Jaiku's new home
Tonight we demonstrated Jaiku running on Google App Engine, a new development environment that enables anyone to develop Web services that can scale up to millions of users using Google's massive server infrastructure.
The announcement was made a short while ago at a campfire event here on the Google campus in Mountain View. Robert Scoble broadcasted live video from the event using his Nokia phone; a production-quality video will be posted in a few hours on the Google App Engine site.
Jaiku will be fully deployed on Google App Engine in the near future. More details on the Jaikido blog.
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April 8, 2008
OpenSocial foundation
Joe has been working on something I like a lot, the OpenSocial Foundation (opensocial.org). It was announced this morning (there's a press call starting in about an hour). It'll be jointly founded by Yahoo MySpace and Google. The current estimate for bootstrapping the entity is July.
Here's a quote from him the release: "The formation of this foundation will ensure that [OpenSocial] remains [a community-driven specification] in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."
The three key points are as follows:
- all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
- public community involvement shapes the specification direction
- an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig
The jury's still out, but OpenSocial could become an important creative enabler as a significant distribution network for social apps. If that's the case, having the spec under the management of an independent entity is not a bad idea.
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March 25, 2008
A beautiful day
The wedding outfits I mentioned in the previous post were released at the Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday. The dress, a flat hexagon that opens up into a complex, delicate form, is called Kide; here's a photo and reportage.
Which brings me to the title of the post. Today's our wedding day.
Ilkka Suppanen, a founder of the acclaimed Snow Crash design collective, had earlier formulated an idea he called “a beautiful day” as a challenge to designers. It is a call to act on the future of a world deep in the grip of change that could wipe out much of what people everywhere hold dear. The wedding is part of Dai Fujiwara's answer. He sees in it birth.
I think of the beautiful day notion simply in the context of relationships. We can make each day a beautiful one to those we love.
We're living a time when it is radically easier for people to come together than it was just ten years ago – like with these leading designers' collaboration around the wedding. This is no doubt a good thing. But there's another side to the growing intensity of interaction. People are also dropping relationships on a whim. According to a study by Rutgers University, only 63% of American children grow up with both biological parents - the lowest figure in the Western world.
Happiness requires longetivity. That you stick around in a relationship. But sticking around is hard, because you've got to keep changing yourself to renew it. A wedding makes one face this fact, I think. There are other ways to face it too, of course. But that's what this wedding and all the wonderful activity around it is really about: facing oneself without false presumptions, naked. Acknowledging that if love and happiness are what we desire, then making each day a beautiful one, that's what it's going to take.
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February 29, 2008
So we're getting married
Note: this post was written on January 31st but I initially decided to not publish it because of the personal nature of the topic. I'm publishing it now, exactly a month later.
I'm one of those lucky chaps who's getting married without having to go through the trouble of proposing. My fiancée took care of that casually from the back seat while we were on our way I forget where. Her suggestion threw me off balance enough to get us thoroughly lost that October afternoon.
In the months that followed the wedding turned into a production involving six leading designers; the heritage of a deceased architect; and a living philosopher. Somewhere along the way Ulla and I will get married, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is the idea; that life is about making each day a beautiful one.
Now, about a month before d-day, we're hosted by Issey Miyake in Tokyo for the fitting of the outfits. I can't say much about them yet except we all went a bit quiet when we saw the dress. This dress will reach out to your soul and squeeze it. It will be released at the Paris Fashion Week on February 26th.
The collection also features special pieces by the Boroullec brothers, Camper, Hella Jongerus, Louise Campbell, and Ilkka Suppanen. It will be made accessible starting the last week of February by quality design publications and at www.itsabeautifuldaywedding.com.
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February 29, 2008
High school shooting
An 18-year old boy shot to death 8 and wounded 12 in a high school in Jokela, Finland this week. The police found the shooter on the school corridor after he had shot himself in the head with his handgun. He died later in a hospital. One of the killed students was a 25-year old single mother completing her second year of high school. She left behind two children, aged 3 and 5.
As nowadays tends to be the case, the news first spread across the Internet. Some of the immediate commentary took place over IRC, and there's a thread on Jaiku that documents the unfolding of the events pretty much as they were happening. One of the comments in the Jaiku thread is a quote from the IRC chat: "there's a boy on the other [IRC] channel whose younger sister is still over there in the classroom."
Before taking action the shooter posted a total of 89 videos on YouTube, some of them featuring Nazi imagery. The videos have subsequently been taken offline.
Damn it. Someone should have seen what was coming.
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November 10, 2007
First week at Google
On October 9th, two weeks ago, our company was acquired by Google. Loic asked me about it on camera at Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday.
A few days after the acquisition we were on a plane to San Francisco, and now, as we're starting the second week in our new roles, most of the new faces have been met and we're able to find the way to our desks in the morning. It's time to focus on implementing the stuff that we came here to do.
To me Google is a chance to work as part of the largest concentration of software engineering talent in existence, especially a few individuals whose work has been instrumental to my own work and thinking lately; and, if we succeed, profoundly change the Web. Other facets of life play into the picture too. Some of my best friends live here, and two of Ulla's key collaborators are in the Bay Area.
Still, it's a change. Our families are 10 hours away. Moving with a baby is different from traveling as a couple. In Helsinki our company had the luxury of total obscurity. Suddenly, at Google, it feels like everyone's eyes are fixed on what the company will do next.
By the way, I also turned 30 on Friday. Picasso supposedly once said that it takes a long time to grow young. Looking around, it's hard to name an environment that could better keep us from growing up.
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October 23, 2007
Tim O'Reilly on what's missing from the iPhone
In June I gave a short talk at a conference called Essential Web at the London IMAX. The organizers of the conference had recorded an interview with Tim O'Reilly about the future direction of Web 2.0, and they played back clips of the interview with Tim between the talks.
I was a bit surprised when the clip before my talk rolled. In the video Tim argued in his characteristically soft-spoken but irrefutable way that the mobile phonebook was the killer Web 2.0 application.
In all honesty I wouldn't have expected the father of Web 2.0 to name the phonebook as the next killer app. Maybe something involving Rails, AJAX, or mashups... but straight off the bat it's hard to imagine anything more distant from a Web site than the contact list of a mobile phone.
Today Tim has posted an elaboration of his argument on O'Reilly Radar. As he abandoned his Nokia S60 phone for an iPhone, he found himself missing the presence-enabled phonebook we created for the Nokia handsets. It's flattering to get acknowledgement for the work the team members at Jaiku - first and foremost our two towering S60 developers Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa - have been delivering.
Allow me to quote Tim a bit here:
"This is the way a phone address book ought to work. I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven "social networking application" represents my real social network. On the series 60 phone, Jaiku was able to embrace and extend the address book. That's just not possible on the iPhone."
I couldn't agree more with Tim about the crippling effect the lack of third party applications has on the iPhone. But I worked on a device at Nokia, so I know it isn't trivial to open up the handset platform to developers. Inevitably, you end up compromising a seamless user experience. Apple, of course, doesn't like to compromise much there.
Still, I'm optimistic that the iPhone will open up. Apple has all the Web geeks rooting for it. It can't afford to lose them to a competitor who delivers an equally compelling device with an open platform.
UPDATE: I elaborated a little on how Apple could open up the iPhone to social web apps in the comments to Tim's post on O'Reilly Radar
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September 28, 2007
Wine as a social object
Today's FT has a piece on the Blue Monster Reserve, a special wine label created by winery Stormhoek for Microsoft and its employees. The label on the bottle features a sharp-toothed blue creature and slogan "Microsoft - change the world or go home."
Since its inception by cartoonist Hugh McLeod, the cartoon has been adopted by microsofties as a symbol of the company's and it's people's aspiration to innovate. I've heard Microsoft employees refer to it as the company's unofficial mascot.
McLeod has a knack for looking at the world through the lenses of object-centered sociality. “Wine is a social object, and so is the Blue Monster: they both inspire conversation,” he is quoted saying in the article.
Besides the fact that Hugh is a killer cartoonist, he has helped traditional entrepreneurs turn tailored suits, and now wine, into social objects. This makes him a valuable of envoy or persona grata who traverses the digital divide which still too often cuts Web geeks off from the rest of the world.
It's good to see theory brought to life in practice this way.
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September 17, 2007
A Bill of Rights for the social Web
Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) has put together an influential group who yesteday posed a proposal for a Bill of Rights for "users of the social Web." Read Joseph's post about it.
I like the way the traces users generate is now increasingly getting described as an activity stream. There's a shift taking place from fixed pages to a flow of actions on objects.
Here's the text:
A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
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September 5, 2007
Scoble: microblogging is the "next email"
Scoble's column on microblogging (featuring Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Facebook) from the latest issue of FastCompany is up online. It's titled "The Next Email."
His conclusion:
"If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we'll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they'll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business."
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August 24, 2007
