnySIM might lead to your phone being bricked when restoring the firmware. I recommend to always restore your phone to default if possible before handing it in to Apple, as you never know if they might break it. A bricked phone will not be fixed by Apple which means you either have to do some hardcore hacking (a.k.a. googling for help) or be seriously screwed.
• Now, the final point says something about the software license agreement (SLA). Somehow just putting your own software on the product breaks the SLA, but to void the warranty that software has to really “damage” your iPhone. As I read it this means that as long as you can return your iPhone to default, they can’t figure out that you ever put other applications on it, so they would have to see you as a valid customer. Even better: if there is a clear hardware failure and you have 3rd party software installed, I can’t see why that would break your warranty.

I think this sign not that clear about wether or not they will help you if you come in with a fully modded iPhone, loaded with a variety of third party applications, and having a non-software issue. On the other hand, if you were able to restore your phone to default firmware, they would probably help you, maybe even if it was HACKtivated. One thing that is definitely clear is that if somehow your iPhone got bricked, it is really your fault and not theirs.

Wrapping Up

It was a lot of work to get the iPhone working as I wanted, and I did run into some issues that weren’t clear to me before hand. Most of those issues are covered above, so read them carefully. I really love the iPhone and love how stable even the current third party applications run. I guess this article will expire quickly though as firmware update 1.1.3 is just around the corner, and only God (and Steve) know what will be announced at MacWorld 2008 this 14th. So if you read this article after these events, keep in mind that the iPhone world is a very fast moving world.

Picture by Breyten Ernsting

Picture by Katie Lips

Yesterday we had the year’s end software social. A nice evening with some drinks with startup friends in Amsterdam and talk about work and parties, Python and DiSo.

Not a lot of reminiscing but instead lots of optimism —which I share— looking forward to the coming year. Have a great New Year’s and see you in 2008.

The food (pizza and coke) was great and the presentations were of high quality, making it a nice event for a Saturday. I think next time I would like to see this happen on a Friday or such, as in the weekend all London public transport seems to be rubbish. Not to mention the amount of slow moving tourists in the subway! Below are the photos and go here for the winning logo design.

The aim of the day was to talk (see the Jaiku backchannel) about how we could use the technologies at our disposal and the data available to create better experiences for users. It looks like most of the specs are there and the conversation has been going on for most of the year. We should begin building stuff.

Mediamatic at least is dedicated to build something on top of anyMeta which needs to be ready by Q1 2008. The workshop was an effort to gather thoughts on the best way to move forward.

This week also saw the announcement of the DiSo project by Chris Messina. A way of building open social networks using Wordpress as the platform.

Problem statement

We spent quite some time on the problem statement and use cases. The discussion went all over the place both in subject matter, scope and level of detail. At this point I don’t think the philosophical considerations are very useful anymore. This is a broad subject and, yes, everybody has an opinion about it. We need to be a lot more concrete about what we want to build and steps we can take right now to get there. I thought that was clear from the event description but apparently not everybody read that.

The vision that is on the table is quite grand. By distributing and taking ownership of your own data, be it profile information, your relationships, your writing, your pictures or your videos, you get full control. Sites that want to participate in this effort will need to abide by your rules and read and write accepted standards. This means a dramatic redefinition of the way the internet works, so dramatic that it will not happen anytime soon. Also, I don’t think that we can standardize all that in an afternoon.

The problem that we need to solve and which is currently causing painful experiences is: Almost every site and application can be enhanced by adding information about the people you know. How do you do that without replicating effort both for developers and users time and time again?

Finally the list of use cases that we came up with:

• Profile Aggregator (OpenID)
• Access Privacy (profile, contacts, stuff I own, claim stuff/ publications)
• Migration of data/ ownership
• Content discovery/ finding stuff
• Set privacy (noindex, etc)
• Consolidation of data/ profiles
• Personal Messaging
• OpenId - reflection of profiles/ relations
• Referencing accross sites
• Control of representation of copy
• Pingback when your object has been used/ altered

XMPP does it all

A lot of work especially by Ralph is focused on creating a Jabber/XMPP pubsub specification which can be used to post content and updates to and making it easy for interesting parties to be notified of those publications. This is very nice and Ralph’s presentation extolls most of the virtues of XMPP.

Still it will take some time before this becomes relevant for the rest of the web. XMPP is the best thing since sliced bread and I imagine that the guys building it can make it do pretty much everything. There are two problems that hamper its adoption.
First the language and the concepts are sufficiently different that people need a lot of introducing before they are up and running with the concepts.
Secondly once you understand it, there is not much it will do for your blog running on a shared PHP host. Also if you do run XMPP on your own server, you can interface with existing services and you can do anything but there are not any well defined interactions yet.

Mediamatic is aware of this and for their own (PHP based) anyMeta sites and for the rest of the world that wants to participate they are going to provide a bridging server where websites can POST updates using HTTP and the service will publish notifications to interested parties both using XMPP and HTTP depending on the capabilities of the receivers.

HTTP may not be ideal and people fluent in XMPP describe most of the stuff it has been forced to do as hackish. Still, HTTP has a lot going for it. With Atom and REST, HTTP already drives a lot of application functionality over the internet. And with Comet style interaction starting to catch on non blocking HTTP servers will become more and more normal. This will make real time interaction and stuff that is currently not scalable easier.

Moving data

Luis Villa’s post eloquently makes the case for being able to move our data whereever we want. This is quite a big problem and not one that is going to be solved easily if at all.
Sites such as Flickr will allow you to get your data but there needs to be more incentive to open up and more standardization in container formats.

The use case that was discussed of being able to own your pictures, the permalinks pointing to them as well as the comments on those pictures and being able to move that wholesale to a different site strikes me as somewhat too utopian. A site such as Flickr offers you their hosted application and hosts your pictures for you. As it happens Flickr has an API which allows you to get your data back but you will never be able to make a 1-to-1 mapping to another service.

Owning your namespace on a server not your own is a known problem: e-mail has the same problem and it still hasn’t really been solved. A few hosts such as GMail are gracious enough to let you POP your emails off their server, but you still have a middle man that you can’t cut out. Owning your own domain and forwarding it to another service (like Google Applications) seems like the way to go.

I don’t see this issue as going to be solved any time soon. The stakes are too high, the subject is too complex and in most cases a local copy will have to suffice. I have gotten used to losing some data at every significant computer migration. You can’t have your cake and eat it. If you really want to be in control, install phpAlbum on your domain on a generic host and move that around all you want.

Concrete steps towards the future

Marc promised a documentation server with the findings and draft specifications soon. Somewhere early next year Mediamatic will publish their public HTTP to XMPP bridge. Blaine, David and Ralph were supposed to draft something of a spec, but I don’t know when it’ll be made available.

Tijs has been creating quite the list of interesting sites in this space. Like the Attribute Exchange schema supported by OpenID 2.0 which looks very interesting. And a start page for all the standards for this initiative: Data Portability.org.

Another thing would be to start implementing the wordpress plugins listed at the DiSo wiki. I have an hAvatar plugin lying around which needs some testing before release.

A Wordpress plugin that will speak to the XMPP bridge service would need to do the following:

• Add XMPP autodiscovery links to the <head> of the blog.
• Ping the bridge service using HTTP every time a post is made or updated.
• Maybe: listen to notifications from the server for stuff such as blogrolling or trackback.
• Maybe: Publish your friend list as XFN to the bridge so interested parties can subscribe to that.

This won’t be too difficult to implement but it has to wait for the pubsub bridge to become public. It’s looks like the best way to converge to each other is to create stuff.

The most important thing in making a good photo is the person behind the camera, is an often heard clich�. But it’s true.
Hitchcock was able to make great movies, that are still exciting today, although he only had two colors available: black and white, but he mastered the technique of storytelling and suspension. In this perspective I’ve got a few tips, how everybody can make impressive pictures, with any camera, no matter what size your lens is.

Tip # 1

Get as close to your subject as your camera allows you, maybe even closer. Zooming in on a person like a paparazzi is safe, but even though the viewer might not understand a thing about wide angles and depth of field, he will experience a zoom-shot as distant and unpersonal anyway. Secondly, getting closer allows less clutter of distracting objects in the photo, which brings me to the next tip:

Tip # 2

When I decide on composition I often choose to eliminate as many objects in a shot as possible, so that only the necessary remain. Even sometimes afterwards I choose to crop the photo’s to exclude even more. �Less is More� is very true in photography.

Tip # 3

To achieve the previous tips, you need one more thing. You need your objects to allow you to get near. This might be stirring in the beginning, but I can assure you it gives a real kick, and it is much more fun to have interaction with the person that you shoot, than to just be a hidden observer. Off course there are ways to make it easier:
You could have a business-card with the web address, where people can review the picture, Sometimes just kindly nodding, and showing your camera in the air, can be enough. I’ve done this a lot, and nobody ever objected.

Finally you just have to get out there and experiment. On the site hocus-focus.com, I’m publishing weekly simple exercises, so you have a little kick in the butt, to get out and focus.

The conversation that started earlier this year and had a big flare with the announcement of OpenSocial just before Barcamp Berlin is going on.

Ralph Meijer presented (announcement on his blog) on the subject during the Web 2.0 Expo on how to solve the problem using XMPP.

At the same time OAuth 1.0 and OpenID 2.0 are coming to fruition and Chris Messina is talking about distributing social networking applications. And Hyves —our Dutch social network— is busy opening up their API.

These are exciting times, but this technological groundwork is just the beginning. The real challenge is making understandable and usable systems using this stuff.

I have provided photographs of events a while back for BlogNation so I knew Sam Sethi already for a while. I had heard rumors about BlogNation employees not being payed for their work, and now it seems these are true. Nicole Simon wrote an interesting comment on the post too, and I hope to have time tomorrow to explain why I think BlogNation is not that much Blog and clearly even less Nation.

AN OPEN LETTER TO SAM SETHI

Please Note: This is an open letter to Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation. I have elected to write this letter after having been one of the principal Blognation authors since August of this year. In all that time I have not received the pay promised in my contract nor the reimbursement promised for expenses incurred on behalf of Blognation during this period. I am not alone. Every other Blognation author is in the same unsavory situation.

This open letter details in very broad strokes the reasons why I have lost faith in Sam. It makes specific statements as to the veracity of things Sam has said or written as well as things he has failed to do. I do not say these things lightly. Every statement made in this letter can be backed up with verifiable written material from email correspondence, Skype chats, or SMS messages.

The final paragraphs are obviously my opinion and do not necessarily reflect that of the other bloggers that are still members of the Blognation team. For a more detailed history of this sordid story, one includes a considerable amount of the actual Skype chat dialog as well as many paragraphs from dozens of email messages, please visit my new home on the blogosphere, owstarr.com (http://owstarr.com), my new email will be oliver@remove-this-first-owstarr.com

Lastly, this post is likely to be removed very shortly after I post it so please, make a screen capture, download it to an off-line reader, copy and paste it into a document or repost it on your own blog(really). At the end, this is a cautionary tale and the victims are the people that have worked for months on the content many of you have enjoyed but for which Sam Sethi has yet to (and may never) pay.

Oliver Starr

Sam,

In case you are wondering why my sentiments towards you have so dramatically changed over the past few weeks I will be as clear as I know how to be.

I don�t appreciate it when people lie to me and I detest it when people lie to me repeatedly, especially when it is obvious that they are lying and have been given an opportunity to come clean. It insults my intelligence when someone lies to me over and over when it is obvious that this is what they are doing and I don�t enjoy having my intelligence insulted.

What you should know about me, Sam, is that I am a truly loyal friend. Ask Marc. I�m the sort of friend that will stand in front of you and take the force of the blow, go to jail, give up my last dollar�there are few limits to what I would do for a real friend. The counterpoint to that is that my friendship and loyalty come with a price. That price is honesty. That price is respect. That price is integrity. I don�t expect my friends to be perfect - God knows, I am far from perfect myself. I don�t even expect my friends to be willing to go to the same lengths for me that I would for them. But I expect�no I DEMAND integrity in the relationship.

When I extend friendship and exhibit loyalty towards someone and they trod all over the respect I have given them it psychically injures me and when I extend the courtesy of a second chance, a pass, and someone that I have treated with friendship and respect ignores me and continues to treat me as if I am a moron it angers me a great deal. It also kills any respect I might have for that individual, destroys any feelings of loyalty, and crushes any sentiments of warmth, sympathy or understanding.

When Nicole was attacking you who had your back Sam? When people first started squawking about the extended delays in payment, who got in touch with you privately to see what he could do to help? Who volunteered their network of connections to aid in raising funds? Or offered to have their good name included in your business plan to help you present a stronger team to prospective investors? Who was the person introducing you to his contacts at companies like SpinVox to help you get more sponsors for Blognation?

I didn�t ask you for anything more than for the truth. The simple, unedited, unembellished, unvarnished truth. I wanted to know the real situation with the funding. I wanted to know the real situation with the funds on hand and I wanted to know the real situation with regards to the payments you said were on the way. That�s it Sam. That�s all I asked you for. Politely.

Te begin with, you told me lies.

When I was in the UK you actually said - to my face no less - that you had already �banked� the funds from the first investment and that you had capital on hand sufficient to cover the operation�s expenses for the first full year.

Then, after I returned home and payments that had been promised failed to arrive and you started hedging about when those funds would actually be coming. I grew concerned so I called you up and got you on the phone.

Do you remember what you said?

You told me that the deal had been �signed� but that the VC was taking some time to complete their process to fund the account. You told me that according to your attorney this process was possible to complete in �four days time� but that because the VC was in the midst of some other deals and that since we were not their sole priority it could take as long as a couple of weeks.

Personally, I thought this sounded a bit peculiar since I have pretty substantial experience from both sides of a VC deal and I�d never heard anything like this before; but then, I considered you a friend and I trust my friends so I told myself that this must be some kind of UK custom that was simply different than how things are done in the US.

Of course this wasn�t anything remotely resembling the reality of the situation and that became clear when the letter you wrote to Wilkins or whatever his name is surfaced. Had the deal been signed and funding eminent, the VC might have found the letter upsetting and been upset with you for failing to divulge something of possible consequence to them but it would have been very difficult for them to have washed their hands of the deal.

Not having signed a deal however this was a very good reason to cool considerably. After all, at a minimum the VCs must have felt that this letter exhibited some very poor judgment on the part of a CEO in whom they were considering an investment. More significantly it demonstrated that the individual appeared to lack a certain amount of self control and this could have the potential to manifest in other surprising and problematic ways. Third, the threat of legal action, action which could at a minimum impede the progress of a company into which the VC was considering an investment was very evident from this communication and might even have been deemed likely.

Even with all these facts before us, you still maintained that things were moving along smoothly. At about this time, since it was clear to everyone that major funding was not happening any time in the next few weeks (and by now had been delayed from the end of September to the Middle of October to October 30th to November 15th to the end of November (maybe)) you told everyone that you were going to take a loan out against your personal assets and make interim payments to everyone.

At this time you told me that you�d be sending me 2000 pounds and I waited for several days, checking the bank each day and even calling the bank a few times to see if any incoming wires could be seen. As you know nothing came in because nothing had been sent.

Others were starting to make noise about this and several of them, Marc included, spoke with me. It seems you had essentially made the same promise to everyone based upon the claim that you were taking a note out against your home to provide cash for interim payments. You made both public statements that funds had been sent and you made private statements to me, too. Here�s an example from our Skype chat:

Oliver Starr �stitch� 5:03 AM
sam are the wires going out today?
Sam Sethi 5:16 AM
yes

That is pretty much as unequivocal as you can possibly get and yet�days go by and still no wire, still no check�still no funds forthcoming in spite of your words above. That is NOT OPTIMISM Sam, that is LYING.

At what point, I began to wonder, does Sam not understand the difference between wanting something to happen and actually making it happen? I asked myself this because you routinely tell people you will call or even that you are actually calling and yet the phone fails to ring. Similarly, you sent a �tweet� that you were �at the bank� implying to all recipients that you were there for the purpose of wiring us some of the money that is owed yet no one received anything.

You made commitments to provide a certain amount of money in the promised �interim payment�. The sole recipient of any funds to date has been Ewan and he�s received half�HALF of what you promised most people and even less than half of what you had promised me. Saying you�re sending 1500 quid and sending only 750 is not telling the truth Sam. I hate to break it to you but you need to get a much more solid grip on reality because the one that you have appears to be tenuous at best.

At any rate, as I think I�ve probably provided enough detail above to illustrate my point, the simple deal is that you squandered my friendship by lying to me over and over again. You disrespected me and my intelligence in the same way. Your inability to own up to your false claims, your broken promises and your refusal to accept responsibility for putting myself, my friends and many other people in a bad situation is another reason why my feelings for you have gone from friendship and respect to distrust, disrespect and zero confidence.

I won�t lie, Sam. I was impressed by your speaking engagement in the UK. You seemed to have it together and I really did believe that this was a project on track to succeed. The only difference between then and now is the mountain of bullshit that you�ve managed to shovel in between us with your inability to tell the simple honest truth.

Frankly, I don�t understand this kind of lying behavior at all because I am clearly not like you. If anything - and Marc can doubtless attest to this - I tend to be a bit too available with the truth. One thing I am not is a particularly good self-censor. Since Marc isn�t here to suggest otherwise or to inject a modicum of additional restraint you�re getting the real nitty gritty accounting of why I went from your ally to someone that holds you in esteem about equal to that in which I hold another blogger with whom I have had an association�

I want you to consider that for a moment as we�ve talked at length about my prior experience and how I was treated and what I am being forced to do about it. I never thought that you would treat me in a manner even remotely resembling the way XXXX treated me but by failing to be honest with me and failing to come clean given multiple opportunities to do so that is exactly what you�ve done.

Incidentally, I�ll have you know that I turned down a VP of Biz Dev position at a top Silicon Valley startup because they felt that blogging for Blognation would put me in a conflicted situation and I told them I didn�t want to leave Blognation as I had made a prior commitment there. It wasn�t the highest salary I�ve ever had or been offered but it was a lot better than what I�m making at the moment and would have done a good deal to defray the losses of the last four months where I received no pay since all I was doing was working on Blognation and of course you know how much that�s made me�

Of course it is important to mention that you�ve also promised multiple times to reimburse me for my out of pocket expenses but as you well know that hasn�t proven to be true to date either.

So� that�s a pretty ugly litany of yours up there; lies, more lies, still more lies, exaggerations, evasiveness, manipulation, usury, fraud even - honestly Sam I think there�s a good chance that what you�ve done is actually criminal not just pathological and antisocial - perhaps even psychotic behavior. Sorry to have to recount it - I never would have expected that I would have had to write anything like this to you. It goes to show that you just never know people until you�ve been down the road with them a few miles, huh?

I know you probably think that I�m the king-hell rat bastard mother-fucker of all time about now, but the truth, Sam, is that I�m no different from anyone else on the BN team�no different that is except that I actually have the sack to say what I�m thinking. Bottom line Sam, you fucked up. Not because the money didn�t come when you expected, but because of the lies you told when you said that it had come�

You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences. I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won�t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you. There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!

Is this getting through to you loud and clear? I know I�ve repeated myself enough times here that I�m starting to sound like I�m brain damaged but then I thought my other emails were pretty clear and they never even elicited a response from you in spite of them being far, far more cordial; understanding, even.

But I�m through being understanding. You need to understand what it is you�ve done and what you ought to be doing to make it right.

As I see it, your chances of raising funds from a VC as the CEO of Blognation are in the very slim to none category. Not only are VCs highly unlikely to invest in a company such that a large part of their investment must be used to satisfy debt, but the fact that every single blogger is in a position to sue the company (or you personally) for breach of contract would send even the bravest VCs running for the hills. Add to this the fact that you aren�t presenting a management team, have never shown me the presentation or business plan or executive summary (in spite of telling me you�d send them straight over), and cap it all off with the Wilkins correspondence and the fact that you�re going to have to explain why key people are leaving and you would have to be named Merlin to make a deal go through.

Nevertheless (and in spite of apparently starting with a new VC which as you well know would take months in the best of situations) you still haven�t suggested to anyone that it is likely or even possible that they might need to find another source of income because things might not go as planned. That�s pretty freaking selfish if you ask me. You�re basically going to fuck up others quite badly but you don�t care and that�s not only evident, it is what at the end of this diatribe, is the thing that more than anything else has cost you my support and friendship.

Even today, you continue to make false promises and to lie about the potential deal that you claim to be negotiating. Why, for instance did you say that the deal was done and that the they were investing $600,000 for 18% of the company only to come back later and post a note from one of the deal brokers that described a deal of $250,000 for 25% of the company. And what happened to the original $500,000 that you said to my face you had �banked� that was for 25% of the company at an impossible $2.2 Million valuation?

Don�t you realize that you�ve completely screwed with people�s live here? People who have families and real bills to pay. People who don�t have a spouse that works at Microsoft or wherever, people that are going to be seriously, seriously hurt by your actions.

My god, Sam; you have some nerve. In spite of all the demonstrated lying - lying I�ll add that is conclusively demonstrated by virtue of the numerous archived Skype chats and the many dozens of emails you�ve sent to me and the other bloggers. Demonstrated even in your updates to your entire team. How do you think you�ll build trust and loyalty among your people when you�ve proven yourself to be absolutely untrustworthy and disloyal?

Or do you even care? I myself suspect you don�t. I think this whole Blognation scam is all about one thing; Sam Sethi�s ego. You got tweaked by Michael Arrington last year and now you�re hell bent on showing up at Le Web with a dozen bloggers to back you up; your triumphant return to the scene of your demise - that�s right, you�ll show Mike and Loic and the world that no one fucks with Sam Sethi. You�ll show them that you�ve built - in less than a year - a blogging empire with bloggers from all over the world reporting 24 hours a day on all the topics the tech world wants to read about. You�ll talk about your advertising play and your new media properties, you�ll boast about your wine cellar and the possibility of hiring some huge name bloggers to round out your team.

I�m sure this will be punctuated by haughty tweets with what you think are big-brained ideas - your obvious effort - to be one of those smart cool kids who launch companies like twitter or Wua.la. You�ll probably stay at a very nice hotel in Paris and encourage all your bloggers to do so too.

And to get them to do so you�ll have convinced each and every one of them to pull the funds from their own dwindling bank accounts because the funding is in� and only has to be held by the bank for just a few more days�

Yes, I�m sure that Paris will be triumphant for you except for one teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy little detail. Trivial in your mind but oh so important in the real world. Your big return, your blogging network, the content in every post, and nearly everything you�ve said or written about Blognation; it�s all based upon lies�

And when that dirty truth leaks out - there won�t be anywhere on earth you can run where the truth won�t find you. (not to mention the lawsuits that are sure to follow close behind)

Sincerely,

Oliver Starr

Design is in the details!

• 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.

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.

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]

K2 Network - service provider and online community for massively-multiplayer games
Telcogames - global publisher, developer and distributor of mobile games
Weblin (Zweitgeist GmbH) - developer of avatar software for internet browsing
WooMe - online speed dating platform

Honestly, I have no idea what the first company did. I must have watched it but it simply slipped my mind. The second company was a big platform provider for a telco to host, distribute and promote mobile games. I never play mobile games except for the little tennis application that game on my Sony Ericsson K610, but if I really wanted to play something I’d grab my Mac, a PSP, or Melinda’s Nintendo DS. In other words: glad they all make money but seriously not the interesting things to blog about.

The last two companies were about stupid animated browser puppets and online dating. I am not the one to install an app to have a whole bunch of Weblin animated puppets walking around in my browser, showing me what other people are visiting the site that I am visiting. Besides it being intrusive and annoying and a possible security leak, it doesn’t even work on a Mac!

WooMe is a kind of online speed dating, which a) doesn’t interest me as I already have a girlfriend and b) I am a GEEK so inherintly not that interested nor motivated to put myself in the line of fire like that.

All and all it was fun today but a bit weak in companies presenting. I actually miss the “expo” part of a conference like this, but I will do a bot of a better write-up later on.

IGA Worldwide - in-game advertising company with proprietary ad-serving network
OpenAd - online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas
Trutap - developer of a social media application for mobile phones
Xtract - social network analytics and mobile marketing

OpenAd is a seriously good idea (unlike Trutap which is like an unfocused big mashup of online mobile services pushed into one chaotic looking java app) even though it is about advertising. Their idea is to crowdsource the advertisement industry, making it possible for any company to use their thousands of creatives to create a new advertisement campaign. The cool thing is that you actually don’t pay for the process (which is the old model) but just for the end product you agree to license. In other words: you only pay for things you will like to use and are happy with. Their previous customers include quite a few big companies so I am looking forward to the future of this business model and the effect it will have on the quality of advertisements.

In short Reid talked about the difference between how people think one should start a business and plan the monetization, versus how he thinks it is best approached. He stated that the old model is to have revenue as soon as you start, be self sufficient and grow on the existing revenue streams once you have established them. On the opposite he claims the new model should be to setup placeholder revenue models as soon a possible, but to plan to change these models as the business grows. For example, if you plan to have a complex advertisement model that is very targeted, don’t start building that at first, but in contrary start with placing Google Ads until the time comes to change the advertisement to a more complex revenue model.

In his new model he claims that monetization is at first irrelevant. If you plan to take a couple of risks in a business, which would you think is more valuable: establishing the monetization or establishing a community? If you build a large community soon any change in the monetization strategies will have a far larger effect on you revenue model than when you start building the revenue models before the community is established. Obviously it is good to build some kind of monetization when you start, because being established and self funding is interesting and motivating, but clearly expect to change the model whenever you reach a higher level of company operation.

I thought this was a very interesting talk, and I have 2 more pages of notes left that I didn’t use in this post, so I will see if Reid has written about this somewhere else or maybe placed this presentation on SlideShare.

7digital - service for secure distribution of digital media
Mind Candy - developer of puzzles, cross media entertainment and alternate reality gaming
Netlog - online social portal specifically targeted at the European youth
Shiny Media - operator of a number of news-oriented websites

Ashley Norris from Shiny Media

I was particularly interested to see Shiny Media, as I am a reader of one of their blogs ShinyShiny.tv and didn’t know they were this big (nor actually that they were located in the UK). The other companies were a bit less interesting, especially Mind Candy which were basically promoting their new online pet-keeping game. Tamakochi all over again and certainly not my beef.

Rawflow - live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming technology
Simply Media - creator, aggregator and distributor of digital video content
t5m - video-based, socially conscious entertainment and lifestyle network
Zattoo - peer-to-peer internet television provider

All of these companies were in one way or another trying to add some more value (and therefore revenue) to the online video model. I specifically enjoyed Zattoo, as they offer Satellite TV over IP to a little program that seems to also run on Mac. Unfortunately you need an “invite” so I will have to tackle the founder in a moment to get acces to their service.

Blyk is a very interesting mobile phone service provider that is free, for 16 to 24 year olds, and sponsored by targeted advertisements. The talk was interesting, especially the fact that they get about 100x the response rate one would get from traditional advertisements like e-mail and banners. The service is currently available in the UK and free to any 16 to 24 year old who can get enough value from 43 minutes and 217 texts a month.

The Jesus Phone

The enormous media hype around the �Jesus-phone� proved it once again: there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there seems to be no other company able to sell a piece of the future than the Cupertino dream-weavers. Once bought however, the great promise turns out to be quite an ordinary thing which is certainly not as good as those futurists had promised. But at that moment it is already too late, so why do we still keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products that are over and over again still not quite there yet?

The Future Promise Paradigm

To get some answers on that question, we can take a look at three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us into accepting things that would normally not directly benefit us optimally.

1. The future is often used to force us to change our habits for own benefits. The products that use this tactic often send the message that “change in our way of working and living” is needed to improve our situation.
2. The promise of the future can be used to keep us from complaining. If a product or service might not be that good today, the promise of improvements in the future is a good incentive to continue on. In other words: be strong, keep going, everything will be alright….. soon.
3. The future is used as a shared dream of mankind, as one day we�ll all be united. If you want the best for the world stay with us, and if you don’t adopt you are obviously against the best interest of mankind.

These partly overlapping points can be found both in business and governmental planning and often tries to explain their choices for the future.

Promising the Future

An example of changing our habits for the best is how the iPhone forces a new paradigm for text input. David Pogueⁱ of the New York Times writes: “Text entry is not the iPhone�s strong suit. The Blackberry won�t be going away anytime soon�. Not only is the iPhone’s text-input different than the Blackberry’s, it�s also slower. The multi-touch interface of the new iPhone is a good example of getting something new, and losing some good features from the past for the sake of it. On one side you get a larger screen and a more flexible interface to operate your phone, but on the other side you lose a way of getting any tactile feedback during the input. When asked, many 14 year olds would show that they are perfectly capable of typing text messages on their phone without even looking. This mastered skill is mainly based on the fact that they can actually feel the shape and location of the buttons they are pushing, but on the iPhone without any physical buttons achieving a skill like this will be something of the past.

Later on in the article even Pogue falls for the “in the future everything will be better”-dogma when he analyses some of the current flaws in the iPhone and concludes to say that he expects things to get updated to be better soon:“On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cell phones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That�s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T�s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.�Just beyond the horizon lies a land of milk and honey where Internet is fast, photos are sharp and interfaces are workable.

The Benefits the Disadvantage

Obviously, Apple is not really selling you a product that is created for the current times, but merely raising your expectations for future products. When you buy any state of the art product, you merely get a beta version of the next model and pay Apple’s research and development cycle. The point however, is not that Apple makes bad products, but that we should start to judge them on their value for money at this moment, and not how good they might become someday. In the end, this is just as we do with almost any other product.

Than again, if you look at it from a more sociological perspective, the use of the future concept can also have a positive side. Historian Allan Nevisⁱⁱ wrote in his research on American history that we are besides bound by history even more bound by our hope for a better future. So, despite the fact that Apple might not be keeping up with their promises in present-day, they do provide a structural basis for giving us the feeling that we are heading for a better future.

Conclusion

To sum things up, all of this leads to the conclusion that although branding strategies like Apple’s force us techniques and methods that would not directly benefit us, not believing in these strategies and instead judging them like others, we would lose the shared hope for a brighter future.

Footnotes:

ⁱ Pogue, D. �The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype�, 2007www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

ⁱⁱ Nevins, A., 1971:398 in Quirks, J.J. The history of the future

Our rendez-vous was the Sony Store in the similarly named Sony Centre. What appears to be a reasonable implementation of an Apple store, could very well have been geek heaven, but fell short on some important points. This comes back to the stuff about experience design we had been talking about yesterday, with some of these products you really wonder what they were thinking.

All sony stuff was live on display to play with. Some of it more succesfully than others. Nice batch of HD videocameras, a mediocre range of SE phones and the Sony SLR range, which is decent but I don’t understand why anybody would bother with.

The real killer was the laptops section where there were some 11″ laptops. The size of the screen was pretty tolerable (Apple should bring out one of these) but the keyboard was shrunk in such a way that typing normally had become impossible.

Even worse was the Sony UMPC that was on display. Clunky �I think you could call it massive� with plastic sliders and other strange controls. Slides open to reveal a keyboard and even has a webcam and finger print scanner. I don’t know what function this device is supposed to fulfill but playing with it for longer than a couple of minutes was an actively painful experience.

Add to this the horribly negative reviews of the T-Mobile Shadow and the Nokia N81 and it looks like device managers are getting desperate. Who will save them?

The party of last night, made this day start at a suitably late time. I just got into the venue in time for Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s demo of Photosynth. This guy is one of Microsoft’s biggest PR assets, and I hope they chain him to the building or something.

Rod Beckstr�m closed off the keynotes with a great presentation about his principles of flexible network structures explained in his book “The Starfish and the Spider”. I’m definitely going to read that book.

My head could not cope with any of the sessions planned for that afternoon, so I spent the rest of the day hanging around the expo and we made an early exit.

Day 3

Today and the last day of the conference, we got in in time for Cory Doctorow’s presentation about the European Copyright Wars. Cory mainly explained the various legislations in place both in Europe as in the US and listening to him, you would think the battle had already been lost.
It seems that EFF and EDRI are making strides in this fight and they can use all the support they can get.
I asked Cory what he thinks about the Pirate movements and he replied he thinks it is useful to have people out there who take an extreme position. We are fighting a war here and some nukes may come in handy. I’m checking out the feasability of a Dutch Pirate Party.

Then it was off to the final keynotes where Tim O’Reilly interviewed Ari Virtanen from Nokia and managed to bore the entire audience to death. This interview missed all the sharpness and candour of the Microsoft one. The one guy who asked why Nokia changed the size of their plug, got applause but Cristiano couldn’t muster the courage to stand up and ask why the N95 is such a horrible phone.

Reshma Sohoni finished off the keynotes with some stuff about Seedcamp and then it was thanks and greetings from the O’Reilly crew and the Web 2.0 Expo was over. We played some final rounds of Werewolf with the regular crowd, and headed out for dinner.

During dinner we talked about lots of stuff including cameras and experience design. About why iPods, iPhones and TomToms are the best devices in their fields for random definitions of ‘best’.
It’s interesting that with all the talk about it and the importance of the subject, that a lot of people still do not get it. I thought the stuff we heard at dConstruct was pretty self evident, but it looks like there’s still a lot of awareness to be raised on this issue.

Day 4

We will be around for one more day before driving back to the Netherlands on Saturday. Let’s see what Berlin has to offer on the touristic side.

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 Marienburgerstra�e. After chilling out a bit more at the house, we made our way to the M�nzsalon 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.

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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.)

Download the free tool here

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.

Picture by Eelke

Four Starters has never been together in a single geographic location since its inception and though that’s normally not a problem, it is a nice change to be able to meet face to face for a change.

And talking about meeting face to face, if you see us at either the Barcamp or the Expo, drop by and say hello.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

Boatloads of Leopard-only developer environment improvements will likely result in many applications releasing new versions that will no longer work in Tiger (10.4). If you’d like to keep your apps up to date, you’ll have to upgrade to Leopard.

Specifically:

• Objective C 2.0 has been released and it looks like a number of important improvements, such as automatic garbage collection, won’t work under Tiger.

• Core Animation makes it easy to add any number of shiny gimmicks to your app. Core Animation only works on Leopard though.

EDIT: Also check out Matt Gemmell’s partial list of 43 leopard-only development features - use any of those and your application becomes Leopard only.

Personally I wasn’t planning on switching until a suitable version of java 6 is released for OS X Leopard, but possibly I’ll be forced into switching sooner than I planned.

(Of course, Cristiano already switched - that’s his personal copy of Leopard above. He’ll write about his experiences installing Leopard soon.)

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.

One of the London Games Festival events is Be Very Afraid, an annual event held at BAFTA displaying how schools and universities integrate new technologies into their curriculum. It’s meant to show policy makers what the possibilities are when children get in touch with new gadgets, ideas and creative resources. I was able to get a guest ticket, so last Monday I found myself being very afraid…I got to speak to a couple of the kids and I found it really refreshing. A couple of weeks ago at BarCamp Brighton there was a discussion of how difficult it was to get kids more interested into technology. What I discovered was that these kids were so passionate and creative without needing any real motivation. Just the opportunity to let them play/work on/mess around with PDAs, Nintendo DSs and iPod Touchs (!!) is enough to make them realise what they can do with it.

I’ll try to describe what a couple of the schools were doing. One interesting thing I noticed though was that it was mainly the primary schools and the first years of secondary schools that were doing the really cool stuff. It seemed as if the older you got, the less appropriate it was to use gadgets and computers in a fun (but useful) way; everything turns so serious. In my eyes, you learn the best if you’re having fun with the subject, so why not try to motivate the students in a better way? Anyhow, here’s what I found out:

Dhoon School, Isle of Man

I talked to a sweet 9-10 year old girl who showed me on a iPod Touch (!!) the website her class created. It was an online learning game, where you could pick a place on the map, watch a video about the place and answer a question about the place. They also had simulated a part of it in a KeyNote (!!) presentation, putting all my KeyNote skills to shame. All the children in her class had an iBook or a MacBook, which they used on a daily basis.

St Columba’s Primary School

At this school the Brain Training game on the Nintendo DS was used to coach kids in logic and math. For ten weeks every morning every child had to “play” 10 minutes with the game. The teacher tested their grades prior to the 10 weeks and after the 10 weeks and discovered a significant increase. The boy (10 years old) I talked to was jumping up and down the whole time, desperately wanting to show how quick and precise he could solve all the math problems.

Whitmore Junior School, Essex

This school offered an afterschool club for children to create podcasts and comics. It started out with the podcasting, with the kids going through the complete process of creating regular episodes, writing the script, recording it and editing it all together. Eventually they also began making a weekly comic with several recurring characters. One of the girls loved it so much that even though she is now moved to another school (high school, secondary school? not sure what you call it here in the UK) she’s coming back every week for the podcasting club.

Capel-le-Ferne Primary School, Kent

There were several interesting things this school did. For starters, they had a special project week, where all the kids brought their robots and gadgets along with them to school. Based on the items they brought with them, they created a movie with some kids filming it, some acting in it, and others editing it and adding sound effects to it. Next to that, they built and programmed Spike (see image), a robot that could “see” the edge of tables (and not fall off) and would try to grab your hand. Finally, every child had an own PDA with camera and internet access. There was one project where 6 of the children went on an excursion to a mill, with the rest of the class staying behind at the school, but staying in constant contact because of the PDAs. The idea was that they had to write a story about the mill: the stay-behinders had help from a children’s book author, giving tips on what type of information was useful. They played this info through to the mill-kids giving them instructions on what to look for. The mill-kids in turn investigated everything and emailed the data and photos of the place back to them.

Final Note

These weren’t the only schools that were at the event, just the ones that really popped out to me. I loved the enthusiasm and creativity of the all the participating kids and definitely do feel intimidated by what these kids are learning to do. Most of them aren’t even 10 yet and they can do stuff better than I can. Just imagine what they’ll be doing in 10 years time! Be Very Afraid, indeed…

I saw Brian Suda present the various ways you can use GPS data and visualize GPS-annotated data using Google Earth on Barcamp Brighton. It looks as though GPS is finally getting a lot of traction with GPS enabled devices such as TomTom Navigators everywhere, GPS integration in some phones and GPS dongles available for about $100.

And if you have a website where data can be reasonably geotagged, you should think about breaking free of browser list pages as the dominant way of perusing your data. There’s no reason people couldn’t get at your site from Google Earth just as easily or (in the near future) just by walking around the world.I’m coming across more and more location based services and some old ones, so I thought I would share some impressions here.

Plazes

The archetypal location based service used to be Plazes, a German startup revealed some three years ago which used a small application to tell a central server where you are located. Early on the application gained a lot of traction among the laptop carrying tech crowd. A lot of people could be found on Plazes and it had some nifty features such as calculating the probability of meeting another person or displaying the velocity of a person in kilometers travelled per day. I used a version of their API to make my own Plazes Dashboard widget back then.

After a while the service stagnated somewhat. Plazes had gotten funded and they had Adaptive Path clean up the site and do a redesign to solve outstanding issues with the Plazing experience.Some time ago they relaunched their service with some major differences. Most important among which were the fact that you no longer needed a desktop application to Plaze yourself on a certain location. The granularity of internet connection points was given up for a new paradigm where anybody could plaze themselves on any location. They had already done this partially with a mobile client (out in 2005 or so) and with an SMS interface to the plazes service (also out pretty early).

The other major feature they introduced is that they added microblogging or status information in their updates. Felix Petersen �Plazes’s founder� had always defined Plazes as a service for �rich geo presence� and a very important part of presence does seem to be what you are doing. Obviously, after they had been beat to this game by Twitter and Jaiku, they had to add this as well. This feature has now been redubbed into activities (as described in the Plazes podcast) and it is now possible to add current or future activities to locations. So I can schedule that I will be working at my new house this week.

A last thing I don’t really understand is why Plazes does not show more information sources on the same map along with your contacts. Knowing somebody is nearby is interesting information but seeing there is an Upcoming event that you are both interested in in the same area that night, would be really great. Plazes promises to release a complete API in the near future, with which it should be easy to make these kinds of mashups. I might try my hand again then.

Bliin

A small Amsterdam based startup that is taking a different approach to the location problem is Bliin. Bliin really is a cute application that allows you to upload geotagged photographs and provides you with a visually really attractive way of browsing the traces.I don’t really know much more about Bliin, but I think the name and the app are really cute. Seeing as they are in Amsterdam we may have more extensive coverage of them in the near future.

Dopplr

A startup getting a lot of buzz by the travelling tech crowd is Dopplr. Dopplr also recently got some funding by some notable users of the application.Dopplr allows you to indicate the locations you are going to visit next and the dates you are planning those visits on (my profile). If you share these future plans with your travel buddies you can then see when you are in the same metro at the same time and meetup.Dopplr’s is yet another social networking site, but it is taking pains to decrease some of the burden of keeping track of your information and making sure it is up to date and correct by making judicious use of microformats. It is expertly designed and implemented and it tries to head up the portable social networks effort by trying to deduce my information. Its guesses of people I probably know and its social network importer, work quite nicely already.

It would seem that a service such as Plazes with its rich array of location data and its installed user base, could easily whip up a similar service and wipe Dopplr out. The information is there but I seem to have some trouble finding relevant stuff on Plazes. An app with a specific focus like Dopplr has a lot of advantages in providing a coherent experience.

FireEagle

During his presentation on dConstruct Tom Coates talked about his work at Yahoo! and a project of his there code named FireEagle. FireEagle is supposed to be a central repository for you where you can store your location data any way you can find it. So this could be GPS based, GSM cell based or any other way you can come up with to pass your location information to the repository. I have no clue what it exactly does, so an invite would be appreciated.

That location information in the repository could then be used to provide you with services and enrich your experience with other sites and provide you with functionality. You would have full control about the privacy and how to share this information.

This sounds pretty similar to what Plazes does and did when I and my friends were using it. Everybody would update their locations to Plazes and Plazes would track that and apply appropriate privacy filters. You could then use the API to get a list of your friends and their locations and other stuff though this used to be quite limited. If there is something we have learned, and which Tom Coates hammered on in his presentation, is that APIs offer a lot of value both to your users and to your business. Plazes looks like they have taken this hint.Maybe it’s a nice idea for Yahoo! to stare their data in Switzerland just like Plazes does. The British government looks like it’s not the most trustworthy one to entrust with your sensitive personal information.

Concluding

The abundance of GPS data is going to make the location space heat up enormously in 2008. I have only touched on a couple of sites I found interesting but there is too much happening in this space to give a complete coverage in one post. Where 2.0 looks like a nice conference where a lot of interesting stuff in this area will be visible.

Just to look at a simple example. Almost everybody in the Netherlands currently has a TomTom Go or similar in their car. TomTom currently offers WiFi updateability of route, traffic and other relevant information for your trip. But shortly the newer editions will have full internet connectivity. Just imagine the kind of social applications you can build on that platform.

Add your location sites and observations in the comments.

You and a stranger are offered 10 dollars. In order to receive it, you must propose a way to divide up this 10 dollars between you and the stranger. If the stranger rejects your division proposal, neither of you gets anything, otherwise it is divided as you directed. You won’t meet this stranger again and this game is only played once. What division do you propose?

Economists use this to explain the concept of economic rationality. Rationally speaking, the economically correct division is 9.99 for you, and 0.01 for the stranger. The stranger, if economically rational, will accept, because 1 cent is more than 0 cents. And thus, as you are also economically rational, you want to maximize your gains, so that’s what you propose.

These same economists will call Radiohead’s offering of their new album, In Rainbows, for �free� (pay whatever you think it’s worth, including nothing), a sucker’s proposal. Clearly everyone would pay nothing � you get the same album regardless of how much you pay. And yet Radiohead is reported to have made to the tune of 10 million USD inside of a month. This wasn’t even expected; Radiohead’s bold move to release the album in this way was designed primarily to sell out concerts (which it has, all 21 of them). One might claim listeners are paying to ensure Radiohead will continue to make music, but Radiohead is not the kind of group that is pressed for cash, and I think they’ll keep making music even if they had to pay to do so. Thus, a rational economic human being truly has absolutely no reason to pay for this album.

So, how’s it work then? Are there are 10 million USD’s worth of idiots on this planet?

No. Human decency is simply an effective motivator. These album sales aren’t the first time the economists were wrong about humanity’s willingness to pay money just to be fair, instead of to optimize personal gain.

Reports that record labels are reconsidering this model abound, but I don’t think the record industry can afford it: This distribution model doesn’t NEED a record label. You can just record your complete song someplace, and pay some serious hosting provider to take care of distribution, and that’s all you need to do. Costs of renting studio time and bandwidth bills don’t amount to enough to require the vast pockets of a record label. The record industry’s clout with the radio can still help launch a successful music career. However, I don’t know about you, but I never listen to radio anymore. I might have a look at the iTunes top 100 from time to time, and I check Last.fm for song suggestions.

And thus we’ve come full circle, because in a world where music is distributed on a �pay what you think is fair� model, with distributed recommendation engines, is economically far more efficient. It cuts out large swathes of middle men. Giving radiohead 10 million dollars was a smart move after all!

Reason 1: Scaling is good for consumers

Google promised a continued increase of storage for Gmail but not for Picasa. The increase in storage for Gmail is a good thing as there is much more value in the promise of a service scaling with you, than a service that doesn’t make any clear plans. In time, we all collect more and more data and therefore need more and more storage. This doesn’t mean that our habits change, but just that it generates some nicely accumulated data.

Picasa doesn’t scale yet though, which generates some serious issues in scalability to users. For example, here is a simple graph showing a fanatic Picasa Web Albums user that (on average) uploads 4.3GB of photos per year, set over 5 years. It uses the current prices which might in time change, but at the moment it shows that a non scaling service could seriously affect your yearly costs.

As you can see, limited storage where the price doesn’t scale in time is seriously not a good deal for the consumers. In the beginning, 10GB of photo storage on Picasa will cost you $20 a year, but as you cross that limit you will have to go to $75 a year for 40GB. Although 10GB is a lot, my hypothetic user and many other users will inevitably cross this limit in time, meaning that would suddenly have to pay almost 4 times the price for the same behavior!

Note: Although Google promised a continued increase of storage, the speed might be a bit slow for some users, meaning that these services are still limited. Unlimited storage is often a good deal, but the best deal for any user is clearly highly dependent on the habits of the user.

Reason 2: Scaling is good for business

Scaling online storage is also good for (some) businesses, which is why Flickr decided to go for their model of unlimited storage. Flickr’s business model thrives on their community, and therefore getting an active community is important. Making their pro-accounts unlimited was a good thing for their customers as they got a better deal the more they uploaded. At the same time it was a good deal for Flickr as all those people uploading, tagging, commenting, and generally socializing around those photos made their business more valuable.

Obviously this doesn’t necessarily work for services where uploading more doesn’t directly add value to the product, but you would be surprised in how many cases it does make sense. In Gmail for example, the best reason for Google to add unlimited (or scalable) storage is that to them information equals money. If a lot of people start throwing away some of their “unimportant” emails because they don’t have any space left, Google loses information about us that they would love to use for showing us advertisements.

Conclusion

In short, if you ever want to offer some online storage, scalability is a good thing to think about for both consumers and business. If unlimited storage isn’t possible, making clear plans for the future of the storage adds some very nice incentive for customers to use your product over others.

For now though, if you weren’t able to attend FOWA, you can now listen and watch to some of the presentations online and see what you missed. I’m personally actually going to go through a few of these as I obviously wasn’t able to attend all of the parallel sessions.

On a Pecha Kucha evening, people who have something to share with others can tell their story to the audience with only one constraint: Each of the 20 slides they have to use is shown for only 20 seconds.

The Pecha Kucha (which means chit-chat) originated in Japan, and quickly spread around the globe. Berlin was one of the first cities to follow, so I had to check it out locally.

What I experienced earlier in Rotterdam and the Hague, was that the evening completely depends on the quality of the speakers. It can be shit, or a hit. The same case in Berlin:

Shiro Masuyama

Shiro MASUYAMA from Japan hardly spoke English nor German. Although the slides showed interesting art installations, it was impossible to understand a word, so I could have just watched them on the internet. Twenty seconds suddenly seemed like a awful long time for a slide.

However, there were two speakers who actually saved the evening with their projects:

Tobi’s Timemachine:

Tobi has developed a Firefox Plug-in that restyles any web page to the 90’s, completely with animated gif’s and midi-music. Completely useless, but we, the audience, loved it. FourStarters would look like this. You can download his timemachine or watch some more examples on flickr.

Alex von Furstenberg:

David Henry Brown Jr is an Artist based in NYC. For one of his projects he used to dress up as a German royalty called Alex von Furstenberg. He would bluf his way into VIP parties this way, and meet up with famous Celebrities to gain his 15 minutes of fame.

His talk really gave extra value to his photos, giving extra information behind every shot. The reason for example, that he had a red nose on some of the pictures, was that he had to wait in the cold before he finally found a way to penetrate into the party ground.

Of course I visited the party afterwards (which wasn’t VIP) to collect a picture with Alex von Furstenberg for my personal 15 minutes of fame.

Round Up:

First of all, the Evening could have used a bit more spice to my taste. Why not ‘boo’ at someone who doesn’t captivate your attention, and ‘cheer’ at someone who does? It may sound harsh, but they are grown-ups who choose to get up that stage. At least it motivates them more to improve, than their friends saying “Great Talk!”.

Secondly, some of the Speakers have no clue about their audience. The event is mainly visited by designers, architects, artists, filmmakers and musicians. So there is no point in asking “Who of you owns a Football Club to sponsor me?” Pecha Kucha is a great place to promote your projects, but don’t expect any miracles if the audience has the same interests as yourself.

Did I learn anything? No. Did I get inspired? Yes.

Will I participate in the future? Yes.

About what? To be continued…

Though small, I see a lot of potential in the event format and the diverse mix of people who are mostly doing pretty interesting things. We discussed al sort of thing such as work, FOWA, Mac, Linux, Open Source, branding, OpenID, Processing art, improvements in Leopard, cameras and the likes. Plenty of cool stuff and lots more to talk about at our next meeting in Rotterdam in two weeks (Upcoming).

Two weeks after that we might be headed back to Delft, if we can secure a nice venue here, or else we might head out to the Hague. And Jeroen talked about a gathering of internet creatives that he is planning on November 30th.

For up to date information and all relevant links see the Open Coffee page here on Four Starters.

Matthew Mullenweg

When we talk about Wordpress there are two products that can be recognized; Wordpress.org is the software that you can run on your own server, and Wordpress.com is the hosted solution for the less tech savvy people amongst us. When talking about scaling his business, Matt was talking about Wordpress.com which was gained users in exponential rate in the last few years.

Obviously at a certain time, any web application developer and decent entrepreneur will consider advertisement. In the age of Google with their Google-Adsense, ads have proven to be a successful stream of revenue for webapps, especially if your app has a big uptake on traffic. Still, many entrepreneurs that started with a social concept and a gathered a solid community will be hesitant about subjecting their loyal users to ads. As a result some find a different source of revenue (selling your statistics?) while others make Pro packages that let users get rid of the ads.

Wordpress.com went in an other direction when they made a clear distinction between loyal users and people reaching their blogs by accident. They noticed that a certain big percentage of their page visits came through search engines like Google. Clearly these people were already presented with ads at those points and adding the same kind of adds to the Wordpress page could be leveraged as some kind of second-level advertising. The cool thing about this though is, that by only offering these ads to people coming from the search engines, the loyal users and readers of Wordpress.com blogs were spared the advertisements and the annoyance.

The logic behind all this is pretty solid. People searching for something might actually be interested in the relevant product that is presented in the ads next to the articles. Loyal readers though will most of the time come to the site no matter what the content was as they are more interested in the user that writes the blog. This is enhanced by the effect that RSS feeds have on people actually being loyal readers no matter what someone writes.

Therefore, only offering ads to the people that are proven to be more likely to click on them makes perfect sense. The result is that when you are a Wordpress.com author or loyal reader, you will rarely even know there are ads.

Thank you Matt for this cool idea, and for saving us bloggers from a world of advertisements!

Matt Biddulph from Dopplr though, showed some ways how OpenID could be used beyond authentication. Dopplr for example lets you add more than one OpenID account to your Dopplr account, which enables you to login to Dopplr with any OpenID provider. This becomes quite redundant when you add more than two OpenIDs, but Matt Biddulp showed that you can use people’s OpenID for more purposes besides authentication.

I already knew, you could use an OpenID to verify that a person is simply a member of a certain group of people. Much like you could use your student card to get discount at a cinema, an OpenID from your university would show that you are a student. Extending on this your national OpenID could prove your nationality, and your corporate OpenID could prove the company you work for.

Note that the actual identity of the user is not relevant and doesn’t really need to be checked as only the type of the OpenID is the important part. Even better, there is no extension like XRI needed to make this even work.

+

A second example though showed how OpenID+Microformats would be able to give any application a nice read-only API. Imagine that you have an app, and you would like to give your user a simple way to add their friends from their other networks. A simple way to do this would be to let the user provide the OpenIDs of some other networks. Checking with the OpenID server if this OpenID really belongs to that user would be enough for you to then simply fetch the Microformatted contact lists from their profile pages on those sites, and compare that info with your own list of users.

Many networks like Twitter and Jaiku already present their friend lists using Microformats, but they don’t yet provide their users with an OpenID login that would allow any other app to actually verify if user X on your application is actually user Y on that other site. Currently Dopplr just scrapes your Twitter profile page for friends when you give them a username, so you could give them any name you want, but if Twitter would become an OpenID provider than they could use this to check if you are really that person on that network.

[More brainstorming on combining Microformats and OpenID]

1. The physical hosting is located in the US, which means that any data you will store will fall under US copyright laws. Some people had some serious issues with this.
2. EC2 doesn’t really offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which means that they might take the service temporarily or permanently offline whenever they feel like it. This is obviously a risk to any business and means that people have been looking for alternatives.

One of the new alternatives is FlexiScale by the UK based company Xcalibre. A few startups like Huddle have already used their scalable servers and profited from their benefits when the product gained popularity. For a few bucks a month you can get a wide range of server options, fully scalable in storage, power, and numbers. Obviously they DO offer a SLA which means that this service is reliable for business.

The only problem I had was that their minimum option was still a bit expensive for me as a young/student developer to play with. I talked with the CEO Tony Lucas about this and he was willing to consider smaller packages as scaling down would be just as easy to them as scaling up. I’m looking forward to what they come up with.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back �9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about �41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least �10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.

Unlike MeeCard and more like Jaiku, this app focusses a bit more on creating an online lifestream for you to share to others. I therefore would miss the option to use this site as an online businesscard (with lifestream aggregation). Further more I noticed there is no “aggregated” RSS feed that your friends could subscribe to, which would make it probably a more useful tool (add a new feed to you aggregation and your friends will be subscribed instantly!).It seems to be a cool trend of sites (I even have another one that I will review soon) that try and make it interesting for people with an active online social life to have one local repository to share their information and lifestreams. Still, I can’t see one that makes it a business.

I actually had a similar idea to MeeCard a while back when I ran into troubles with my MooCards that had 3 urls on it. I realized that it would make sense to have one central place online where people can find you, your lifestream, your details and your external links on all other websites, without having that content all on your own website. I decided to write something like this as an experiment for me to learn Ruby on Rails but never got much further than this.

The idea behind Meecard (example) is to have one online card that you can “configure” yourself and have it show your lifestream, links to your accounts, personal info, and basically anything more. They haven’t gone public yet so I am hoping to some beta access soon and give it a real try, as it sounds interesting and I would like to see how configurable it is.

I never really went into taking my personal project that seriously, as I noticed in a few discussions with friends that it was pretty hard to get a businessmodel around this. When I asked the same question to the MeeCard guys they noted that they hadn’t really thought about that either.

I just registered and Reinier and myself will drive to Berlin from the Netherlands. We have 2 seats available to join us for the ride. Definitive date of departure and return to be discussed. Fuel price split, this will probably be the most comfortable and cheapest way to get to Berlin.

And now it’s off to the Hague for the Web 2.0 drinks in the Boterwaag. See you there.

Update: Cristiano is also coming. Right, Cris?

1. Why would we really need this application?
2. Do I need to login to Facebook before I can use your application?
3. Do I need a Twitter account before I can use your application?
4. What other company does your corporate logo feel close to?
5. Do I need to register before I can even look at your application?
6. Do I need to re-add all my friends when I join your site?
7. If I join, will you start spamming my friends with invites?
8. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
9. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
10. Does your mom understand how to use your app?

Got more questions we should ask, then add them to the comments before tomorrow.

LinkedIn has often been cited as an example of good interaction design because with this small piece of feedback they incentivize their users to fill in ever more complete profiles. Social networking mostly is a game even if it is for business, and with this score they have made it an even more compelling game.

But imagine my disappointment when upon reaching the 100% mark I did not get any kind of end game reward or a clue on what to do next. Usually in a video game upon reaching 100% (i.e. completing the game) you would get an end game sequence explaining the what you just achieved.
In some cases you would also get a new quest even if this only was starting the game anew while retaining your levels. Retaining your levels seems pretty relevant to LinkedIn but suppose there was some deeper meaning to the social network besides filling in my profile and making connections.

Oh wait, there is: Upon completion LinkedIn should offer a congratulatory message and state that now that you have succeeded in their social network, you have everything you need to succeed in the real world. The game goes on in real life: ‘Go out and kick some ass!’ Maybe add some practical pointers on how to actualize your LinkedIn network just as they did with filling in your profile.

So the lesson is that it is a good thing to give your users something to strive for, but also allow for a reward (however intangible) once they have reached that goal (Kars agrees with me). You may indeed make your users quite happy in the proces.

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.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.

Up until that day I had never ever been cut by a stranger, I mean, not even once. I always had friends and family around who could for better of worse do the job. Only once my hair was touched by a stranger, when a nurse washed it in the hospital.

I was not quite sure, why the concept that the shop owner had chosen six years earlier was so strong, that it got me entering the shop, sitting down, getting my hair washed and cut, paying the �10 bucks and heading off.

A simple Message

On my way home, I saw several other barbershop which had the same deal for the same price. But the same message didn’t appeal. What the previous owner had perfectly understood, was that in order to get me inside his shop he had to communicate one simple message: get a new cut fast and cheap. He used the complete display window to communicate this.

I noticed some other shops using the same technique.

When you are opening up a shop, realize that your fa�ade is probably the cheapest and most effective advertisement that you have, so why not cut to the chase and get your message across?

I think the same thing goes for your website design. Sure you can complicate things by listing numerous advantages of your business compared to others, but often it is much more effective to focus on the one most important message. Consider your landing page as your shop window.

Now, there is news of a new webapp named Quechup (I’m not linking to them on purpose) that recently took it to the next level by just inviting everyone in your address book, even if you have told them not to do that. Eventually this leads to a “virus” much like those old school email viruses that spread themselves by mailing everyone in the receivers address book. The app has been in the news quite a lot, and I think it proves some of my point, including the fact that it stupid that people are starting to regard invites as something normal without thinking.

Obviously this new trend shows an even worse trend of people giving their email login details to any random app! People should realize that email functions much like a single sign-on at the moment, meaning that with your email login details anyone could get access to any of your other websites. I hope more people will start to realize that we need to develop and adopt new technologies that will enable apps to intercommunicate without having to share the login details.

Disclaimer

Before I start talking about what I think of OpenOffice, let me explain that I appreciate their attempts. OpenOffice has been great at enforcing the Open Document Format that is becoming more and more mainstream. I salute the people behind ODF that make sure that there will be a real standard (unlike OOXML) that will be usable by anyone who wants to make an office suite.

The Players

When you look at some of the current office suites being used, you can probably limit them to the following leaders:

• Google Docs
• Apple iWork ‘08
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org

Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice obviously try to play to the same crowd: office addicts. I am not trying to say anything bad about these users, but these people simply need their office suite because of their business, workflow, or other important external factors. Apple iWork and Google Docs on the other hand try to do something different. Call it a niche, call it innovation or call it the long tail, but in the end both of these products make sure they have something specific that makes them more interesting than the big two.

Google Docs

Google Docs has a clear advantage above all other products: collaboration. Because of the online nature of Google Docs they are the only suite of the four that makes collaboration extremely easy. Universities, companies, and even individuals all see the advantages of this. Google recently even proved that Google Docs is destined to coexist next to big suites, by providing OpenOffice in their Google Pack. Admittedly, Google Docs is not the most powerful suite, but unless you are an office addict, you really don’t need anything that powerful.

iWork ‘08

Apple iWork ‘08 on the other hand is making life easier for Apple fans. The suite doesn’t focus on business or students, but just people wanting to make something nice. Like most things Apple it is absolutely simple to use and attracts all kinds of people that aren’t in it for using the tool, but for making a product. Sadly there is nothing like iWork for Windows, but there is a clear niche for tools that enable simple creation of beautiful documents.

Microsoft Office

Clearly, Microsoft Office has a long history with business users. These users enjoy the full integration of Office with products like Outlook and Exchange, and the full range of possibilities the suite offers. OpenOffice is slowly gaining on Microsoft Office, especially in the public sector, but for most companies the economic reasons for a switch to OpenOffice might not be clear. Furthermore, although open standards are nice, not every company has the same to gain by adopting them.

So What About OpenOffice?

What’s OpenOffice’s niche? What sells them? Surely it is not things like ease of use or collaboration, as those are clearly better handled by Google Docs and Apple iWork. Will it sell because it is open source? Maybe governments and other IT companies might understand the importance of open source, but others mighty simply not care to change their workflow.

Then, is there a reason for OpenOffice to exist besides it being open source? Do we still need OpenOffice if ODF ever becomes an industry standard? I personally hope that OpenOffice will be here to stay, but it is clear that with the increase of interoperability, less and less people will be interested in big office suits. And as less people will need Microsoft Office, less people will also need OpenOffice.

Maybe, once we are done standardizing, it is time to leverage the power of open source to the point of innovation?

A lot of meetings and consultations with various institutions and freelancers etc. have taken place and have resulted in a mission statement, guidelines and proposed organizational structure. Information on the guild can be found on PPK’s webpage (in Dutch).

Front End Guild

The idea of the guild is to certify frontenders so clients know they are hiring somebody who knows about webstandards and is able to make standards aware choices for your web project. The guild will have a certificatory exam and candidates who succeed on this exam will receive a �standards aware� certificate.

The fact that such a professional organization is being formed with standards based webdevelopment at its heart, says a lot about the standards movement and the progress that has been made. A lot of companies have been pushing standards for a long time and this is a way of formalizing that push, while at the same time serving as a wake up call for those firms who still haven’t adopted web standards.

On the other sides these kind of certification programs serve for large clients and large contracting firms to help each other out and in the process close off their markets. I have not become a member because I am naturally suspicious of certification and I don’t see any immediate benefits of membership at the moment. Furthermore I don’t think any exam taken by a commission would prove much about my knowledge or add anything of value to it.

Controversy

The guild has not been without its share of controversy. Some web developers in the Netherlands most notably from Q42 have raised questions about the objectivity and independence of the organization. These have been both questions about the place where the discussion should be hosted but also a lot of issues about strategy, mission and focus.

In the discussion on PPK’s server some comments by people were deleted without clear reason or procedure. This lack of transparency and obviously strange practice of censorship created a lot of doubt in people (including myself).
At some point Lon Boonen of Q42 posed a counter candidacy to be chair of the guild.

I visited the conference on webstandards organized prior to the constitutive meeting. Because I arrived a bit later I did not sit in at all of the panels. Here some short reports from the panels I visited and the issues raised.

Clients Panel

This panel with some clients (�opdrachtgevers�; couldn’t think of a better translation) told about their requirements for websites and how they got aware about the necessity to code sites with standard awareness in mind.

They seemed to be a very clued in group with a lot of knowledge about standards and why to use them. One of the arguments they gave was that separation of content, style and behavior gives them more grip on a project. A lot of problems why standards could not be properly implemented was put on the CMS and editor level.

One of the issues they did raise and which directly relates to the raison d’�tre of the guild is that they have a hard time finding parties who can guarantee standards compliant code. They expect the guild and its certification to offer an easy way of finding standards aware front enders.

Interesting to hear the perspective of these clients, but these seem to be clued in more than your average client. It would have been interesting to hear more about ways to convert clients who do not yet see the importance of standards.

Code Review and aside on XHTML

Tom Greuter from Info.nl did a short code review on a project they did at Info.nl with a look inside of the templates. You could see that they have a lot of clue at Info.nl and that they produce some very tight templates, CSS and JavaScript. Also interesting to see that jQuery is indeed quite popular both at Info.nl and with the people at the conference.

I do keep being surprised that XTHML 1.0 Strict is heralded here and at pretty much every shop as the new gospel. What happened to using POSH and HTML 4.01 which will work everywhere. Did they simply go out of fashion because they were not new and snappy enough anymore? It’s not like there is no literature on the subject or that XML is at all alive on the web.
You can have a technical discussion on this issue, and you could side with either one considering the technical merits. The actual distribution however suggests that nobody has looked at the technical merits at all but that everybody has simply jumped onto the same bandwagon. If we want a vital and really standards aware frontend community, it would not hurt to incorporate more independent critical thought into it and teach people to make their own informed decisions.

Flash within the guild

To end the afternoon Bobby van der Sluis made the case for why Flash should be taken into the guild as a discipline in front-end coding. He took a very circumspect way of getting there and posited Flash as a plugin technology in the continuous development of the web and in its relation to the other technologies we already have to our disposal. This was a very smart way of putting things but unfortunately it did not really address any of the real issues.

Here is my take on Flash. (This could become an article in its own right.)

Whenever the issues of accessibility and search engine indexability with Flash are raised, there are always some Flash developers who say that it is possible to make accessible websites in Flash. While this may be possible in some distant galaxy, it certainly is nowhere near common practice and as long as that is the case Flash programmers need to be called on their bullshit.
It clearly is not easy enough for your common Flash developer to create an accessible Flash site. This lack of interest and capability within the Flash platform to play nice with others makes me think that there is too much work to be done to clean Flash up before it deserves an equal place in a standards based movement.

Right now Flash is only justified when used for complex visuals, animation and/or media. I have yet to see media poor Flash sites which provide the user with a decent experience. A notable exception for this argument is I’m In Like With You which had some very nice Flash integration in its previous version, and where they are pulling off some truly virtuoso work in the current.

Flash sites do not even adhere to the most basic tenets of usability. Usability dictates that people spend more time on other sites than they do on your site. Therefore your site should look and act similar to other sites.
This does not stop common Flash developers from re-inventing user interface, interaction and controls time and time again. In almost all cases they reinvent all of these paradigms very very poorly, rendering a grave disservice to their users. Every button in every Flash site is different (because it is skinned) but a button may seem like an easy control to implement, it definitely is not.
Add to this the impossibility of altering text sizes (which always seem to be too small) or to apply user style sheets for other special needs and you have a usability disaster.

Finally Flash is not a part of the Open Web. Web standards are open technology to promote an inclusive and open web on which everybody can participate. Flash is a closed proprietary technology which locks in both authors and consumers to a single vendor. For only this reason alone Flash should be avoided like the plague and handled with extreme care in the rare circumstances where the benefits outweigh the multitude of cons.

Constitutive Meeting

After the conference everybody went somewhere to get some dinner and prepare for the final constitutive meeting. I could not attend this meeting, but we should have blog posts summarizing the events of the night and the outcome of the elections some time soon.

Update: PPK himself has a post on the meeting and it seems that the differences have been solved amicably and the guild is off to a good start.

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.

The location for this event is set in Caf� 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.