Note: this post was written on January 31st but I initially decided to not publish it because of the personal nature of the topic. I’m publishing it now, exactly a month later.

I’m one of those lucky chaps who’s getting married without having to go through the trouble of proposing. My fiancée took care of that casually from the back seat while we were on our way I forget where. Her suggestion threw me off balance enough to get us thoroughly lost that October afternoon.

In the months that followed the wedding turned into a production involving six leading designers; the heritage of a deceased architect; and a living philosopher. Somewhere along the way Ulla and I will get married, but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the idea; that life is about making each day a beautiful one.

Now, about a month before d-day, we’re hosted by Issey Miyake in Tokyo for the fitting of the outfits. I can’t say much about them yet except we all went a bit quiet when we saw the dress. This dress will reach out to your soul and squeeze it. It will be released at the Paris Fashion Week on February 26th.

The collection also features special pieces by the Boroullec brothers, Camper, Hella Jongerus, Louise Campbell, and Ilkka Suppanen. It will be made accessible starting the last week of February by quality design publications and at www.itsabeautifuldaywedding.com.

An 18-year old boy shot to death 8 and wounded 12 in a high school in Jokela, Finland this week. The police found the shooter on the school corridor after he had shot himself in the head with his handgun. He died later in a hospital. One of the killed students was a 25-year old single mother completing her second year of high school. She left behind two children, aged 3 and 5.

As nowadays tends to be the case, the news first spread across the Internet. Some of the immediate commentary took place over IRC, and there’s a thread on Jaiku that documents the unfolding of the events pretty much as they were happening.  One of the comments in the Jaiku thread is a quote from the IRC chat: "there’s a boy on the other [IRC] channel whose younger sister is still over there in the classroom."

Before taking action the shooter posted a total of 89 videos on YouTube, some of them featuring Nazi imagery. The videos have subsequently been taken offline.

Damn it. Someone should have seen what was coming.

On October 9th, two weeks ago, our company was acquired by Google. Loic asked me about it on camera at Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday.

A few days after the acquisition we were on a plane to San Francisco, and now, as we’re starting the second week in our new roles, most of the new faces have been met and we’re able to find the way to our desks in the morning. It’s time to focus on implementing the stuff that we came here to do.

To me Google is a chance to work as part of the largest concentration of software engineering talent in existence, especially a few individuals whose work has been instrumental to my own work and thinking lately; and, if we succeed, profoundly change the Web. Other facets of life play into the picture too. Some of my best friends live here, and two of Ulla’s key collaborators are in the Bay Area.

Still, it’s a change. Our families are 10 hours away. Moving with a baby is different from traveling as a couple. In Helsinki our company had the luxury of total obscurity. Suddenly, at Google, it feels like everyone’s eyes are fixed on what the company will do next.

By the way, I also turned 30 on Friday. Picasso supposedly once said that it takes a long time to grow young. Looking around, it’s hard to name an environment that could better keep us from growing up.

In June I gave a short talk at a conference called Essential Web at the London IMAX. The organizers of the conference had recorded an interview with Tim O’Reilly about the future direction of Web 2.0, and they played back clips of the interview with Tim between the talks.

I was a bit surprised when the clip before my talk rolled. In the video Tim argued in his characteristically soft-spoken but irrefutable way that the mobile phonebook was the killer Web 2.0 application.

In all honesty I wouldn’t have expected the father of Web 2.0 to name the phonebook as the next killer app. Maybe something involving Rails, AJAX, or mashups… but straight off the bat it’s hard to imagine anything more distant from a Web site than the
contact list of a mobile phone.

Today Tim has posted an elaboration of his argument on O’Reilly Radar. As he abandoned his Nokia S60 phone for an iPhone, he found himself missing the presence-enabled phonebook we created for the Nokia handsets. It’s flattering to get acknowledgement for the work the team members at Jaiku – first and foremost our two towering S60 developers Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa – have been delivering.

Allow me to quote Tim a bit here:

"This is the way a phone address book ought to work. I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and
certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven "social networking application" represents my real social network. On the series 60 phone, Jaiku was able to embrace and extend the address book. That’s just not possible on the iPhone."

I couldn’t agree more with Tim about the crippling effect the lack of third party applications has on the iPhone. But I worked on a device at Nokia, so I know it isn’t trivial to open up the handset platform to developers. Inevitably, you end up compromising a seamless user experience. Apple, of course, doesn’t like to compromise much there.

Still, I’m optimistic that the iPhone will open up. Apple has all the Web geeks rooting for it. It can’t afford to lose them to a competitor who delivers an equally compelling device with an open platform.

UPDATE:  I elaborated a little on how Apple could open up the iPhone to social web apps in the comments to Tim’s post on O’Reilly Radar

Today’s FT has a piece on the Blue Monster Reserve, a special wine label created by winery Stormhoek for Microsoft and its employees. The label on the bottle features a sharp-toothed blue creature and slogan "Microsoft – change the world or go home."

Since its inception by cartoonist Hugh McLeod, the cartoon has been adopted by microsofties as a symbol of the company’s and it’s people’s aspiration to innovate. I’ve heard Microsoft employees refer to it as the company’s unofficial mascot.

McLeod has a knack for looking at the world through the lenses of object-centered sociality. “Wine is a social object, and so is the Blue Monster: they both inspire conversation,” he is quoted saying in the article.

Besides the fact that Hugh is a killer cartoonist, he has helped traditional entrepreneurs turn tailored suits, and now wine, into social objects. This makes him a valuable of envoy or persona grata who traverses the digital divide which still too often cuts Web geeks off from the rest of the world.

It’s good to see theory brought to life in practice this way.

Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) has put together an influential group who yesteday posed a proposal for a Bill of Rights for "users of the social Web." Read Joseph’s post about it.

I like the way the traces users generate is now increasingly getting described as an activity stream. There’s a shift taking place from fixed pages to a flow of actions on objects.

Here’s the text:

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their
  friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service,
  using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their
  site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup
  within the service.

Scoble’s column on microblogging (featuring Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Facebook) from the latest issue of FastCompany is up online. It’s titled "The Next Email."

His conclusion:

"If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that
we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and
they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to
participate in the heartbeat of business."

Recently more people have been tossing around the idea that an open social network enabler could be the Next Big Thing.

John Battelle wrote that

“PageRank was based on a big graph: the links that make up the web. The next breakthrough, many argue, will be based on the social graph, the links between us all.”

Earlier this spring David Sacks posted on TechCrunch about portals moving “from browse to search to share.”

Little surprise then that one of the more interesting (and well attended) sessions at this weekend’s BarCampBlock was Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal founder who reportedly has joined Google), David Recordon (OpenID, now at 6A), and Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) on the open social graph.

“Social graph,” for the record, is what  Facebook calls the map of how their users are connected to each other. Brad has been working on a distributed alternative for a while and he recently jelled his ideas together into a well thought-out essay.

(If you haven’t yet read the piece, you should go read it now).

The problem, in short, is the lack of a way to connect people across services. Anyone who has signed up to more than a single Web service will recognize the issue.

Web services should be able to freely combine. But as it stands each Web service has to implement their own user accounts and friend policy (the social graph). We want simple services that do just one thing really well – for instance, I might use Tripit or Dopplr to share my travel and Goodreads to share my books – but the cost of maintaining accounts on multiple services is too high if they all require me to add and update my contacts manually.

The lack of interoperability between Web apps left open the opportunity for Facebook to create an environment where it’s easy to develop new apps without needing to waste time implementing user accounts and friend policies (Facebook already provides those for you). Users can fluidly discover what apps their friends are on and quickly add new ones without having to create new accounts and add contacts each time. Facebook has critical mass – that is to say, enough people are on it that this actually works.

The problem, however, is that the apps interoperate only within the closed world of Facebook. It would be better to have real interoperability between independent apps.

Brad’s solution is to create a service where people go to aggregate all their networks into a master network, and then let other services check against that to automate friend discovery. The outcome to the user who signs up to a new service should be “These 8 friends of yours are already users here, would you like to share your books / music / pictures / trips / etc. with them?”

Furthermore, the proposal is that the service that hosts the master networks (or administers the code that generates them if people run it on their own servers) should be run by a nonprofit.

This is a familiar scenario: all services benefit from certain shared data, such as track IDs (music), ISBNs (books), and now people. The idea in giving the project to a nonprofit to run is to get competing services on board and ensure impartiality.

People look for two qualities in this type of infrastructure provider: 1) critical mass and 2) ethics. It should appear stable enough that it’s reasonable to expect it to stick around for a while, and since we trust it with our data its intentions have to come across as good not evil.

My initial reaction is it doesn’t matter if the provider is a business or a nonprofit as long as the two criteria are met. The MusicBrainz / CDDB case is illustrative of the difficulties one can run into both when a for-profit service starts misbehaving and when a nonprofit that takes over its job struggles without critical mass. There are positive examples too. Wikipedia is a nonprofit with critical mass; Google is, for most people, still an ethically acceptable ad/map provider.

The discussion‘s ongoing. Some prefer a more radically decentralized approach. Brad’s piece inspired Dave Winer to do a podcast on the topic. His conclusion:

“a network that, from Day One, allows users of other networks to participate, and allows developers to access user’s data, with the user’s permission, but without permission from the network, may become the www of open identity systems.”

See also: An open Facebook?

"You’ve heard us talking about it, possibly even had one of our lovely beta testers telling you how great it’s going to be; now it’s out in the wild, and ready for you to download." More on the Jaikido blog

Some initial reactions:

• Om Malik says: "Yum"
• DownloadSquad calls it "a pretty impressive feature list"
• Mashable observes: "Nokia and Jaiku seem to have a really good thing going"

See also:

• Technically Speaking: Jaiku Integrates the power of conversation into Nokia S60
• 901am: Jaiku releases new mobile conversation client for Nokia Series 60

I woke up this morning and felt like blogging. It’s been a long time :)

We’ve had Reboot, FOO Camp, and a bunch of other opportunities for rewarding conversations and so it feels like I could write posts for a week about all the new or further developed thoughts and ideas that are crowding my head. I’ve touched on some of those in recent talks (here’s video&slides from one), but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about them yet.

I’ll start by jotting down a few notes on questions that might be useful to ask when evaluating the potential of something to be turned into an online social object. As a disclaimer I guess I should say this may not make much sense unless you’re familiar with the previous posts on the subject (a number of people have suggested I revamp this blog to make it easier to navigate the material – I’ll eventually get around to doing that).

• How well does the potential object yield itself to breaking it down to structured data? For instance trips can be pretty easily structured, as on Dopplr. Dopplr trips have only three key data points: a start date, end date, and a destination. Each one is expressed as a discrete. It got too complex with free text entry for destinations, so they decided to use cities with over 80,000 inhabitants as a proxy (so when I travel to San Sebastian in spain, I need to pick Bilbao on dopplr).
• What data points to pick? You want to pick the data points that are sensible definitions of the object and give you the most interesting handles for generating sociographs. This is tricky because the more data points you introduce, the more fine-grained sociographs you can generate, but the more complext the system becomes. Events (as on Upcoming) are already more complicated than trips because you want a title, start and end date & time, location, and some kind of invitation policy. It’s a bigger usability hurdle but the tradeoff is reasonable if the assumption is it appeals to a broader population of users. Like on Upcoming vs. Dopplr, more of us go to events even if we don’t travel that much; events are more interesting than just who’s traveling where.
• How often do people generate new instances of the object? This question should replace the "who’s your target customer?" question because your main target are probably the same people who generate lots of instances of the object. If a lot of people generate new objects often, ads+subscriptions probably make sense. If they don’t use it that often but the social networking adds a lot of value (as when looking for a book, car, real estate), then you need higher-value ads and/or transactions. If it’s the sort of object that few people create, but those who do do it lots, you’re probably talking about a hobbyist or professional audience (e.g. Dogster for petlovers) and might be able to tap into its special channels to figure out a business model
• How much social gravitational pull does the object have? Complex social objects offer a lot of handles for discussion. A movie, for instance, has a cast, a plot, special effects, and plenty of other conversation points that people can talk about. Simple social objects like microblog posts don’t have as many such handles. On microblogs like Jaiku it’s typically someone just asserting something, to which you might or might not be inclined to reply. Big social objects have more social gravity. Movies attract viewers and conversation like stars and big planets attract matter from space. Tiny social objects are more like a meteor shower; each one has very little gravitational pull as such, but when you add up all the tiny particles in space, they embody more total matter than the big constellations.