Ridiculously busy again these past two weeks, so just a quick post to point out a (lengthy, and altogether rather self-indulgent, I’m afraid) email interview I did with PinoyWebStartup.com, a TechCrunch-esque blog about the local tech entrepreneurship landscape by pigmata media. People who read my blog gv regularly will probably not see anything new, but otherwise, check it out and send the pigmata guys some love.

Building a number of social networks we are acutely aware of how much of a frustration it is to sign up to a new site. Entering user details freshly for each one loses its charm pretty quickly and locating friends just makes it downright frustrating. I’ve been on the lookout for a solution for a while now to reduce this cost of signup.

There are a few key pieces to the puzzle. Personal details are important as the key parts of a user profile. Friend relationships are slightly more difficult to represent between differing networks but none the less, important.

Over the years there have been a few attempts to solve this signup pain. So far, the social net has been content with walled gardens but slowly with the number of social networks growing by the week, this problem is now becoming an important one to solve.

The few alternatives that have appeared are:

FOAF
From the FOAF project site:

“The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.”

FOAF has been around for quite a number of years but so far hasn’t gained much of a following. It has the benefit of describing both a person’s details and their friends, the downside is that its built using RDF making it difficult to use. So far, it hasn’t taken off. Before its time? Perhaps but from the looks of it a few other technologies are creating more of a buzz.

OpenID
The focus of OpenID is primarily authentication, another area closely intertwined to social network portability. It does provide the ability to send a person’s details along during signon. The current implementation is limited in the sort of details it can send and no understanding of friend relationships. It is being actively worked on and future releases are looking promising.

Microformats
hCard and XFN, two microformats, are now being explored as another alternative for portable details. Recently some loose guidelines and patterns have been published utilising and a few sites authors and sites have started exploring. Like most of the microformats, this is a lightweight alternative, using technologies familiar and already established. It also doesn’t tie into any one technology or platform and so the could be work well together with OpenID.

When we launched 3eep, we made sure that our user profiles were hCard enabled and friend relationships used XFN. This essentially allowed the public details to be used by any microformat parsers. From that sort of base we are now exploring ways of importing details from other sites.

Satisfaction has already created a very nice system for importing details from a number of the microformat enabled sites. It looks to be user profile details only, so there is still need to a good system for importing friend relationships but it certainly offers a good vision of what can be done.

Our team with a new product are looking at the issue of importing the friend relationships. There seems to be a few hurdles to overcome, especially in the matching of friends between networks. Without unique identifiers it becomes hard to know who is who from one network to another (email would be the logical choice but how many sites are silly enough to let machines read email addresses). We have come up with partial solution so keep an eye out for invites in the near future.

There are a number of options that are looking like options to reduce the signup pain, although it is still early days. The microformats push, seems to be heading in the right direction but it only time will tell if it will really take hold. At least while we are waiting we can add the hCards to get the ball rolling.

Syndeo::media was mentioned in several local Philippine newspapers, could not find a copy online so I posted it for everyone to enjoy. Thanks Ike…

“BIZBUZZ” Sunday, 17 June 2007

By Ka Iking Señeres

(BIZ-080) “BUILDING GLOBAL FILIPINO COMMUNITIES”
Way back in the late 80’s, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) organized Science & Technology Advisory Councils (STACs) in key diplomatic and consular posts abroad, for the purpose of involving the Filipino communities abroad in the national development programs back here. Originally, the intention was to fill in the vacuum that was created by the abolition by the Department of Science & Technology (DOST) of its network of Science Attaches. Eventually however, the goal of continuing with the function of science diplomacy in particular was expanded to cover the broader function of economic diplomacy in general.

At that time, I volunteered to join the New York STAC Chapter, and that was how I got involved in national development work again, after I left the University of Life and the Ministry of Human Settlements. Along with other STAC Chapters worldwide, we were able to bring back projects and technologies to the Philippines which were needed by national development programs back here. From my vantage point as a volunteer in New York, I saw the basic weakness of the global organization, and that was the lack of an enthusiastic receiving end back here. It appeared then that the career diplomats at that time had some difficulties in adjusting to the new genre of economic diplomacy, after working so long in the environment of traditional political diplomacy.

To cut a long story short, the network of STAC chapters has practically died already, and along with it died the private sector component of science diplomacy in particular, and economic diplomacy in general. I am happy to say however that out of that organization, outstanding STAC members such as Dado Banatao, Paco Sandejas and Dennis Mendiola eventually found their own ways to bring back their talents and technologies back to the Philippines, thus infusing new life into our ailing economy. Dado has gone into joint ventures with the Ayala Group, Paco has established high tech companies here, and Dennis is the prime mover behind Chikka.

I have no doubt that there are thousands of Filipinos abroad who are willing to help and support national development programs here, if only there is an organized receiving end back here. The success of Gawad Kalinga (GK) in gathering support from Filipino communities is an example of this, and it is very easy to explain that the attraction of GK is its strong receiving end here. Other than that, GK has the added advantage of having well organized communities abroad.

On the practical side, it would be reasonable to say that Filipinos abroad would need a receiving end here to get help for their own needs and for the needs of their relatives. Very few would need help in linking with national development programs back here, and that is why we should leave the door open for this possibility. Hopefully, we could popularize development involvement to a point where everyone abroad could just join the bandwagon.

Considering the fact that there appears to be no system or procedure that could be used by Filipinos abroad to bring home national economic development inputs to the Philippines, is there a need to put up one? My answer is yes, with a caveat that this time around, it should make use of advanced communications technologies in order to make the system work better.

Syndeo Media is a software company that specializes in building online “social communities” composed of members from all over the world. To start with, these communities should be real in the sense that there should be actual people who belong to it already, and the only remaining challenge is to build “virtual” communities online, on top of the “real” communities that are already in place.

Next Mobile is a communications company that is licensed to provide inbound and outbound international direct dialing (IDD) services using the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, an innovation that has drastically cut the costs of global communications. They now offer their services to 22 countries where Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are concentrated.

Marinduque is the first province that has agreed to join our Integrated Farming Systems (IFS) program. As a result of our training and financing services, we could expect many farms in this province to join the agricultural productivity bandwagon and before we know it, OFWs from Marinduque would also want to jump in. With the help of Syndeo Media, we could now build online social communities for the province, so that Marinduquenos from here and abroad could keep in touch with each other and help each other in business and in development.

With Syndeo serving as their online “meeting place”, Marinduquenos who live in the 22 countries serviced by Next Mobile could also have the added advantage of calling their relatives, friends and business partners back home, for a fraction of what IDD calls would normally cost them. Looking at it in another way, IFS is actually a form of organic farming but is perhaps better, because not all organic inputs are clean and environment friendly. With IFS as an alternative, OFWs could avoid the already crowded businesses such as taxis, jeeps and tricycles.

With the advantage of having IFS, it is now actually possible to plan the economy of Marinduque in such a way that it would set targets to increase access to public services and utilities in line with the Philippine Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). What is best for the province to do now is to already measure its benchmarks, so that it could compare its prospective improvements as higher productivity from IFS would increase the personal incomes of its residents.

Just like the proverbial field of dreams, I am sure that Marinduquenos from all over the world would visit the virtual online community of the province if we build it. Just build it, and they will come, as the saying goes. When that happens, no one could ever guess how these loyal compatriots would act and move to bring home economic development inputs to their provincial homeland. For sure, none of them would want to be left behind as their province would move forward, thanks to the fact that their newly reelected Governor, Bong Carrion had accepted IFS early on. Same goes for Eastern Samar, as their reelected Governor Ben Evardone has also accepted.

Thanks to the research work of Engineer Bong Yambao, we have found a good use for the lowly “kuhol” that is now considered as a pest in farmlands. Yambao discovered that by drying its meat and pulverizing its shell, we could have a good source of protein and calcium that would now be used as feed ingredients by farmers who would be mixing their own animal feeds.

Tune in to “Gulong ng Kabuhayan” on DZXL (558 KHZ) Mon to Fri 6 to 6:45 PM. Join the InterCharity Network. We assist you in starting a small business, in financing and in marketing. Email ike [@] kaiking.net or text us at 09196466323.
Unit 324, Guadalupe Commercial Complex, EDSA, Makati.

I have setup and created Manila’s first OpenCoffee meetup. Please Join Us!
OpenCoffee Club

Manila OpenCoffee Club Upcoming Group

The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers, and investors to organize real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.

Next Meet up: Thursday, June 7, 2007 – Coffee Bean – Greenbelt

So yes, please forward this info to other entrepreneurs, developers, and investors.

If you missed John Chambers at the Network + Interop check out the ZDnet article
Cisco CEO John Chambers proclaims the future is Web 2.0

“Chambers proclaimed that Web 2.0, which he defined broadly as collaboration, is the future.”

“Consumers are driving business. There are a lot of ideas with social networks, and we are changing the business from a formal hierarchy to informal social network council implementations,”

This is an embarassingly late re-publishing of an entry I posted on my personal blog a week ago:

In an awe-inspiring display of technical wizardry coupled with facial hair that would make Michael Arrington pee himself, the evil geniuses at syndeo::media have somehow managed to launch two new social networks in the same week. Odysseylive.net is the revamped, restructured sequel to Mobiuslive.net, and 3eep is a community site focused on sports out of Australia. (Considering that we were only fielding a dev team of 2.5 people, I’d say that that’s a fairly impressive feat.)

Since I’m too pooped to talk in more detail about the two new products, I suggest you head on over to the sites’ respective domains and see for yourself what our mad science has wrought.

Now, if you don’t mind, this evil genius is going to bed.

I’ve just finished writing a series of articles focusing on getting a Rails development environment running on a Windows machine. This is primarily for the new people joining our team over the next few months, and explains some key concepts like Ruby language characteristics, SQL, and subversion usage. I purposely kept the programming discussion shallow as my main focus was getting our designers up-to-speed without overwhelming them with technical jargon.

You can check out the full series here:

PART ONE: Introduction to Ruby, Rails, MySQL and Subversion.

PART TWO: Ruby Installation and Language Primer.

PART THREE: Rails, MySQL and the Windows Command Prompt.

PART FOUR:  RMagick and Subversion.

I came across an interesting (though mostly off-topic) tidbit this morning while reading David Landes’ very excellent The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, regarding the island of Java, and the meaning that its name has taken in popular speech. Java, as you probably all know, is an island in the Indonesian archipelago, which has become so known for its coffee exports over the centuries that the word “java” has practically become synonymous with the beverage. The interesting thing is that coffee trees aren’t even native to Java, and were actually brought over by the Dutch colonizers from Ethiopia in the 17th century (originally called “Mocha,” after a seaport).

Now, try to imagine what the world would be like if the Dutch had decided to grow the coffee somewhere else, like say, Ceylon (which is where they had instead chosen to grow cinammon). Assuming Ceylon enjoyed a similar success in growing the coffee trees, it stands to reason that the word “Ceylon” would take the place of the word “Java” as being the de facto coffee source.

Now extend that thinking even further, about three centuries down the road to the year 1991, right around the time James Gosling at Sun Microsystems was hard at work developing a “virtual machine” that would allow the same code to be run on practically any platform or operating system. Codenamed “Oak,” this virtual machine had some trouble getting a good name, and the development team compiled a list of 20 decent ones, with one of the top choices being inspired by the kind of coffee they were always drinking at the office. Eventually that virtual machine became so popular that it is now currently deployed on about 2.5 billion devices, and enjoys one of the biggest development communities in the world.

Yes, I’m talking about Java, but the point is that “Java” the programming language could very well have been named “Ceylon” if the Dutch had made slightly different choices 300 years ago.

Hell, we might even be developing our mobile applications with C2ME, writing our DHTML with Ceylonscript, or building interfaces with ACAX. Positively mind-boggling, isn’t it?

Now I’m not talking about Social Search but social networks.

The Cyworld’s, MySpace’s, and other hundreds of niche networks are turning into the “new search”.
“Ad Spending in Social Networks will reach $865 million in 2007.”

MySpace getting at least $525 million leaving the rest to the niche networks.

Will Social Networks be dominated by the big gorillas, or will smaller players have a stronger play?

What will happen in 2010 when Ad Spending in Social Networks reach $2.15 billion.
Internet consumers are embracing social networks the way the present and past consumers have embraced search.

Working in this industry I get notified by friends, google, or a blog about every new social network that hits the streets. In Febuary 14th 2005 the the social software weblog (now retired) put out a Social Networking Services Meta List.

This list now stands at 380 entries. Posted Feb 14th 2005 5:55PM by Alberto Escarlate

It’s now October 2006 and lets just say that list has grown. Yet Another Social Network Service (YASNS) after another. Most of us only here about the gigantic communities when something drastic happens like MySpace power outage or a Facebook revolt.

But what started it all?

Who was the first Social Network Service?

SixDegrees.com was the original social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001. Wikipedia entry:SixDegrees.com

What happened to the first Social Network Service?

People who confirmed a relationship with an existing user but did not go on to register with the site continued to receive occasional email updates and solicitations; probably for this reason, SixDegrees acquired a reputation as a spammer.
.....The company was based in New York City. At its height, SixDegrees had around 100 employees, and the site had around 1,000,000 fully-registered members. The site was bought by YouthStream Media Networks in 2000 for US$125 million. Wikipedia entry:SixDegrees.com

Not all social networks make it, the more examples we have in market the more we get to understand what keeps people coming back and engaging in a community.

Cheers to Yet Another