D17’s blog

Again a big debate is evolving about who is the owner of your data in social networks, what can you or a third party that you authorize do with the data. A couple of months ago Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook for using an unreleased feature from Plaxo, to scrape info from his contacts on Facebook and import it into Plaxo. Now Google launched a new tool last week called Google Friend Connect. It let’s you grab content from one site and publish it to another. Again, the whole service was blocked by Facebook. The guys at Techcrunch do not agree but say this is really about control of user profiles, and therefore where the users go.

Not really a surprise, that Facebook is not allowing them, no?

As social networks will always want to make you use their web site for advertisement purposes, they will not be inclined to let you easily export your data. So a (or a few) big central trustworthy authority would be best, something like OpenID.

One of the major problems with this approach: if they just keep the data and provide API’s, where’s their business model? Advertisements is not going to work, so the only way would be to let users pay for centralized storage. Will they? Maybe they might, but it will take some time before the users start to get used to this idea and become willing to pay. In the mean time, cat fights will go on, between major networks with tons of user profiles and little (social that is, Google is quite big otherwise) guys that want to tap into that information.

Now that China has more than 220 million Internet users, it has surpassed the USA with 216 million Internet users. Also today the news arrived that in Europe we have 250 million Internet users. For both areas there is a steep increase in usage compared to USA. Of course, the USA can be seen as the place where most of the Internet was invented, but has reached pretty high numbers compared to inhabitants already. In China and also India there is still a large number of the population that is not online, so the room for growth is still there.

Ergo, the Internet is becoming more and more non-USA. So all businesses online should pay attention to non-American and non-English users, not only in language, currencies and fulfillment, but also in all cultural aspects like ways of communication. One thing that puzzles me is that most of the businesses online still stem from the USA. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL are all american companies. Where are the european and Asian companies? In the mobile world there are a few, but where is the european version of Amazon? The asian Google? Or should I ask that question again in 2-3 years?

Google is competing with Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and launched their own Google App Engine service today. With currently only support for Python but more scripting languages to come you can access their own database system called BigTable. You will have some limitations in data, CPU cycles and traffic. These limitations will be lifted in the future but then you will have to pay for it. This will make it even more easy and cheap than with Amazon to deploy and host your webapp.

For me, I’d like to see other languages added like Ruby on Rails, which it even easier to use than Python with lots of out of the box functionality. But the good news is that it’s coming some time soon. Also, finding cheap python or RoR hosting is pretty difficult, as all the shared hosting companies only offer .NET or PHP languages.

Sounds really excited no? So I tried to sign up for one of the 10,000 preview accounts, but they were already gone:(

Not too bad, no?

A small note about something I am really excited about the news that Google is making its documents available for offline usage. Google is using Gears for this. So although Internet access is ubiquitous nowadays, it is not always present. Want to work on your documents in the train? Quite difficult until now. Its not available on my accounts yet, but I hope it soon is! Same for the plans to not only make docs and spreadsheets available, but also GMail messages.

Last week Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale announced his stepping down as CEO. He will still be involved with strategy, but leaving the helmsman spot to someone else. Linden Lab is the company behind Second life, the online 3D world that was the big hype of 2006.

Sounds to me like Linden Lab is trying to turn Second life from a hip thing that attracts a lot of media attention into a company with a decent turnover/profit. All companies go through phases, from unknown startup, through hip thing to money machine. Every phase has its own characteristics and requires different sets of skills of the management. So I guess it’s not so strange to see a change like this.

It must be difficult for a CEO like Rosedale to have to let go of a baby like LL, but a decision that is probably very wise. Realizing too late you’re not the right person anymore can be much more painfull. And hey, a startup phase of a company is much more interesting than putting down an organisation with structure and processes, cutting down costs and taking out all the fun but money burning projects.

So now the only question is: how long will Rosedale last next to a new CEO? I don’t think a desk in the room down the hall is a wise idea.. What do you think?

Sometimes some guy is just a genius and a kind person, and writes a brilliant piece of software that he wants to share with the world. Sometimes a genius is well, not such a good person and still writes software he puts online. On Coding Horror there is a post about a shareware program called G-archiver (on purpose no link) that backs up files to your Gmail account. And in the process, very conveniently, emails your username and password to the Gmail account of the creator of the software. Ahem. Sounds like your worst nightmare, doesn’t it?

I wonder why G-archiver can still be downloaded, or wasn’t caught in the first place. In the old days (10-12 years ago) I liked those shareware sites like tucows. In those days open source wasn’t big yet, but programmers would put their software online for 10-30 euros with a trial version. Nowadays they seem to struggle for life, and are trying as hard as possible to drive traffic to their sites. You see that with the money all sense of ethics and responsibilities leave the company.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html

Update 13/3/2008 (yep european notation): G-archiver is removed from download site finally.

testing 1, 2, 3 first post:)

Ha, I figured I should start this blog with a first post about installing Wordpress (version 2.3.3) on a blank Apache/MySQL machine with CentOS as operating system. I have installed Wordpress earlier, but that was with Fantastico. This is a script library that big hosting companies use to offer an easy installation to end users that do not have adminstrative rights on their machine. As I am now the proud owner of a Xen VPS I have my own CentOS machine to manage, including a clean Apache and MySQL. Previous installations were a piece of cake, and I didn’t think this would be otherwise. So there I went, trying to beat previous records. Alas, some things had to tweak before everything was up and running:

1. Getting different virtual hosts up and running.
   As the web sites www.d17.nl, www.d-17.com and blog.d-17.com are running on the same machine with the same ip-address, I wanted to use name based virtual hosting to distinguish between the sites. So I configured my virtual hosts, but nothing happened:(. Turned out that I had to enable it first with the NameVirtualHost directive, which is default turned off. So I added this line to my httpd.conf:

   NameVirtualHost *:80

   which says that name based virtual hosting is active for every ip-address on the machine, but only for connections on port 80.

2. Enabling url rewriting for SEO-friendly URLs.
   So now my homepage worked, admin part also, but clicking through to a post page I got an error. I knew I had SEO-friendly URL’s turned on, and was expecting this to be hampered by a not functional mod_rewrite. I had already put the .htacces file in the root of my blog, so apparently it wasn’t processed. So again to httpd.conf, to add this line:

   AllowOverride All

   and not in the general section, but within the Directory element within the virtualhost config section.

3. Making MySQL behave.
   I was stubborn and didn’t want to follow the 5 minute installation manual. Turned out I misconfigured the rights of the db user related to from what hosts it was allowed to login. So you should just follow the manual precisely:)

Tada, hello word!