This is just a short list of challenges that I faced with my current business. Feel free to suggest other things in the comments.

1. your relationship with the company & people you’re starting with: coming out of a position that involved reading a lot, a lot of contracts, I’m kind of particular about how to phrase them. I like the idea of contracts if they very clearly state the boundaries of your position and the relationship you have with others. It should also clearly state the deliverables that have to be met, though that can also be included in a separate “action plan.” A good contract should leave no room for misinterpretation, which is why it took about 3 weeks and 8 draft-revisions to get it just how both me and the company wanted it. Of course, a 1 person business doesn’t have to do this, nor someone that doesn’t get paid, though both in “hobby (that become) startups” situations and multi-team startups, it’s good to have a thing on paper that states a number of things including responsibilities & shares, as well as, if possible, time-frames for carrying out the job. You don’t need a lawyer for this, it’s best to start with a simple list of what you want to achieve and work from that. Very important is to mention what national law this contract falls under (e.g. Dutch law or French law), full names & addresses, etc.
2. your intellectual property: I’m kind of running up against something like this now, which is why I think it’s worth mentioning. IP has different values in different industries of course, but in my industry, a high-tech non-software one, it plays an important role. Not only is it important to dedicate certain resources at protecting your IP, you also have to watch out that others don’t lay claim on it, just because you spoke to them once or twice (or worked there at some point. The Mattel vs. Bratz case is an interesting one to follow for that.). IP protection also plays a part when talking to outside parties like investors. Last but not least, it does protect you against copycats, though, as mentioned, the value of patents or similar varies from industry to industry.
3. your own finances: They say that you should have enough saved up to not have to work for 1 year. I’ll just say that I made sure that I do have a comfort zone, though not so much that I won’t stay hungry (lesson 101 in entrepreneurship and raising (rich) kids: instill a hunger for success).
4. the company finances: at my last company, my job was to handle certain business affairs for companies that have their legal address with us. Company finances are a complex affair, and plenty of swindlers out there try to get out of taxes here and there. Not that I don’t sympathise, but be careful of not signing something that makes you responsible for someone else’s problem. Something similar occurred last year, where someone signed something that nearly (!) made him responsible for ca. 1 million euros in unpaid taxes. Let’s just say that the lesson was to have complete transparency from the start and not sign if it doesn’t exist. Preferably this should be specified in the contract (point 1) also. The other side of the coin is that the company has to become a financial vehicle for the people working there. That means that managing its finances (income and expenses) is vital to making sure that there’s also enough money to pay all the costs.
5. staying organised: Kind of obvious, a chaotic entrepreneur doesn’t make for a good entrepreneur. As I have about 12 different jobs, I have to make sure that I don’t forget what needs to be done, to prioritise the important things at the right time, and to delegate those tasks that I have no time for or someone else is better suited for.
6. staying healthy: I’ve seen three people pass away that I’ve had a professional relationship with. One was of an advanced age, one had a deadly disease, and the third passed away at a very young age of medical complications. Two of these were entrepreneurs, and both let themselves get carried away by stress. Stress means: less sleep, eating crap-food (my new term for fast-food), and not taking the time to exercise. It is not where I want to end up, I want to do a good job (it is just a job) and live long enough to reap the rewards (preferably, I’d like to live forever, but that’s a future startup).
7. staying connected to people: as a first time CEO, I have a lot of questions and the best way to have them answered is to ask them to people that are smarter than me. Luckily, there are many, many smart people out there, and people love talking about that which they know.

That’s it for now and all I could fit into 30 min. of writing. All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

It seems strange to keep a diary as an entrepreneur, which is thought to be a career that is all-consuming. But I made the resolution to not get lost in my work, leaving enough space for inspiration and reflection, next to all the getting things done.

Inspiration, aka new ideas or thinking out of the box, primarily comes from taking time to have new experiences and meeting new people. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut when spending 9 to 5 in an office. Reflection comes some time after getting things done and so my words today will be mostly about stuff that happened some time ago, during 2009 in fact.

You’ll often find pre-/post-/non-entrepreneurs arguing about whether e’ship is something you’re born with. I think it’s arrogant to argue either way. E’ship is the pursuit of opportunity weighed against the opportunity cost of pursuing something else. Entrepreneurs are not formed in pre-school, running a lemonade stand, it just makes sense at a particular time and environment. And in this case… it made sense to me.

Flashback December 31st 2008. I received a call from an inventor that had read about a previous experience of mine in a technology business and asked me to help him with the business plan for a new venture exploiting a similar technology. As it was something that appealed to me I said yes. The project turned out ok, we secured seed funding to develop the technology, and I moved to Luxembourg for a job in finance, while staying on as a silent advisor in the tech startup.

Flashforward 9 months. The startup was finally ready to demo the technology which had so far only existed in our heads. It’s an important qualifier, not only for our business partners and investor, but also for the team and myself. While we had discussed something similar before, it was at this point that I was asked and considered to run this company.

To go back to “what makes an entrepreneur,” you’ll often read about entrepreneurs being a. all-invested in a venture (as opposed to investors, who diversify their risks across multiple investments) and b. Entrepreneurs having to make (relatively) calculated risk decisions. And that is what I did, I made an, as much as possible, rational decision whether I wanted to commit fulltime to being an entrepreneur in this venture. So that was my decision process, which required serious thought, consultation with friends and family, and more.

End of part 1. In part 2, what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur. You can read all my e’diaries from now on under the tag Vincent’s ediary. If you have questions, obviously I’m pretty mysterious about our business, post a comment or mail me via the address on the right.

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

As formal as Address sounds, it’s not meant to be. Just a small reminder that we are still here, more exemplified perhaps by the inverted correlation between blogging and doing great things (P.S. Many of us can be followed on Twitter, which doesn’t appear to have that problem).

Yes, we have all been busy doing things like moving to different countries and continents, starting companies, starting and changing jobs. I think Cecil is even well on his way to becoming a e2.0 authority, and judging by Fidji Simo’s tweets, I think she’s developing herself into an expert in retail—on-, off-, and hybrid forms. And that is amazing news and exactly what I always wanted from Tech IT Easy—a “workforce” that is productive outside of Tech IT Easy and contributes to its members’ lives on- and offline as well.

Which is why I still encourage anyone interested in technology and its commercialisation to join us, to develop and contribute their thoughts and expertise!

All that aside, what more can I wish for our readers and bloggers on this Christmas day? For one, I wish for a better 2010 and I am 100% certain that it will be. We all got a little roughed up in 2009, but what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger! The Internet Boom & Bust… pah, I laugh at its impact: it lead to Le infamous nouveau Web, aka Web 2.0, aka the one where 37Signals had to remind us of the revolutionary idea of charging $$$ for products. I also laugh at Enron, as all its promised consequences of accountability haven’t affected the upper-tier of management one bit (and maybe never will).

But I don’t laugh at what is happening today, I’m happy about it. Between the magnificent state’ification of banks, the “new/old” lean approach to doing all business, and the threat of global warming, it’s another warning shot at us, the complacent human race who thought they had it all under control again. The world isn’t perfect and I hope that every one of those bumps bring us closer to making it better.

All cynicism aside, we live in a time where information is at our fingertips, where collaborative filtering and neuroscience help us better filter the relevant stuff to the top, where we can still publish news at a click, which is still an amazing concept, and where we all have GPS in our hands today, and augmented reality in our hands tomorrow. Yay, the innovative mind and yay, it’s practical outcomes!

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t hear from us before the 31st of December, have a great transition into the new year!

Love,

Your Tech IT Easy team:
Alex, Jeremy, Steve, Fidji, Georgia, Cecil, Vincent, Kari, Manu, Lucien, Matthias, Raj, Raphael, and Remy

I had wished very hard my sharp-minded friend Sébastien Blanc joined me as a partner when I founded environmental management software company Verteego, almost two years ago. Instead Séb accepted an offer from online collaborative tools Yoolink, which makes me think that either I’m very bad at convincing people on joining me in projects, or that Yoolink is a very special startup. Although both options are still wide opened and not exclusive at all, I like for some reason to consider it’s Yoolink that’s an amazing company and felt it would be just fair play from me to interview Sébastien on what actually Yoolink is doing for its enterprise customers.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and Wordpress altogether?

Wordpress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and Wordpress. Wordpress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

A few months ago, I wrote to you about an experiment I was conducting regarding collecting videos from people that could not make it to a reunion I was organising for my high school. Out of the ca. 300 people that signed up to our Facebook group, only ca. 100 can make it in the end (this weekend). Many of them live all over the world, hence it made sense to try and involve them in some way.

Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS  is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use Wordpress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

We’re all stupid busy and it sucks. Tech IT Easy was started under the guise of studenthood which does not in any real way reflect “professionalhood.” 10-hour days are not uncommon in my line of work and it doesn’t leave much space for reflection–the real currency of writing.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

This is a message just regarding the state of affairs for Vincent van Wylick and no one else.

On my last blog, on food & retail, I ended with a conclusion as I don’t like long silences and having people guess what’s going on.

The short answer to that is that I will be taking an extended leave of writing for Tech IT Easy as I currently have other professional and private matters to focus on. My definition of extended leave is not that I will no longer write, just that I will write when there’s time and inspiration, but no longer on a daily schedule.

I still very much love to put my thoughts to paper, so expect a post whenever the mood hits me. For the rest, I don’t speak for anyone else on Tech IT Easy, all of whom are busy as well, and I sincerely hope that they too will find it within themselves to keep you (and me) updated on their thought progression when they find the time.

Vincent out

I’d say, thanks for all the fish, but instead I’ll leave you with the most amazing video of fish I’ve ever seen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Yesterday evening I was cheerfully chatting with a friend, arranging meeting-up.

- Friend : blah blah blah;

- Georgia: blah blah blah;

… when I saw my self posting a thing I couldn’t recognise having thought of. Neither remembering having thought in a previous conversation. chilllll.

- Friend : are you nuts? why are you saying this?

-Georgia : (confused) ehhh, because it must have been this or that or the other thing.

-Georgia : but I am telling you that the place has changed blah blah blah

Ecstatic I was watching myself from a certain distance. crazy uh? It happens a lot to push back thoughts but it was the first time I experienced doing it at real time. It felt like dreaming !

As tech-savvy TIE readers you realize that this is actually a particularity that this this lovely peer-to-peer program has and lets your profile being simultaneously active with different IPs. All it takes to experience this chilling story is having logged in from a different pc. (DIY)

So what’s the blog deal?

Well, it had never occured to me to experience  how older people might feel with technology, sometimes. Understand in theory yes, but live it never.
There it goes, now I can discuss with myself on skype and with mom in real life.

no comments please, I am moved.

Comments on this blog? No, not many, and I know I’m not alone either. Another blogger thought that the main casualty of Twitter isn’t blogging, but actually commenting. We alluded to something similar a few years ago, when Kari and me both wrote blog posts on where the conversation was going. Ironically, back then, we did get comments, but my conclusion was that comments were moving towards more specialised platforms, like Digg, Slashdot, and now Friendfeed, and maybe Twitter.

Back when I followed 300 people on Twitter you couldn’t pay me enough to read my Twitter-stream. I called it trying to drink from a waterfall several times and you all know what happens when you drink from a waterfall: you fall in!

No, the only way I read Twitter content and pretty much the best way to catch my attention these days is to @vincentvw me, just because I have an rss-feed just for that.

The traditional, “writing for success” way? Write a compelling title. But that has back-fired on me as a reader more than once. You can also write posts to p*ss off people, which is pretty effective, but leads to stuff like death threats.

I like the idea of pinging someone personally, à la the Twitter reply, much more. What I would like is something as follows:

A system that gives people the option to register with their names, contact-details, and interests (in the form of tags, maybe). And when, and only when, that particular interest is being written about, then you get pinged.

I guess you could already do this with some fancy Google tracking or just by subscribing to a tag-based rss-feed (Delicious allows for this, not sure about other platforms). But I see this as a great way for blogs to become relevant once more. It would also force bloggers to connect more with their readers’ interests and perhaps lead to a stronger community feel.

What do you think?

Vincent
(Picture, called “Emptiness is form,” is courtesy of Scott Snibbe.)

I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

Dear readers,

For a reunion event of people all over the world that I am co-organising, of which a certain part cannot show up, I am planning to give the latter a chance to send their greetings recorded across the internet and shown in either video or audio-format (with picture) at the event.

However, I am a need of the appropriate service that can facilitate this process. Essentially, I am looking for:

1. Something that is web-based and does not require a user to install software on their computer
2. Something that will take video and/or (preferably both, but not necessary) audio
3. Preferably at an adequate resolution / audio quality to be played on a large screen in front of a large room of people
4. Something that I can export into an application like iMovie for Mac or Windows Movie Maker
5. As this would likely be a compilation of 50 or so people, something that requires minimal effort on my part, except for setting up the service, doing the downloading, and post-editing.

I realise that this is likely unknown territory for many of you, as it is for me, but I think would actually generally be pretty cool and hope to brainstorm about your ideas and/or the possibilities/limitations with you.

Any ideas?

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of Kimpton Middle School)