Written on 5th June 2009
4 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
There will be no more YouTube, no more Facebook, no more Twitter…instead…
(only 20 seconds long…)
Written on 15th March 2009
1 COMMENT
Martin Kloos, Web Strategy Consultant
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing What Would Google Do written by Jeff Jarvis, Designing Web Interfaces written by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil and 33 million people in the room written by Juliette Powell.
I’ve always read Jeff Jarvis’ weblog Buzzmachine about news and media with much pleasure so I was excited to find out he published a book on Google. In “What Would Google Do” Jarvis describes the world of doing business from Google’s perspective. Already published in January this year, the book provides you with a set of rules to live by with. The book describes 30 Google Rules in total, of which “Give the people trust and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose it” and “Your customer is your advertising agency” are some interesting ones. Perhaps many of the rules are implicitely familiar to all of us, but it is good to see them written down in an old styled book fashion way like this. The book is mainly a manifesto for doing business open source style andbook is fully packed with facts and useful information for doing business in this new age of openess and innovation. Opinions on Amazon vary, but since reading a book wouldn’t harm you in any way (most of the time) it is worth a read.
The web is bringing us new innovations every day. With technologies like Ajax, Silverlight, Air and many more, designing user friendly, rich internet applications is becoming more and more important. Bill Scott (great name for a blog!) and Theresa Neil understand this like no other and have written a great book on this matter: Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions. In designing Web Interfaces Scott and Neil present no less than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. The book is divided into six sections all devoted to one big design principle. These are: Make it direct, Keep it Lightweight, Stay on the page, Provide an invitation, Use transitions and React immediately. All patterns (and anti-patterns!) are explained in depth to the reader. Designing web interfaces is a must read for anyone closely involved in interface design.
Juliette Powell’s 33 million people in the room: how to create, influence, and run a successful business with social networking has been dubbed “a timely crash course on how to leverage your business’s online presence”. Well that’s some introduction… Powell has written “a practical guide to social networking that empowers readers to build social and cultural capital in view of increasing financial capital”. The book is (again) densed with a wide range of case studies, as well as an exhaustive description of the success of Obama’s groundswell fundraising campaign. Fascinating about this book is it’s roots in social (psychology) network theory. With her call for ethics and authenticity and her ability to explain how to put social media campaign’s into action, Powell has written one of the most informative books on social networking to date.
Written on 19th February 2009
12 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In an article published in the journal of the Instiitute of Biology, Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman has been quoted as saying social networking sites are harmful to our health and could eventually lead to serious health problems such as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.
Dr Sigman believes although these sites set out to improve human connectivity – they are in fact doing the opposite and ensuring lack of face-to-face contact. There is scientific evidence that suggests this lack of contact can alter the way genes work, negatively affect immune responses, cause imbalanced hormone levels and have a direct impact on mental performance.
Dr Sigman also argues using electronic media undermines people’s social skills and their ability to read body language.
“One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being…In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no-one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled.” Said Dr Sigman
A concerned Dr Sigman discussed the claims in an interview with the BBC, a portion of which can be heard above.
via BBC.
Written on 4th February 2009
14 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Seems like all I’ve written about the last couple of days is Google, I would apologise but lets face it, at the moment – Google runs things.
The latest nugget of news is in regard to a new Google Mobile Maps feature called Google Latitude. The new feature lets you broadcast your current location to a select few people based on where on the GPS from your mobile phone.
As Techcrunch points out, the feature is an application in itself where you are able to keep track of people’s locations, call, email or instant message them at any given time. The application also offers a “list view” which reads like a friendfeed stream. Fret not however, you can fake your location or simply choose to not be shown at all.
iPhone users will need to wait before the application is released however Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 users can access it very shortly via google.com/latitude on their phone.
Its bad news for location based social networks such as Loopt, Whrrl and Brightkite all of which are doing their best to become THE mobile social network, yet as with many areas Google is able to gain a large foothold of the market with just one update to a product.
The ultimate question however lies in the notion of trust – do you trust your location with Google as well as nearly every other aspect of your online life?
Read More:
Written on 3rd November 2008
4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week a new Twitter Money making scheme launched by a company named Magpie. You give them your Twitter account data and they insert regular commercial messages in between your own tweets. They get access to your loyal followers, you both make money.
You can imagine that this sparked some controversy amongst the Twitter audience. One thing the company did very well was include a simple test to find out how much your Twitter account is worth. Our results are here on the right:
Even people who hate the idea of selling their tweets couldn’t resist checking their virtual worth and sharing that with their followers. The result: everybody is talking about Magpie and I’m sure they get a lot of sign-ups. Whether they have enough advertisers is another story though. All Magpie commercial messages are preceded by #magpie and the only ads you currently see are for their own service. You can see this yourself by searching for #magpie. (UPDATE: looks like they found some advertisers. I see lots of different ads now.)
One thing a lot of people are wondering about is how many followers you would lose by using Magpie so we decided to set-up an account for our own Twitter username and will let you know what the result is in 30 days. We now have 1280 followers on Twitter and gain about 5 new followers a day. We should have 1512 followers by November 30. We will let you know how this turns out.
Here are some of the mixed reactions to Magpie on Twitter:
Written on 6th October 2008
22 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
There’s another iteration of a white-label social networking site creator in town, and its name is SocialGO.
Much like the heavily funded Ning, other social networking software makers such as PeopleAggregator, SocialSpring, Kwiqq, OneSite, GoingOn, CrowdVine, Mzinga, Haystack, CollectiveX, Moli, KickApps, DZOIC, Pringo, SmallWorldLabs and about a gazillion others, SocialGO enables you to create an online community website which can be ran stand-alone or bolted onto an existing website. Features include communication stuff like (instant) messaging, content-sharing for photos and videos, blogging tools, event management tabs, an API and blah blah blah.
If you hadn’t noticed by the number of similar services I was able to find after a 5-minute search, this particular market seems to be completely saturated, and my guess is only 2 or 3 from the list I provided above will prove to be viable businesses.
As far as I can tell, SocialGO doesn’t bring anything new to the table and is therefore remarkably late to the game. You have to wonder why UK-based Bright Things believes it can make SocialGO stand out in the crop. Jumpstarting the creation of social networks by giving away £1000 for the most ‘creative and innovative’ one is hardly going to make users aware of the service at all.
How do they plan to make a dent in the plans of Ning to become the default go-to site for creating social networks on the fly, when the Palo Alto company has someone like Marc Andreessen as Chairman and co-founder and oh … over 100 million dollars in funding? Not to mention the competition they have from existing social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which offer customization tools to deliver a personalized networking experience for their users as well.
I’m all for taking risks and launching new web services that have a shot at appealing to a large number of people, but where’s the added value in this one? Or maybe I’m just being too cynical here, in which case you have the opportunity to convince me of the advantages of SocialGO in the comments.
(Hat tip goes to MoMB, which recently celebrated its 3rd birthday. Congrats!)
Written on 30th May 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Take a look at your desk, chances are high you’ll see a huge stack of business cards. All collected at conferences, meet-ups, and Open Coffee’s. It’s actually a bit absurd: while we’re digitalizing our lives, we still use paper to create the foundation for a new contact. Project E is one of the first initiatives that strives to change this contradiction. They’ll allow you to get connected in seconds with a newly developed portable device.
E is a small, slick-looking, curvy white device. It’s just a matter of pressing two of these devices against each other to get connected on services like LinkedIn. Sync it to a PC or mobile device once you’re done with a conference or meeting, and all of your social networks are up to date with new contacts you’ve made.
Three Dutch designers came up with their idea during their graduate master year at the academy for art and media technology in Hilversum. I’ve talked to one of these innovative guys, director Renato Valdés Olmos. He explains the thoughts behind this new approach to social networking: “What we, and everybody else for that matter basically observed is that the Internet has made our world very small. We can connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere. This has changed our world thoroughly. Especially at a social level. Quantity of contact has taken over quality of contact. So we figured, ‘Hey, can’t we get the benefits of all these great online services and communities to real-life situations?’ ‘How can we translate these benefits and getting people closer together in physical reality at the same time?’ We still believe in face-to-face contact.”
The next step for Renato and his two partners was thinking about how to do this: “We researched connectivity between cellphones and smart phones. We came to the conclusion that there must be a faster way to exchange information.” Renato wanted to get people connected with “a device operated by a single gesture. “Exchanging contact info and social networking info with E takes as long as a formal handshake.” (more…)
Written on 6th April 2008
1 COMMENT
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.
According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:
1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”
2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below). It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.
I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.
In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed. I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.
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