If your Mum changes her phone number and emails you a .vcf file, you have to add it to your address book, connect your phone to Bluetooth… but you have to pair it first, so end up using a cable… and then fire up iSync to get your contacts on your phone.

That’s how it is today.

But everyone has different devices, and each device has its own address book, so we end up with contact pools. It’s difficult to sync. If someone changes their number, you have to input it several times, which is made worse because the interface is awful. Input methods, like T9, can get in the way for names.

Soocial.com creates one contact pool, and distribute them to devices when you need it.

So, your Mum changes her number, you double click, it’s automatically distributed to all your devices. It doesn’t spam your friends asking them to update their contacts. If you update your number, it automatically updates on everyone else’s address books.

Desktop apps like Address Book, Office, and MS Outlook will have a plug-in. Developing an open API, because it needs to work in your apps. There will also be a web app to help you manage your contact information.

Soocial.com, alpha on invitation.

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(Yahoo!)

‘User’ is a bit of a derogatory term, and have to move away from using the term and turn ‘users’ into ‘people’. Came up with a pyramid:

1% – creators
10% – synthesisers
100% – consumers

Web 2.0 tries to make everyone a creator
100% – creators
100% synthesisers
100% – consumers

Try to make it easier for everyone to participate in all roles.

Anyone with an X is now a Y
keyboard –> author
camera –> photographer
iPod –> DJ
browser –> publisher

There is a dark side. If you factor out all the pirated content on YouTube you have chimps doing karate. Democratising publishing and the best they can come up with is this. Lots of UGC can be a sad experience.

But when you look at some of the most interesting photos in Flickr they are amazing. These are ‘user generated content’, all taken by ordinary people, not professional photographers. It’s amazing in quality, it’s emotionally moving, some of it’s funny.

Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ is an algorithm, done implicitly. The concept is stuff that is interesting to everyone, not just those who know the person involved. Look at how many times the photos was commented on, viewed, blogged about, linked to, etc. All that organic activity allows us to distil ‘interestingness’. When they launched it, there was no gaming of the system, no spam. Could use retroactive techniques to go back into the archives and see what the most interesting photo on the day they launched was.

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(Amazon)

Doug Kaye, building GigaVox Audio Lite. Lots of annoying things that you have to do to get a podcast sound professional, so GigaVox is an app where you drop in your MP3, and it’s converted and published. You can, if you want, put ads in and publish it.

Doug hardly did anything when he developed this – he used Amazon’s S3 Storage at the centre of it, and the EC2 service to do much of the processing. EC2 means that you can just use processors when you need it, and when you aren’t using it you don’t pay for it.

What if
– launching a new business on the web was simple?
– you only had to focus on the business
– You could manage growth more easily

What if you only had to compete on idea?
– That’s now how the world is right now, it’s a hassle to get things going.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a paper called From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources.

What we are seeing online with the way that resources are used, these trends are happening in all sectors.

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Gold Sponsor

Browser-based writing, calculator and spreadsheet. Seamless compatibility with MS Office. Created a bridge, can send documents back and forth. Anywhere, any time access, 1 gb of online storage, collaboration support. Simple document management. Free. May put ads in future versions, using contextual ads but without invading privacy.

Mashup API, take Office documents, and want to show them to readers of your blog, e.g. you want to show an Excel spreadsheet to people on your blog, currently you have to either download Excel spreadsheet or convert to an image. So can instead use ThinkFree API.

There are also browser extensions for Firefox or IE to view any link to office document inside the browers. OS X dashboard, Google and Yahoo widgets. Also a WordPress plug-in.

Can convert, say, Powerpont into Flash. Spreadsheets are turned into HTML, and it looks almost identical to the original. Viewer.thinkfree.com

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Started off in a studio flat in Whitechapel. Matthew came over in 2005 as lead web developer.

Early Growth lessons
Don’t overextend – scale with your growth not before. Until you need the four man tent, stay with the two man tent.
Make sure revenue sources scale with increased usage, e.g. Google ads, user subscriptions
Involve users in your web application’s story, make sure that they know about your start up, know that you’re growing, and make them ivolved in the growth. If it’s a social network, growth should be a selfish aim, recruiting new users should improve their own experience. be as open as you can afford to be, it will pay off.

Late 2004, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm has separate sites. But site news was front and centre, and they talked candidly. Put development up there as part of the product. Started off with a donation model. Had server failures, followed by a flurry of people giving money to buy new servers. As soon as you pitch it as a feature set, it doesn’t really give you the opportunity to do that.

Openness and growth
In 2004, had a cool service but needed data. Rather than try to do it themselves, they created the Audioscrobbler Protocol 1.0, so that any developer could create an app that sent track data to their server. Once you had a profile, you should be able to access it via webservices For developers wanting to make a plug-in, they have to see a ’round trip’ and see their results helping users. Immediately had Winamp, iTunes, WMp, Amarok, plug-in. And dozens more.

Promote a community around your application. They had forums and news on the front page. People to hear bad news than no news. So they want to know that a disaster is happening rather than be cut out of the loop. They will be more likely to tolerate your growing pains then.

Showed their submission graphs to the users to that people could see what what happening. Users appreciated information. Appreciated transparency. When things went bad, they would parody their graphs.

People found the 404s funny, and took advice to go make a cup of tea literally and Flickr’d it.

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Sponsor slot

Commoditisation. Formal definitions is “a change from monopoly to perfect competition”

Or:
yesterdays hot stuff –> today’s boredom
how novel, exciting and new –> uninteresting, unloved and taken for granted.

EG, electricity, Exciting in 1890s. It mattered, it provided new competitive opportunities, could replace people with machines. 1930s we had the national grid.

Rare thing becomes a common thing, ubiquitous, distributed.
When something is novel and new, it provides a competitive advantage.
When it is common it becomes just the cost of doing business.

1990s, web sites were novel and new, so web designers were hot. We made a different, created a competitive advantage. Except we didn’t – all that was happening was a big IT arms race, everyone wanted bigger and better IT. And if you weren’t armed, you were history.

New thing > leading edge > standard products > utility service

Constant move towards commoditisation. IT is not a strategic choice, it is a cost of doing business.

Trends:
Software as service
Utility computing
Web 2.0 – implies there are things that are old had and commonplace
Can’t insist on oodles of cash to build what we used to build. Now people want commonplace as cheap as chips. What should be cheap? Operating environments. No competitive advantage on having your own web infrastructure. Is a phrase for this competitive market – yak shaving. Doesn’t makes sense to do things over and over, pay someone else to do it .What is needed is an environment to build and release what you want and pay for what you use, e.g. Amazon S2.

Zimki. Build what you want without ever going near a database. problem of vendor lock-in, so Zimki is open sourcing everything. Will be able to switch environment, take your app and go elsewhere, or sell resources back. More like the national grid idea. Balance supply and demand. Lots of waste in hosting, and when there is waste there is opportunity, both financial and environmental.

Commoditisation is a growing trend and if you’re not looking at it you can bet your competitors are.

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Development of community on the net
– Personal home pages and profile
– Personal content creation
– Ability to interact with others
– ability to ‘friend’ with others.

Benefits of community
– heightened customer loyalty
– self-policing
– amplified word of mouth
– better feedback
– stronger ad more interesting filets on content

Three levels of communcity
– lightweight social processes: Digg, Last.fm, Craisglist, Del.icio.us, Amazon, Netvibes
– collaborative information structures – Flickr, YouTube, Threadless
– high-end collaboration – Wikipedia, Lostpedia, OS projects, CouchSurfing

Case studies
Flickr – photo sharing community. What is success? Growing healthy communities. Flickr still growing a healthy community.
Twitter – SMS community. Just answer the simple question ‘what are you doing right now’. People subscribe and find out what you’re doing. Grown fast. Addictive, if you haven’t tried it don’t cos we like it working.
Wordpress – developer community
Threadless – art-based apparel community
Barcamp – geek conference community

Common themes
– sense of fun/play
– keeping the dialogue going
– “wouldn’t be awesome if…”
– “simple platforms for building on”
– compelling stories
– rewarding of community members

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Way back when, no one thought that we’d be using the internet for the things that we do now, like Voip or video streaming. No discussion of the future of web apps would be complete without discussing trends.

Current state of web applications for online communities. If you think about the web you think about content, but web based email is the number one web destination, even beating search. Traditionally Outlook, Eudora, but people use webmail a lot. IM and chat is tarteing to move up the ranks, thanks to tech like Flash and Ajax. Almost every successful website is based around some community aspect. There’s blogging, social networks, but some less obvious ones like Wikipedia, eBay where reputaiton was a key driver, and even Amazon. This is a hallmark of ‘Web 2.0’.

But it’s not a new concept. We had webrings way back when. There was the Open Directory project which still going with peopel contributing human-created directories.

You can have a dialogue, you can have mashups.

Exciting time, lots of technologies that are going to change the way that people communicate.

Trend towards disaggregation and personalisation. Can be scary for traditional companies, so instead of having a portal, people are going to where the information, niche or news it. Great for users, embodiment of long time. People can come together around a passion. Has a risk – you can lose control over an app which can be good. But one of the things people talk about YouTube is that it’s so easily embeddable, Photobucket was similar, they drove a lot of the image serving for MySpace. But as they grow larger, there are risks. YouTube faces copyright question. Google News faces challenges on copyright in Belgium.

Same risks and opportunities in the communications space. Communications tools embedded in situ, e.g. IM on a website.

Mobile is a big driver. Content and community apps that follow users wherever they are.

People are spending a lot of time online, but they aren’t going to a portal or a destination. Blurring of online or offline worlds. This is evident in Second Life. Brands are establishing an identity in virtual worlds, e.g. BBC, Toyota, Vodafone. SL is just one, there are more – There.com, WoW, that have active, vibrant online communities and commerce.

Interesting questions. Users don’t really understand the technology they are using. We have responsibility to ensure that our apps are safe, neutral, secure. Despite all the publicity, people don’t care about online privacy, they don’t worry about what happens when they put their data online. Security boxes just get clicked past. So need to ensure that the default behaviour is the right behaviour.

Who to trust is a difficult, and OpenID distributed identity management makes this even more complicated.

Tools we build must be accessible to all. Those who are visually impaired, deaf or motion impaired, older generations, different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Need to balance tools that are powerful and mash-upable and customisable, but also easy to use for consumers.

Need to create a world that’s rich online, which compliments the world offline. We are here to make the world a bit better, to have a bit of fun and make a bit of money.

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