IB

Loic wanted feedback, so here’s mine ;): Loic has just startet his fifth company, seesmic, and it’s going t be something like twitter for video. What I like is the idea of quickly recording yourself in a video message in order to express some quick thoughts, like Oli did today. We’ve done something similar in a kind of karaoke system: on fan-clips.de, which is the football fan community of the 1.FC Köln, you can record yourself, while watching the official club hymn: you can win a prize when the jury has voted you as best singer – see my bad trials here – I definitely won’t win ;). But back to seesmic: what I see as kind of problematic is that in video the publisher defines the speed of the reception of the viewer: I can only get the information from the video-message, when the person has "spoken" it, "acted" or whatever. When I read my RSS Feeds, or my twitter feed, I can quickly jump to the next paragraph, kind of "scan" an article for keywords and just read that particular part. So it would be great for seesmic to have a system for comments or viewpoints you can jump to, which have clear tags. They should be able to be set by the publisher in an easy way and extended by the community. When I slide over them with my mouse, I could "scan" the whole movie in advance – maybe a kind of preview picture could be implemented, too. Got some ideas in that direction…

A year ago I wrote about the then just launched T-Community, which was a first step of the Deutsche Telekom in the world of user generated content. Now I got an email telling me „Thanks a lot for all your feedback – but we’ll close the community by the end of the year – you may export your data, but you can’t use it any longer.“ (not that I have EVER used it, but anyway…) But it’s quite funny, that they offer me to change my account to fussball.de – in case I want to use all of my community features in the future…fussball.de is a t-com driven special interest community in football – quite interesting strategy of them – seems as if they see no future in „global“ communities but in special interests…

Well, first of all I have to say, I’m really thankful, that our cat is still alive: over the weekend he must have bitten into the battery charger of my macbook – thankfully into the thinner side of the cable with 12V , not 230 V 😉 But I was not able to buy a new one today, so I had to rely on my Vista driven ThinkPad T61. Mh: it’s really ugly compared to the black macbook – but: it’s fast (basically since I put those 3GB in – Vista DOES NOT WORK with 2 GB or less) and for today I set up some neat features, which makes it really „usable“ (I know, these are luxury problems 😉 ):

• Thunderbird as my IMAP client works like a breeze: it’s really fast and setting it up even with my secondary gmail IMAP account was no problem.
• Of course, Firefox for everything internet.
• Tortoise svn client
• MS Project (basically the reason I own a thinkpad)
• The Last.FM client
• Skylight for the „workflow“
• Skype – of course
• Pandion for AIM and our internal jabber server
• Visio for the drawing
• iTunes
• Command and Conquer 3 (tssssss….)
• And finally WORD as blogging tool (First entry, so let’s see if it works 😉

What I really like with the TP is the fingerprint – scanner at the login (and wow, Vista really works with „sleep mode“)

Yes, I apologize, I’m still using my Vista driven thinkpad beneath the macbook… and now found silverlight, which is the successor of Application rocket .. very cool interface and d a m n fast 😉

It’s been some weeks now, since I really got into last.fm – I think it was around the time I installed all the airtunes stuff (by the way: just found amua which is an alternative player for last.fm – it’s a kind of proxy for the last.fm webservice and uses itunes for playback which means, that now last.fm streams to airtunes through the whole flat 😉 ) . It’s great to have your personal music profile there, always automatically being served with new stuff you like. Today i stumbled upon an article on Nicholas Carr’s blog (via Robert), which deals with the idea of Apple and Google merging their core competences: Apple building new slick „alwyas-online“ devices, and Google being responsible for the web back-end. And Eric Schmidt being on the board of Apple this indeed could be a real thign going on at this time. The major point behind it is having all your data on the web, always accessible via some device. this of course has major security an performance issues, but Google with their super-computers could be the one dealing with it (in fact in some ways they already do with their office- and email apps they are offering.) And I really like the idea – in fact this is already happening with services like last.fm: as long as I’m online, and I am actually the whole day in office and with WLAN at home, I have the last.fm player playing my music – basically no need for an itunes library anymore though I need it for syncing the ipod – but I think you get the idea. Having data centralized and always accessible could be the future of personal computing – the main thread will be, as noted, availability, security and performance. This is why I believe in p2p based structures in the future. Let all your devices be able to share their small amount of hard-space they have and you build the scaling, resistant and perfect performing backend for the future. It’s failsafe, even if certain structures are down. This is the centralized model, Google and Apple might build, decentralized. For that one thing seems to come clear: availability and bandwith will be the currency of tomorrow: „if you’ve got bandwith you can share with me, I’m willing to „pay“ (say „give“) you something. For that „currency“ I’m giving you, you are able to get other things like a movie-download or three songs on itunes. It’s so much fun digging into this, cause it’s going to change the game, and with a very very small part, we take place in it… 😉

…something huge is going on together with our friends over at clicktivities – seems as if Dusseldorf is getting even better for us cologne guys 😉 more after the break 😉

Should’nt be that complicated 😉