Written on 3rd July 2009
0 COMMENTS 
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Although I just recently returned from Internet Week New York, I’m about to set foot on another exciting, new adventure. From July 5 to July 10, I’ll be traveling around London together with my Geeky friends. aka The Traveling Geeks. The TG’s are a small informal group of technology bloggers and influencers who like to travel to various regions around the world, collaborate with technology innovators and leaders on interesting projects and then share everything with the rest of the world via blogs, videos, podcasts and social networks.
On this trip, we’ll be on the hunt for innovative uses of new technologies in Great Britain, especially by lesser-known companies, and spotlight how those innovations may improve people’s lives. We’ll also compare the thought (more…)
Written on 18th September 2008
65 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A little more than 24 hours ago we posted a bookmarklet here titled TwitterKeys and then all hell broke loose. Here is what happened before we launched it and what has happened since.
On Tuesday evening, just as I was getting ready to go home, I noticed a Tweet on Twitter with a symbol in it which I hadn’t seen before. I copy pasted the symbol and Tweeted it:
Sander (@sandervdv) was working next to me and said “Hey, just open your Character Palette. There are tons of symbols there that you can copy paste”. I immediately did and then replied “Very cool, but kind of hard to find. Can’t we just put them all in a floating browser window so you can easily copy paste them while you are Twittering?”. Sander smiled and said “Sure, and I can even write a Bookmarklet so you can easily access it”.
Then I left the office and went home. At 8pm I opened my laptop and found Sander’s Bookmarklet code in my Inbox. I did a quick test with the help of a few Twitter users to see which symbols would work on all platforms and by 10 pm I uploaded the files, wrote a simple post with the details and launched the whole thing by Twittering the following line:
I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺
Immediately I noticed people starting to play with the characters and flowers, comets and stars flying all over Twitter. Within a few hours the Twitter founders found out about TwitterKeys and twittered about it:
Biz Stone (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 16,680 followers):
“Trying out TwitterKeys ☺ which helps you put little icons in your tweets ♥”
http://twitter.com/biz/statuses/923898532
Evan Williams (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 18,650 followers):
“♺ @biz’s post about http://bit.ly/twitterkeys. Neat! ”
http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/923901604
Then other famous people started talking about it:
Howard Rheingold (3,908 followers)
“I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺ via @bomega”
http://twitter.com/hrheingold/statuses/923879515
Leo Laporte (55,837 followers)
“I ♥ Twitterkeys. ☛ http://snipurl.com/3r09l ☚”
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/924264132
So within a few hours these 4 Big Twitter users promoted Twitterkeys to their combined 95,075 followers. The result? About 15,000 unique visitors to the original blog post within 24 hours, 60+ diggs, lots and lots of TwitterKeys on Twitter, reviews on 150+ blogs and a nice spike in RSS Feed subscribers…
Today we launched version 2 of TwitterKeys which displays even more characters. If you haven’t installed it yet do it now:
Drag this link to your browser
bookmarks toolbar: TwitterKeys
Here at The Next Web Blog we love to write about people working on Next Web technologies and services. But we also love to contribute a little ourselves from time to time. Hope you like what we do!
Written on 27th April 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
San Francisco was flooded by Finnish companies last week. They’ve teamed up to organize a meeting at the uber-hip restaurant Foreign Cinema to meet with well-known web professionals as Loic le Meur, Scott Rafer and Howard Rheingold. Boris and me were there and really enjoyed meeting all these ambitious entrepreneurs who prove that Finland’s technology industry consists of more than just Nokia. This week I’ll highlight some of the companies, starting with XIHA Life. This is the world’s first multilingual social network, targeted at people living outside their home country.
Howard Rheingold speeching during Finnish meet-up
Juhani Polkko, VP Business Development, told me users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they understand or want to learn, and the content on the site is filtered based on the preferences. So imagine that you’re an English-speaking person from Germany and have a friend in France. When you check out his profile, you’ll only see the English content on his site. The French comments and messages have been filtered out.
I like the idea of their service, as learning other languages or keeping up with the ones you speak a bit are valuable assets. Moreover, the numbers of languages they offer is impressive (see below). Though I’m slightly disappointed Polkko and his team have built another social network. Why didn’t they create an overlay service on top of existing social networks?
Polkko: “We are initially building a niche social network and target the people who have the natural need to use multiple languages in their everyday life, like expatriates and exchange students. The next step is to create mash-ups for content from other social media websites and apply our language recognition and filtering algorithms. This is somewhat limited because you would need to build the algorithms inside other networks such as Facebook, but they can be applied to all the content which is available through open APIs and XML-feeds, or other content which the users own the rights to.”
So whether you like XIHA or not, these Finnish guys do offer us a glimpse of the possibilities when social networks adopt open standards. We could filter out content we don’t understand and use every network in our own language – without excluding other people. Let’s hope it’s not an utopia.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
