Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 – kickoff

I made it to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, following some interesting travel situations and timezone jumps… I’ll almost certainly blog about last week’s diving trip once I’ve had time to get back from the Expo and sort through the photos!

This is a good opportunity for me to meet up with some fellow IBMers who I’ve not yet met in person, although I’ve come to know them well through our internal and external social networks – social software FTW! – and of course it’s also a great chance to meet new folks and extend my network. It’s my first time in Berlin (positive impression so far) and I think my first time in Germany for about 10 years.

If you met me yesterday I was probably somewhat zonked by the travel – but I spent the afternoon in Leisa Reichelt’s usability workshop (very relevant to me given my new role at work) and the keynote sessions. The keynotes were interesting but it was fairly hard to do anything approaching livestreaming or liveblogging as the wireless network wasn’t playing ball… and my Eye-Fi card didn’t seem to want to connect through the conference wifi (ah! just got that working!) and I can’t VPN out to the corporate intranet either, so there’s something screwy going on. Good coverage on Adam’s blog.

More to come, I should think. Hopefully I’ll call in to give a report on Dogear Nation on Friday too. Photos from the event are going into my set on Flickr.

Oh, and as an aside, the new Brightkite app for the iPhone is lovely – should be really useful for conferences like this.

Social networking with schoolfriends in Poland

One of the sites making waves in Poland at the moment is Nasza Klasa, or Our Class. When we were there at Christmas, the whole family was getting very excited about it – reconnecting with old friends and giggling at old pictures. A lot of fun.

It’s interesting that this social network is even needed. Lots of local / native language sites and networks do exist, not only in Poland, particularly in the Far East for instance… this is one area where sites like Facebook sometimes fail. Poland in particular has its own instant messaging network (Gadu-Gadu, on which I have an account but never seem to be able to login using Adium) and other reinventions of the otherwise English-speaking wheel. Although some of my family are on Facebook, they are also enjoying using the Polish alternatives.

Nasza Klasa is suffering growing pains having gained several million users in a very short space of time… it’s particularly evident in the performance of the service, unfortunately. The site reminds me a lot of Friends Reunited, which I suppose was one of the earlier social networks. The idea is the same – reconnecting schoolfriends – and even the colours and layout are not dissimilar to the original Friends Reunited design. Looking at Friends Reunited now (part of the ITV empire, for some reason), it does look horribly dated. We complain about Facebook’s walled garden, but FR has absolutely no APIs or feeds, you have to visit the site to do anything, and you have to pay to be able to contact your friends. Thank goodness the web moved on.

An excellent September Minibar

As I type this, I’m on the train on the way back from the September Minibar meetup at the Old Truman Brewery in Corbet Place.

Very cool to get along to a Minibar meetup again after a break of a few months. It was interesting to see the number of my Twitter contacts who wish they could have made it! I’d been hoping to meet Chris Dalby, and my colleague Shiyghan… neither of whom made it this time.

Instead, I had some very interesting conversations with, amongst others, Matt and Katherine Cashmore. Matt is from BBC Backstage and ran the BBC/Yahoo! HackDay in London. I’d seen him on stage at the event, but hadn’t had the opportunity to connect with him… so it was good to finally have an opportunity to talk to him about all the cool stuff that BBC Backstage does, and with Katherine about all kinds of social software topics. Matt also made the announcement that Backstage is about to launch a new website, which is something to look forward to. I also had a fascinating conversation with Martin Kamara from BBC World Service (who is very tall – definitely taller than Roo) about my social software evangelism, and what his organisation is up to.

Finally had a chat with Christian, the organiser, and Hannah from OpenBusiness … they are about to celebrate the first anniversary of Minibar with the next “special” meetup on October 19th in association with Seedcamp. It has been a great effort so far. Also, Hannah put me in touch with some really great people – looking forward to developing the new connections.

On to the presentations… which were a little hard to hear at times, thanks to a power blackout depriving the venue of a PA system.

Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt enable users to create their own t-shirts and other branded products… so far so standard… except that they also enable sites to embed the shop platform. It is all RSS and CSS-based, so it is highly customisable, probably more so than Cafepress (which I immediately thought of when Larry Ryan started talking about the concept). I’ve been burned by import duty on stuff from Cafepress in the past, and following a chat with Larry it sounds like Spreadshirt could be a great alternative. Turns out that these folks have been around for a number of years (they started in Germany in 2002, and expanded internationally in 2005). One to check out… plus they were handing out discount vouchers and free Minibar shirts!

School of Everything
These guys were funded by Seedcamp one of the Seedcamp finalists, and the alpha version of the site launched today. The concept is that “everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach”… you can set yourself up on the site as being able to provide training or education in a particular subject, and local users can find you. SoE will then take a small cut from helping to manage your profile and schedule. Apparently this is built on Drupal in PHP, and the presenters were talking about an API, although what form this could take was unclear. There were questions around how this would work though… at the moment, anyone can set themselves up as a trainer, and although there will be a user recommendation system to weed out bad ones, there appears to be no need for any kind of accreditation. Lots of enthusiasm from the team, an amusing presentation, and an interesting concept. Oh, and a man who needs help finding a place to buy a tank that he bought (long story, kinda).

Babyfy
Babyfy has been open for a couple month and is aimed at the ~1 million people who go through the “babification” (pregnancy and birth) process in the UK every year. The concept is that it is a social website to help new parents find products, recommend hospitals, and provide reviews and support to one another. I’m personally somewhat dubious – I see a bunch of potential holes in this, from disgruntled parents making unwelcome comments about hospitals, to companies pushing products more than having users recommend them… the main thing that sprang to my mind was a recent controversy in the UK about baby formula advertising, and whether the site would accept such advertising. It is early days though, and I’m sure the developers will have to think about these things as they go forward. I can see that it has some great potential, and who knows, I may even need to take a look at it in the future… (!)

Miomi
This very nice-looking website is apparently built entirely in HTML and Javascript at the moment, which is impressive. The idea is that you can browse a timeline of history. Memories – both public (culled from Microsoft and Wikipedia) and private (your own audio, video, image and text feeds) – can be stored and browsed. This really reminded me of Rememble which I heard about at a previous Minibar (and which, incidentally, is due to launch publically soon). Apparently these guys will allow companies to sponsor events and timelines or years, and also allow users to embed the timelines on their own sites. A Microsoft influence is evident – the map is based on Virtual Earth, and the developers mentioned that a Silverlight version might follow soon. The idea kind of appeals to me, but a) in common with my reservations about Rememble I’m not sure how this differs from other lifelogging solutions like Tumblr or, increasingly, Facebook and an aggregation of Twitter, blogs and Flickr (apart from the timeline); and b) more scary than Rememble, there was discussion of automatically sucking data from the web, which bothers me as I’d rather explicitly authorise what content of mine becomes part of “world history”, in a way… maybe I misunderstood.

A lot to think about, new stuff to check out, and some great company and conversations. Well worth the time.

Technorati Tags: Cafepress, minibar, miomi, Babyfy, rememble, School of Everything, Spreadshirt

Windows Live Writer, meet Lotus Connections

The latest Beta of Windows Live Writer is out.

I’ve been trying it out with Lotus Connections – namely, with our internal IBM blogging system which is also known as BlogCentral. I was able to successfully add my blog as a new account… WLW auto-detected all of the connection details, and downloaded the editing style (but not the list of categories).

Why is this important? Well, it means that, as previously hinted, Windows Live Writer now works with with Atom Publishing Protocol. This is goodness.

Update: hmm, maybe not. Looking at some debug traces, it looks like WLW is still hitting the metaWeblogAPI endpoint. So maybe I’m mistaken…

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, blogging, Atom Publishing Protocol, APP, IBM, Lotus, Lotus Connections

Facebook and the enterprise

I recently gave a presentation on social software to an internal conference at IBM. In it, I identified what I see as a number of key webapps out there on the interweb today. Along with blogs, I also talked about del.icio.us, Dopplr, Twitter and Facebook (MySpace being so last year, especially since Facebook’s API went live a few months ago)

One of the accusations commonly levelled at Facebook is that it is a walled garden for data. They appear consume the data that people put in, but it is allegedly remarkably difficult to get it out again.

This morning, Dennis twittered at me to point me at an excellent post highlighting how data can be shared out of Facebook. SAP’s Craig Cmehil has demonstrated how this could be done – interestingly, the scenario he suggests is for companies to pull in information about new hires from their Facebook profiles.

Facebook as a trusted third-party / clearing house for personal data? Will enterprises go along with this? It’s all very interesting. I’ve been saying for some time that entropy will happen as increasingly, new webapps pop up demanding that we create profiles, duplicate data, etc.. Could Facebook be onto a winner here?

(I’m off to a meeting, but may post more on this if my brain kicks into gear later!)

Technorati tags: Facebook, social software, profile, Dennis Howlett

Zero

When I got back from the WebSphere Services Technical Conference in April, I posted about the level of interest in simplified development, Web Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0.

Yesterday, Project Zero emerged.

We’re talking REST, PHP, Groovy and mashups.

Come and take a look. For full details, read the FAQ and follow the blog. Then, download the code and join the community.

Technorati tags: Zero, Project Zero, IBM, PHP, Groovy, mashup, web 2.0, community driven commercial development

Oh Plazes, where art thou…

I had an email this morning announcing that the new Plazes is online, so it looks like all of the features should now be public.

There are just a few things that still bother me – I think if the team could sort these out, they might get a bit more uptake:

1. Some of us have been kept up-to-date via email. The Plazes blog has been very quiet on the subject of the whole upgrade. I’m grateful for the alpha/beta exposure, but it seems like more awareness could have been built up around the new version by more coordinated use of blogs, email and other media.
2. The Plazer for Windows and Mac has been re-released, but the Mac one in particular has had some problems. It would be nice if these were open sourced, or a better way of reporting issues existed than the comments in the new Mac group.
3. The API has changed. I’ve seen inconsistent messages on the blogs or via email that certain parts of the API have been / will be removed before certain dates. The WhereAmI XML-RPC PHP endpoint has certainly been removed, and as a result my little Applescript for ecto is not currently working. The success of Web 2.0 sites is usually a lot to do with their APIs and the ease of use… right now, Plazes could be opening this up a lot more and letting the community play with the new features programmatically. The upcoming Hack Day is a case in point – participants could be making use of APIs offered by Plazes if they were made available.
4. [added in a later edit] They seem to have stripped out some of the privacy features. Before, I could choose which of my IM accounts or email addresses to reveal publically or to contacts… this option seems to have gone. An unwelcome regression in function.

I still think Plazes is a cool site, but there’s so much more they could be doing to build their own momentum.

Technorati tags: Plazes, Hack Day, mashups, API, communication, Web 2.0

Hack Day – Yahoo, BBC, London, June

One of the things I’m most looking forward to this month is Hack Day in London, an event sponsored by Yahoo! and the BBC.

Inspired by previous Yahoo! Hack Days, at IBM we’ve been running our own internal Hack Days – in fact, the third one has just happened. We’ve had great fun. Some of the coolest internal tools that I use (intranet-specific Firefox extensions, Sametime plugins, Second Life gadgets, and so on) have come out of the Hack Day experience. Kelly has so much more on her blog about our internal events. I have to say that I’ve often been more an observer of the internal event since I’m usually out with customers… but I participate in all of the internal communities, and I’ve enjoyed seeing what we as a group have come up with.

So, anyway, my colleagues James Taylor, Benjamin Hardill and I will be there at the London Hack Day(s) on 16th and 17th June 2007. We’re looking forward to meeting fellow hackers, discussing what’s new and hot in mashups, coding, Web 2.0 and the world, and hearing the speakers. I’m sure I’ll be live blogging, live twittering, and taking photos too!

Technorati tags: Hack Day, Yahoo, BBC, London, IBM, Web 2.0, mashups

Attacking social networking

A couple of fellow bloggers have noticed the BBC’s apparent attack on social networking tools. Dennis and Euan both highlight reports such as yesterday’s one about bloggers getting sacked for their postings. When I read that, I did think to myself that it was scaremongering… clearly people need to be aware about what they write, but I have a fair amount of faith in the common sense of individuals, and besides, responsible companies have blogging guidelines to enable people to navigate this scary new world of the editable web…

Then, of course, we have Stephanie Booth’s appearance on News 24 this week, answering typical alarmist questions about the “dangers” of the Internet (and a good job she did of replying to them, too).

As I drove in to work this morning, I heard a very silly story on the Today programme on Radio 4. Their journalist, Rory Cellan-Jones, was investigating whether Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter were any use. His conclusion appeared to be that he was too old for them, since he didn’t end up with any friends once he’d signed up (apart from the ubiquitous Tom on MySpace, and the founders of Bebo, once he’d pleaded with them to be his friend!). He also derided Twitter, commenting that people seemed to talk too much about mowing the lawn – ironically I do have one friend who talked about his lawn this week, but I typically find Twitter far more useful than that. He could have mentioned the status broadcast, IM, location awareness and microblogging features, but presumably those would have been too advanced for the Today audience to cope with. It was a very bad item. I was shouting at the radio by the end of it.

The one good thing about the story was that the Bebo folks did make the point that the age profile is getting older as users grow up. I had a similar conversation with a local authority who came in to IBM Hursley today – I was presenting on Virtual Worlds and talking about the fact that youngsters are driving the technology change and bringing social networking tools, and ultimately “games technology” and virtual worlds, into the enterprise.

Of course the week began with alarmist reporting about the dangers of wireless networks. Suw twittered and bsag wrote a commentary on that programme, so I won’t go into it myself.

So, in essence, we’ve now had a week of “the BBC beats up on social networking and the Internet”. A concerted effort? I do have to wonder. And to what end? The BBC already makes a big deal about its own blogs and talks a lot about Web 2.0, and then lays into the tools that are out there. Weird.

Partly as a reaction to today’s news story, I finally signed up for Facebook. Within a couple of hours of Twittering my presence there, I have a bunch (well, 10) friends – and those are only a few of my contacts from other networks. I really need to go and explore some of the groups and look up old friends and contacts from elsewhere – I’ll do that once I get some time.

(annoyingly, onxiam.com is not currently accepting my new identity – hope they get that fixed soon!)

Technorati tags: BBC, Web 2.0, social software, social networking, Stephanie Booth, Euan Semple, Dennis Howlett, Suw Charman, bsag, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, onxiam, identity, Rory Cellan-Jones, Radio 4, Today, Second Life, Virtual Worlds

Spam and marketing hit Twitter

I was not particularly delighted to receive an email informing me that I was the latest Twitter friend of this person (warning, potentially NSFW)… not after I’d seen what they were peddling, anyway. Far from adding them back, I blocked them. At least the new friend email was the most harm they can do (beyond littering the public timeline).

A new phenomenon – Twitter spam… Twam? Sadly I’m not coining this term (I thought I was being terribly clever there, you know). There’s actually a whole blog devoted to this, and more reading available.

More interestingly, it looks like some music artists are starting Twitter pages to go along with their MySpace and other sites, presumably for marketing reasons. It will be interesting to see whether any of them use Twitter themselves, or let their record companies do it for them…

Technorati tags: Twitter, MySpace, spam, marketing, music, advertising, twam

Social network capacity

I’m just listening to this week’s /Talkshow, which features Leisa Reichelt talking to Stowe Boyd. I’ve been following Leisa’s blog Disambiguity since I came across her Ambient Intimacy concept, and been following her Twitters. One of those instances where social networking tools have produced a worthwhile strand of interest.

— wiggly flashback sequence —

A few months ago I was driving home from Hursley and listening to Radio 4’s comedy programme The Ape That Got Lucky (now out on CD! also available on iTunes). I actually only caught a single episode – the second one in the series – Social Development.

There’s a section of the programme (about 7m 20s in) where they discuss the limits of the size of crowds and tribes. It is obviously a comedy, so it is presented in a humorous manner, but I found the discussion quite intriguing. The idea is that tribes used to expand in size to around 80-120 in number, but that was as large as they ever got… and even today, our brains are configured to cope with around the same number of people as acquaintances as our primitive ancestors were. Today we live in “super tribes” in cities, but we still have a limit to the number of people we can cope with… so now we break our networks into smaller tribes: associating with clubs, countries, cities and so on.

I immediately began to think about social networks. How many acquaintances can I reasonably keep track of?

— end flashback —

This same concept – the Dunbar constant of 150 – comes up in /Talkshow (about 9m in)… do the new social networking tools allow us to stretch the number? Can we keep up with more people?

My Sametime list at work probably has a few hundred people in it, but I still only regularly keep in touch with around 10 people via IM. If I look around at my online presences, I have the same groups of people in my lists on Last.FM, Twitter, Dopplr and other networks – and the sizes of those lists are relatively limited – so I probably do keep up with some people better. I think I would find it difficult to keep up with more than around 150, and certainly “intimately”. I’m increasingly relying on the ability to annotate contacts in my IM list to remember where I met them, what I know them for… a sure sign that my brain is running out of capacity for remembering things!

I’m fairly sure that the Dunbar number does apply to social software. I’m loving the network I have, but this week I started to reject people on LinkedIn and remove some people from Twitter as I couldn’t take in all the information – it was becoming noise, or I didn’t feel I’d be able to maintain the relationship well enough. The challenge is that I don’t want to allow this to prevent me from reaching out to new people in the future. I need to start trimming the list of feeds I read, for instance, to make room for new ones.

I’ve mentioned before that social networking tools have enabled me to enrich my physical network. I come back to the point that it is important to maintain a network, and develop it, through meetings in person where possible… dovetailing neatly into the fact that I’m getting together with Al Wood this evening, thanks to some monkchips-originated winedrinking, and subsequent blogging and Twittering

Technorati Tags: Al Wood, ambient intimacy, anthropology, Dunbar number, Leisa Reichelt, The Ape That Got Lucky, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, Stowe Boyd, talkshow, tribes