Ulla and I will run an introductory course on Web 2.0 and recommendation-based markets at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki on Friday. The course is for anyone who is wondering how the Web might affect the design and marketing of their product or service. It will probably benefit designers, consultants, marketers, and general managers across a wide range of industries. The course fee is 265 euros. The language will be Finnish. There are still a few places left – sign up here.

Ray Ozzie is showing a demo of ‘Live Clipboard‘ here at ETech. It’s a way to copy structured (for instance, microformatted) data from a web page and paste it to another web service or desktop app while keeping the structure intact.

Some things this enables him to show:
– Copying an event from Eventful to your desktop calendar so it automagically gets placed in the proper date & time
– Copying your profile from MSN Spaces to Facebook, with the custom field for ‘location’ getting added to the profile
– Copying billing & shipping address information from the clipboard to an e-commerce site

This is going to significantly improve the Web-to-desktop app user experience. Here are screencasts of the demo. The work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

Microsoft got itself one hell of a CTO when it acquired Ozzie’s Groove Networks last year.

Popped in the Google NYC office and Yahoo’s London office last week. Couldn’t help noting how similar they are: very central, very hip, several floors. Google scored points with its afternoon tea service, whereas the Soho restaurant scene works to Yahoo’s advantage.

Pretty stark contrast to the Nokia offices in both cities, which I’ll just summarize as the boonies.

I’m quoted towards the end in Social Machines, the cover story of the August issue of MIT Technology Review. The article is the most comprehensive summary of Web 2.0 that I’ve read so far, and it does take a while to read through. The gist:

The arrival of continuous computing means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable “information field.” This field is created by constant, largely automated coöperation between

1) the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players,
and camera phones

2) the wireline and wireless networks that serve people’s locations as
they travel about, and

3) the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools for finding information and communicating and collaborating with other people.

I think it’s an important detail that TR Senior Editor Wade Roush blogged a draft of the text early on, and incorporated quite a few readers’ comments in the final print version.

In his message to Dodgeball users, Dennis Crowley writes:

As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone … Now that we’re part of Google, we’ll have more resources available to us. That means Alex and I can get back to building new features. We have a lot of ideas that we’ve wanted to work on for a long time and we’re excited that we will now have the time and resources to actually follow-through with them.

Congratulations Dennis and Alex!

What’s the defining value driving the ‘web 2.0.’ where, to quote Jeremy Zawodny, ‘vendors think of themselves as not just service providers or hardware vendors’ but as platforms for developers? Jon Udell put it well in a post about the new event databases that are popping up. He thinks there’s room for many different services:

If you want a seat at the table you just need to have good table manners, and that really comes down to one simple rule: don’t lock in my data. Services that try to do that will fail because, in the final analysis, social applications are powered by the people who co-create them. We’ll use online services to help us create and organize our information, but we’ll use them opportunistically. Services won’t own our information. We’ll migrate it freely to wherever it works best for us.

We could call this the dinner table perspective: we’re all contributors, and the point is to have an enjoyable conversation together. The idea of value as necessitating a process of co-creation—not merely viewing it as an inconsequential if welcome sideshow—is quite distinct in comparison to the one in Joachim Buschken’s recent book Higher Profits Through Customer Lock-In. According to the book summary:

For the most part, Customer Satisfaction programs are ineffective. Companies need to strive for Customer Lock-in. Customers are locked into a company’s product when the switching costs are high. This could result from the product being integrated into the companies’ business systems. Thus, managers must ask themselves, ‘How can I increase the switching costs of my customer?’

This could be called the prison perspective: customers are inmates, and the point is to keep them from escaping. If they are happy in their cells that’s cool but in the end, it’s the efficiency of the locks that determines the profits of the business. It’s interesting to think about the practices and arrangements that continue to reproduce both rationalities in their own worlds… and how one might subvert them ;)

For a while, Alex has had something to say about the current state of social software. Now he has summarized the four main points of the argument:

1) For an independent consumer brand to rise out of the currently bubbling social software stew, consolidation of existing services may be the requisite next step

2) However, the business model of some of the ’small pieces’ out there appears to be a quick exit through acquisition by an existing big player

3) The blogosphere is very US-centric and this is hindering its economic growth

4) Most importantly: to break into the mass market, blogging needs to become less cool. This is, in my opinion, the most interesting challenge because it requires a transformation of the user experience into something that diehard bloggers might no longer recognize as ‘blogging.’ Posts need to incorporate simple objects that require less effort to create and manipulate than freeform text. Moblogs, reading lists, FOAF listings and such are interesting steps in this direction.

Perhaps in the future, blogging could become a convention for expressing object-centered sociality, to borrow a term from the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina.

Here’s an internet prediction: As the cost of publishing the things you have and the things you want decreases linearly, the volume of non-monetary exchange (lending, sharing, donating things) will increase exponentially.

Open web services that connect ISBNs (for books) and UPCs (for DVDs, games, and other durables) to data about products enable bloggers to unambiguously identify what products they wish to peddle on online marketplaces like eBay. In the coming years, blogging the products we own will be further simplified when barcode- and RFID readers become embedded in cheap everyday handheld devices such as cell phones.

I think there’s reason to believe that the resulting change in social behavior will not be just quantitative—not just more eBay, more Amazon. It was the portal-driven Web of the 1990s that brought forth the revolution in retail and classifieds. This time it will be different.

The shift to a blog-driven Web can set in motion a new, lively circulation of pre-owned products among networks of friends who play with the dynamics of social capital, not financial capital. Where Amazon pioneered the Web’s retail layer, and eBay pioneered the bargaining layer, a service like Mediachest could pioneer a new lending layer in product circulation. Up until now, this layer has existed off-line, but it has been limited to enclosed and perishable social pockets where discoveries of eligible products in a suitable person’s possession is largely a matter of chance, and lack of appropriate forum for exchanging lending / sharing / donating initiatives complicates the face-saving rituals.

Some distinct characteristics of the emerging online lending layer:

– First, it is about retail products, but unlike Amazon, it is not about retail transactions. Rather, it’s about recycling, swapping, donating and borrowing (mostly) pre-owned products.

– Second, it’s about moving material goods, but unlike eBay, it doesn’t require national or global logistics. It’s about very local logistics—not the suburban neighborhoods as much as the trust-based interpersonal networks that inhabit every institution in our society: the workplace, the school, the sports team, the hospital, the university dorm.

– Third, it may not be about PC users as much as it is about mobile users (although that is contingent on the trend of more hackable mobile terminals).

– And finally, the emerging online small worlds oriented around non-money-based circulation of material objects might not at first reach many of the more affluent 30 to 40-somethings. But they are much more likely to reach their kids—or get originated by them.

For a few years now, socially-minded tinkerers have been building various systems for locating friends in bars. The most popular approach to solving this problem technically has been to dump the required computation about where you are to the user (see Imahima and Dodgeball, for instance). The problem is that to shout “Here I am!” users have to learn to input the commands, which is a bit clumsy even on i-mode phones. Another approach has been to use GPS or cellular positioning, but even where the technology is available, it’s not precise enough. A third way is the check-in/check-out approach, where some piece of technology (usually a low-cost card-swiper, infrared beacon, or RFID reader) is installed in the physical setting and users carry some sort of ID tags. There the problem is the cost and scalability. When building the Aula space for instance, we wanted for there to be a graceful way to let other members know when you’re there. After months of negotiations with the building management, wiring the door locks, and scavenging hardware, we managed to get the RFID-based Hunaja system working. But transferring the system to other premises was too costly, and so we had to shut Hunaja down when Aula left that space. The fourth and most recent solution is to do the tracking with WiFi or Bluetooth, although users then need an expensive terminal. Even if no one has quite figured it out yet, there might be a niche for a business model here, because (some) proprietors are willing to pay to attract a community of regulars, and (some) people will pay to publish their whereabouts to their small worlds when they’re out in town. (Although for sure it does have its problems, like stalking.)

Cory Doctorow writes: “The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy.” I’m reading Carlota Perez’s “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,” where she argues that every 50 years or so capitalism undergoes technological revolutions (sort of like the Kondratiev long waves) that go: technological revolution—financial bubble—collapse—golden age—political unrest. ICT:s were the 5th technological revolution, and if Perez is right we should now be in an important turning point of “institutional adjustment”. If the adjustment is successful, Perez says it will lead to a golden age period of full employment, comfortable profits and all the good stuff, although inevitably people’s expectations will grow too high and lead to frustration and protests. Although the emphasis is on the financial side, her analysis is rich and interesting.