Blog - Oliver Thylmann

Entries in twitter (13)

Wednesday

Dec302009

Blippy just Rocks!

Posted on

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 21:32 tagged

blippy,

finance,

realtime,

twitter in

Business,

Web 2.0

Boy do I love Blippy! Seldom has there been a service where I am so pissed that internationalization is hard. The thing is the only account I have that works with the service is my Amazon.com Kindle account. Even iTunes doesn't work as it is the German one. If you are unfamiliar with Blippy read this intro on Techcrunch as well as the follow up where Blippy announces tracking $1 million in transactions only one day after opening their doors. People are already talking about Blippy being the next Twitter, which is really mostly to mean that the Twitter idea is starting to be so big that it can be split up into more tiny niches, with Blippy being one.

Many people will wonder why Blippy is so good or why anyone would share all this information about themselves and I suggest, just read the stream by Leo Laporte or Matt Cutts or Jason Calacanis (who recently purchased a Canon 7d by the way) or Philip Kaplan one of the founders.

For all their credit card stuff they are using Yodlee as do most of the other things out there that interact with US bank accounts. Sadly I do not know of any such service in Germany at this time. Might be somebody that should do this but I am unsure about the German privacy laws.

To finish it off here is a video interview with Pud (Philip Kaplan). He also founded Fucked Company and Adbrite by the way. With Adbrite being so well copied all over Germany I see now reason why this will not happen soon here in Germany for Blippy, expect we don't have Yodlee.

Actually I hope somebody will start a Yodlee in Germany and give the account access to Blippy so we keep it integrated!

Update: and just now they twittered about international support for iTunes. Germany was missing but added minutes after me telling them. Congratulations! So blippy went international in 2009! cool :)

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Saturday

Aug152009

The Evolution of my Rememberall

Posted on

Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 14:42 tagged

Search,

evernote,

friendfeed,

rememberall,

rtm,

save,

tumblr,

twitter in

Web 2.0

I am a technology addict, and I love trying new things. One thing that has always been important to me is how they all work together to form a greater whole. Above that, some weeks ago, together with my Squarespace move, I decided to not have personal servers anymore. Not sure how long this will hold, but I will try. Servers at home are excluded, and ... a never mind, you get the point. E.g. I love Noserub, but I will run it hosted by somebody else.

But back to the main point. My Rememberall. There is so much stuff going on around you that you really need an infrastructure to keep yourself sane enough. It is probably easiest to understand how I use things by going through the day.

A) E-Mail: To start of I check my mail, yeah, I still do, and make sure only stuff I have to answer remains. Things I can answer now, are answered, things that I want to answer later remain, and things that are ToDo's are forwarded to my private E-Mail address at Remember The Milk so they end up becoming (unsorted) ToDo's. All else is archived directly through a Keyboard shortcut (thanks Mail Act-On). I say archived because all mails are in GMail and never deleted.

B) RSS: Yes, RSS is not dead for me yet. I use Google Reader and am very happy with it. I always read the "All Items" list, navigating through keyboard shortcuts. Especially on the iPhone, where I use Byline which syncs with Reader, I mark things as Favorite that I want to closer read later. If I already know that I like it but want to share it with the world, I "share" it potentially with note, which is automatically ending up in my Tumblr Blog at stuff.thylmann.net.

C) Twitter: Some here, I use favorites to mark things I want to read later. I am switching clients on the Desktop but on the iPhone I end up using Tweetie, even though I tried several others.

D) Read it Later: This wonderful service actually is used to add anything that I want to read later while in the browser. It includes an iPhone app that syncs via Nocat and hence I have lots of stuff to read later on my iPhone to read whenever I have the time. It also brings me to my next point. There also are two Bookmark lists for reading very shortly and reading some time, but let's see where they end up at in a few weeks.

E) Remembering: I leave that with Evernote really. Whatever I have read and liked, whatever I think I would like to save, whatever I want to remember, it ends up in Evernote. Either through a forward in Read it Later, via a Bookmarklet or right from the Mac. And it ends up in Spotlight on the Mac too.

F) Friendfeed: I am actually not sure what to od with this now. I was actually setting it up as my personal search engine. I ended up adding people I think are emm... intelligent and as they add all their personal feeds to their accounts, I presume in the long term it will/would have allow(ed) me to get very good search results. Sadly now they have been bought by Facebook so I will have to revisit Noserub again but that is against my idea of not having a server. Maybe just locally. ;)

G) What is missing: I still need one thing that aggregates it all really. I'd like all that is being shared with notes to end up somewhere, full content, all items in evernote, all my twitter messages, all my blog posts, all my photos, whatever. It is still a little bit too distributed. But as distributed is the way of the future I am looking forward to using this setup now and re-integrating that. I am hoping for a few things for the new Social Timeline being developed by Squarespace.

So what are you using as your rememberall.

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Wednesday

Aug122009

The Hubbub about PubSubHubbub

Posted on

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 21:42 tagged

live,

wordpress in

Ok, you have to love the name. Pubsubhubbub is simply the best name for a technology for ages, period. And it is currently pitted as the better step towards a Google Wave like future than Google Wave itself.

So what is PubSubHubbub:

A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS).

In longer terms, it is part of a system that removes the need for Google Reader to query my RSS feed every few hours to see if there is something new, instead allowing for Google Reader to be notified when something changes. The argument is that it gives us the live web and it decreases resource need. For a better into check out This Week in Google Episode 2.

I really like it and so does Anil Dash as visible in his post The Web Way vs. The Wave Way.

There is just one thing that makes me wonder. I remember a long time ago when MovableType was it, with everyone arguing that it was better to have the blogging platform publish static HTML files when you published a blog post as you are publishing so few of them in relation to the traffic that the resources are better spent there. But servers got more powerful and Wordpress changed this around to say that you want easy and fast publishing, the possibility to change your design around, the switch things, which makes it better to have the publishing be dynamic. This is what I see again here. We had centralized systems and only a few of them but slowly we are getting more and we want to move around. This changes how the content should be put together. We have friends all over the place and hence on request we do not want them to come from one source but from several, which is starting to become possible due to server power and general infrastructure items like Pubsubhubbub. It's push due to the underlying changes in how we interact with each other and what we say is important.

We somehow want near-real-time communications. The problem I see though with Pubsubhubbub is how the technology scales if you have for example 1 million friends on twitter. With a centralized system this is relatively easy. If each of your posts needs to be published to 300.000 hubs, this starts to become a pain. But with a polling mechanism it would not be live. How much resources are we will to spend for live, and who will pay the bill?

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Thursday

Jul162009

The Twittergate Document Leakage

Posted on

Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:13 tagged

finance,

twitter in

Business

A lot of discussion is going on on the net about the leak of internal Twitter documents to among others Techcrunch.

First of all I think that Michael from Techcrunch is handling it very well, both traffic wise for the blog, and ethics wise. He talked about getting the documents which lead to huge discussions about security of the cloud, ethics, passwords, and more. These were good discussions in my mind and important ones at that. But all the time he said he would not publish all of the documents and that which has been published by him up till now is really only things that in my mind he does need to publish. Especially as Scoble already pointed out, others, old school media, have already published.

I really like this bit from one of Michaels posts about why they will post some of the stuff:

“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly.

And remember. This does not mean he wants to publish everything, ethics are still involved.

Interesting to see are Twitter's financial numbers. They already blew past the user numbers they had guessed they would get, but we will see what the monetization strategy will really be for the next 6 months. Revenue should be trickling in now. I am not too worried though as they only need to make $1-$2 per User per Year to turn a profit, and that should be doable. Hell you can generate highly targeted Leads for well over a hundred USDs or clicks for easily above $1. Corporations will pay for access, ... .

What I really like though is Ev's comment on his blog post:

Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they're certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world. As Peter Kafka put it, this is "akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there." That is an apt analogy.

I made me remember Ricardo Semler's book Maverick (or Seven Day Weekend, not sure anymore) in which Ricardo goes on about the openness they are working in. For a pitch to a project they would open up their entire profit/loss calculation, balance sheet whatever because in the end he said, nobody is going to beat you because they know your projections or past numbers. They will beat you because they are better, at execution. This is really what Ev is saying. Hell, now somebody outside knows that they were planning in February to make $400.000 this quarter. Who cares. It's not something you love being out there, but mostly because it is not a learned thing and because people will start questioning you. Above that, plans always come out differently and this might come back haunting them for an IPO, especially if their numbers are worse. But hey, they have $45 million in the bank which will last them another year at current growth rate without revenue.

The biggest lesson: Have good passwords. :)

Please not all become one and the same

Posted on

Monday, March 16, 2009 at 21:10 tagged

facebook,

friendfeed,

twitter in

Business,

Web 2.0

Ok, this is starting to get on my nerves. Venturebeat is reporting that you can now choose to have parts of your items within Facebook public, aka visible for everybody. Facebook themselves go into a bit more detail:

Just go to your privacy page and change the settings you want to the new "Everyone" option. You can opt to make one or all of the following profile elements more open: Profile, Status Updates, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Personal Info, Education Info, Work Info, Photos of You and Videos of You.

Yehaa! Another public profile. Another bit of status updates. Another place to copy more of the same. Can all you people really start deciding what it is going to be? Xing is for my professional life really, and I am very happy that they are sticking with that focus. Facebook was for my general social graph / friend connections that is beyond just business. I really like it to be more private because it can be, as it has my friend connections. I am putting a lot of stuff into Facebook, which I am also putting into thylmann.net by the way, so it is very similar to FriendFeed there for me (Oooops, another one there. ;)). I am slowly not able to keep track anymore people!!! It would be no problem if they were all copy cats to start out with but they were freaking different!!! Grrrrr....! At least they should all give me the option to keep everything out of the SE indizes even if it is public. And this again pushes the importance of something that is portable and really mine, e.g. my own Noserub install at thylmann.net. Because you know what? My ID, My Everything, My Life is freaking MINE. And that means that I need to be in full control and need to be able to decide what people are pointed to and move it, with all the content. So I want a few things:

Give me the option to lock out Search Engines
Give me a full data export of my data in XML
Somebody build the perfect life aggregator... I think Noserub is a good start

Because you know what? These things are slowly not anymore about connecting me with my friend but to keep a log of my life, and that is something completely different and something that needs to be extremely more portable.

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