Björn’s Blog

Thanks to the Deutsche Bahn, who cancelled my trains to Munich that I wanted to take this weekend, I got to attend the community camp 2008 in Berlin instead. Basically, the community camp was like a Barcamp, but with a special focus on (online) communities. (Of course I also got to attend it thanks to the organizers who made it happen in the first place - a big thanks in their direction, it was great!).

It has been over for almost five hours now, but somehow I feel like I can’t think clearly at the moment. Since I can’t do any other work, I’ll try to gather some impressions from my notes and jot them down for the blog. Andreas has also written about the last session we attended, mobile communities.

I’ll try to be briefer than with my Barcamp Leipzig recollections. The main effect of barcamps on me is to fill me with all sorts of ideas, that might not even be directly related to the sessions I attended.

A/B testing for websites

The first session I attended was about the site relaunch of friendscout24 and how the used A/B testing to increase their conversion rate of new users by 10%. It was interesting to see an example of applied A/B testing. They used a tool called “Optimus” (apparently not exactly cheap) to automatically test variations of images, texts and structure of their start page. Optimus automatically finds the best combination. For example, allegedly the image on the start page did not make much of a different (variations like blond woman, dark haired woman, couples, romance, etc.) in Germany, but a huge difference in Italy.

It got me thinking about ways to integrate A/B testing into existing web frameworks like Ruby On Rails. It is a bit of a pity to have to resort to an external tool, if you know in advance that you’ll need it anyway. Maybe a lot of time and effort could be saved by integrating the possibility of A/B-Testing from the beginning.

Tchibo Ideas

The next session I attended was a presentation by the Tchibo Ideas page, an attempt at crowdsourcing ideas for new products that Tchibo could produce and sell. This interests me greatly, because there is hardly a product that I am fully satisfied with. I constantly wonder about processes that would enable “common people” to affect the products they can buy. I find it very frustrating to own a faulty product and not be able to do anything about it (sadly, the odds that the producer will listen to my complaints are very slim).

Personally, I have great hopes for Rapid Prototyping in the future, which means that hopefully people can produce the things they want in the form of Open Source Hardware. Open Source Hardware means that everybody can change the things they annoy him. It already works for Software - personally I am a Linux user because in many ways it supersedes other operating systems. But for non-programmers, it is still too difficult to change anything about Linux, so it is more tailored towards geeks (oversimplified - actually Linux is already very good for non-geeks, too). So it is very interesting how to make it easier for everybody to improve the products they use by themselves.

But I disgress - to my disappointment (but also relief, because it means I can still become a pioneer in that area), Tchibo doesn’t offer any special tools for ideas shaping. They offer the basic features you would expect: people can propose “problems” and “solutions”, that can be rated by the community. Similiar things were already seen at Cambrian House among others (famous examples include Dell’s ideastorm or Ubuntu brainstorm).

Usually I am very wary concerning creativity competitions where you might end up giving away your idea for a couple of hundred € (I think the most you can win at Tchibo is 10000€), because I fear the other party might make a whole lot more money from my idea. However, Tchibo seemed surprisingly fair - I am not sure if the option still exists if you submit an idea the normal way, but you can also opt to submit your idea to Tchibo privately first, in which case they evaluate it and secure all kinds of rights for you. They might end up producing your idea and giving you a share, which is the way it should be.

Also, it might be worth considering that even if your idea is potentially worth a lot of money, if you were never going to realise the idea, a couple of hundred bucks might still be better than nothing.

Also Tchibo wants to include the designers in their marketing campaign, that is, their picture might be on the final products and so on. Of course I can’t vouch for them (check out their terms for yourself), but it really sounded as if they were genuinely trying to be fair. I signed up for their service, even though reception in bloggerland was mostly bad - I think a lot of prejudice against Tchibo, but who knows.

A bit disappointing: most “problems” and “inventions” on Tchibo Ideas so far are really unattractive, for example when I checked yesterday somebody proposed a device for cutting spaghetti. For me, such a device is an abomination. There is already so much useless crap in our world, that I think we are doing a better deed by reducing the clutter in our households than by adding to it with luxury junk. On the other hand, maybe I should really get some of those clips for washing socks, because I truly hate sorting socks. (I plan to build a Lego Robot for doing that one of these days, but who knows when I’ll find the time - the clips are an easier solution).

I had to leave early on Saturday, so I missed out on a couple of sessions and the party. Although that reminds me, one big inspiration from the community camp and also the recent Barcamp Berlin: BEAN BAGS! They had bean bags (provided by CrownCrow), and it was a good reminder about how comfortable they are. I must get one eventually (Andreas recommends checking out the bean bags from Muji).

Support for communities, example “wer-weiss-was.de”

Impressive track record, apparently wer-weiss-was.de have been operating for 12 years now. To put that into perspective, according to Wikipedia the Mosaik browser by Netscape was released on October 13, 1994, marking the beginnings of the usable internet.

Anyway, they told some stories about their experiences with maintaining and supporting a community. I took away the recommendation of a tool called “OTRS” as an open source ticketing system, and got the idea to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for some moderation task (for example checking the safety of uploaded images). A lot of discussion was about the volunteering moderators. A recommendation for reading was A Group Is It’s Own Worst Enemy, but I haven’t read it myself yet. Another thing that might be worth considering is Slashdot’s fully automated moderating system, that assigns moderator powers and meta-moderator powers semi-randomly to it’s users. It might be too complicated for non-geeks, though.

Weltverbesserer-Communities (safe-the-world communities)

Next up was a session about communities that want to help making the world a better place. Again I have a special interest in that, not only because I would like to help make the world a better place, but also because I have proposed such a project at the StartupWeekend Hamburg last year: Debug The World. I would still be interested in doing that one of these days…

Unfortunately the session left me a bit unsatisfied. I jotted down a lot of links to existing “save the world” communities, but learned little about their inner workings. Ideology was a topic, but again little was learned on how to keep the ideologies on a site in check.

I felt reminded of a recent sociological experiment that showed how it was completely random what piece of music would become a hit, if users get to see other users preferences (Update: found article describing it, among other things, search for Salganik). The same could happen with a newly launched “save the world” site: the ideology of the first users might repel other users, so you are stuck with the ideology of the first users.

Ultimately I guess if you launch such a site, you have your own ideals, and will try to steer your community into that direction. I would not want fascists to use my tools to plan for their own idea of a better world, for example.

I am currently too lazy to copy all the links that came up in the session, so I can only hope sombody will eventually update the Community Camp Wiki. The speaker was working for Utopia.de, and I think two founders of Weltretter.org were in the audience sharing some interesting experiences. I wish them luck with their efforts…

Managing friends in social networks

PaulinePauline hosted a session about managing one’s friends in social communities. From the subject, I was hoping for something else: how to find new friends in social networks. Sometimes there are interesting web projects that I can not use for lack of participating friends. I have written about Twitter, another example would be Google Reader. I am curious about the sharing of blog articles among friends that Google Reader provides, but I can not benefit from it because I don’t know anybody else who uses it.

Pauline was talking about another problem, though: how to maintain your friends lists across social networks, and do’s and don’ts of the friend search in such networks. A major gripe is seeing immediately who you are already friends with in search results, but also being able to check out somebody’s profile from within the search results without having to leave the results list.

A nice touch is to use special information, for example “people that have many friends in common with you” or “people who have attended the same events as you”.

Discussion also touched possible solutions to the multi-account problem. Some networks already offer to import your friends from other networks. It seems quite feasible to attempt to copy someone’s friends from Twitter, for example, as many people show their real name in their Twitter profile. Another nice touch is to just assume a user is using the same username everywhere.

On the other hand, admitting to knowing too much about a user might creep them out. For example, it is possible to discover a users rough location by analyzing their IP address, but showing a user “people online near you”, many might be shocked that their location is known.

Another nice touch: Facebook for example tells you to connect a new user with some friends, if you invited them to the network. That way, the new users have an easier start.

I also had the idea for a service that registers your username on all new social networks. A problem could be that people could use the service to squat on usernames (like domain name squatting).

Mobile Communities

The last session I attended was the second part of a session that started the day before (which I had missed) about mobile internet and mobile communities.

Some tidbits: automatically logging one’s status might lead to a couple of problems. For one thing, if you suddenly stop logging (for example your location), it might arouse suspicion (jealous spouse). But even though, for example I would be a bit confused if I saw a friend was visiting my city and didn’t even call me. Or somebody is online at ICQ and doesn’t chat with you. Another interesting aspect: people like to start conversations from trivial things (like bad weather). If you already automatically log all trivial things automatically, you might take away some possible conversation starters. For example, you might not call a friend to say “hi, I am in Berlin” if your phone has already automatically logged the fact.

Qype was mentioned as a solution for discovering cafes nearby while on the road, but I am not sure if it can also filter for individual taste, which would be more community like.

I am interested in seeing product ratings on the go (for example by photographing a barcode of the product with my phone), and Kooaba was mentioned as an image recognition technology that might even make barcodes unnecessary. I was also shown BdSave$, which is apparently a product ratings app for the iPhone.

Talking about “augmented reality” was also interesting, Google Earth already recognises if you hold your iPhone vertically and switches to a horizontal viel of the location around you. So in the mountains, it might really be possible to see names above the summits of the mountains around you. And presumably, soon this technology combined with Google Street View will allow for advertising in the augmented real world.

That’s it for now…

This idea sprang from my paranoia: sometimes I imagine walking down a lonely alley and being attacked by thugs. I wonder if I saw them from the distance and they looked suspicious, would I take some pictures of them? Would photographing them make them think twice about attacking me? On the other extreme, they might get angry and try to destroy the camera, not without hurting me beforehand.

It is probably not a good idea on relying on the ability to take a picture in an emergency situation like that. Nevertheless, since I just ordered a new mobile phone with GPS capabilities, I wonder about using it for a kind of emergency service. The idea is simple: in an emergency, take a picture and send it to a known address. A service at that address will notify emergency services. Since the picture has GPS information embedded, emergency services can find you easily. From the photo, they might get a good impression for the requirements of the situation.

Another possibility would be for existing photo sharing services like flickr to watch out for certain tags. That way the user would not have to remember an extra address for the emergency photos.

Thinking about it a bit more, some enhancements come to mind. Emergency operators could cooperate with phone network providers to call you back and determine your location even if you don’t have a GPS receiver (this could also work for calls and SMS - not sure if it is being done already). With modern mobile phones, it might be possible to make a life video connection to the scene of emergency and have somebody give you instructions through the phone (for example instruct you how to try to revive somebody). It might be useful to have a software and service that already integrates those features - in theory emergency services might be able to call you on your video phone just like that, but without a standardized way, it is probably too complicated in the actual emergency situation.

Sinister Aspects

While I am not sure how useful such a service could be in reality, some possible sinister aspects also come to mind:

• What if the pictures were open to the public? Some weirdos might be hanging out on the site watching for pictures of bad accidents. Presumably the site would have to be accessible for emergency services only.
• On the other hand, such a site would be a good source of pictures for newspapers and blogs. Maybe a healthy money could be made, which could be donated to a foundation to support victims that don’t have good health insurance.
• The worst: what if the service took off and people would start to photograph everything that seems somewhat suspicious. In no time, we would have a very bad police state situation, worse than fascism, were any activity that is ever so slightly out of line gets reported immediately. Not something I would want to be responsible for.

Since it relies on cooperation with emergency service, this idea would probably not make a good startup. But it might be worthwhile to pitch it to the authorities. Working on a contract that goes back to an idea of my own would still be better than working on something that has nothing to do with my interests whatsoever. Also, contracting with the government is probably a very good deal - after all, they usually don’t care about money, as it is only the taxpayers money they are spending, not their own.

Because of the complications, this is another throwaway idea I probably won’t tackle. But I would be interested in your opinions. If you think it might have some merit, I might change my mind about it.

Recently talked about this idea with a friend. I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it.

The idea is simple: offer a service where people can queue songs into a playlist of an internet radio or audio stream by sending an SMS to some number. This could be used as a Jukebox in bars and restaurants.

The thought is not new, I remember pondering related ideas years ago, when Bluetooth was coming up. However, by now the conditions make it easier than ever to create such a service. I think making it based on a website would be best, because clients could easily put up a computer display somewhere to display the jukebox options. It is easy to sign up for SMS services, so that customers could pay small amounts of money to play a song. SMS is much more reliable and easier to use than bluetooth.

A fun side effect could be to create a playlist of “music you might like”, like last.fm, that would automatically adapt to the taste of the venues customers.

A problem could be that random people could send SMS and make the jukebox play nasty music, even if they are not at the venue. Probably there would have to be a feature where the owner of the bar creates a selection of appropriate music that people could choose from.

Another question would be if a website would be enough (customers would have to use the terminal to see what music is available), or if a mobile website would be called for that customers could browse on their phones.

The biggest problem is getting rights to the audio files, and paying appropriate taxes for playing music in public places. I know nothing about this. Maybe for a simple version music from Seeqpod or Skreemr could be used, or an online radio like Last.fm. It would be cool if there already was a service where people can create their own internet radio streams, that could be controlled from the service. Probably there is - if so, I estimate the SMS Jukebox could be programmed within weekends time

It is too bad that there is no wholesale for online music (that I know of anyway), so that people could create interesting services around music. As it stands, probably a lot of money has to be paid to lawyers to make deals with the music industry. Apple and Amazon could do it, but for smaller businesses, it is hard (I think). Or they just scrape by in the grey areas of unclear legitimacy, like the aforementioned seeqpod and skreemr. Not something I would recommend, although I applaud their chutzpah.

By internet search I found only one existing SMS Jukebox project, which seems to be provided by the mobile phones operator Orange in France. This is also a reason that I think my friend will not mind me sharing the idea.

Another caveat of the idea is that I have no idea how to market it to bar and cafe owners. Anyway, that is why I file it under “throwaway ideas”, because it is unlikely that I’ll tackle it myself for the time being. Older throwaway ideas of mine can be found at Cambrian House.

On the other hand, maybe I should just go around and ask in bars in my city if they would be interested. I am still looking for a nice project for the summer.

continuing from Barcamp Leipzig (part 1)

Storytelling for Companies

I have difficulties to recount what I learned from Till’s presentation, although it gave a lot of food for thought. The subject is a bit hard to grasp for non-marketeers, though, and towards the end the main thread got somewhat drowned in too many off-topic comments from the audience. So we actually only got to see the first few slides of the presentation.

The basic idea (as I understood it) is to present your company in a way that appeals to audiences (especially journalists). Several classic motives of storytelling come to mind as a template. A popular example is “David against Goliath”. If you are a startup, chances are good that the story would apply to you. So rather than proclaiming “we have the best product”, you could tell the story of how you were dissatisfied with the status quo and decided to try to improve the situation against all odds. If you ever walked across an IT business fair like the Systems in Munich or the CeBIT, you might know what this is about. There are so many companies who sound exactly alike - “we solve all your problems, and we have the best products” - but it is never clear what they actually do. A very frustrating sight.

It really is hard to recount, because I think it will only become clear once you try it. I haven’t tried it, but I can imagine what it could be like. As Till and commentators said, often the story takes on a life on it’s own. People start to muse about possible continuations for the story, and you yourself start to fit yourself into the story.

A lot of the off-topic comments were from the “Alternate Reality Gaming” crowd, in my opinion they missed the point a bit, because that was not the kind of storytelling Till had in mind. I could be wrong, though. Eventually, they decided to hold their own session for Alternate Reality Games, which I also attended.

This marked the end of the sessions for Saturday. In the evening there was also a party for barcamp attendees, but since Andreas and I first went home to see my girl-friend, we arrived there only late, and we also didn’t stay long. I felt I had already exhausted my capacity for socializing for the day, so that there was not much point to being at the party.

Sunday unfortunately I had to leave quite early to catch my train, but I got to see two more sessions.

Alternate Reality Games

Alternate Reality Games are games in which a team of puppet masters sets up fake clues and circumstances in the real world, to allow players to play in an alternate reality. For example, apparently recently some people received parcels with mysterious contents, without ever having signed up for a game or ordered anything. Those inclined could start deciphering the clues and presumably stumble across the generated story. An early example was Majestic a game that would communicate with the players by phone, among other things.

I am not sure how big the marketing impact of these games is, as I never stumbled across them before, but usually communities form around solving the game. At the moment The Lost Ring appears to be a bigger ARG, sponsored by McDonalds (other links are listed on the barcamp leipzig page). It also has a german branch - apparently the story is that around the world several people woke up without memories, and the goal of the players is to help them on their way. One of those people is located in Germany. As an example for actions the presenter mentioned to meet for sports with that person (ie go running), or try to talk to him to cheer him up and so on. I find it hard to imagine - how can the person go running with hundreds of players? But of course it is interesting in a way. A younger me would probably have gotten excited about it, but at the moment I felt that “normal” reality is interesting enough and I don’t really need to get involved.

Apparently there are also grassroots movements of people trying to organize non-commercial ARGs, but often they underestimate the effort that goes into them, and they fail. Thing to remember.

AntMe

Tom from AntMe seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and to be honest, I envy him a little. I have always been interested in Artificial Life, but industry jobs in that area were rare. With AntMe, Tom seems to have found a way to make money with Artificial Life, Game Programming and getting girls interested in Computer Science. Of course he had to sell his soul to Microsoft to do that, but it seems a small price to pay.

But slowly from the beginning: AntMe is a programming game, in which you program ants to harvest sugar and fruits as fast as possible, all the time evading the hungry, ant-eating bugs. You can write programs to control the ants and upload them, to be rated in the Highscores list. There is also a multiplayer modus where you compete directly with other ant colonies.

That is just great, fantastic, especially as apparently Non-Programmers actually seem to get it and enjoy it. The ants are programmed in C#, which explains the Microsoft endorsement (basically, I guess they pay the bills and salaries): they use it to win people over to C#, possibly even make C# the first programming language they ever learn. It sounded as if AntMe also visits job fairs, girls-days and the like to present the ants and get people interested in programming. A few days ago apparently there was something like a “girls-in-science day”, so Tom got to present the ants in front of a large audience of teenage girls, who actually liked it. I can’t really get over this - it is even more amazing than earning a living with Artificial Life programming

The game itself is very nicely done, with cute 3d graphics. I was sceptic at first because the ants seem to know a few tricks that real ants don’t, but once you see them running diligently across the screen, you can’t help but like them. Tom also had lots of stories about the ways the AntMe community managed to outwit the programmers of the simulation. For example they created a kind GPS system which allows ants to go to absolute coordinates, something they were never meant to be able to do. I was also interested in the “Ticket Ants”, which seem to be among the most successful AntMe competitors: if a sugar heap is found, they calculate exactly how many ants are needed to carry it away, and create tickets for the task. Idle ants then start accepting the tickets and getting to work - you can’t get much more efficient than that. I am interested because I wonder if “logistics” can really perform better than nature - it seems for the virtual ants the answer is yes, but of course real ants face other constraints (they don’t have a centralized server, for example).

Sadly, my aversion against C# is too great, so that for the time being I probably won’t join in the fun. But who knows. I understand the reasons for it being C#, and for some people it definitely is a suitable language (like if you know you will always stay on the Windows Operating System). Actually, as a Java developer I used to be interested in C#, but now I think it is not different enough from Java to warrant the effort of learning it for me, and I want to move to dynamic languages anyway.

Last weekend I went to the Barcamp Leipzig. Location, weather and the attending people were brilliant, so it was a weekend well spent. Barcamps are also called “unconferences”, as they are conferences without a plan. There is no predefined schedule, instead, anybody from the audience can declare to give a talk or host a session on any topic they fancy. Most sessions are about computer stuff, but it is not mandatory. For example, at the barcamp munich there were also sessions on magic tricks and night photography. Many people decide to host sessions without having prepared very much, but it usually works well, because it ends up more being a discussion with the attendees of the session, rather than a frontal lecture.

There is always something that puzzles me about events like that, which is the way I, and maybe most others, socialize. Why do I talk with some people, but not with others? Usually in the beginning I talk to a lot of people, and nearing the end I hardly approach anybody new. It wasn’t that extreme this time, but there were still some people that I have never spoken to over the whole conference. Last year I went to a one week workshop in Amsterdam, and there were people I never talked to once. What I wonder: are the people I talk to the right ones, and if so, how did I know? Not to be misunderstood, I didn’t meet anybody I didn’t like at the barcamp, but there might be people that have the same interests and would really click with me, becoming co-founders for the next startup, and I might not even have talked to them. In any case, if anybody reads this: I am happy to hear from you, even if we didn’t exchange contact information.

This question gave me an idea for another project: analyze social graphs available on the internet to see how people socialized at barcamps. For example, there is a twitter account for the barcamp leipzig, and it seems most attendees who also use twitter decided to follow it. Now I could look a these people’s friends lists on twitter before and after the barcamp. If they became followers of each other shortly after the barcamp, they probably met at the barcamp. Then I could analyze their tweeds to determine their interests and similarities (maybe some other social network would be more suitable, for example Xing lets people list more specific interests than twitter).

Finally, a brief overview of the sessions I went to see:

Genetic Algorithms

Kennon decided to use slides from his lecture notes to give an overview of genetic algorithms. There was nothing new for me, but it was nice to meet somebody else who has the same interests. Also, the barcamp organization inspired a good area of application for the GAs: it would be nice to arrange the session slots in such a way that as few people as possible miss sessions they would have liked to attend. Maybe one of these days I’ll try to implement that for fun.

Open Street Map

I have known about open street map before, and I have high hopes for it: it is the attempt to generate maps from GPS data that is submitted by volunteers. Similar to wikipedia, everybody is allowed to edit the maps, but some geeky equipment helps. Somehow I had never given it a closer look, but the enthusiasm of the two presenters Claudius and Nathanael was infectious. Clearly, they were having a lot of fun scouting for uncharted terrain to close the gaps in the open map. For example, if they were driving somewhere and see an uncharted road, they would make a brief detour to collect the data for OSM. To me, it sounds as good a motivator as any other to go outside. Also, as I descibed in my article about GeoTags, I have become interested in maps recently, and having freely available data would be great.

I hope to contribute to Open Street Map in the future, unfortunately at the moment I don’t have a capable device. Actually walking routes with a GPD logger is not the only way to contribute, though. For example, Open Street Map apparently was the first online map to provide maps of Bagdad, which had been transferred from satellite images by volunteers.
It was great to see how quickly OSM is growing - you can watch the expansion of charted terrain over time.

Innovationsmanagement

This talk ended up being more of a brainstorming session than a lecture. Scout24, the employer of the speaker (Cindy Beer), is apparently wondering how to ensure ongoing innovation in their company. One strategy could be to look at ongoing “megatrends” and think about what needs they could produce in the future. Examples for megatrends being mentioned were the aging of society and the increasing use of mobile internet. For me, there was no “new megatrend” that I hadn’t heard of before. It would have been interesting to hear what scout24 thinks are the important trends for them, but the presentation did not get to that point because of the discussions with the audience.

Another problem is how to manage the innovation. For example, one approach would be to create a dedicated “innovation team” within the company. This could result in all the other teams becoming “uninnovation teams”, though. They might decidedly not innovate, or even worse, if any other team would innovate, the innovation team could feel threatened and try to undermine the other innovating teams.
Incentives are another problem. At least I feel that I would not like to give my best ideas to a company that I was employed for. If the company would make millions from my idea and I would get nothing but my paltry salary, I would feel cheated. So some kind of reward scheme seems necessary. It is not always obvious how to quantify the value of an idea, though. Not every idea translates directly to revenue for the company. If a team in the company is responsible for evaluating the value of an idea, the “innovation team” problem kicks in again. What if you have a great idea, but for some reason, the evaluation team doesn’t like it? O2 had a system like that - I think it was still better than having no means for employees to give input on new ideas at all.

For me that discussion reminded me about “prediction markets”, which are apparently successfully used by some companies. The idea is to create a market similar to the stock market, but people can bid on ideas with virtual money. That way, the evaluation of the idea happens through crowd wisdom, instead of single individuals. A public example is Yahoo! tech buzz, but some companies also use such tools internally.

Another point that was raised that to look for new ideas, one should not only think about problems that look for solutions. Sometimes just going for something fun works, too. I am not sure I am convinced: making something fun also solves a problem, the boredom or loneliness of people. But maybe only looking at everything as a problem really is cropping too many thoughts.

Twitter for Corporations

Twitter continues to boggle the minds of everyone, even the people who use it on a regular basis. Since I am a fairly new Twitter user, I was hoping to gain some new insights by this session on corporate twitter. The plan for the session was to look at several examples of corporations using twitter, but because of the unreliable internet connection, it did not work so well. Instead, there was a lot of interesting discussion with the audience. Some examples for corporate twitter blogs were available, though.

Fail: the Deutsche Bahn is twittering about problems with their trains in remote locations, which can’t possibly be of interest to a wider audience. However, some people in the audience questioned the authenticity of the twitter, they thought it was just somebody else posing as the Deutsche Bahn. It certainly seems to be becoming a problem, people are already registering other people’s domain names as twitter accounts to mess with their reputation.

Fail: Preisbock - they are an example of twitter spamming. Whenever somebody decides to “follow” you on Twitter, you get an email that informs you so. It is not required to follow back, but generally considered the polite thing to do. So some companies simply try to follow everyone, and a lot of them follow back. It is very comparable to “trackback spamming” for blogs. However, if it fails, you leave the target of your spam with resentments against your company. Not good.

Success: I don’t know, the presenters liked the twitters of bild and some other magazine whose name I forgot. Bild is of course the specialist for catchy headlines, so it is not a surprise that they do well on twitter (the main attribute of twitter being that messages are limited to 140 characters). They do the same they do with their headlines, short, catchy sentences that are almost impossible to ignore, even if you actually despise the newspaper. The other magazine was giving their writers turns to twitter about the things happening at the office. Some people liked it, but others thought it made a very unprofessional impression.

Success: Till from Sonntagmorgen.com was in the audience (and they provided excellent coffee for the barcamp). They have a twitter account for sonntagmorgen and as an example, track people twittering about coffee and follow them. That approach seems more acceptable than the random approach taken by Preisbock, although I guess technically it is still spamming. Sadly I forgot what else they do and how successful they are. I think Till is a very good marketeer, though, so I think they must be doing well.

Success: I don’t understand what betacamper does, but they were successful with viral marketing on twitter. The trick is simple: after signup, redirect the user to twitter with a prefilled form field saying “I just signed up to beta camper”. Users are just the press of a button away from spamming their friends with this message, and apparently many did so. Much more effective than the old “recommend to a friend” email forms. On twitter, you don’t need to enter your friends email addresses, and because of the short sentences, you don’t need to wreck your brain for something interesting to write to your friends. I am definitely planning to copy this approach.

Other interesting points in the discussion: some people thought that Twitter is just the same thing as an IRC chat. Andreas told me about a friend who some years ago really used IRC the same way people use Twitter today: hanging around in one channel all the time, messaging about things like “cooking something for dinner now” or “going to sleep now”. The difference with twitter is maybe that you are not constricted to a specific channel, and of course it is much more accessible than IRC. Everybody builds their own channel on twitter - most people said that twitter is more like background noise than a dicussion you follow closely. I asked some twitterers who follow more than 100 people how they do it, and to my surprise they admitted that they use filters to only see important messages. So twitter becomes a farce in the end: it is a symbolic act to follow somebody, but people do not really read each others messages in the end.

Still, I think Twitter has a lot of potential. The service itself is maybe too basic, but a lot of other pages build on Twitter, and some killer apps could emerge. I like the idea of mining the network, as I described above (who made friends at the barcamp), there are filters to see only important messages, and so on.

(to be continued - I have to leave for work now…)

One thought that excited me recently: the geographical information that is often saved in newer digital photographs via GPS, combined with photo tags on photosharing pages like flickr or just the context of photos, will lead to an implicit tagging of maps.
Probably the information will not be accurate enough to generate maps like “normal” maps from them (that show specific buildings and streets), but surely it will be possible to identify landmarks and other things that are not commonly marked on maps.

For example, I was never sure where or what exactly the “Cote D’Azure” is, so I searched for it on flickr maps, and it already gives me a rough idea of the area. Flickr maps was a bit unsatisfying, though. I suspect they show only a few photos, not all matches. Through the flickr forums I found another service, loc.alize.us that seems to rely on flickr data, but shows a few more hits. I am still not sure what exactly it shows. Anyway, for now there are usually just a few hundred hits, but soon it will be millions, which should provide pretty accurate information.

Another thing I searched for is “Kungsleden”, the name of a trail in Sweden that I walked once upon a time. So far, there are not that many pictures, but you can already see where the path probably is, and I am sure soon it will be a very precise map. It also seems to work quite well for the Camino de Santiago (Jakobsweg in German), at least for the Spanish part.

Another idea to play around with would be the spreading of plants animals, or of fashion and architectural styles. And this article on the effect of names reminded me of a project a former colleague told me about, where he extracted addresses from the phone book to aid his father’s research in the etymology of names. Apparently a lot of interesting things can be derived from names, like how much people moved around in former times. With geotags, it might soon be rather easy to get that information (Facebooks photo service might be very interesting for this, because it encourages tagging pictures with the name of the people who are in it).

I know this thought is probably not very cutting edge. GeoTags have been around for a while, and people are already building services around it (like loc.alize.us). Still, I am intrigued, also because some nice mathematical problems might be involved (for example, determine the real location of something if pictures have been taken from different places. Discover what different tags mean the same thing). The current maps don’t really satisfy my curiosity, and they are probably geared towards different purposes.

I wonder how much data Flickr is giving away through it’s API? I already checked, and the API is not ideal: when you query for a photo, the response doesn’t seem to include the information that if is GeoTagged or not, and it is also not possible as a search parameter. So one has to make an extra check for every photo and get as a response the geotag if it exists, or the info that it doesn’t exist. Still, I didn’t find anything about traffic limits. I don’t know what other photo sharing sites are out there that could be interesting. Also, I wonder if online newspapers and blogs commonly include the geo information in the photos they display. (Another search idea: “accident” could reveal hotspots for accidents).

I’d love to play around with this. So many things to do… But we’ll see, perhaps I’ll actually get around to it eventually. In any case I am now more sure than ever that for my next camera (or camera enabled phone), I want to have that GPS tagging feature. Recommendations are welcome.